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…

Previous ‘Four To Doomsday’ next ‘The Visitation’

Castrovalva: Ranking - 72

 

 Castrovalva

(Season 19, Dr 5 with Adric, Nyssa and Tegan, 4-12/1/1982, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Eric Saward, writer: Christopher H Bidmead, director: Fiona Cumming) 

Rank: 72

   'Ah so Doctor, you escaped from Castrovalva? Well try some other paintings for size: The Tardis is being run over by a train in Turner's 'Rain. Steam and Speed',  there's a melted watch attacking you in Dali's 'The Persistence Of memory', there's a pile of Andy Warhol soup cans set to fall on your head and I've teamed up with The Sea Devils for Monet's 'Lilypads' and 'The Silence' for 'The Scream'. Now all I have to do is leave in my Tardis I parked in this Magritte painting and...what? 'This is not a Tardis?' Just a one-dimensional drawing of one? What's happened to my dimensional stabiliser? Curse you Doctor!...'

 

In which the Doctor, who isn’t quite formed yet, visits a world that doesn’t really exist and is nearly defeated by an old enemy playing a fictional version of himself: ‘Castrovalva’ has a unique feel about it, as ghostly and ethereal and as rule-breaking a story as any in the show’s catalogue. It’s the perfect accompaniment to the 4th Doctor’s demise at the end of ‘Logopolis’, another place that on the one hand is made up of pure mathematics and ‘block computer transfers’ but on the other is pure imagination, a story that’s right at the join between these two universes. Many Dr Who stories are thoughtful, like crossword puzzles to solve interactively, but this is the only one that’s a Rubik’s cube, a set of different sections impossibly linked that only make sense viewed from the ‘right’ angle (with a dash of ‘Snakes and Ladders’ thrown in for the way directions defy all logic). Dr Who at its most cerebral, it’s as brave and as daring as any story and the fact that it happens at the start of a new series, with a whole new series, as the last-minute replacement for another script that fell through at the last minute, makes the liberties it takes all the more courageous. That story was ‘Project Zeta-Sigma’ by ‘Meglos’ writers John Flannagan and Andrew McCulloch and, despite starting at the exact same place, with the 5th Doctor waking up in the 4th Doctor’s scarf and clothes at the end of ‘Logopolis’, couldn’t have been more different: it reads very like what ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ will become, a cold war parable between two super-powers with nuclear arms locked in a stalemate. Only they just happen to be invisible. And they live in an invisible spaceship. What was intended as a budget saving device confused the heck out of producer John Nathan-Turner who thought that all they could put on screen would be a blank screen while some voices talked and asked them to have another go, moving the story to the end of the season (to the slot that ‘Time-Flight’ had) before dropping it altogether. Intended to be a very template Dr Who story that was different precisely because this Doctor couldn’t yet hit the ground running, it’s the source of the Doctor’s choice of outfit: something in the story reminds Tegan of cricket uniforms, so she comments on them to the utter confusion of Adric and Nyssa who only know crickets as insects and picture them in cricketting outfits – it takes the Doctor coming out of the Tardis wardrobe in cricketing whites to explain the mistake. Needing someone who knew the series and could write for it in a hurry, JNT went to recently departed script editor Bidmead to ask him to come up with something – anything – with none of the usual restrictions, except that it had to feature the newly regenerated Doctor being slightly out of his depth.

