Enlightenment: Ranking - 21

 

Enlightenment

(Season 20, Dr 5 with Tegan and Turlough, 1-9/3/1983, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Barbara Clegg, director: Fiona Cumming)

Rank: 21  

   'It was the schooner Buccaneer 

That sailed the wintry stars 

Tacking from the Earth to eternity 

Via a stop off on Mars 

The skipper was a pirate 

With a fleet for company 

Of outlaws she's kidnapped 

From one of the Earth's seven seas 

Her rival was a gentleman 

Striking in nature and in name 

They both risked their crew across the blue 

All for a little game 

The treasure was Enlightenment 

Understanding was the prize 

With neither side deserving 

If you looked into their eyes 

No 'twas the timelord from Gallifrey 

Who saw through the reserve and hate 

And his cabin boy who claimed the prize 

Worth so much more than pieces of eight 

The eternals tried to claim their prize

Enlightenment to set them free

But they miss that the story’s in the journey

And not what’s out to sea

Such is the woeful tale of the Buccaneer 

The big loser in the race 

But such is the fate of all mankind 

To be left dangling in space, arr!' 

If you ask me Humans have got it all wrong. There we are living most of our lives in ‘space’, trying to fill up the world around us with things like overflowing bank accounts, status symbols and online followers, when really we should be living in ‘time’, making the most of our all-too-short lifespan because none of those things we spend our life chasing will matter in the slightest when we’re dead. The only real way anyone comes out of life a winner is if they filled their lives with meaning and purpose that create ripples so that we can be remembered after we’re gone, but only a few people are ever lucky enough to get to do that: it’s a sad sobering fact that, unless you’re involved in as timeless a series as Dr Who, you probably won’t be remembered at all once your great-grandchildren are dead. Dr Who knows that agonising truth of existential despair that gnaws away at the heart of human existence better than most series: the Doctor has been granted multiple lifetimes to explore the universe and make the most of every minute (even if those minute’s aren’t necessarily spent in chronological order and some of those minutes end up ‘undoing’ the work of other minutes) and yet you still feel if he lived forever it would never ever be quite enough to do all the things he wants to do. And if the Doctor struggles to make the most out of life when what chance do us mere mortals, stuck in one time and space, have? 

 Writer Barbara Clegg knew this better than maybe any other Dr Who writer and came up with The Eternals, one of my favourite alien species in all of Who, beings who get the ultimate blessing of being able to live forever, but unlike the Dr they can’t think what to do with their empty lives so fritter them away instead because without that rigid deadline to work to life has even less meaning or purpose, with days just a vacuum to be filled. Like Captain Jack and Ashildr to come, eternity is a curse not a blessing, with the removal of death effectively removing all sense of life because nothing matters anymore. The irony of ‘Enlightenment’ is that they gleefully waste the lives of the ‘Ephemerals’ (basically ‘us’, or any species with a shortened lifespan) in their own silly trivial quests, games and competitions, that none of them will ever remember in a few centuries’ time, because they think our lives are too short to be of any value or consequence – but are their lives any better or more important for being so long and yet so empty? The Eternals are one of the most casually cruel and detached races in all of Dr Who, but they have a motivation that’s more believable than most alien species who want to take over the Earth or destroy us all: sheer boredom. There’s something particularly chilling about a species that wants to kill you not because they hate you or because they want to convert you to be like them but because, well, it passes the time doesn’t it? And you were only going to die in what, forty, sixty, eighty years anyway? It’s not like you were going to do anything useful in such a short time. A lot of alien races look down on humanity for various reasons but tp the Eternals, especially, we’re insects with such an impossibly short lifespan our lives look like a complete waste of time. 

 Clegg was a radio writer who lost her job when Radio 2 dropped all their long running radio dramas including her pet project ‘Waggoner’s Walk’ (a sort of more plausible version of ‘The Archers’). A scifi fan, she won a gig adapting ‘The Chrysalids’ for Radio 4, John Wyndham’s seminal 1950s tale of prejudice and mutation that, of all his books, most feels like a Dr Who story. We follow David, the son of a family who have survived a nuclear war and are racially pure and like all others who resemble them convinced that they’re somehow special. David becomes close to a little girl from another family he treats like a little sister but is horrified to find out she has an extra toe and ‘isn’t like them’, that she’s ‘ephemeral’ with a life that doesn’t matter in the same way theirs do. He’s caught between going to the authorities and reporting her or helping her and eventually helps her and her family escape, while finding out he has super powers of telepathy himself so he can ‘talk’ to her from a distance and join with others like them, his entire world view overturned by actually getting to know one of the people he’s been taught to be so prejudiced about. Radio 4 Extra still repeat her version most years somewhere in their schedule it’s so good. Having got a taste for scifi Barbara then contacted Eric Saward, script editor of Who in this era, who she’d worked with in the past, asking for a job. 

 Being the ‘junior’ writer in season twenty Clegg was given the ‘difficult’ slot wrapping up the ‘Black Guardian trilogy’ (not part of her original script) and dutifully sat down to write it with plenty of time, but to her horror found that the time she’d put aside to write the first draft was when some distant relatives had ‘booked’ themselves into her house. They were from a far posher background than Clegg with no work to rush back to and she found them ultra-demanding and draining, as they insisted on being ‘entertained’ at all times and if they weren’t they got passive-aggressive in the way only posh people looking down on poor people can (sample line: ‘We don’t punish ephemerals, we just use them…kindly’. Yeah right!), adamant that she was wasting her time with a writing career when she could be doing something important. Like marrying for money and hoarding it. As the writer started waiting on her family hand and foot and re-acting in a dazed sort of way to their demands she began to think about the story she should have been writing and came up with a race that had imposed themselves on humanity in much the same way, expecting to be entertained but distant and removed from the people entertaining them, as if they didn’t really care. The Eternals are a great creation because they’re the opposite of what the Doctor stands for, his antithesis even more than a Master or a Dalek. The Doctor left Gallifrey partly because he has a passion to see the universe and has two hearts big enough to care for all the people he meets and the opposite of love and passion isn’t a Dalek-like hate, its disinterest. Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler had already gone down this route creating the Cybermen but they were more of a robotic-style distant caused by removing emotion chips. Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke, too, had created the timelords to be the Doctor’s detached opposites but in Robert Homes’ hands they’d changed into a race that had all the same passionate feelings like jealousy and anger but that these were all kept hidden. The eternals however have lost the ability to feel because, after living so long, they’ve become numb to feelings. For the Doctor life is beautiful and to be lived to the maximum however long you’ve got; to The Eternals life is something to suffer and waste on petty things. 

