Kinda
(Season 19, Dr 5 with Adric, Nyssa (sort of) and Tegan, 1-9/2/1982, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Christopher Bailey, director: Peter Grimwade)
Rank: 27
'How other companions might have -reacted to the Mara:
Jamie: 'Och, ghost-Zoe, stop making out I'm a wee bit slow or I'll put you across my knee and larrup you!'
Jo: 'What a groovy dream, pink snakes are my favourite kind of snakes. Wait, why do I keep throwing myself at aliens? And why do I have this sudden urge to cry?'
The Brigadier: 'Don't think much of Deva Loka. It looks a bit like Cromer. Giant pink snake there - five rounds rapid. Oh no its my worst nightmare - every regeneration of the Dr arguing with me all at once!'
Leela: 'I'll stab you snake - I know not what you do to my mind but I vow my revenge...even if it means revenge on myself! Ow, I just stabbed myself'
Mel: 'Aaaaaagh I'm too fat, must exercise and drink more carrot juice!'
Rose: 'Sob! I thought I was special!'
Martha: 'Sob! So did I - at least you got to have the Dr, he won't even look at me'
Donna: 'Sob! Well I blooming didn't think I was special, I'm just a temp!'
Amy: 'Why am I spending my life waiting for the Dr? I should be my own person without being afraid of being abandoned...Oh dear, Rory's dead again, that's not nice'
Captain Jack: 'That was a lovely sleep. Eh? What snake? I don't have any faults to haunt the darker recesses of my mind Dr - I'm perfect! or maybe I just don't have a mind that big?'
‘Kinda’ is a mystery wrapped in an enigma entombed in a riddle with a ‘surprise’ hidden away in the middle. Only instead of a bit of plastic wrapped in layers of chocolate the surprise ‘alien’ that’s hiding in the middle of this story, waiting to be discovered, is a realisation of our darker impulses that drive us, bringing an awareness of another world beyond the physical realm we live in that exists above beyond and outside us. And in this unseen world time and space and grown-ups don’t exist, only the moment you happen to be in at any one time like a newborn infant– which is a problem when you’re trying to land a machine there that can only travel in time and space. ‘Kinda’ is, it’s fair to say, rather odd and all the odder given that it comes in the era of the 5th Doctor, a time when Dr Who is as down-to-Earth and soap opera-like as it will ever be (except for the 3rd Dr era when it was, quite literally, confined down to Earth as it were but even then there’s something more basic and realistic about the Davison years). Like Kinda surprise eggs (both getting their names from the German for ‘child’) there’s enough chocolate to keep Dr Who fans stuffing their faces with all the things that usually happens in this series, but it’s the surprise in the middle that makes this story work on so many extra levels – for some anyway (other fans who just want a more normal story with normal monsters will just find this story a choking hazard). It’s the kind of trippy hippie programme that makes you ask if everyone making it were on drugs (but not the harder-edged 1980s kind but the 1960s stuff; even ‘The Web Planet’ looks almost normal when seen back to back with ‘Kinda’). There is nothing else on TV ever made that’s quite like it, a story that doesn’t just have symbols and metaphors attached to it but has a story somewhat clumsily attached to the symbols (with the exception of sequel ‘Snakedance’ which, if anything, is even trippier). ‘Kinda’ is the sort of story you can get lost in for hours and re-watch a thousand times and still feel as if you haven’t come away with everything and I’m already itching to re-write this review a third time to cover the twenty new things I’ve come across since re-watching it last time. No wonder ‘Kinda’ became the source of the first ever Dr Who guidebook to turn out a bit like this one, analysing contexts and themes and symbols – ‘The Unfolding Text’, written by John Tulloch in 1983, which chose this story to analyse in depth alongside a more general overview of the show (and, blimey, if you think my reviews are wordy…)
So much deeper than your average Dr Who story is this that ‘Kinda’ often feels as if you’re watching an entirely different series. So inexperienced was the writer (whose grand total of writing credits are his two Dr Who stories and two plays-for-TV, one of which is set in Midlands city Birmingham and involves a fictional pier!) and so reluctant was he to do any interviews whatsoever that rumour went round the Dr Who fanbase for decades that ‘Christopher Bailey’ was just a pseudonym for a more famous writer who was slumming it, with names like playwright Tom Stoppard (who really did write for TV under false names but said he never wrote this one) and even singer Kate Bush put forward (because ‘Kinda’ feels like one of her albums in TV format). After all, nobody in the production team knew much about him – it was Dr Who tradition for writers to travel to television centre and meet with the script writers and discuss their work but Bailey did it all from home, in the post. But no: Christopher Bailey was a teacher who just didn’t like talking and who felt that he’d said all he wanted to say so retired ‘Kinda’ is just the sort of work that shouldn’t be explained, from the pen of a writer who’d rather keep the mystery. Which, umm, rather makes my life reviewing it difficult. It’s also a story that bears the hallmarks of lots of other writers too, with this story joint-first with ‘Castrovalva’ for the amount of writers who shaped it, this being at a time of quick turnover in the script editor department between Christopher H Bidmead (who commissioned it: hallmarks – the unsettling feel and fairytale aspect) Antony Root (who was on a three month placement helping out the series – chances are the moe ‘grounded’ dialogue comes from him) and incoming script editor Eric Saward (I will bet my own inner pink rubber snake on the fact that the cliffhangers are his, not least because Saward complained to ‘The Unfolding Text’ that Bailey considered ‘a cliff to be something you view from and a hangar something to put your coat on’!)