 Wanting to make the most of not having those restrictions. Bidmead got to thinking what he could possibly throw at this new Doctor. His inspiration seems to have come from the rest of his conversation with JNT when he asked over ‘old friends’ (that he’d last seen only a few months ago but hadn’t expected to see again so soon). One of these was BBC head of serials Graeme MacDonald: it was common practice for the Who producer and script editor to meet with him every so often with outlines of the forthcoming stories to get final confirmation and make any last-minute changes. Bidmead had been tickled by a confession JNT had made about the Escher paintings that hung in MacDonald’s office, with their impossible architecture and mind-bending perspectives. JNT even asked Bidmead to sit on a different side of the desk so JNT wouldn’t have to look them (in the producer’s words ‘art should be soothing, not give one a headache!’) Though he agreed and took it as the good-natured joke it was meant to be, secretly Bidmead fundamentally disagreed with the producer: he loved art that made him think and changed the way he viewed the world and he thought a logic problem like this was exactly the sort of thing Dr Who should be doing. Only because this is the 1980s era of DW he doesn’t send the Tardis off to meet Escher (as would have happened in the 1960s or the 21st century) – he sends the Tardis inside a world that’s just like the painting, a world that (spoilers) it turns out is mathematically impossible and is complete and utter fiction, a figment of mathematic equations. Instead, partly as an in-joke, but partly as a last-gasp attempt to convey his vision or the series during his time as script-editor (when he tried to bring more maths and science and logic to the Whoniverse) Bidmead set about creating a world that wasn’t really a world and which defied all logic, with similarly impossible architecture. 

 Bidmead went away and read up on Escher, the Dutch artist who’d moved to Italy and set many of his paintings there. One he particularly liked was Escher’s simplest, a simple drawing of a tower the artist gave the made-up name ‘Castrovalva’, the name of an actual town in the district of Abruzzio. Imagining the sort of world that might exist inside Bidmead ‘borrowed’ imagery from several other paintings: ‘Bovert’ (‘High and Low’) which features different views of the same building rendered in the same way as a double-exposed photograph so that both existed at once; ‘Trappenhuis’ (‘House Of Stairs’) which features a staircase going up and down simultaneously, depending which way you viewed it; ‘Klimmen en Dalen’ (not ‘Come On Dalek’ as you might think but ‘Ascending and Descending’) where people go up and down a staircase, impossibly, side-by-side without acknowledging the other; ‘Relativiteit’ (‘Relativity’) – yet another staircase but divided into three that run parallel but not intersecting); ‘Watervall’ (‘Waterfall’) in which water somehow flows, impossibly, up as well as down; ‘Tekenen’ (‘Drawing Hands’) in which two hands come ut of a drawing, pen in fingers, and draw each other and ‘Belvadere’ (a place name) which features the front and back of a building in the same place simultaneously, while beside a man sits staring at cuboid, looking puzzled (replicated on screen here in the scene where the Doctor, sitting at a park bench, first begins to wonder about the realities of this world). As you might have guessed, all of these play havoc with ideas of perspective and mess around with your perception of reality. One painting that’s never mentioned but ‘feels’ as if it should have been an inspiration, by the way, is ‘Self Portrait In Spherical Mirror’, where Escher’s own hand contains a ball where he sits in his own library staring out at the viewer, looking to all the world like one of the ‘Brian Of Morbius/Timeless Children’ pre-doctors. 

 On a level even above that, however, this story plays around with one of Escher’s favourite concepts, that of ‘recursion’ – something we would think of as a branch of postmodernism today, a painting that knows it’s a painting. It’s a bit subtler than that though: it’s an idea impossible to sum up in a single sentence but in Escher’s paintings at least is a mathematical concept that deliberately confuses the idea of something with the method used to make it, so that something complete can be hidden inside something bigger that only seems complete, part of an open-ended cycle that further blurs the line between reality and fantasy. Those hands drawing each other is a case in point: the left hand simply can’t be creating the right hand because the left hand itself only exists because the right hand created it. This is very like the many time-travelling stories in Who where something only exists in the present because somebody in the future went back to the past to create it. For a series that came up with the concept of the Tardis its actually a surprise they hadn’t tried something impossible-except-in-theory like this before. A lot of the language in this story is ‘recursive’ too, full of small concrete statements hidden in much larger abstract ones that sound like they make sense but are actually contradictory nonsense when you sit down to study them (‘How do I know you’re telling the truth? ‘Because, sir, I maintain I am, and I am a man of my word’). Nothing in this world is quite concrete and every question people ask about this world only make it less defined because what we’re told is more and more contradictory. Sadly nobody uses ‘recursive humour’ though (and to understand what recursive humour is, you, uhh, need to understand how recursive humour works. Ho ho ho). 