 The eternals are also the antithesis of mankind in many ways: our journeys into space have been all about furthering our species and trying to get a foothold on another planet or solar system before we accidentally snuff ourselves out, going to great lengths and through harsh difficulties so that our offspring might get to live that little bit longer, but the Eternals live long enough to master space travel almost by accident and have long ago turned it into a silly parlour game, the explorers of our world replaced by pirates who live for the treasure not the quest. Because Eternals have lived so long most times are the same to them, their lives a random grab-bag of images borrowed from other cultures including ours, having made no impact on the world instead of the people they take out of it. And so, almost by accident (Clegg almost certainly wouldn’t have seen it, not being a Who fan as such) we end up with the scenario for ‘The War Games’ all over again fourteen years on, only with naval personnel instead of soldiers, a clash of different eras and countries all racing against each other, hypnotised into not thinking anything is wrong, all for the amusement of a powerful race who holds power over life and death. 

 There’s a longstanding tradition in scifi and even in real space travel of having spaceships being just like the ships of the sea – we call them space ‘ships’ for starters – because it’s the obvious next stage we go to after exploring our oceans. ‘Star Trek’ for one was pitched as a series about being like the sea films of old but in space and have the same ranking system as well as a ‘naval whistle’ as their communications call. For the astronauts who set off into space, exploring it for the first time, are ‘our’ eras equivalent of the sailors of old who travelled the seven seas not knowing what they might find and still half-convinced they might fall off the edge of the world or meet dragons. Usually, though, writers have spaceships that are just treated like ships – in this story the space shuttles really do look like ships in space, racing around planets as ‘marker buoys’ and driven by ‘solar winds’ (a real scientific discovery still kind of new in the 1980s where all suns are thought to emit a stream of protons and electrons that can be detected in the atmosphere of a planet like Earth’s magnetic fields). The shot at the end of episode one, when we think we’re in a historical only to see, as the Doctor does, that we’re really in an Edwardian sailing vessel tacking through the vast emptiness of space and racing a Greek galley (with a motor to make the oars move in and out), a Chinese junk and a river boat from the early Americas is fabulously Dr Who, something semi-ordinary clashing head on with something extraordinary. The Edwardian setting is the perfect choice, a time when mankind was as removed from his fellow man as he ever was in our history, living to a rigid system of manmade codes of class and status and when a lot of posh humans were behaving like The Eternals on a much smaller scale, oblivious to the fact that, to an eternal, they’re all small fry too. The sailors taken in this story about how distant the officers are but how this is kind of normal – to them very little is different to how it would be in their real lives anyway, while the actors playing eternals are all coached to give deliberately vague, under-played performances, director Fiona Cumming hiring actors that were naturally blank-faced and were able to go without blinking for long periods of time. The brainwashed Ephemerals stolen from their own time (and surely answering a few maritime mysteries of missing men along the way) have no idea what they’re really doing of course and they’re in a daze and if they fall to their deaths into space from the rigging then, no problem, they weren’t going to live much longer anyway and there are plenty more humans to be plucked out of the sea. 

 Of course the Doctor’s going to be outraged when he finds this out and the story gives Peter Davison lots of room to be cross and emotional, while making the most of the contrasts between Dr 5’s youthful vigour and the Eternals’ aged blankness. We’re used to seeing the Doctor as a natural mediator between two factions at war but never quite like this, where he’s too long-lived to be an ephemeral and too short-lived to be an eternal (this story’s second best line: A lord of time? Are there lords in such a small domain?) JNT and Saward had decided between them to make the 5th Doctor more passive, in contrast to Tom Baker, but here the Doctor is back to being multiple steps ahead of everyone else, working the solution out just a little head of the audience as a good regeneration always should. 

 This is a great story for the two companions too though and this is a rare Dr Who story that could only have worked as well with these two aboard the Tardis. One of the richest sub-plots is when an eternal named Marriner becomes fascinated by Tegan’s rich but ‘tiny’ mind, so full of emotion and rage and confusion and life, so different to his own. It’s one of Dr Who’s weirdest yet most plausible love stories as he tries to woo her in the way he would any eternal, only to keep putting his foot in it by not quite understanding how her world or her mind works: he can’t see why she’s upset when he rummages through her memories and re-creates the bedroom she’ll never see again onboard his sailing ship for instance or her misery when she thinks Turlough has fallen overboard and she’ll never see him again. After all, her life is short too so why become so detached to things and people she’s going to lose anyway? He’s used to bending every mortal to his will, so finding someone this feisty and used to having to stand up for themselves, creating boundaries that she won’t let him cross, fascinates him. Janet Fielding is parked off to the side in too many of her stories, despite the richness and potential in Tegan, but she finally gets a non-Mara story to get her teeth into and really makes the most of it, playing up Tegan’s confusion and conflicting emotions – sometimes her emotions can get in the way but here they’re the whole story round which the plot pivots. It’s a clever idea that’s somehow both sweet and creepy all at the same time: we’re removed enough to see that mariner doesn’t want to cause upset but also involved enough to see why, to Tegan, it feels like stalking, invading her personal privacy even when she says ‘no’. The fact that the background is the Edwardian age and she’s wearing a very elegant Edwardian dress rather than her usual stewardess outfit (or her ‘boob tube’, one of the most contemporary bits of clothing in the series – the Doctor continues to be oblivious to human clothing by ignoring her when she’s all ‘tah-dah, didn’t I scrub up well?’), only underlines how very different this world is to Tegan’s and how far she is out her comfort zone. You feel sorry for Marriner, who is getting his first glimpse into how the other half live and how love and passion makes life worth living and sees his own as mere ‘existence’, confused but fascinated by someone so unlike himself. However you also really cheer for Tegan like never before as she basically tells Marriner where to get off, even as he looks at her with blank confusion and it’s pitched as being the age-old story of a ‘forbidden’ romance between upstairs and downstairs and a man with all the privilege trying to take advantage of it. Only the scifi twist means that, rather than being a fumbling awkward teen. Unused to feeling emotions, Marriner is impossibly old (being only the second story written by a woman in Dr Who – and the first, ‘The Ark’ is debatable whatever the credits say – you can also see ‘Enlightenment’ as a feminist statement, about the gulf between the impulses and standards of men and women). However Tegan copes with this better than most companions (she’s a trained air-stewardess after all, used to looking after haughty passengers who waste the equivalent of her year’s salary on ‘extras’ during their flights). There’s a particularly poignant moment when she sees the photograph of her Aunty Vanessa, who died in Tegan’s first Dr Who story ‘Logopolis’ and Marriner won’t understand why she’s upset to be reminded of someone she loved and who died before her time, because that’s going to happen to her one day soon too isn’t it? 

