and destroyed its new snake body. This time, the Mara had apparently been permanently destroyed. Unfortunately, it turns out that the Mara has retreated deeper into Tegan's mind. The Mara is revisited in the 2010 audio story The Cradle of the Snake, when it erupts in Tegan yet again. The Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa and Turlough search for a cure on Manussa, but hundreds of years in its past, when it was still an industrialized civilization. The Mara moves beyond Tegan and finally manages to possess both Nyssa and the Doctor, before finally being destroyed through an array of cameras and televisions. In the Torchwood episode "Small Worlds", Jack speculates that "fairies" may be "part Mara". However, his noting of "Mara" as the origin of the word "nightmare" and their ability to steal the breath from their victims suggests that he is referring to the Mara of Germanic/Scandinavian mythology rather than the Manussan Mara. Christopher Bailey, writer of Snakedance and Kinda, was a practising Buddhist and named Doctor Who'''s Mara after the Buddhist demon Mara. The two names share a common Proto-Indo-European root. The Mara was mentioned by the Tenth Doctor in the 2007 Children in Need special "Time Crash". The Mara also appears in the final story in the 2014 anthology Tales of Trenzalore, when it possesses some of the inhabitants of the town of Christmas and forces them to dig up the remains of Jalen Fellwood so it can use them to get a new body. The Doctor manages to defeat the Mara by filling the snow machine with salt, something that Fellwood believed held magical properties. Because the Mara draws power from this belief, it ends up being destroyed. List of appearances TelevisionKindaSnakedanceAudio plays The Cradle of the SnakeAnthology Tales of Trenzalore'' See also Mara (demon) References External links Mara Fictional monsters Fictional snakes Television characters introduced in 1982