 It’s a brilliant if complicated concept and they almost get away with it despite the odd dodgy special effect: there’s something not quite right about this world from the moment we land tin Castrovalva, but it’s not until the episode three cliffhanger that we finally realise that this world can’t exist, that the geography is all wrong and that it’s all a big trap, the newly regenerated Doctor sent to heal in a place that’s fictional, created by The Master using Logopolis-like mathematics (with the unwilling help of Adric who might or might not be double-bluffing and secretly making it obvious nothing is real: the script is ambiguous about this) and fed into the Tardis databanks so a desperate Nyssa and Tegan take him there. Ironically, it’s this ‘fake’ world that feels like one of Dr Who’s better thought out planets until it implodes in on itself: it has a library, houses, markets, a tapestry, a history, traditions, children, animals, all the details that most alien worlds probably have somewhere but which we don’t always get to see, all believable yet not obviously stolen from anything ‘ours’. The people we meet feel ‘real’ too and their gradual realisation that they’re fictional and just blocks of data is devastating – when the librarian Shardovan notices that the 500 year old history of ‘Castrovalva’ includes entries in the present day for instance, or when the tapestry updates itself automatically with the days’ events or when the Doctor makes the Castrovalvans draw a map of their homes which are in four different places at once. This aspect of the story was inspired by a childhood thought of Bidmead’s when reading a book and trying to create one of his own: what if these people he was writing about knew they were fake, artiticial creations who didn’t know it? What if he, himself, was a fake construct created by another being he couldn’t comprehend? Would he act any differently if he knew? And while he felt alive he couldn’t seriously vouch that everyone around him was (most writers would turn these other people into robots or androids, but Bidmead goes a whole other way and makes them computer constructs who think they’re flesh and blood). Anyone whose ever played ‘The Sims’ or similar sandbox strategy games with characters they create will have thought of this, but ‘Castrovalva’ was written before such games existed . This is the great central conceit of the story then: what does it mean to really be alive? Especially if you can be fooled into thinking that you’re real? And what do you do when you find out you’re not? 

It’s fitting that the newly regenerated 5th Doctor should be thrust into this story because he doesn’t know who he is yet - throughout this story he isn’t quite cooked yet, as ghostly and half-formed as Castrovalva itself. This Doctor spends longer than almost every other Doctor trying to work out who he might be (only the 2nd Doctor arguably takes longer, taking six full episodes to reach the point where Davison is after four in ‘Power Of The Daleks’).It’s a great contrast: there the Doctor is, genuinely real but disbelieving it as he floats in a ‘zero cabinet’ because his senses are overwhelmed, in a city full of people who know with some certainty they’re real, even though they aren’t. For a while he even spends time in a zero cabinet that’s shaped like a coffin: never has a regeneration felt more like a physical re-birth. This is, notably, the first time the Doctor spends time being his younger selves before pulling his new self together and working out who he is now based on who he used to be: there are some lovely scenes of him in the Tardis unravelling the 4th Doctor’s scarf, babbling lines spoken by past regenerations, mimicking their/his mannerisms (pronouns are weird for timelords), even tootling on the 2nd Doctor’s recorder brought out of storage. And when he does decide he’s kind of an anti-Hartnell: a wiser older head on young shoulders (rather than an old looking head on young ones), with all the extra experience of those extra lives but without the authoritarian respect that made people listen to the First Doctor (even at times when he didn’t know what he was doing and improvising wildly, still green around the gills). The 5th Doctor is kind of the ‘mid-life crisis’ era (along with the 6th Doctor), someone whose experienced so much and yet is coming to realise how little he still knows. 