Death, specifically the Doctor’s, is the key theme of the ‘Black Guardian’ aspect of the plot too and after being sidelined in ‘Terminus’ we see the proper conclusion to the story of Turlough and the Black Guardian’s plot to kill our favourite timelord, in revenge for having been outwitted by him back in the days when he looked like Tom Baker. Like The Eternals Turlough found it much easier to try to kill the Doctor in his first two stories when he was a stranger who probably wasn’t going to live very long anyway (as the Black Guardian was surely going to kill him some way or another) – but now he’s no longer a stranger but a friend whose saved his own scrawny neck so many times already Turlough can’t be emotionless about his mission any longer, even if it means his own death. Knowing the Doctor personally really shouldn’t have made a difference of course – the Doctor was always like that (give or take the opening few stories where the 1st Dr’s a cantankerous old git!) and all life is precious, but then to the Black Guardian too all life is ephemeral and limited, even a timelord’s. In his first two stories Turlough is a pain, a coward whose afraid of what the Black Guardian will do to him if he fails, even though he’s the worst assassin ever, too scared to go through with the plan but too scared to tell the Black Guardian the deal’s off so caught in a sort of limbo. He’s mostly there to make the Doctor look more gullible than we’ve ever seen him (Tegan, by contrast, is far less naive than the 5th Dr for all her younger years and has been suspicious of him from the start, a rare case of a companion having one up on the Doctor). Clegg though has more sympathies for Turlough than his other two writers and re-writes more subtly, as a man in a job he hates and would do anything to get out of, but who doesn’t know how to ask for help to get out of it. 

 Turlough spends most of this story tormented by his big decision and the moment when he decides a better option than letting the Dr live or die is to kill himself by leaping overboard is another of the all-time great DW cliffhangers (the only time a companion’s dared throw their lies away without rescuing someone or being possessed) and in contrast to the Eternals Turlough is a survivor first and foremost who’ll do anything to live, which is why it’s so shocking: we know how much turmoil he must be in to end his life when he begged the Black Guardian to save it not so long ago. Mark Strickson gives his best performance in a script that gives him a lot to do, despite being in pain for a lot of it (the stunt with Turlough’s suicidal leap went wrong when the kirby wire he was on snapped, giving him a limp for several weeks afterwards). Turlough is a survivor even in death though and after being rescued, rather than go through with it again, he throws his lot in with the rival pirates to see if that does any good. Wrack is a fascinating character: she’s an Eternal too but whereas Marriner and his captain Striker drift in and out of life she’s living it to the max for all the wrong reasons, getting fully into character in this odd human world of the past, reckless because she can’t be hurt. She’s much more like the Doctor in that regard, but still can’t see the bigger picture that life is for more than fun and luxury, wasting lives in her quest for an ‘enlightenment’ she’s too blind to see. Who’s first(ish) female writer enjoys making Wrack one of the strongest (and indeed strangest) female characters seen in the series, a lady whose not very ladylike and living in a men’s world that ends up with her being more manly than any of the men, a force of nature to be reckoned with. She’s a far more convincing women pirate than Madam Ching from ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils’ (at least as depicted on screen), someone whose working for The Black Guardian too and far more natural at it than Turlough is (what with a female director too ‘Enlightenment’ is arguably the most ‘equal opportunities’ story of the entire original run of Dr Who – it won’t be until ‘The Witchfinders’ thirty-five years later it happens again). 

Producer John Nathan-Turner deliberately picked Cumming to work on this story, figuring it was right up her street (a character-driven scifi with no aliens or other planets) and he’s quite right: Cumming clearly ‘gets’ this story whereas too often in the Peter Davison era directors are just doing a job. She’s excellent at casting: Lynda Baron makes the most of the middle of her three Who roles (so very different to the lounge singer of ‘The Gunfighters’ and the shop assistant of ‘Closing Time’) just the right side of hammy (mostly!) and Christopher Brown deserved a much bigger career after playing the part of Marriner (sadly it doesn’t look as if he did much TV after this). Credit too to two of the actors who were only cast at the last minute as replacements, following yet another industrial strike at the BBC (this time for electricians) that delayed the filming and meant the originally cast actors were pre-booked and couldn’t appear. I’d love to have seen what Peter Sallis would have done with the part of Captain Striker, returning to the series fifteen years after ‘The Ice Warriors’ had he not had commitments riding a tin bath down a Yorskhire hill in ‘Last Of The Summer Wine’ - don’t ask - but Keith Barron is a more than capable replacement and while Leee John (that’s really how he spells it) gets a lot of stick from fans but isn’t that bad. He did the part was a favour: he wasn’t an actor at all but a singer with pop band ‘Imagination’ and a big Whovian, who was on a break from Top Of The Pops when he heard someone from the Dr Who production team drowning their sorrows in the BBC bar about the need to re-cast immediately and said he’d love to be in the series whenever they needed him; he’s a lot better than he’s usually given credit for considering he’d had almost no rehearsal time and no acting experience and besides he’s a pirate’s mate – he’s meant to be over the top. The script gives the characters nautical names for extra sailor-spotter points: ‘Striker’ isn’t, as some fans think, a reference to the union strike that scuppered this story but a steam-boating term for an engineer’s apprentice, ‘Marriner’ is from the word ‘mariner’, ‘Wrack’ was originally ‘Wreck’ as in ‘Shipwreck’ and Captain Davey took his name from ‘Davy Jones’ locker’. While Wrack’s ship was always ‘The Buccaneer’ it was realised very late in the day that Striker’s shipdidin’t have a name and they needed it to build the lifeboat props: Clegg’s on-the-spot solution ‘The Shadow’ is perfect for a crew that’s halfway between the Black and White Guardians (though on first viewing many fans assumed it was a clue to the Black Guardian’s ‘Shadow’ assistant from ‘The Armageddon Factor’). 