The fun thing is that, when it starts, ‘Kinda’ seems just like any other tired old Dr Who story with the same old formula the show had already beaten to death by 1982: a group of people who are almost-but-not-quite British Empire colonialists have almost-but-not-quite taken over an alien planet where the natives run around freely living much simpler, primitive lives. A survey team from (presumably) Earth who are living Da Vida Loca by exploring the jungle planet Dava Loka, which is not unlike darkest Africa. They arrive expecting to have conquered the natives by teatime: after all they’re mute and don’t do much, standing around staring at them with big round eyes. The more ground the survey team uncover, however, the more they go mad, until only three people are left: Sanders whose your old fashioned no-nonsense colonel (down to looking like the KFC mascot), Hindle his more junior second in command desperate to impress and Todd, the token women whose wisdom is usually ignored by her more masculine colleagues. The locals of Veda Loka are exactly the sort of ‘uncivilised’ savages human explorers are always coming across and bringing their ‘gift’ of civilisation to. But who are the more civilised here and who are the more adult? The explorers in their pith helmets imposing their rules and regulations on a world that’s never known it needed them, ground down and driven mad by their responsibilities and social norms or the locals, who might not have built anything of any lasting technological brilliance but who don’t need to because they’re at one with nature and walk around with beaming smiles on their faces? The explorers have tried to impose their world view on Deva Loka and bring their gift of civilisation and bravery but they’re clearly taking the pith and so afraid of contamination by this new world that they hide in their special suits that monitor your body’s reactions to the world and keeps you normal and ‘stable’ . But it’s all fake and artificial: life is full of surprises and scares and to be overwhelmed is to be alive – you’ve only really found your equilibrium when you can handle life’s ups and downs yourself, without acting out or hiding behind artificial stimulants, not because a sit tells you to calm down. You need to breathe the air of the world on its own terms, not on your terms, because the world is bigger than you and your needs. The locals, meanwhile, have learned this and aren’t scared of the newcomers at all. Many a fan has seen parallels here with the British empire and colonialists, a common theme in Dr Who (see ‘The Savages’ ‘The Sontaron Experiment’ and ‘Demons Of The Punjab’ for three more examples of national guilt), especially with how the Brits treated Australia, given that the focal point of this story is (to date) our only Australian companion Tegan. Aha, you think, I know where ‘Kinda’ is going - it’s about how unsuitable these old-fashioned people are when separated from their cosy corner of the world with hierarchies and systems and placed here in the real wilderness when they can’t hide behind it all.
Then ‘Kinda’ goes in
weirder, more ‘hip’ and surrealist directions. During their travels Sanders
finds a box named ‘Jhana’ which, allowing for a bit of free translation, is the
Buddhist concept of ‘Dhyana’, the art of being able to tap into your
sub-conscious and uncover all the hidden impulses that exist underneath your
shallow, everyday exterior. It’s also a sort of Pandora’s box which, after
being opened, will never be the same again
(see ‘The Pandorica Opens’ for a more typically Dr Whoy take on this,
where its filled with alien monsters, although even then the twist is that the
‘monster everyone fears most is…The Doctor). The real primal naked ‘you’ in
other words, before getting dressed in the clothes of civilisation and culture
we’re all expected to wear. The colonialists with their petty everyday ideas of
career and routine have no chance against such a foe and their attempts to
dress these locals in suits and ties, converting them to their particularly
Western way of thinking, is laughable: instead this is a planet that converts the
converters and makes manmade constructs of such things as power struggles, time
and space utterly irrelevant. It’s society that’s wrong – every progression we
think we’ve made has only led us further away from our ‘true’ path, to simply
be and live and experience life as it comes. While a lot of Dr Who stories are,
in part, trying to make us grow up to be responsible adults, who can see beyond
the fake promises of the local millionaire megalomaniac and his alien friends,
to try to do the better thing the way the Doctor inspires us to, ‘Kinda’ is the
story that would have us all regress back to being playful children curious
about the world and aware of our tiny role within it. But all of us have
forgotten how, even the children who aren’t allowed to simply be children the
way they used to but who are being trained for their future role as adults.
