Doctor Who: The Masque of Mandragora (1976) (a.k.a. Philip Hinchcliffe’s The Daemons)
Hear me out. If I hadn’t watched The Daemons immediately before watching The Masque of Mandragora, I almost certainly would not have thought of this as Philip Hinchcliffe’s version of that season eight classic. But the parallels are there, if you want to see them.
At a superficial level, the Doctor is much more a man of action than usual for a Tom Baker story and parts of the action seem like a throw-back to Jon Pertwee’s Doctor (who screenwriter Louis Marks had previously written for). While admittedly not quite as active as he is in The Seeds Of Death, in just the first episode, he backflips a guy, knocks another soldier off his horse and then immediately steals said horse and rides off on it (Pertwee would have no doubt insisted on the use of a 15th century Italian motorcycle instead of a horse).
A more interesting comparison is that a main undercurrent of The Daemons is the Doctor’s “science vs magic” argument between Jo and Miss Hawthorne. In Masque, Louis Marks, Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe pick up this thread and run with it and to an even greater extent they make it a more fundamental part of the story.
The adventure is set during the late 15th century — the birth of the Renaissance — and it makes that era’s science-based movement away from superstition a plot element. The Mandragora Helix is taking advantage of the fear and superstition of that era to profoundly alter the progress of history in a way that The Daemons touches on but never quite gets there the way that Masque does.
If you want another parallel to The Daemons, I’ll offer the cliffhangers for episodes three in both stories. Episode three of The Daemons is notable in that the character who is in danger is the story’s protagonist, the Master, as he cowers from the mighty Azal. At the end of episode three of Masque, the character who is attacked and killed by the superior force is also the character who has been the story’s bad guy for three episodes, Count Federico.
The comparisons from this point on are now much more superficial, but both stories do feature some great location work. Masque heavily features Portmeirion but manages to look very little like the Village from The Prisoner.
So if you’re looking for the spiritual sequel to The Daemons, you can’t go wrong by taking a little peek into 15th century Italy. And if the comparison to other Doctor Who stories doesn’t tickle your fancy, there’s another piece of media one could reference. When Tom Baker’s Doctor is asked to tell the future of a character who is destined to die by the end of the story, he gives more or less the same answer that Marlene Dietrich’s fortune teller character does in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil: “You haven’t got any.”