 There are lots of lovely moments that stay in the memory long after the story has finished, full of very Dr Who juxtapositions of the ordinary and extraordinary banging up against each other, while there are lots of great twists and turns in the script that’s forever keeping you guessing what will happen right up until the last showdown. If there’s a problem then it is (spoilers) that last showdown (allegedly added by script writer Eric Saward and not by Clegg at all, though to be fair to him some of the scenes between the sailors making everyday conversation, added to pad out a story that was under-running at rehearsals, are his too and they’re some of the best he ever wrote): most fans can see the real prize of ‘enlightenment’ coming a mile off and it’s a bit of a cheat that the Doctor refuses it and gives it to Turlough, who uses it to rid himself of the influence of the Black Guardian, not to mention the unnecessary maguffin of the red crystal Wrack smuggles into Tegan’s tiara that ends up being the ‘focal point’ of the weapon Wrack has trained on Striker and Marriner’s ship (it really is amazing how many special properties crystals have in the Dr Who universe, though at least this one doesn’t come with lots of overgrown spiders attached). Enlightenment, you see, is not the tangible treasure everyone thought they were racing for, it’s knowledge...Yeah great, I’ve won non-prizes like that in raffles too. It doesn’t match a new fangled solar toaster or a holiday on the Moons of Poosh now does it?! In Clegg’s original draft it was made clearer that ‘enlightenment’ or knowledge was a very different thing to ‘wisdom’ being more the experience of what to do with that knowledge, with all those extra years the Eternals spent idly drifting through space failing to help them to see the right thing to do, which is a lot more in keeping with the overall mood of this story (and an idea she took from the Book of Genesis and the tale of how humanity was kicked out of the garden of Eden for apple scrumping from the ‘tree of knowledge’ without knowing what it was they were taking). It’s a bit of a mess when you think about it though: if the Guardians are all powerful they must know that the Doctor can see through this, The White Guardian’s cryptic messages of warning are no help at all and the Black Guardian has no reason to side with Wrack (she’s clearly going to double-cross him the first chance she gets). And why doesn’t The Black Guardian simply kill Turlough anyway out of pettiness? We’ve seen how he can cause physical harm to the boy and rejecting a crystal shouldn’t change that. To be fair I don’t know what else they could have done with Turlough’s story, which was a bit of a non-starter to begin with given that he was never going to kill the Doctor for real so was always going to have to learn to be ‘nice’, but it all feels too easy a way to defeat someone whose supposedly the root of all evil in the universe and whose story we’ve been following for twelve whole episodes (as long as ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’). It’s unfortunate too that we see both guardians on screen in this story for the first time: I rather liked the fan idea that they were really one and the same person in a different mood following their original appearances in ‘The Key To Time’ (because you can’t have good without evil, which would have been much more in keeping with the usual Dr Who ethos). The ending becomes even more stupid when the Doctor ends up in the middle of another similar quest, this time for ‘eternity’, at the end of ‘The Five Doctors’ in two stories’ time without apparently noticing. Asking Peter Davison to smash a pretty substantially built crystal prop first time, against a rug and some rubber flooring standing in for decking, is also asking for trouble. 

Still, that doesn’t get in the way of a story that’s much bigger and more important than just what’s going on in this particular era of Dr Who: it’s a dark and complex mood piece high on atmosphere asking bigger questions about what it really means to be alive and making the most out of the short time we have. The result is a story that feels as if a lot of love and thought has been devoted to it, from the script to how its shown on screen, with the usual high standards of a BBC historical costume drama, even if we aren’t strictly back in time at all but in the future. All the more impressive, really, given how making this story about sailing was the opposite of plain sailing in so many ways. It’s funny how a lot of the best stories in the Dr Who run were hit by strikes (see ‘Shada’ and ’The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’) while others turned out to be the worst (such as last week’s ‘Terminus’): that extra pressure, of everyone having their backs up against the wall to make this (before Peter Davison has to rush off to appear in JNT’s regular Christmas pantomime, which this year was ‘Cinderella’), seems to have inspired the best out of everyone and you can’t see any signs of the rush with which this story was made on screen. There are no flimsy scenes, no hammy acting, no mundane direction – even the scenes added at the last second because it was under-running (the sailors chatting to Turlough) feel as if they belong and are necessary (although I’m still confused by the sailor joke that a pig can’t be a sailor because it can’t look upwards: surely there are bigger reasons, such as its tiny hooves and the fact it can’t keep a hat on. Not to mention the fact it can’t take orders and would probably eat all the ship’s biscuits). Everyone is trying their very hardest to make this work and for once they’re doing it from a rock solid ground with the original script which is a thing of beauty with more opportunities to be still and breathe (despite the constantly ticking clock) and properly get to know these characters and this strange world instead of just rushing off to follow the plot again. Legend has it that JNT, who never quite understood this story, considered scuppering it altogether to make the planned season finale (which became ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’) despite the fact that all the models had been made and location filming done, before Saward pointed out that they couldn’t afford to leave the ‘Black Guardian’ trilogy hanging. To me there’s no contest: we would have lost precisely nothing is that hodgepodge of recycled ideas had been lost forever, but this one? It’s genius. Thank goodness ‘Enlightenment’ prevailed, in all senses of the word. 