Sanders starts off trying to look up his problems in ’the manual’ but there is no universal manual for life
which is always personal and always different, with different Maras for
different individuals. Instead he regresses from being a strong authority
figure to being full of wonder and awe, as if seeing the world for the first
time. Hindle goes mad, unwilling to accept who he is or what he’s become and
gradually becoming more and more unhinged as the story goes on, fighting to
hang on to a piece of the safe certain world of rules and regulations he
understands. The scenes of him, driven mad, insisting his ad hoc Deva Loka army
all straighten their ties is a glorious symbol of who he is and why he doesn’t
understand this world he’s conquering whatsoever. And then the story does an
about turn and becomes a story about the darker impulses of puberty, of sex and
hormones, of our desire, of our lustful thoughts that cause us to act out and
do weird things, making adulthood the bad guy. For Todd? Well, she’s not really
affected and just rolls her eyes a bit. You see, on this world only the
youngest girls and oldest women escape the worst effects of Jhana,
acknowledging its existence without being afraid of it, without the macho
impulses to seek conquer and destroy that are all damaging to the psyche. For
female intuition can more easily grasp that something ‘other’ beyond what man
creates was out there all along; the masculine concept of shaping your
environment just doesn’t work on this planet. The men, much simpler on this
planet, can’t express this unknowable subconscious world which is why all the
men are mute and only the women speak. They even ‘inherit’ their knowledge
through the people who have died – a shared learned wisdom through their subconsciousness,
caused by being children of not just their biological parents but the whole
community (with the talk of having ‘seven fathers’), something that I wish the
script had explored further but which is just a throwaway detail here. Why don’t
the men talk? Can they not comprehend it, do they not feel it or are they just
not good at talking about ‘feelings’? The script is nicely ambiguous about all
three. Even the Doctor (not yet a woman, at least on screen) ends up
man/timelordsplaining to Tegan about things he only vaguely understands but
which she ‘knows’. And then the story does an about turn and reveals that each
of us at every age are primitive hairy beasties in part, that each of us is
driven by subconscious impulses and dark desires that we try to ignore or
refuse to act out on – our insecurities and our warped sense of identity which
isn’t a single construct but an ever-changing moving target.
So it’s all the more
confusing for the locals when the Tardis turns up in the middle of all this and
the Doctor doesn’t act like the men of their world or the explorers. Of course
we know now, after the Jodie Whittaker years, that timelords are kind of sort
of non-binary, both genders at once. I don’t think that’s what Bailey is
getting at here though: in his original script Bailey was writing for Tom
Baker’s Doctor and turned him into a wise sage, before re-writing it for the 5th
Doctor as more of a ‘fool’, someone who knows enough to know how little he
really knows. The 5th Dr really takes to Todd, whose an older, wiser figure
that’s more obviously suited to his youthful-yet-wise Dr than any of his actual
companions, open-minded enough to realise that this is one of those planets
that needs to be explored on its own terms. Adric, meanwhile, goes a bit
bonkers himself, enjoying the chance to be Hindley’s own junior second in
command and notably finds himself trapped in the colonial weapon of choice: a
sort of canvas tank on wheels that enables the survey team to wander through
the jungle like a safari landrover. Ostensibly its to keep them separate from
any germs on this planet, but this planet doesn’t work like that – instead this
planet gets under your skin not through touch or inhalation but simply by being
around it. Nyssa, having been written into the series only at the last minute
and without room in the script to add her back in, basically goes to sleep on
the Tardis (its tempting to think that Trakenites, with their own mystical
source of power, basically understand this stuff already so don’t need to learn
wisdom the way the others do and the planet puts her to sleep instead, though
that’s not how they put it on screen – she just gets a bit tired after being
hypnotised in previous story ‘Four To
Doomsday’ and needs a rest).
