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.