 The Eternals alone are a strong enough concept to deserve a return to the series (what happened to them in the time war between the timelords and Daleks for instance if they cannot be killed in the usual way?): I can also see why the idea of an upper class who cared so little for the lives of the underclass would have made such an impact at the time Margaret Thatcher was prime minister and the same ideas would work just as well now sadly, in a 21st century when we all seem to have been left behind by the rich people in power looking after themselves (I can totally believe our government is made up of Eternals, even more than I can believe they’re all Slitheen or Autons). This is a story with so much cope we barely scrape the surface inside four episodes and of all the writers who only ever given one shot at writing for Dr Who Barbara Clegg is one of the most deserving of a second go, with an ability to write believable characters in unbelievable but magical surroundings and worlds I’d love to see more of. The story goes that a lot of people making this story were disappointed with it: despite being friends Saward was very dismissive of the script (which he thought had nowhere to go past the first cliffhanger), JNT thought it a filler episode between the bigger action tales he wanted to make and even Peter Davison said it’s the script that confused him the most from his three years working on the series (quite the statement given his run also includes the two Mara stories and ‘Castrovalva’!) They’re all wrong: from the first fans ‘got’ that this story is exactly what Dr Who is meant to be for, putting things together from other series that normally wouldn’t go and weaving an emotional, moral tale around them. In any era the imagination seen in ‘Enlightenment’ (and no I don’t just mean Leee John!) would stand out as something special, but in an era when Dr Who was playing things so safe and as consistently ordinary as it had been across 1983 it stands out even more, a story to make eternity bearable, that lives on in your memory eternally long after more ephemeral stories have been forgotten. 

 POSITIVES + The model sailing ships are gorgeous. The revelation at the end of part one that we’re not in an actual Edwardian sailing ship but out in space is arguably the most memorable part of the entire story but would have fallen flat if the model shots hadn’t matched up to the glitz and glamour of the set. Thankfully, they’re superb: it really does feel as if we’re gliding out into space and that the infinite cosmos really is just the other side of the rigging. Or at least they are on the ‘original’ version of this story – they’ve been ‘updated’ for the 2009 ‘special edition’ omnibus released on DVD and overseen by director Fiona Cumming where – despite the higher budget and computer graphics – look far more dated, with that peculiar unreal computer style that was all the rage back then. Most of them were borrowed from the National Maritime Museum and are bigger than you might think, coming up to the height of most modellers’ waists judging by production photographs, apart from the Greek galley which is a specially built prop complete with mechanical oars that went in and out. For all ships the sails billowed thanks to tiny fans that were hidden in the set.

 NEGATIVES - By the end the Doctor knows, as we at home do, that the ship he’s on is an illusion, a figment of the imagination held together by the sheer willpower of the Eternals. The same goes for everything that exists inside the ships. So why does he choose this moment to stick a second whacking great stick of celery in his lapels to replace the first one? And why doesn’t it disappear the minute the Tardis leaves the ship? (For that matter why didn’t the first one, picked up in similar circumstances in ‘Castrovalva’?) While I wouldn’t fancy touching celery on a spaceship full of terminally ill lepers either (so previous story ‘terminus’ is out) if the Doctor’s that desperate to be warned about praxis gasses that might kill him (by making his celery turn purple) wouldn’t it have been easier to ask the Brigadier for some in ‘Mawdryn Undead’? Or during recent stop offs at Heathrow or Amsterdam?! 

BEST QUOTE: Marriner: ‘I am empty. You give me being. I look into your mind and see life, energy, excitement. I want them. I want you. Your thought shall be my thoughts, your feelings, my feelings’. Tegan: ‘Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me you're in love?’ Marriner: ‘Love! What is love? I want existence’. 

 PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Professor Bernice Summerfield And The Heart’s Desire’ (2005) is, as the title suggests, part of the series of Big Finish spin-offs starring ‘New Adventures’ companion Benny which have by 205 reached as far as series six, a sort of cross between Ace and River Song with just a dash of Rory. In this story Benny is investigating a pulsar that beats in Morse Code when she discovers a shard of ‘Enlightenment’ and meets eternals named ‘Hardy’ and ‘Barron’ (presumably a gag about Keith Barron and Lynda Baron both acting in this story, as well s a pun on their ‘barren’ empty lives!) It all gets a bit complicated, given the revelations about previous stories and places Benny has been to within the series that all turn out to be illusions made by the eternals, but ends up following much the same plot as the TV story, albeit without the Black and White Guardians and with Benny hurling enlightenment out an airlock, something which causes the eternals to end up mortal because of the tie they’d spent in the human world. Or something like that anyway. This story makes the Black Guardian trilogy seem ‘normal’ and easy to follow. Still good though! 

We’ve mentioned it before, but the comic strip ‘Time and Time Again’, made for the 30th anniversary of the show in Doctor Who Magazine and features all sorts of changes made to the Doctor’s storyline. It’s all caused by The Black Guardian seeking revenge for what went wrong in this story and he’s not a happy bunny, unravelling the Doctor’s timelines bit by bit from his 7th incarnation backwards until he never leaves Gallifrey to travel. The White Guardian puts it all right by the end, though the Doctor loses his Tardis instruction manual in his haste to leave, causing no end of problems later on! It’s a sweet indulgent nod made for a fanbase starved of reasons to celebrate in 1993 and feels a lot more like ‘proper’ Dr Who than ‘Dimensions In Time’ does! 