 Until now regeneration has been as much a mental, psychic process as a physical one, but this regeneration looks as if it really hurts and Peter Davison plays it as if he’s still suffering PTSD after the fall from the radio mast in ‘Logopolis’. For most of this story he’s a passenger – literally given that Tegan and Nyssa have to lug him around for most of the story – helpless and hopeless in ways that the 4th Doctor would never have been. It’s a brave gambit given how much was riding on this story which didn’t just launch the series but a whole new timeslot on Mondays and Tuesdays with an audience who might not have been able to catch the series on Saturday teatimes. It’s a gamble that only partly comes off too: it takes a month for Peter Davison to fully ‘become’ the Doctor and watching him act all loony and levitate in zero rooms isn’t a substitute for Tom Baker dashing around being eccentric. To be honest, for me it never really feels as if this more passive and quieter regeneration ever really is the Doctor until his swansong in ‘Caves Of Androzani’ (when they finally work how to play him, a as a decent man pushed past his limits) and so much of the 5th Doctor’s era is a waste, with everyone so sure what they don’t want him to be (i.e. Tom Baker) that nobody is quite sure what they do want him to be. The fact that he spends his first story being given the runaround by the people around him (in stark contrast to, say, ‘Power Of the Daleks’ and ‘Robot’ where the new-born manic Doctor is giving everyone else the runaround trying to keep up with him) is a bad sign. Even though ‘Castrovalva’ was actually the 4th Who story Davison filmed (partly because of the script problems, but also sensibly to give him a chance to find out where he was going before asking him how he was going to get there) it never quite feels as if Davison knows what he’s doing, although already there are touches of this Doctor’s best trait: his vulnerability, something none of his predecessors ever had and the small moments of toughness when he gets fed up being polite and tries to take control. Curiosity about the new Doctor made this the last Dr Who story to break the ten million mark in the 20th century (by contrast ‘Logopolis’ only made an average of six million; the day change was partly to be a trial run for new soap ‘Eastenders’, with which Who has always had close ties – see ‘Dimensions In Time’ for a full crossover – but also because ITV had put ‘Buck Rogers’ on at the same time and Who was haemorrhaging ratings so badly). At the same time, though, the ratings fell off so sharply by the end of this story that people seem to have got bored waiting to find out who the Doctor might be. I can see why: two episodes of not much happening, except the companions pushing the Doctor round on a trolley and getting muddy do test the patience rather and the second episode particularly is one of the hardest going of the 1980s because not much happens at all (at least the first episode throws yet another Master plan at us, sending The Tardis back to The Big Bang – yes again!) 

The part of this that works, though, is that for the first time in a long time The Master’s plan feels like a real threat. We don’t get too fussed when baddies seem to have the edge on the 4th Doctor because he’ll invariably do something amazing to get himself out of trouble, but you don’t know that here because this Doctor is so new and unsure of himself, out of it for this story more times than he’s, well, in it. The 5th Doctor is weak and confused, so The Master ought to have it easy. By contrast The Master has never been more confident or in charge (oddly so, actually, given that his plans for ‘Logopolis’ and sending the Tardis back to ‘even one’ in the opening episode both fall apart in quick succession). Anthony Ainley’s revived Master will become written as a pantomime villain in series to come, but Bidmead understood how to write for him and both here and in ‘Logopolis’ he’s at his best, running rings around the Doctor apparently for fun by having him, well, running round in rings trapped in the fictional city with no way out. He’s the Doctor’s equal who pushes him to his limits, with all the same tools of intelligence and imagination and gadgets at his disposal but who uses them to ‘wrong’ the universe, to tip it out of equilibrium, not ‘right’ it, because he wants the universe to reflect the chaos he feels in his mind. Ainley’s reveal (spoilers) as ‘Portreeve’, the kindly custodian of Castrovalva, is one of Dr Who’s better surprises and shows off just how much of ‘The Master’ is just a role, not Ainley being himself, all sweet and doddery in contrast to the laser-sharp brain of The Master’. ‘Neil Toynay’ (an anagram of ‘Tony Ainley’) is the first time the production team went to the trouble of keeping his disguise quiet, an idea created by one time extra and director Fiona Cumming’s husband Ian Fraser late one night when she was worrying about the credit in the Radio Times. It’s a great and very apt example of misdirection: you’re so busy looking at the shifty Shardovan you overlook the kindly Portreeve completely the first time round. Legend has it longterm Who videotape editor Rod Waldron, who’d seen everything the programme could throw at him across years and who knew Ainley well after editing both ‘Keeper Of Traken’ and ‘Logopolis’ was so surprised at the revelation in the editing suite he fell off his chair! Admittedly, like the Moffat stories to come, this is a trick this story can never play twice (once you know who The Master is you’ve lost a large chunk of the enjoyment of watching this story the first time round) nevertheless it’s still fun to look back and see how they did it, making Portreeve so very different. Having an enemy whose so sure of who he is he can pretend to be the complete opposite is a clever idea for a new Dr’s debut especially and follows on from tales like ‘Power Of The Daleks’ (where the Daleks aren’t themselves either) and ‘Spearhead From Space’ (where people have been replaced by plastic mannequins) that builds on the idea of identity and our ability to think who we are). 

