Really terrific, top-tier villains in Doctor Who are phenomenally hard to come by. We’re sometimes lulled into forgetting that by just how many times the show has bottled a moment of intellectual or philosophical lightning and turned it into an avatar of science fiction evil. The Daleks are radiation-crippled Fascists in personal tanks, and also child-victims of genetic experimentation locked in the dark and only allowed to scream. Cybermen are ordinary humans driven insane by fear of ageing and weakness and death, and so driven never to feel anything at all. Sontarans are overcompensating militarists, driven only by their sense of inner righteousness and the rules that apply to their conquests.

And so on. 

Plenty of villains never get a second shot at on-screen glory because – whisper it quietly – they don’t deserve them, at least not on the basis of their first showing. Big Finish, in fairness to the company, has had a much better success rate when it comes to resurrecting one-shot villains and getting to the heart of what could make them genuinely successful, recurring fiends.

But the Mara…

Ohhhh, the Mara. Yes, when it first turned up in Kinda, the production values all around it were pretty ghastly, from the studio forest to…well, to that snake, but ultimately none of that mattered, because the idea of the Mara, translated from Buddhism into Doctor Who by Christopher Bailey, and represented on screen by Jeff Stewart, and Janet Fielding, and Adrian Mills, really gave us a different take on the nature of what horrifying, dark, playful, spiteful evil could be. No one was really surprised when the big snake that lived in the Dark Places of the Inside came back the very next season in Snakedance. 

The Mara resonated with people, whether they knew their Buddhist lore or not, because everyone has something akin to the Mara within them. The Mara is traditionally a personification of all the things that are antithetical to enlightenment and progress. Fear. Repression. Self-doubt. Self-loathing. Culpability. Guilt. The Mara takes each and every one of those emotions, and beats you with them mercilessly while tempting you with solutions, so that what results is your personal madness, and a degree of self-replicating chaos in the world around you – often to the point where the “great wheel” of the world has to turn, meaning an end to everything you know.

All of which is at least partly to explain that if you slap a giant, recognisable snake on the cover of your new audio release, people will buy it, because the Mara has such a hook in our brains and our emotions that we want to know more.

Then, you listen to Torchwood – Art Decadence, and at first it feels like a weird slamming together of worlds. In the first instance, it’s one of those cases where there’s a new Torchwood operative we’ve never met before. Sometimes, as in the case of Torchwood – Soho, with Norton Folgate and Lizbeth Hayhoe, those work spectacularly well, and birth themselves a spin-off series. More often than not, though, they don’t, as in The Dollhouse, which imagined an American “Charlie’s Angels” branch of Torchwood, or The Dying Room, which created a WWII Torchwood variant for what likewise turned out to be a one-shot audio bubble universe. So by now, we always approach a new iteration of Torchwood with a little trepidation.

Secondly, Art Decadence takes us to 1920s London, and a setup which has PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster all over it. And initially, that feels like the weirdest setting to which any writer could possibly bring the Mara. After all, Jeeves and Wooster are all larks and fiddle-de-dee and whatnot, eh?

Well, yes, Jeeves and Wooster are. But the 1920s, for all the hot jazz, hotter liquor and arguable sexual liberality for the rich, were also a time more repressed in terms of “decent society” than Wodehouse ever touched upon.

And the scenario here gives Jeeves and Wooster a distinctly Torchwood half-twist. Where Wodehouse has Wooster avoiding marriage simply because he’s happy in a vacuous life of shallow pleasures, here we have a gay “Wooster,” his wife packed away in the country while “Sir Reginald Dellafield” (Wilf Scolding) gads about in London, while also, under strict instructions from an aunt, representing Torchwood in terms of vanquishing alien threats before he can escape to his club. His butler-cum-valet, Forster (Simon Kane) is also gay, but being from a lower social class, he cannot find the freedom to be himself, but represses his sexuality in service to Sir Reggie, who in some sense more than feudal, he loves.

So – gay Jeeves and Wooster do Twenties Torchwood. Larks indeed – until two new arrivals threaten their way of life. One is an eager young manservant with an eye to profit and a willingness to be Reggie’s new plaything. Peter Janks, played by Timothy Blore with an “anything goes” sense of abandon that channels the spirit of the age, threatens the stability of the longstanding pair, willing to throw himself at Reggie for advancement, but becoming an object of both attraction and revulsion for Forster.

Into all this, throw the Mara. The knower of secrets. The prodder of guilts. The spirit of darkness from the places of the Inside.  

What you have then is a changed and strained dynamic as Sir Reggie gains a snake tattoo after he visits London’s hottest new gentleman’s club, where darkness and light, life and death, temptation and consequence dance every night, turning the wheel of chaos, brutality, slavery and consent.

The potential to throw the world into chaos, or at least to ride it into the 1930s, where death and madness will achieve its new epiphany, is irresistible to the Mara, and ultimately, the story becomes a question of whether a man so tightly repressed as Forster can stand against the ultimate tempter, can find a way to win the world from darkness back to at least what passes for light in the 1920s.

There are some wonderful tense dialogue scenes here, as the Mara’s bluff is called, and it absolutely doesn’t care, talks almost amicably about the chaos it will cause, enflame and ride, talks about the men it has subdued and possessed, talks about all the things it can offer to Forster, who has rarely felt himself free. And while, as in both Kinda and Snakedance, there’s an evocation of the giant serpent incarnation of the entity, also as in both the TV versions, the real power of the Mara comes when it has a human form, able to speak as a human, make deals as a human, unpick defences and steal secrets as a human. It’s never the serpent-form that’s most effective in a tempter – it’s always the whispering knower of the truths we hide from the daylight. 

Art Decadence delivers on that Mara in spades, and may well stay with you long after you finish the story. It would be entirely unfair to spoil the ending for you, because while you’ll inevitably see some solution coming, the likelihood that you’ll guess exactly where it goes is miniscule. 

Art Decadence brings the Mara to an unexpected time on Earth, and balances its Wooster source material and its Mara darkness beautifully, bringing chuckles, shudders, and ultimately a lesson of heartbreak at the repressions that either felt necessary in that age and class, or that simply represent the private sadness of a man good enough to stand against the snake.

Beyond good enough to stand alongside the two TV Mara stories, Art Decadence is a release you might well end up giving a re-listen soon after you finish it the first time. As such, it’s well worth your time and your money, standing as a special intersection of Torchwood and one of TV Doctor Who’s creepiest villains. Tony Fyler