 Previous ‘Terminus’ next ‘The King’s Demons’

Snakedance: Ranking - 26

 

Snakedance

(Season 20, Dr 5 with Nyssa and Tegan, 18-26/1/1983, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Christopher Bailey, director: Fiona Cumming)

Rank: 26

   'How other monsters might have re-acted to being inside Tegan's mind:

 'Nyssa, could you turn up the heating? I'm turning into an ice warrior here!' 

'Stop being so emotional Dr! And you seem to have a bit of wobbly leg, would you like me to provide a cyber-replacement for you?!' 

'My name's Tegan Lopez and I'm an air stewardess for Chameleon Tours' 

'Let's play a game Dr - no not the trilogic game this time, how about pink snakes and ladders?!' 

'Highlanders? Braveheart Tegan - literally. I'm played by Mel Gibson in this one!' 

'It takes all-sorts to make a world, Dr. Mmm, I just fancy some sweets right now'. 

 'You dare insult my Aunty Vanessa?! Exterminate!' 

 ‘Snakedance’ is kinda like ‘Kinda’ continued a year on, a story which plays with the concepts of our inner psyche and the fragmented illusions of the self, only this time it feels much more like your usual DW tale of invasion, brainwashing and quest for power. If that sounds like a dilution of everything that made the first story so good then, well, actually it isn’t: all the big concepts that made the first stand out so much above the rest of the era are still there and the only thing that’s really missing is the giant pink bouncy castle snake (and while DW fans famously disagree on absolutely everything this is one change we can agree, to a fan, is a big improvement). There really aren’t that many direct sequels in DW for such a long running series and those that do (‘The Web Of Fear’ ‘Monster Of Peladon’ ‘New Earth’, even ‘Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ a little bit) tend to recycle the same elements in a slightly tweaked setting without really adding anything new, forgetting that the thing that made the first story so strong in the first place was the brave way it did something no other DW story could do; with two unique episodes sitting in a back catalogue it takes away the thing that made the first one stand out the most. Not so ‘Snakedance’ though, which feels more like a continuation and extension rather than a repeat and one that flips the idea of Tegan being ‘invaded’ by having Tegan become the ‘invader’, lashing out at other people instead of self-sabotaging herself. It’s hard to say what’s more frightening: seeing brave courageous feisty Tegan reduced to tears of helplessness in ‘Kinda’ or laughing mercilessly like your worst school bully as she takes over a whole new world, Manussa. ‘Kinda’ was full of names that related to Buddhist ideas but the only new one this time is the planet name, which means ‘everyday’ and Manussa certainly seems a lot more like ‘our’ planet than Deva Loka ever did. 

While the locals are much more like your everyday DW fictional world than the people we saw in Kinda (they can all talk this time, for starters) the thrill comes from seeing a world that in other DW stories would be unremarkable sent running in horror not because of some invading psychopathic villain or race of monsters or the latest cold war parable or even a fictional demon turned real but because of one of our heroes we’ve come to know and love. And not in the usual ‘alien brainwashing’ way either, but because the Mara has distorted her sense of self and exaggerated feelings that were lurking within her mind all along. There’s no particular reason for The Mara to manifest itself back in Tegan’s life here, except that a cave that once housed snakes triggers painful memories in her subconscious: it’s a shame that the plot isn’t more random than that for once and the story been more about how you can escape all soerts of things in life but never your sub-conscious. It would be interesting to debate what might have happened if the pink snake had started controlling Tegan on another planet, causing the Great Fire Of London more directly ‘The Visitation’ for instance, or when following Concorde to prehistoric Heathrow and especially if it had attacked Tegan during her ‘gap year’ back on Earth (Tegan would have been wanted for a spree of murders and probably never be able to return home again). However it would be in keeping with The Mara’s backstory of living off guilt and shame that it arrives right here in Tegan’s timeline, when she’s still suffering from survivor’s guilt following the after-effects of Adric’s death by dinosaurs on a spaceship and more normal guilt after watching the 5^th Dr suffer a similar invasion-by-unlikely-entity in ‘The Arc Of Infinity’, a story driven in part by what her cousin discovers in Amsterdam. We’ve seen in the run of stories since ‘Kinda’ just how emotional Tegan really is, the events of that story having broken through Tegan’s surface level character and turned her into someone who cares far more than she did when we first met her in ‘Logopolis’ (perhaps breaking through the trauma of just what The Master puts her though in that story killing her aunt and very nearly her planet; like Nyssa she’s been suffering a form of PTSD ever since). It makes sense that, deep down, she’s resentful of the people around her for what they’ve put her through and guilty for her part in similar life changing events for strangers because she’s grown close to the 5^th Dr and Nyssa by now and know how they feel. While it might have been more fun to see The Mara take over prim and proper Nyssa (it would have explained why she went to sleep in The Tardis last time so suddenly too) writer Christopher Bailey isn’t done with Tegan yet: he wants to see how someone as fragile yet courageous as Tegan has handled the knowledge that she has a primal beast lurking within her waiting and further the idea that you’re never really done confronting your inner pink snake, that the job of ‘shadow work’ making peace with your faults and weaknessess is never really over. 