 No wonder the Tardis cloister bell, only established in ‘Logopolis’ are ringing again, the part of the Tardis that warns of impending doom – a neat addition to the series that really ups the drama (though you have to question why it wasn’t ringing for some earlier stories – ‘The Edge Of Destruction’ at the very least). It ‘knows’ what’s going on, that it’s being sent to a place that doesn’t really exist, but with the Doctor unconscious it has no one to ‘tell’. Poor Nyssa and Tegan are all so new to this (this being their third and second story, respectively) that it’s a wonder they get as far piloting the Tardis into The Master’s second trap today and out of his first, following the Tardis databanks well enough to pilot the ship to Castrovalva in the first place. The Master, for all his laughing and terrorising of the pair, obviously respect them greatly by even thinking they can pilot their way out of the big bang and for both of the companions this quest is personal over and above rescuing the Doctor: The Master killed Nyssa’s dad Tremas and Tegan’s Aunty Vanessa. Of all the people they see on their travels he’s the one they hate the most, so facing him without the Doctor properly there yet ought to be the single scariest thing they do. Alas Bidmead, uncharacteristically, doesn’t seem to have thought that through. What he does manage to do, though, is give both companions a lot to do in this story, using the first two episodes as a chance to get to know them better in the Doctor’s absence. Bidmead created Tegan and while Johnny Byrne wrote the script for ‘Keeper Of Traken’ Bidmead really took to Nyssa and developed her in the script editing stage and few writers understood them better. Tegan is a naturally expressive, emotional Human who struggles to control her temper and is pushed to her limit by her travels, but she knows that if she’s going to come out of this alive she has to be more like Nyssa, calm and controlled (this is also part of her air stewardess training kicking in). For her part aristocrat Nyssa is terrified and secretly thinks Tegan has the far more natural reaction and is struggling to really feel things this story, to lose the natural numbness and detachment her upbringing has given her. They make quite the team, this pair of opposites and even if JNT had to intervene in rehearsals to remind the actresses that on screen they weren’t that many stories in yet and so weren’t best friends just yet their chemistry and mutual respect shine through. Poor Adric gets a raw deal though, kidnapped by The Master before the story has properly got going and even though he’s the member of the Tardis team we now the best by far (this being his sixth story) you totally buy the ambiguity that he might have sold The Doctor out to The Master now the Doctor isn’t ‘himself’ anymore and looks as if he might ‘lose’. As much as this is a coming of age story for the other three, that goes double for Adric whose morality is tested like never before (and though other stories copy this idea, it’s never done as well after). Bidmead returns Adric to his ‘artful dodger’ personality from ‘Full Circle’ here after a few stories of being more like Oliver Twist, the young kid hanging round the Doctor’s coat-tails and asking questions. The Doctor has been his father figure since losing his brother on Alzarius but now, with his father figure apparently gone (and looking not much older than he is himself) Adric isn’t thinking straight either, easily seduced by The Master. Not least because the timelord in black seems to respect him far more, to the point of building his entire third plan around him (odd for an enemy who only briefly saw the lad on Traken and Logopolis and hasn’t really seen do anything that complicated with mathematics or computers just yet). 