However as the closest
thing to a representative your average 1980s viewer has in this era of the
series (despite the fact that she’s nothing like anybody who really existed in
the 1980s) its Tegan who goes on the journey of a lifetime, sent to sleep by
the local windchimes (that Adric and the Doctor are too busy to really notice),
visited in her dreams by a creepy mime-clown who invades her mind in an attempt
to get control of her – in a sequence that’s as close to a ‘rape’ scene as they
dare putting on Saturday teatime telly and even then goes a bit strong - opening
up all the suppressed primal forces that humans keep hidden. Poor Tegan: she’s
always been a bundle of nerves and
insecurities, sharing Tardis space with no less than three aliens who are
super-brainy and bright and she doesn’t know who she is anymore after her
travels in the Tardis have pushed her much further than she’s ever been pushed
before. It’s not for nothing that the first scene we see of her in this story
is her sulking as Adric and Nyssa play chequers and messing up their game – in
her dreams her visions play too and taunt her, while questioning whether she
really ‘exists’ or not. This is also, surely, not just about the fact that they
can play a board game better than Tegan can but how they interact with each
other and the world so effortlessly, ‘playing games’ that we all play in
society, while Tegan keeps getting things wrong and making mistakes and thinks
that’s all she is (it would surprise a lot of people just how little people
care about the mistakes you make – because, after all, they’re too fixated on
their own which you didn’t even notice). You really feel for poor Tegan, as
she’s taunted by her evil doppelganger Dukka (a Buddhism word that loosely
translates as ‘shadow work’ – basically it’s the necessary suffering you have
to go through in order to achieve enlightenment and understanding about your
part in the universe and your status in it as a flawed mortal being, accepting
yourself for who you really are, although weirdly it translates as both
‘suffering’ and ‘one who heals suffering’, i.e. a Doctor) ‘Anicca’ and
‘Anatta’, meanwhile, aren’t just names that sound a little like ‘Adric’ and
‘Nyssa’ but Buddhist words meaning ‘impermanence’ and ‘egolessness’ (‘Anatta’
is played by Anne Wing, mother of
‘Hitchker’s Guide To the Galaxy’s Zaphod Beeblebrox on radio and T actor Mark
Wing-Davey, the sort of frood who’d be visited by the Mara and insist there was
nothing wrong because he’s perfect). Not quite how I’d describe her Tardis
companions but this Tegan’s subconscious brain, not reality, and it makes sense
that she’d think her cool calm, unruffled alien travelling companions have got
their act together. Because that’s what the Mara really is, a being that seizes
on your imperfections and tells you that everyone else is perfect and it’s only
you and you alone that’s a hot mess, even though in reality everyone carries a
Mara of their own around with them (well, almost everyone: I mean, there are
people out there who think they’re perfect and somehow strangled their own
snakes at birth but the rest of us just found those people cocky irritating and
weird. Captain Jack was one until Russell T started writing for him in
Torchwood series three and gave him a guilty
conscience).
This is totally Tegan’s
story and Tegan’s particular brand of Mara (other people would have different
symbols and insecurities) though and a rare story where the writer has gone
away and thought about a character: this story really wouldn’t work anything
like as well with another companion, but its tailor-made for Tegan, the bossy
shouty one who so desperately needs to be in control but underneath her strops
so desperately needs to be loved and fit in. A mess of hormones and bluster,
she’s tailor-made for a villain like The Mara to infect and watching her
journey from relatable misfit to scary monster is one of the greatest
rollercoaster rides of the series, painting Tegan in far more dimensions than
any other story. Janet Fielding is sublime here in a story that asks one
hell of a lot from her and while we’ve seen the vulnerable fragile human being
that lurks behind Tegan’s bolshie argumentative side a few times now, it’s in
this story that we really get to see what a ‘front’ that is for the scared
little girl inside who hates being out of her comfort zone and losing control of
the world around her (Donna is her 21st equivalent who goes through a similar
rite-of-passage in ‘Turn Left’, a story which is like a folk memory of this and
‘Planet Of the Spiders’ stuck together, even though it works in quite a different
way). Too often in other stories Tegan ends up being a caricature, someone who
loves the sound of her own voice and arguing for the sake of it, but here we
learn why she is how she is, because it helps drown out the feelings of
inadequacy that lurk within her and how she feels better if she gets the last
word in.
So, what on the Deva Loka
was in that box? We never fully find out but here a few guesses. One is that
the box represents puberty: it’s what makes the men on this world say nothing
of consequence and which drives the women to be chatty both, as they split into
their gender specified roles of masculine and feminine. Just look at the effect
opening the box has on the people contaminated by it: though it doesn’t always
come over on screen they’re meant to look older, with bags under their eyes,
and speak in deeper booming voices: the only thing missing is sprouting hair
(and let’s face it the natives have rather a lot of that already!) Dr Who
doesn’t often talk about sex and rarely ever directly, its more a world of
chaste romances (give or take Rose’s weird flirtatious lines about dancing in ‘The Empty Child’ and whatever the Doctor
got up to in ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ and
‘Human Nature’ anyway). ‘Kinda’ is
easily Dr Who’s sexiest story, albeit in a deeply weird way: just look at how
Aris goes from being a mute gentleman to a savage, breaking things on contact
with Tegan’s raging hormones as he tries to show off to her, the pair of them
infected by a very phallic-looking ‘snake’. While a lot of Dr Who seems cute,
bordering on childish, sometimes what they get away with amazes me and the
sight of Tegan salivating at the sight of bare chested men in a kid’s show
screened for a family audience on a Saturday tea time is decidedly one of them:
shockingly the original script had a lot more of this before the director
started to panic and toned it down. Tegan also gets a very fetching snake
tattoo on growing older and while that’s more a rite of passage in the 21st
century than the 20th that still sort of fits: opening the box
causes you to grow older and either settle for taking the money and having a
career (as Hindle tries to do) or starting a family, which means having babies.
Or is the box temptation?