And so it is that ‘Snakedance’ turns the usual DW cliches on its head: its the companion people need to be saved from not the other way round and the Tardis – that symbol of hope and rescue – ends up being the source of the problem by taking Tegan to this planet. ‘Snakedance’ is, like ‘Kinda’, driven by Tegan’s fear and self-loathing but the difference this time is that its not an inward journey anymore but an outer one, as Tegan can’t handle all the inner agony that’s built up and lashes out at other people to avoid lashing out at herself. It’s kick-the-cat syndrome, or perhaps a side effect from living in a dog-eat-dog world, only for Tegan its still a pink snake that’s inside her and makes her want to control and hurt other people so that they don’t hurt her first. Tegan’s journey from victim to bully is in keeping with everything we learnt about her in the earlier story and Janet Fielding is, if anything, even better at playing bitchy than she is playing broken. And if even someone as brave and feisty as Tegan can’t shrug off all the trauma she carries the rather wet people of Manussa don’t stand a chance and it isn’t long before the strangely dressed locals are feeding off each other’s negative energy and possessing everyone they meet with the same ugly vibes. The first one is future national treasure Martin Clunes in his first non-spear carrying extra TV role at the tender age of twenty-two and this time he’s the one with the spears, sticking them in people when Tegan over-powers him and even this early on, dressed up like a camp androgynous gypsy, he’s superb the equal of any guest part in the series (check out the lipstick!; clip shows love to embarrass Clunes with how he looks in this story and every other year one will think its the first time the clip has ever been discovered even though its on every sodding time on those ‘Before They Were Famous’ type progs). Even in the thankless role as a Manussian Behaving Badly he out-acts everyone else off the screen except for Janet. As the local spoilt brat with power he’s a good choice for the Mara to infect: he’s basically Prince William, bored out of his mind, resentful of all the nonsensical traditions he has to carry out and secretly thinking the locals are simpletons inferior to his magisterial presence, but enjoying the money and fame it brings him too much to truly step away. He’s not bad though and not usually cruel; its just that the Mara finds enough wickedness in him to exploit. People have spent his whole life nattering in his ear about how big and important he is and how his ancestors once faced down a snake just like this one so its bound to give him a dodgy ego problem. Sensibly Bailey turns the one thing that never quite worked in ‘Kinda’ on screen - the giant pink snake, which looked cuddly rather than demonic – and replaces it with a snake tattoo that passes between the hands of the possessed instead; to this day I wince when I see people with one just in case they’re about to unleash their inner Mara on me (you’d be surprised how many there are) and the effects are, especially by 1983 standards but even for nowadays, frighteningly convincing. There is a giant pink snake here too but cleverly its a joke: my favourites scenes in this story are the carnival parade that takes place, a sort of folk memory of a time the Mara visited Manussa and infected people before, which looks like an even low budget version of ‘Kinda’ of the sort that a local village would put on; it may well be the writer’s gentle pith(helmet) take on how ‘Kinda’ turned out on screen with a BBC budget and his own inner demons getting the better of him as he tries to distance himself and say ‘that rubber snake had nothing to do with me guv’, yet also serves the story beyond the bitchiness, making Manussa feel like a real planet with a real story long before the Tardis shows up. 

I love the fact too, that the Dr suddenly looks like a blithering idiot as he tried to warn this planet about an imminent local alien invasion: for once they don’t believe him not because this sort of thing is beyond their comprehension but because he’s basically repeating the plot of all their fairy stories they were told when they were children and they’ve spent their whole life thinking The Mara was made up. It’s our equivalent of waking up to find someone telling us St George is real and about to battle a dragon or Snow White is visiting with seven Sontaron dwarves: like the locals here we’d be more confused than scared. Martin Clunes is the standout this week, but The Manussians are a good bunch of supporting actors and actresses all round: Elisabeth Sladen’s hubby Brian Miller is very good too as cave-pedlar Dugden (and in the future it gave him an excuse to turn up to conventions and sit at the bar with fans buying him drinks while his wife talked to everyone), you can see why a still unknown Jonathan Challis (as Chela) became a big hit a few years later in Scouse soap opera ‘Bread’ and Colette O’Neil is terrific as Lady Tanha, whose kind of Queen Lizzy II, partly struck by the importance of all these local traditions and the privilege bestowed upon her and partly secretly agreeing with her son that it’s all just a little bit silly. Then there’s Dojjen: I still can’t work out if this worldly-wise hermit is brilliantly underplayed by Preston Lockwood, who perfectly understands the unfolding symbolism and subtext behind the story about staying zen and calm in the face of disaster, or whether he just didn’t get it at all and acted the part the way he would in an everyday soap opera; either way its note of realism, right at the point where its least expected as the Dr has travelled so far for spiritual guidance, is striking (for the record Lockwood made a career out of playing roles like this – he’s a magician in the 1980s BBC ‘Chronicles Of Narnia’ for instance and plays him more like a businessman – but I still can’t tell if that’s because directors recognised he was perfect at injecting a little earthiness into impractical roles or whether because those were the only jobs the actor could get). The Dr always seemed in control during events on ‘Kinda’, embracing this mysterious world through a combination of deep thought and acceptance of Deva Loka on its own terms, but he’s notably out of his depth for much of this story: he’s not around when Tegan runs off (poor Nyssa suffering PTSD of her own as her best friend suddenly turns nasty out of nowhere when they were having fun together) and spends much of the story catching up to what the viewer already knows for a change (I wonder, too, if ‘Kinda’ was written with Tom Baker’s more confident 4^th Dr in mind, without a chance to see how Peter Davison would play him – but now Bailey has he’s used the 5^th Dr’s traits of innocence and naivety against him, making him more than a little insecure himself). 