 Or is he? Something ‘Castrovalva’ never quite gets right is the ambiguity of how much Adric knows what’s going on and how much of a hand he plays in ‘creating’ Castrovalva. As seen on screen The Doctor works out what’s going on and tears down one of the ever-changing Castrovalvan tapestries, revealing Adric behind it. But was the Alzarian leaving clues for him to follow all along, knowing that The Doctor would see through the contradictions in this world once he finally woke up? (While The Master, for all his brains, isn’t really a ‘details’ kind of guy to pick up on them too and is having far too much fun poncing about in white). The way it’s done on screen is quite ambiguous: no one welcomes Adric back with open arms as the ‘hero’ but nor does anyone tick him off for working with The Master either, while for his part Past-Portreeve is too busy running for the exits to tell the bioy he’s the reason it all went wrong. Assuming this world is Adric’s creation though, more than The Master’s it reveals a lot about him. Naturally it’s a world based on mathematics, as you’d expect, with or without deliberately contradictions thrown in, but what’s remarkable is how much Adric makes this world like The Tardis rather than Alzarius. There are no marshy swamps, no ‘us v them’ societies, no marshmen who come out of the swamp and evolve. Instead we have a library and an apothecary, two things very much associated with the ‘Doctor’. We meet three characters who all sort-of resemble the past Doctors (did the 4th Doctor sit Adric down with the family photo album at some stage to natter about himself? It would be entirely in keeping, especially after Romana left). Shardovan, the authoritarian librarian, is the first Doctor, an endless source of information. The kindly magistrate Ruther with the twinkle in his eye on the outskirts of the action is the second Doctor. The dashing apothecarist Mergrave, who sacrifices himself at the end when he works out what’s going on, is surely the third Doctor (complete with love of costumes, even if it’s the Second Doctor who would most appreciate all these way-out hats. But then, why does Adric some up with hats at all? Nobody on ‘Full Circle’ was seen to wear one and neither do the Doctor or Romana – only in ‘State Of Decay’ would he have seen anyone wearing any and, honestly, he saw more people wearing crowns in that story).All three are the sort of father figure he’s been desperately searching for his whole life and even more so since losing elder brother Varsh (and thought he’d finally found with the Doctor, until he ended up young): they’re firm but fair and each one remarkably similar. That leaves Portreeve, who isn’t a projection at all of course, but The Master (Portreeve is indeed an archaic name for ‘magistrate’, a pseudonym he’s used before). When he was created by Terrance Dicks and Barry Letts between them the original plan was to have The Master revealed to be the Doctor’s brother, in a final showdown that was sadly never made because actor Roger Delgado died before it could be written, never mind filmed. Someone in this production team, though, has clearly been reading up on this: ‘Planet Of Fire’ has The Master die while in the middle of saying the word ‘brother’ and this story, too, points to a much deeper and more trusting relationship with the Doctor than we usually see. It’s as if. By becoming Portreeve. The Master can go back to the way things used to be when their relationship was kinder (I’d even go so far as to say The Master feels more like the elder brother again now he looks younger, after years of The Doctor being more authoritarian than he is). The Master is great in this story despite it being an odd fit when you think about it (a trap built from a world conjured up from logic is a Cybermen trap - The Master’s the most illogical foe there is! Indeed it was JNT who asked Bidmead to stick The Master in after reading the scene breakdown). 

 It’s not just the main cast, though, but the extras who sell this world – actually much more than most worlds in the Whoniverse that are actually, you know, real. There are children playing in the street, something we hardly ever see (the one who talks, Souska John, is the daughter of assistant floor manager Nick and niece of Liz Shaw actress Caroline). There are even animals, with one of several uses of chickens for ‘atmosphere’ in a Dr Who story (see ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ and ‘Fires Of Pompeii’ for two more). The town itself looks like the sort of place people have walked down for generations, not a bit of computer block transfer, especially the library and its many books (including ones that go right up to the present day despite being thousands of years old: an early clue) and the tapestries that mark several centuries (and which keep changing: another clue). When things fall apart (because the town centre cannot hold) it’s devastating because this lace seems so ‘real’ and it’s really well done too, with (for its time) one of the best uses of digital technology in all of Who and several ‘trick’ shots. Usually computers are meant to make the places we see on screen feel clearer and more natural but here they’re used for chaos, with the camera made to stare at the monitor of the action taking place which is staring at the camera and so on, inside itself ‘recursively’ until the image distorts (the perfect depiction of the plot as written in the script), while the scene of the camera image divided into five (the seperations created by the use of actual fuzzy felt shapes, a 1980s children’s toy that ironically enough I used to create my own Dr Who adventures with, then removed by CSO so that the pictures appeared to bleed into one another). Even something as simple as the director turning shots around so they enter scenes from the ‘opposite’ direction of where they should have arrived is clever and contributes to the feeling that something isn’t quite right even before the Doctor starts working it out. Only the rather obvious ‘upside down’ trick shot, when the actors run from left to right and the whole scene is flipped as a mirror image (something that should have been more tightly edited to look less obvious) doesn’t quite work. 

