This one is just OK. The plot isnt anything too interesting, though we get some nice sets and a new TARDIS control room

Louis Marks is not one of the series' more inspiring decade spanning writers, but I did enjoy his fourth Doctor stories (this and Planet of Evil) significantly more than his previous efforts for the first and third Doctors (Planet of Giants and Day of the Daleks).

The most exciting moment of this serial happens up top with The Doctor introducing Sarah-Jane to the "old" TARDIS console room, it is a more radical interior redesign than we ever could have hoped for. A beautiful Victorian mahogany console - so much more "The Doctor" than everything that has come before. By making it a different room in the TARDIS rather than a redesign it adds to the mythology of the show and sense of infinite space inside the machine.

Its not just that TARDIS that looks beautiful but the locations and costumes. I loved seeing Sarah-Jane in her posh 15th century frock - period costumes are something the BBC was and continues to be fantastic at. Anyone who has seen The Prisoner would admit that the location of Portmeirion could have been put to *slightly* better use in this story, but there is no doubt that it livens up the screen considerably more than your typical Doctor Who set.

The story itself has some exciting twists and turns, the villain we are presented in part 1 does not end up being the ultimate threat, which is satisfying. It is let down by a couple of far-fetched elements in the plot, where annoying leaps of logic are made which pull you out of the drama.

The baddies are often wearing static masks, which work well in the cloak and dagger scenes but less well in the brightly lit conversational scenes, with the actors relying on their vocal acting chops (not the most engaging TV). The main character you are routing for in 14th Century Italy is another one of these limp, young, wet leaders (that we saw twice on Peladon) that seem to be "nice" rather than have any character. His friend Marco however is a very passionate and exciting character to follow - his brief interactions with Tom Baker were marvelous.

We continue our journey through the universe with the television adventure, The Masque of Mandragora. Always a favourite of mine, I was looking forward to watching my newly purchased DVD of this serial and, fortunately, I wasn’t disappointed and didn’t have a case of the memory cheating me.

That said, one thing I’ve noticed in this marathon is that I’m paying less attention to the TV stories I am rewatching than the audio or comic strips. I think the familiarity is, if not breeding contempt, certainly allowing for a slightly lacksadaisical approach to viewing the stories. I made a concerted effort to watch Episode 4 without distraction having only half watched the previous 3 instalments (doing work, using my laptop etc). I also watched the final episode with my 3 year old son. He is very much a David Tennant fan (my Doctor, as he says) and hasn’t really seen any classic Who but did seem engrossed in Mandragora’s attempt to take control of Renaissance Italy. He was perturbed however at the lack of sonic screwdriver use.

The Masque of Mandragora starts strongly with the introduction of the ‘secondary’ control room (although the ‘Come to think of it, this was the old one’ line from the Doctor has always jarred with the ‘anal-fan’ me as Tom Baker picks up a distinctly Pertwee-style ruffled shirt suggesting that this was a console room used by the earlier Doctor which of course, they didn’t. Then again, maybe at some point prior to this story, the Doctor travelled with Jimi Hendrix and the shirt belongs to him.)

This wood-panelled delight is the first in a series of strong sets for the entire story. Renaissance Italy is recreated with painstaking detail (Barry Newbery used a contemporary painting for the design of Hieronymous’ study) and the studio work is complemented by the location work carried out at Portmerion.

Portmerion is a place I visited many years ago and very excited I was too to be visiting the location of this story. It was a family holiday which also saw us take in the long gone Llangollen Doctor Who Exhibition, the home of Dapol, and so was a bit of a Doctor Who pilgrimage for me (much to my family’s dismay I’m sure). It is a beautiful, if slightly odd place. When I visited I hadn’t yet seen The Prisoner (although I have done since) but did immediately recognise some of the key Mandragora locations – particularly the balcony Federico stands on for the Doctor’s near-beheading and the passageway Guiliano leads the Doctor and Sarah down on their way to the catacombs. Somewhere I have photos of me standing in these places.

Talking of the Doctor’s execution, it occurred to me whilst watching this scene that this might be the first occasion, in my marathon, of the Doctor facing execution by beheading, but then on checking my spreadsheet, I realised he faced a similar fate in The Time Warrior, at the hands of Irongron and Linx’s robot. With the 1666 set The Visitation soon to crop up, the Fifth Doctor’s line of ‘not again’ at the close of Part 2 (I think) will have extra irony. I’ll be keeping an ‘execution watch’ throughout the rest of this part of the marathon as we travel through periods of time when beheading was all the rage for disposing of unwanted and troublesome people.

The performances in The Masque of Mandragora are uniformly superb if, in the cases of Count Federico and Hieronymous, a little fruity. Jon Laurimore and Norman Jones are clearly having a whale of time plotting and scheming (and Laurimore features in the DVD extras commenting on what fun it was to play such a melodramatic villain). Gareth Armstrong and Tim Piggot-Smith present believable ‘goodies’ even if Giuiliano sometimes comes across a little wet. The relationship between the two has been retconned by 21st century fandom into a gay affair, but the on screen performances and dialogue don’t really suggest anything more than a particularly close bromance. Indeed, the novelisation (of which more later) makes pains to suggest an attraction between Giuiliano and Sarah.

Accompanying the superb sets and performances are a plethora of beautiful costumes. There are a large number of extras in this story, both on location and in studio and they are decked out in a variety of colourful and intricate doublets, dresses, tights, masks, glorious hats and bewigged left, right and centre. Particularly effective is the scarlet and gold livery of the various soldiers.