The ending of ‘Snakedance’ is a big improvement on its predecessor, as the Dr basically saves the day not with mirrors and a bouncy castle snake but by meditating, visiting local guru Dojjen and thinking deep thoughts as he stares into a crystal and refusing to back down from his own darkest fears, while refusing to accept the ‘evilness’ of the Mara (because he can also see Tegan in a way she can’t, for her kindness, empathy and courage and knows that no one is all bad). It might have been better still had Tegan herself shouted down the Mara lurking inside her and accepted that she’s just a human with frailties like any other, but it still works as an ending: sometimes all it takes to quieten down the primal fears within you is to have the people around you who care for you tell you how great you are and give you a hug. There are no scenes in ‘Snakedance’ quite as deliciously surreal as the ones in ‘Kinda’ of the colonialists hiding from a box of their own darkest fears. Manussa itself isn’t quite as invitingly strange and other-wordly as Deva Loka. The idea of the Mara bringing out someone’s outer lust and recklessness as well as their inner doubts isn’t as fully explored as before. Poor Nyssa gets almost as rum a deal as she did in ‘Kinda’ where she fell asleep for four episodes, mostly running around yelling ‘Tegan!’, without the subplots Adric got last time out. However ‘Snakedance’ just wins out a smidgeon over its predecessor by courtesy of being a lot scarier (the first episode cliffhanger, where Tegan is getting her fortune told, and a crystal ball explodes with an image of a skeleton snake while she laughs uncontrollably, now fully in the grip of the Mara, is my candidate as not only one of the best cliffhangers but hands down the single best DW ‘possession’ scene of them all - and kudos for making the snake a skeleton this time, with the perfectly-lined up shot of Tegan being ‘swallowed’ by the snake not far behind – that one shot alone must have taken hours to set-up just right with 1983 technology!) and by having this strange and unlikely threat invade a world that feels a lot more like our own (while Deva Loka was designed to feel like darkest Africa ‘Snakedance’ feels a lot more like Britain, with its divide between rich and poor who are terribly polite eccentrics, bored Royals who are clearly unfit for their job and full of daft customs people have forgotten the real meaning of over time but carry on doing anyway). ‘Kinda’ felt like a gripping piece of telly as we could get lost in another fictional world, but ‘Snakedance’ feels like a better bit of Dr Who and more of a morality tale than pure escapism, as if the Mara is lurking inside all of us. They’re both pretty incredible stories in their own ways though, a brave daring step from a series that was playing it a little too safe for most of seasons 19 and 20 suddenly becoming the courageous anything-goes series DW had been when it first started. It’s a real shame we haven’t seen a repeat of The Mara somewhere in DW by now (on screen anyway; poor Tegan gets a third takeover in ‘The Cradle Of the Snake’, one of the better 5^th Dr Big Finish audios, while a third script was submitted ‘The Children Of Seth’ which would have seen how the Mara affected the guilty conscious of the Dr – and the egotistical, brash, insecure 6^th Dr at that. Now that would have been interesting!):‘new Who’ needs one story this downright baffling and weird and The Mara is one of those timeless ‘monsters’ that would work just as well then and now (I mean, if they’re even bringing the Celestial Toymaker back this year then surely anything goes?!) It’s even more of a shame that Christopher Bailey retired after this story: his is one of the most unique and imaginative writing voices DW ever had and, admittedly mostly by courtesy of only having two stories, sits neck and neck with Douglas Adams as statistically my favourite multi-story DW author. The result is another highly impressive story that no other series would ever have even considered, never mind done half as well as this.

+ If you want people to imagine a whole world without being able to build many sets then build a town square or a market: its amazing how much of a bigger feel for a world you get when you have random extras mingling at large, each one seemingly with their own stories going on separately to the plot. Manussa feels like one of DW’s most believable planets because the people we meet aren’t all from one class, one gender or a bunch of soldiers: they’re families, bachelors, children, people passing through on their way to work, others enjoying a day off, all of them united in an anniversary pageant of an ancient tale of invasion by the Mara, utterly oblivious to the fact that the modern-day repeat is going on just out of shot. My favourite detail: there’s even a punch and judy stall, complete with miniature snake!

- Well, I say this looks like our world...Only even in the 1980s nobody was wearing clothes like this. Costume-wise Manussa is more of a ragbag than the usual DW planets, which ought to mean a fascinating world of cliques and classes, where everyone’s identity is driven by their lot in life and reinforced by the restricting nature of how they’re forced to dress. In practice it means every last bit of outlandish clothing leftover in the costume department when other programmes have had their pick, whether they fit together or not. I mean, just look at those over-size earrings (which seem more like something an Aztec would wear) draped over some togas (which appear to be secondhand from ‘I Claudius’ – well they do both have snakes I suppose), gloves taken from a documentary on falconry and Martin Clunes additionally dressed in some painting overalls at one stage, complete with drips of paint over the front and one (of many) of the silliest hats ever seen in the series. Weirdly hermit Dojjen is the most normally dressed of the lot.   

Kinda: Ranking - 27

 

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 5^th 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 21^st century than the 20^th 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 4^th 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.

NEGATIVES - At least until part four when the Mara turns into a pantomime snake. Peter Grimwade did his best, cutting out any shots of the Mara in the script until the last reveal when he couldn’t hide it anymore, but nobody can take this story seriously once a blow-up-doll snake painted pink appears in a hall of mirrors. The writer was reportedly horrified and wrote ‘Snakedance’ as a way of remaking this story without the big pink prop. Matthew Waterhouse’s best acting? Saying ‘it’s fantastic’ when the big snake appears without laughing.
BEST QUOTE: Panna: ‘It is the Mara who now turn the wheel. It is the Mara who dance to the music of our despair. Our suffering is the Mara's delight. Our madness - the Maras' meat and drink. And now he has returned’

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Snakedance’ is very much a direct sequel transmitted a year after ‘Kinda’.

‘Cradle Of The Snake’ (2010) is a third story for the Mara and is every bit as good despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that’s it’s a Big Finish audio story (where the pink snake looks rather better in your imagination!) Number #138 in Big Finish’s main range, it’s every bit as creepy and intense as either ‘Kinda’ or ‘Snakedance’ and of all the writers who semi-regularly write for the company Marc Platt is the best at mimicking the different fells of different Dr Who eras. It feels as if this really could have been made by the real 5^th Doctor eras and features a stunning performance by Janet Fielding as Tegan is possessed by the Mara yet again, this time with a concerned Nyssa and an increasingly confused Turlough along for company. After Tegan has a funny turn on board the Tardis the Doctor wants to defeat the demon inside her once and confronts it, before it turns on and possess him! The tardis travels to Manussa, the Mara’s planet of origin for a big showdown - only the Tardis being what it is it arrives too early, centuries before the Manussan Empire exists. Noobyd knows about The Mara and yet its influence is everywhere, feeding off the baying mobs who want to cause an uprising. After a lot of complicated Dr Whoyness the Doctor finally confronts the snake within his mind and Nyssa sets up a hotline for future victims so they’ll know what to do when the snake returns! An ambiguous ending has the Doctor comment that he doesn’t think they will ever be entirely free of the Mara – although to date the pink snake hasn’t appeared in any other story. Yet…

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