After all there is a snake and Tegan was dropping apples on Aris’ head to get
his attention. Deva Loka is, after all, a paradise planet that looks not unlike
what The Garden of Eden would look like (at least were it made inside a TV
studio on a Dr Who budget in 1982). Surely, then, this is a Christian parable
about the Garden of Eden. After all, it is a story about temptation, of how Eve
was tempted out of paradise by darker impulses Notice that it’s girls who have
come to terms with this temptation and Tegan that it affects the most. The
Bible, let’s face it, is more than a bit sexist: what Bailey does here is
redress the balance and say that men aren’t intelligent enough to even see dark
impulses. Aris, after all, becomes a hulking brute only after Tegan starts
flaunting herself at him and to this day most rape trials feature defence along
the lines of ‘she made me do it with her short skirts and smiles that made me
think she wanted it, even though she ran away screaming’. It’s not just sex in
this instance though but everything: all we had to do to stay in Eden was to remain
where we were, to be part of nature, but no, we had to think we knew better and
start colonising things. and the snake is representative of mankind’s mistakes,
of how our side that causes our biggest problems in society (hatred, jealousy,
rage) keep tripping us up every time we try to evolve. The Deva Loka natives
are the ‘us’ we used to be, at one with our planet and the impulses inside our
head but the explorers are the ‘us’ we are now, who acted on those impulses and
turned them into a capitalist society, ignorant that what we’re doing is really
‘progress’ when all we’re really doing is trying to find that same peace we
used to have. This wouldn’t be the first Dr Who story where curiosity has been
the downfall, for characters from the Doctor on down. Just look, too, at how
many times people munch on apples, the ‘forbidden fruits’ that humans were
meant to leave well alone (the Doctor adding ‘an apple a day keeps the…err…ah,
oh dear’ in one of the story’s best lines). No wonder this story ends with a
giant pink rubber snake telling us ‘go on, you know you want to…’
This is, however, not so
much a Christian story as a Buddhist one. Pandora’s box is karma: every bas
thing we ever do will haunt us until we put it right, each of us victims of our
impulses. The best thing we can do, the only we can find peace, is to study our
darker sides and tame our inner pink snakes, to embrace them as a part of us.
Just look at how the Doctor defeats the Mara in this story not with his usual
technology but with a giant mirror, for if there’s one thing evil can’t stand
its being stared at face on, accepted and understood for what it is. There are
Buddhist names galore in this story, so much so that they’re said to have
embarrassed the author when he got older and thought he’d been a bit too
‘obvious’, but ‘Kinda is one of those stories where the clues are so hidden we
need something to go on. We’ve already mentioned a few but here are a few more:
‘Deva Loka’ means ‘realm of the Gods’. ‘Mara’ means ‘demon’ (but is also close
to ‘maya’, ‘illusion’ – more specifically an illusion we created for ourselves
because we don’t want to see the truth of the world we live in. A lot of George
Harrison songs use that concept).
‘Karuna’, the name of the lead female local, means ‘compassion’. A lot
of Buddishm too is about escaping the ‘wheel of time’ that keeps you trapped in
a cycle of regretting the past and fearing the future instead of simply living
in the moment and appreciating it for what it is, because that’s the best way
of finding peace and finding peace is everything, not status or money or
careers or status symbols. The explorers are outraged that this expedition is
playing havoc with their time table, but timetables are manmade thing: nature
happens at its own sweet speed. The single most Buddhist moment in the story,
though, isn’t a name or a phrase but the moment a mad Hindle screams ‘But you
can’t cure people. Not when they’re broken!’ That might be the Western idea of
madness and quite possibly the Christian one too (there are lots of uncured mad
people in the Bible) but not in Buddhism: if you do this sort of thing properly
and fully (and Buddhists are the first to admit that it’s hard to do anything
properly and fully) then you absolutely can fix yourself, by going inaside to
face your inner demons, to sit with then and tame them, to see them in context
of your full self and all the good things you get right also and to live in
balance, in harmony with the world around you. Hindle can’t fix himself because
he’s going about it wrong, holding on to heirarchy and shouting and orders and
doing things for the sake of it, gnoring the inner Mara inside him, not because
he’s unfixable. None of us are unfixable, because it’s us who broke ourselves –
sometimes through our own Mara insecurities, sometimes through what we did to
ourselves to shoo the Mara away, sometimes indirectly because people asked us
to or gave us an alternative, though really every decision we take is ours,
including the one to start fixing ourselves instead of breaking ourselves. And
what does the box of ‘Panna’ mean in this context? ‘Wisdom, enlightenment, a
realisation about the truth of things and how they really are. Only to get to
the truth we need to unwrap our own particular constructs, the things we’ve
built up ourselves to shelter us from that truth. No wonder it sends people who
aren’t ready for it mad or catatonic and leaves men mute while Tegan is
tortured by what she thinks she is rather than what she really is. The world,
after all, is a scary place - and all
the more so when it’s a Dr Who world and we have to cope with living in it
sometime.
