A classic Doctor Who villain is set to make a comeback in an upcoming three-episode audio spin-off that also features Paul McGann as the Eighth Doctor.
The Mara returns in Doctor Who – The Eighth Doctor Adventures: Deadly Strangers, a boxset of full-cast audio drama now available to pre-order ahead of December.
First introduced in Doctor Who’s episode ‘Kinda’ in 1982 and returned in ‘Snakedance’, the Mara is a gestalt entity that takes on the form of a snake and preys on hosts via their dreams.
Upcoming audio episode ‘The Gloaming’ will provide the Mara with the perfect hunting ground in the form of a luxury sleep clinic. There, the wealthy go to sleep through their planets’ darkest times, leaving room for the gestalt to infiltrate their dreams.
The Eighth Doctor (Paul McGann), Charley (India Fisher) and companion Lady Audacity Montague (Jaye Griffiths) arrive on Gloaming, realising an old enemy is looming in the dark.
“We’ve been wanting to bring the Mara back to Doctor Who for a while now, and I thought it would be interesting to see how they would work in the context of a different TARDIS team,” producer David Richardson said.
“Every previous TV and audio tale has focused on the fantastic Fifth Doctor team, but it’s good to shake things up and here it’s the Eighth Doctor and his friends who face their malign influence.”
“What’s rich about this TARDIS team setup is that Charley has a long history with the Doctor but Audacity is relatively new,” ‘The Gloaming’ co-writer Lauren Mooney added. “There’s an insecurity that can arise from being a new part of a team, and with the Mara, that opens up.”
Co-writer Stewart Pringle discussed the episode’s literary influences, saying: “It’s been so exciting to dive back into ‘Kinda’ and ‘Snakedance’, two incredible stories, and also into the world and the mythology that Christopher Bailey wrote for the Mara, which is this incredibly deep and very literate conceptual world, heavily influenced by modernist poetry, TS Eliot in particular.
“We wanted to lean deeper into that and the idea of the Mara as a creature that emerges at the death of an empire.”
Deadly Strangers also includes episodes ‘Puccini and the Doctor’, seeing the Time Lord meeting the Italian composer, and ‘Women’s Day Off’, set in 1975 Iceland.
Doctor Who – The Eighth Doctor Adventures: Deadly Strangers is now available to pre-order as a collector’s edition 3-disc CD box set (+ download for £22.99) or as a digital download only (for £18.99).
Doctor Who airs on BBC One in the UK and Disney+ elsewhere. Classic episodes of Doctor Who are available on BBC iPlayer in the UK.