Historically, there is little that is grounded in fact – there are no true historical characters (Leonardo da Vinci is mentioned but never seen) or events – but set, as this story is, at the dawn of scientific reasoning, much is made of the conflict between the superstition and science. Hieronymous’ religious fervour and astrological predictions contrasts with Giuiliano’s passion for science, with Federico’s political ambitions providing a third strand to an intelligent script. There is also the presence of a Roman cult, but the Cult of Demnos is, as far as I can tell, a work of fiction for the purposes of the story.

The eponymous masque in episode 4 is a lot of fun (until the killing starts) and, although restricted slightly by the studio set, has some wonderful costumes and masks along with the entertainers, music and dancing (although Elisabeth Sladen overacts Sarah’s reactions to the fire-eater/jester a little, as if Sarah would never have seen such a spectacle before). The novelisation also describes an enormous feast.

Contrasting with this opulence, is a streak of violence which strikes the audience from the very first scene set in San Martino. The slaughter of the peasants by Federico’s soldiers is very violent and quite gruesome and the Helix-destroyed bodies are only saved from being stomach-churning by being blue (another detail the novelisation changes allowing the reader/listener’s mind to envision even more horrific injuries). The torture of Marco is also quite harrowing, thanks to the performance of Tim Piggot-Smith – as they don’t actually show any torture on screen. (The novelisation has Marco, and latterly Giuiliano, Sarah and the Doctor tied to racks as oppose to hung from the walls as they are on screen).

One minor niggle I have about the story is the section involving the hypnosis of Sarah by Hieronymous and the Doctor’s subsequent explanation for how he knew something was up.

Sarah asking how she understood Italian always struck me as a blooming good question. Surely any one of the companions (and for that matter the viewing audience) before or since would have asked the question (and indeed Rose does in the ‘new’ series – I say new, but of course The End of the World was shown SEVEN years ago!). I can only presume that the ‘Time Lord gift’ the Doctor mentions not only allows his companions to understand any language but also prevents them from being aware of this influence. Otherwise I can see no reason why Sarah asking the question would immediately allow the Doctor to realise she was under the ‘fluence’.

The only other issue I have with the story is the Mandragora Helix itself. I find non-corporeal entities as antagonists a little frustrating. Hieronymous, especially in his golden mask, makes a suitably chilling mouthpiece for the Helix and, fortunately, we also have the scenery-chewing villainy of Count Federico, but I can’t shake the vague feeling that a solid, central threat is missing from the story. It’s interesting that, although the Mandragora Helix was never revisited on television, despite the Doctor’s revelation that it would cause trouble for the late 20th century, it has been featured in the Seventh Doctor/Ace/UNIT comic strip, The Mark of Mandragora; the Tenth Doctor/Donna/Wilf novel Beautiful Chaos; and, apparently, there is strong implication that the entity defeated in the First Doctor/Ian/Barbara/Vicki PDA, The Eleventh Tiger, is the Helix (although this contradicts the Doctor’s assertion of trouble in the late 20th century, set as it is, in the 19th century). I haven’t yet read the two novels, but the comic strip I remember being a lot of fun and a good extrapolation from the events of this story.

All through this review I have mentioned the novelisation. In the last few years, Audiogo have been releasing audiobook readings of the Target novelisations. I own a complete collection of the novelisations themselves and, for many of my early teenage years, read these magical adventures in a world of Doctor Who which wasn’t yet available to me on VHS or DVD. The Masque of Mandragora was one I do remember reading, mainly because of the rather odd cover showing the Doctor’s face surrounded by Hieronymous’ golden mask. I haven’t been purchasing the audiobook versions as I didn’t really see the point of having a third hand version of a story I could watch on DVD/VHS. Also, I find single voice audio quite hard to listen to as I find my mind wanders very easily (especially if it is one with little or no additional music or sound effects). But, my local library had a copy of The Masque of Mandragora audio book read by Tim Piggot-Smith and so, for the purposes of this marathon, I thought I’d give it a go.

I’m not going to be rushing out to buy the back catalogue of these releases, but it did hold my attention a little more than I thought it would. That said, by Disc 4 I was really just carrying on through a desire to finish it now I had started rather than a passion to hear the story itself. Tim Piggot-Smith does a very good reading and his voices for some of the characters are very similar to their television counterparts. I particularly liked his Hieronymous and actually his Doctor did, in some parts, sound remarkably like Tom Baker. It goes without saying that his Marco was pretty good too! The music and sound effects added another layer to the story but whilst it was interesting to hear the differences between the novelisation and the television serial (the TARDIS lands in a vineyard for example ( detail from the original script), and Marco is consistently described as being blond rather than Tim Piggot-Smith’s natural redhead), I can read the book itself for that and there wasn’t anything about the audiobook that made me feel it was an indispensable addition to the enormous world of Doctor Who merchandise. I appreciate that these are very well produced but I think I’ll be sticking to Big Finish’s original audio adventures and leave the audiobooks to the odd visit to the library (probably to coincide with future TV stories of my marathon – I know my local library has copies of The Dinosaur Invasion, The Green Death, Pyramids of Mars and the Giant Robot at least).

The Masque of Mandragora was an enjoyable, and fairly unique, trip to not just another time but another part of the world. Doctor Who didn’t do sumptuousness like this often, but when it did, it did it very well indeed.

The Masque of Mandragora does exactly two noteworthy things: first, when Sarah eats an orange in the most bizarre way possible, and second, when Sarah says the alphabet backwards and gets it wrong (an action which is never commented upon, cementing in the eyes of tardis.wiki the fact that the DW alphabet is different to our own)

Other than that it's just a bit dull

One of those stories that you don't really hear spoken of that often. It's fun to see Four in a historical story and the BBC always did a fantastic job with period settings and their costumes. It meanders a bit to begin with but gets quite good in the last couple of episodes as the threat of the Cult of Demnos ramps up and Tom Baker is in fine form.