How do most people escape
reality? Some form of addiction, with drink or drugs being the most obvious. So
is the box also some form of drugs? Just look at the way the natives of this
planet look like hippies who’ve turned on, tuned in and dropped out. For what’s
in the box can alter the way you see the world and can heal or harm, depending
on how you use them and how badly you want to escape your reality. These visions, that come to these characters
in their subconsciouses, come to them in trippy dreams, where they’ve gone on a
‘trip’ into another realm that’s helped them see the world from another angle –
we think at first Tegan’s gone to ‘another planet’ before we find out that
she’s actually gone inwards, into her own mind. Note how Tegan enters this
realm - like many druggies - through music, specifically the windchimes that
hang from the trees on Deva Loka, a sound traditionally used for meditation, to
go ‘inwards’; some Buddhists, hippies and beach Boys fans will also tell you
about the concept of ‘good vibrations’, that there are some notes human bodies
respond to well instinctively and others said to be quite terrifying – lots of
chords were banned in the dark ages for being ‘the music of the Devil’ (certainly
possession by the Devil would explain a lot of the worst of Mozart, Bach,
Clementi and other unlistenable composers who dabbled in those notes; see ‘The Devil’s Chord’, a story that didn’t
yet exist when I first wrote this review but says much the same thing).The
writer seems like the sort of big-thinking existentialist with good taste who
would appreciate and know of The Beach Boys’ ‘Smile’ too, an album abandoned
partly directly because of Brian Wilson’s durg habit and partly because of his
fear that he’d unleashed his own inner demons into the world when the studio
burnt down the night after recording a song about ‘Fire’; another song on the
album, which he never did finish in the 1960s, was ‘Wind Chimes’, a track about
closing your eyes and trying to be at one with the world. Brian also reverted
back to being a ‘child’ in so many ways, after years of being forced to be a
hugely powerful grownup ahead of his time, just like Sanders does here (the
only thing missing is the piano buried in sand and going back to bed).
Once the box is open though, once you’ve been bitten by the ‘snake’, chosen your addiction to shut up the Mara in your head, it’s very hard to close that box again, leading to addiction. Talking of which actually there’s another story far more like ‘Kinda’ than any that’s usually mentioned, albeit one that’s never generally recognised because it feels so different: ‘The Abominable Snowman’ from 1967, where the 2nd Doctor gets in trouble for similar cultural appropriation and a disembodied alien voice in a monastery tells the locals to start doing their bidding. Only the big difference is that story was firmly against the idea of youngsters going round and talking zen at a Buddhist camp when they might get attacked by big hairy beasties at any minute and wouldn’t have a clue how to fight them off; in ‘Kinda’ and ‘Snakedance’ the big hairy primitive beasties are the people who really know what’s going on and it’s the so-called evolved oldie oppressors who just haven’t got the slightest clue what life is really about. And in 1982, compared to 1967, the drugs are much darker and evil now, more deadly, taking the people who take them further away from Eden and purity and being at one with the world – because nothing makes you more self-obsessed and cut off from community than addiction.
‘Kinda’ is, as you can
tell, not like other Dr Who stories. Heck it’s not really like any other TV
story or indeed thing else ever made in any medium: it’s a story that takes a
totally different tack to the usual Dr Who monster story set in time and outer space
with monsters, because this adventure is all about inner not outer space,
features an alien who lives outside time and where the monsters are us, or at
any rate our darkest impulses. Even the dialogue is strange: I haven’t strictly
counted but I’m willing to bet a far larger percentage of this story than
normal is people asking questions, usually ones that can’t be answered, whether
to other people who don’t know the answers either (including The Doctor for
once) or rhetorical ones. It’s unsettling in all the best ways, creepy but not
in the usual Dr Who ‘there’s a monster about to eat you’ sense, a surrealist
nightmare dreamworld (and usually dream worlds in Dr Who are stupid or lazy
writing, but not this one – it has to be a ‘dream’ because only in dreams are
you free of the Buddhist wheel of time and free of any control). It’s a thrilling attempt to do something very different, to stretch Dr
Who’s usual elastic format to breaking point and challenge the characters with
a story that doesn’t work in the same linear, scientific way as other stories.