 So, ‘Castrovalva’ is a story that takes a bit too much of a meandering path to truly be called a top tier classic, with episode two, quite literally, getting bogged down for far too long. This is a story that really makes you draw on your patience and as such is perhaps not the very best idea for an explosive ‘new season, new Doctor, new timeslot’ format. If you’re patient enough to let it unfold, though, ‘Castrovalva’ rewards you greatly, a pretty darn good attempt to do several impossible things from the first: re-create a series of paintings that defy logic, throw this Doctor in at the deep end against a real threat at the peak of his powers and allow us to get to know two of the companions that little bit more. The beginning and ending at least are right up there with Dr Who’s best stories: bold, imaginative, daring, trying something no other show would think of never mind try and with just the right balance of action, plot, humour and character moments. Especially episode one which continues Bidmead’s fascination with The Tardis as a place where magical things happen, an open-ended machine that can do practically anything and as elastic in the way it works as the series format itself, unlike so many lesser writers who treat it as a sort of intergalactic bus service. I love the fact that there are rooms referred to that we haven’t heard mentioned before never mind explored yet, even though we’re nearing the show’s 20th anniversary (although sad that half of them we don’t get to see before they’re jettisoned in episode two). The twist in episode four, too, is gripping stuff you really don’t see coming and which turns the entire story up on end in one move). Yes it’s a shame about a lot of the middle but it wouldn’t be an Escher-influenced piece of art without some contradictions and a story that can bring you down as wel as pump you up. Sometimes in the same scene simultaneously. Overall for a piece of scifi its impressive, for a series entering its 19th year on television it’s hugely daring (there are no short cuts in Castrovalva, only right angles) and for a last minute replacement it’s a triumph. Maybe they should have let Adric conjure a few more worlds to let the Tardis loose in given how good this one is? 

 POSITIVES + There’s a really sweet moment when a still recovering Doctor finds himself in the Tardis wardrobe (for the first time on screen, though people were always coming out of it in the Hartnell and Troughton days) going through old costumes. The moment when he plays the 2nd Dr’s recorder for a few bars, before sadly putting it back again as if he’s not that person anymore, is really sweet (and a moment improvised by Davison on the spot) while Peter’s a natural mimic, arguably more convincing at being Hartnell and Pertwee than he is being the 5th Dr. Most regenerations are only interested in the future and shed the past but this one enjoys spending time there. This is, surely, a side effect of the fact that ‘Castrovalva’ is the first story shown since the beloved ‘Five faces Of Dr Who repeats’ in the gap since ‘Logopolis’ (‘An Unearthly Child’ ‘The Krotons’ ‘The Three Doctors’ ‘Carnival Of Monsters’ and ending with a repeat of ‘Logopolis’ itself, weirdly, even though it had only been on a few months earlier), the first time Dr Who had dipped into its archives to repeat a story that was anything more than a year old. As much as this story is impressively new there’s something warmly nostalgic about it too, particularly these opening scenes and at nineteen years old Dr Who now has more than heritage and nostalgia to draw on. In a few years’ time this trait will get silly, but here it’s judged to perfection. There was even more nostalgia in the studio: at one stage in episode one when Davison wasn’t needed yet he had a ‘lighting stand-in’ to get the positions right (not unusual in TV: even Russell T has done it standing in for Christopher Eccleston). Sometimes they even roped in studio visitors. On this story it happened to be Patrick Troughton who turned up without knowing it was his successor’s debut story (not least because he’d been in the role for months by then).

