Doctor Who's Paul McGann joins companions in BTS pic for new audio adventure

The Mara is a gestalt entity that manifests itself in the form of a snake and takes over hosts via their dreams, and producer David Richardson had been wanting the baddie to return for a while.

"I thought it would be interesting to see how they would work in the context of a different TARDIS team," he explained.

"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."

In total, the Eighth Doctor (McGann) and his companions Charley (Fisher) and Audacity (Griffiths) return for three brand-new episodes, and as well as coming face-to-face with the Mara at a luxury sleep clinic, they'll also encounter the legendary composer Puccini and meet a troubled child during a women’s strike in 1970s Iceland.

The new adventures are titled Puccini and the Doctor, Day Off, and The Gloaming, and are respectively written by Matthew Jacobs, Lisa McMullin, and Lauren Mooney and Stewart Pringle.

Speaking about reintroducing the Mara, Pringle said: "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."

Doctor Who – Deadly Strangers is now available to pre-order exclusively from the Big Finish website.

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