Some fans I know hate it and see it as a load of confusing, badly made
nonsense: it’s a story that came absolute bottom of the Dr Who Magazine season
poll for 1982 (and remember this is a season that included ‘Time-Flight’). In
some ways I sympathise because there are a lot of problems with ‘Kinda’: a bit
more plot and a bit less symbolism would have helped sell this concept a lot,
while even by the standards of the rest of the year this story is quite
shoddily made, with budget cuts everywhere you look. I so wish, for instance, that ‘Kinda’ had been filmed on location
(preferably in a real jungle, ideally in Africa to emphasise the links to
Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’, which is like a really poorly written and
obvious version of ‘Kinda’ by someone who didn’t really know what they were
doing) because a story about realities and illusion with that many
plastic-looking trees is hard to take. The biggest problem with this story –
and there are sadly quite a few – is how this deeply weird tale has to work
within the recognised confines of other Dr Who episodes. This is a story about
breaking the rules that breaks as many rules as it can and shouldn’t be forced
into 25 minute slots with cliffhangers to punctuate the tension, even though it
has to because that’s what Dr Who does and they’re three of the weirdest in the
show’s history, artificially creating peril that isn’t really there (Hindle
yelling that he now has ultimate power over every living thing like your
everyday Dr Who baddie, Hindle making the Doctor open his own particular pandroica’s
box – which of course does little to him as he’s already been through this
process in ‘Planet Of The Spiders’, not that the audience at home too young to
see that story would have known that and the Doctor, having travelled far and
wide for advice from a mystical hermit, finds his quest has all been for
nothing as she lies dead within her cave).
The ending is also far
too pat for a story like this, the Doctor basically restoring balance by
opening a box and shattering a mirror so that everyone sees themselves as they
really are, which doesn’t make for the most thrilling bits of TV ever made
however logical a conclusion it is in context (it’s almost a relief to find that this
solution is too simple and an illusion itself of sorts, The Mara staying
attached to Tegan and building its strength until overpowering her again in
‘Snakedance’, because your inner demons aren’t as easily vanquished as your
everyday Dr Who monsters). Logically this story should also have ended with
Tegan herself defeating her own personal pink snake, acknowledging it but using
her inner strength and the help of her friends to face it down and send it back
into its box, to co-exist alongside it rather than defeat it, because only
person who can fix you is you. That’s the one part of the story that feels as
if it got changed from the original idea, unless the writer got defeated by his
own personal Mara demon of insecurity and missed a trick trying to shoe-horn
this script into a better fit for a Dr Who story that is. And then there’s the animal
manifestation of the Mara itself, Dr Who trying to create an all-seeing,
all-knowing other-worldly energy source that’s made up of our darkest impulses
in snake form and having it turn out as an inflatable pink bouncy castle with
painted on fangs (the Mara is notorious as one of the single worst special
effects in all of Dr Who, but honestly there isn’t a way they could have
realised this concept on screen without it looking stupid; even now with CGI it
wouldn’t look ‘right’ because something like this can never be seen properly. The
Vashta Narada are the closest modern Dr Who has come to making a similar
shadowy presence and even they had to wear spacesuits that walked
unconvincingly to make the horror work). In a way that almost fits this story
though: this is a tale all about facing up to and acknowledging your weaknesses
and vulnerabilities that hold you back and convincing monsters, low budgets and
rigid formats are Dr Who’s Achilles heel in every era, but particularly this
one. Of course ‘Kinda’ isn’t perfect. It was made by Humans and Humans aren’t
perfect. But just as we should learn to forgive ourselves and sit with our
inner pink snakes so we should learn to forgive this story for being made on a
shoestring budget for a family audience in 1982.
A less forgivable obstacle,
though, is how unlikeable the characters are: the female Deva Lokas are meant
to be all-wise and knowing, to have been through so much learning that they’re
learnt compassion for those who haven’t gone through what they have, but
they’re almost unbearably smug. Richard Todd doesn’t quite know how to play
Sanders, even his long acting experience leaving him totally unprepared for a
part like this (the first actor to have been nominated for an Oscar to appear
in Dr Who, decades before Carey Mulligan, he played it as a comedy role in
rehearsals before the director had a word with him).Simon Rouse as Hindle plays
him with more sympathy than you might expect but still resorts to lots of
shouting that grates on the nerves. Heck, even Adric is at his worst in this
story and annoying in the extreme as he continues to back the ‘wrong’ horse and
get into trouble through his own meddling, which is really saying something
given what he’s like in the other stories – only for some odd reason he never
ends up being attacked by a Mara of his own (he is male, is that why? Is it
because Alzarians from E-space can’t be invaded by telepaths? Is it because the
Mara knows he’s going to die and pay for his karma that way? Or is it more simple,
that Adric’s too dense to realise he isn’t perfect?) The 5th Doctor has more
than a few shades of his know-it-all 3rd incarnation too, so much so that it’s
a surprise the Mara lets him off and doesn’t at least give him a headache: he
is at least bright enough to accept that the female natives and explorers both
call him a ‘fool’ for not being as worldly wise as they are, whether that be
Deva Loka or Earth, because he doesn’t know as much as they do (he’s like the
fool in the tarot card, where the fact he doesn’t know anything is a good thing
because he’s open. To go back to music that’s what The Beatles’ ‘The Fool On
The Hill’ is all about too).The story really goes downhill when anyone other than
Tegan or Todd are on screen, the latter played by Liver Bird Nerys Hughes, who
copes remarkably well considering this story is so far out of her wheelhouse
and she would never have thought in her wildest dreams that a request to her
agent to find her a part in Dr Who to show off her range beyond playing a
Liverpudlian girl about town would end up with her saying lines like she does
in this story – it works though, in as much as Todd is our ‘everygirl’
identification figure in this story once Tegan zonks out. ‘Snakedance’ is, its
fair to say, a much easier watch than ‘Kinda’ all round, the big ideas in this
story established enough to be slotted in much more easily to your more usual
everyday Dr Who runaround.