 NEGATIVES – In between the elaborate trap set by The Master in ‘Logopolis’ and the city of ‘Castrovalva’, the rogue timelord tries to send The Tardis back to the big bang so that everything inside explodes and he could be rid of his old adversary forever. Which is nuts: this is an enemy who won’t kill the Doctor until he can see the look on his face when he’s been outsmarted (something key to the plots to both stories when they get going). It’s all a bit daft and a bit desperate and feels like an attempt to throw in some jeopardy to get the story moving before the Castrovalva bit takes off, rather too easily solved with a bit of Tardis data-banking, the jettisoning of lots of rooms (why does this work?!) and a touch of lippy (no, seriously). Normally this would have been enough plot going to keep whole series alive (indeed, its mighty close to the ‘crack in the wall’ idea of series 5 of New Who) but here its a side journey, just an excuse to build up to the first cliffhanger and once the Tardis gets out of it, it’s never mentioned again (you think Tegan would have said something sarcastic to The Master like ‘so that was your idea of the big bang? I’ve had bigger!’) You can tell that Bidmead has, for the most part, forgotten what he wrote at the end of ‘Logopolis’ nearly a year earlier. If they wanted jeopardy, then why not carry on from the end of ‘Logopolis; when people are still shooting at the Doctor and no doubt confused as to why the man they were running after was dangling from a radio telescope and why he now has a different face (none of the guards seem to mention the guy who was threatening the universe seconds earlier either. Maybe because they’ve got problems of their own and all have different faces now – this regeneration thing really does seem to be ditching this story!) Well, all except Tegan who wanted to go home and here has the chance, right at the start of the story (she doesn’t know the Doctor enough to care for him more than, say, planning Aunty Vanessa’s funeral just yet). A more experienced script editor would have caught these missing bits – but then this story never had an official script editor as Eric Saward hadn’t started work (JNT did it himself for the most part: I suspect the more anorakky references to stories past are his). Also, if The Master has gone to the trouble of assuming his first two traps for The Doctor aren’t going to work how come he never sets a trap in case ‘Castrovalva’ fails? I totally thought we were in for a whole series of these revelations: ‘Yes Doctor, you thought you were on a spaceship with Stratford Johns as a giant green frog but actually ‘Authority’ turns out to be me, The Master! Now get this green make up off me! Oh and day hello to my pet pink snake I’m , ahem ‘Kinda’ fond of it, heh heh heh…’ 

BEST QUOTE: Shardovan: ‘You made us, man of evil – but we are free!’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: Big Finish story ‘Psychodrome’ (2014), which is a story in the ‘Fifth Doctor Box Set’, makes good use of securing Matthew Waterhouse’s services for the first time (till 2014 most of the 5^th Doctor stories are set during his second and third years) and carries on immediately after the closing seconds of ‘Castrovalva’ and features a 5^th Doctor who still hasn’t quite recovered from his regeneration yet. It’s the first chance the companions have really had to talk to the new Doctor and there’s a lot of lovely character moments, before the plot descends into yet another of those ‘captured by primitive tribesmen on an alien planet’ type stories.

When delirious in ‘Castrovalva’ the Doctor warns the Brigadier to watch out for the Ice warriors, something that never happened on screen. Another Big Finish story, 2022’s ‘Wrath Of The Ice Warriors’, finally filled in that gap with a story where the second Doctor and the Brigadier meet a third time following events in ‘The Web Of Fear’ and ‘The Invasion’ and end up embroiled in the mystery of a trawler that’s disappeared in Scotland (oddly the Brigadier doesn’t bang on and on about his clan tartan like he will in ‘Terror Of The Zygons’). Volume two of the ‘Second Doctor Adventures’ it’s a good story but I personally still have trouble getting my head round Patrick Troughton being portrayed by his son Michael. Throw Jon Culshaw playing the brigadier in too and it just doesn’t feel like Dr Who somehow.

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Previous ‘Logopolis’ next ‘Four To Doomsday’