Still, I have the utmost
respect and admiration for just how many risks ‘Kinda’ takes and I’m more than
kinda fond of it: this is a story that never takes the easy way when the hard
way will do, that asks big questions of the characters and by extension the
audience at home that it didn’t need to ask and which works to an internal
logic as well built as any yet utterly different to anything else in this
series. I can totally see why, despite coming last in a Dr Who poll, this story
was also selected by The National Film Archive as (so far)their only Dr Who
story to be kept safe, in a vault, protected from war, famine and plague as a
signifier of perfect television. ‘Kinda’ is special, ‘Kinda’ is important and
‘Kinda’ is unique. Well, I say unique: actually it’s incredibly similar to
Ursula Le Guin’s 1972 novel ‘The Word For World Is Forest’, where a high-tech
military excursion in a peaceful forest disturb a bunch of peaceful natives,
the book slowly moving from painting the invaders as sophisticated and the
locals as primitive to the last few chapters where it’s clear they’re really
the other way around. This is a stick a lot of reviewers use to beat ‘Kinda’
with but copying from sources is nothing new (almost all the Phillip
Hinchcliffe era 4th Doctor stories lean heavily on past sources,
just more obvious ones) and ‘Kinda’ does do new things: by adding a snake and a
possession, mostly. ‘Kinda’ is still a remarkable bit of TV in so many ways,
not just as a xript but in realisation, full of really memorable and haunting
scenes: there’s a fast-zoom into Tegan’s eyes, to show us that we’re inside her
mind, which is unlike any other shot in anything (it was made using an early
quantel computer). Also effective are the ‘possession’ scenes, of a half-mime,
half-clown in white makeup shot in dazzling bright light and Jeffrey Stewart,
as Dukka, is the other star of the story, just the right side of creepy and
inhumane. Even with the mistakes ‘Kinda’ is a story you have to doff your cap
to and admire – full credit to the writer for coming up with it, the script
editors for not just parking it in a quiet corner of the production office
filing cabinet but attempting to make it work, producer John Nathan-Turner, who
might have been responsible for allowing the show to slip into blandness and
repetitiveness a lot of the time but was brave enough to take chances and stand
by a story even when it was as weird as this one, regular Who director Peter
Grimwade for not simply sitting in the corner of the studio crying and giving
up (which would, after all, have been entirely in keeping with the story’s main
theme) and the cast for working out just how to do something none of their
acting experience or training could ever have prepared them for. Too clever?
Maybe. Too weird? Almost certainly. Badly made on screen? Often. Perfect?
That’s an impossible manmade construction which has no place in the real world
and whose aim will only lead to greater unhappiness and misery in having a goal
that can never be fulfilled (in other words, no). And yet there’s a
sophistication, originality and imagination to ‘Kinda’ that makes it one of the
greatest Dr Who stories of them all, because of rather than despite its flaws –
both the flaws of making TV for a few pence and bits of string in 1982 and the
flaws that lie within us all. Would that Dr Who had taken this many risks more
often because it’s when its brave and groundbreaking that Dr Who is often at
its very best and few stories take as many risks as this one. Silence your
inner demons, stop laughing at the effects it gets wrong and enjoy a story that
by all common sense shouldn’t exist, at least not done quite like this yet
does.
POSITIVES + We’ve
touched on this already but how amazing is Janet Fielding? Tegan’s possession
by her dark (Dukkha) side must surely be the most terrifying of all the
quadzillions of possessions in Dr Who in scenes that are positively terrifying.
After all, you can run away from monsters, but where do you run to when the
monster is yourself and you’re in the scarier recesses of your own mind? Often
when companions are possessed you can’t even tell, but in this story there’s a
gulf of difference between Tegan’s surface and Mara sides and it feels as if
they’re being played by two different actresses: Janet’s deeper voice, wild
stary eyes, sinister laugh (so much more evil than Anthony Ainley’s!) and
Tegan’s quivering, jibbering wreck are both note-perfect, conveying our
heroine’s utter terror that helps sell the idea of the Mara as surely one of
the single scariest ‘baddies’ ever seen in this series. How I wish they’d given
Janet script this good and this brave more often: this is one of the best
performances any companion in Dr Who ever gives and all the more so given that,
in her first three stories where Tegan’s a stereotypical whining Australian
with a big mouth, there isn’t even a hint that this is coming.
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