Four episodes
Aired between 1st February 1982 and 9th February 1982
Written by Christopher Bailey
Produced by John Nathan-Turner
Directed by Peter Grimwade
Synopsis
The crew land on a jungle planet called Deva Loka. Whilst everyone explores it, Nyssa stays behind to recover from a series of fainting spells she's been having.
As they explore, the Doctor and co. find a bunch of crystal structures that make musical sounds.
Tegan is enthralled by them an falls asleep near them. As she rests, she has something of a nightmare, encountering a bunch of spectre-like figures that all bear the mark of a snake on their arm. One of the spectres, Dukkha, tries to get Tegan to let him use her body to spend some time outside of the dreaming world.
He does so by trapping her in the nightmare, reflecting herself and making herself doubt what is real and what is fake.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Adric find a human recon team who are looking at Deva Loka for colonisation. They've found a bunch of natives called the Kinda, who are totally silent (well, the males are), and have subjugated themselves. During there time on the planet, some of the recon team have gone missing and one of the soldiers, Hindle, is slowly losing his mind.
The commanding officer, Sanders believes that the Doctor and Adric are responsible for the latest person going missing and they keep them locked up whilst he investigates in an environment suit called the TSS. He leaves the unstable Hindle in charge of the base whilst he's gone.
As Sanders is out, he encounters female Kinda who present a wooden box to him that turns him child like. When he returns, he is content to let Hindle be in charge and he does whatever anyone tells him.
Back in the clearing, Tegan eventually lets the Dukkha take control of her, and she awakens, quickly taking control of a Kinda male called Aris who then goes off to rally the Kinda together to destroy the recon base.
Hindle in the meantime has somehow made two of the Kinda follow his orders and he has set explosives around the base with a threat to blow them up if he feels like it, or if anything from the
outside tries to get in.
The Doctor makes friends with the scientist from the recon base (Todd) and together, they manage to make a run for it, but Adric is caught and forced to stay and buy into Hindle's insanity.
Whilst they are in the jungle, Todd and the Doctor come across the two Kinda females - Panna and Karuna - and they tell them of the fact that great destruction and evil is coming. They share a vision that shows a sort of cycle of time, where disastrous events happen once every few thousand years. It becomes clear that Aris is the centre of all this and he is possessed by an evil spirit called a Mara.
Aris turns up and hypnotises Karuna, removing their ability to stop him from killing the humans. She is eventually freed of the hypnosis, but is possessed by the life force of Panna to do so, effectively killing Panna's old body.
Together. they find Tegan, wake her up and explain what's happened and what she's unleashed.
Back at the recon base, Adric has had enough and tries to escape in the TSS. This coincides with the Kinda marching on it.
Adric is unaware that the TSS responds to thought waves and it ends up firing its gun in all directions, wounding many of the Kinda, and Aris. The natives flee and Aris is left on his own to run into the jungle.
The Doctor shows up and helps Adric out of the machine.
Together they go into the recon base and overpower Hindle, eventually making him look into the box which somehow restores his sanity.
The Doctor figures out that the Mara doesn't like to see its own reflection and he recruits the restored Kinda tribe to use solar panels from the recon base to trap Aris in a ring of mirrors. The Mara slithers from his arm and manifests as a giant snake. With the mirrors reflecting it and each other, the Mara is effectively banished to the dark realm where it came from.
In the aftermath, Todd decides to leave the planet when human supplies arrive. The Doctor encourages her to register the planet as unsuitable for colonisation. Sanders and Hindle decide to stay.
Nyssa emerges from the TARDIS fully rested, just in time to head off again on their next adventure.
Trivia
- Ok, let's get the most referred fact out of the way - Much like The Planet of the Spiders, Kinda is a story based around Buddhist concepts.
- The character of Nyssa had to be cut out of this story whilst contract negotiations were taking place, along with royalty issues from the writer who created her.
- This story was originally commissioned by Christopher Bidmead, but had gone through so many re-writes that by the time it came around to being filmed, Antony Root (script editor from Castrovalva up to this story) took it on.
- In fact, I believe the script editor job was under a bit of a fight between Antony Root and Eric Saward who were both being tried out for the role.
- Supposedly during the filming of this, Matthew Waterhouse was trying to tell Richard Todd (Sanders) who is an Oscar nominated actor, how to act. Waterhouse defends this by saying he was sort of poking fun at himself for accidentally doing exactly what he was telling Todd not to do. I'll let you decide if he's telling the truth or not
- As noted before, this was the third story of season 19 to be filmed, done before Castrovalva
The Review
More than a few years on, Kinda is now regarded as a classic by the Doctor Who fandom as a whole. They say it is daring and inventive, to be applauded for trying to be abstract and moving past the monotony of running down corridors and having hammed up villains. These people claim that Kinda sticks out from the lacklustre bunch of stories from Season 19 (with the exception of the Visitation).
Whilst I can personally agree that it is an unusual story, it's only unusual in the same way that Warriors Gate was, but for me, maybe a bit less entertaining.
This is one of the very few Doctor Who stories that has a supernatural bad guy that's not just a futuristic alien. It deals with concepts and other intangible stuff, which is not bad in itself, but as a result the narrative threads make very little sense. It could be just me that's not intellectual enough to truly appreciate the story, but I don't think so. I understand that it's about temptation and the cycle of history and other concepts of enlightened living, okay, I get it. What happens in Kinda however is that it's told in a very...boring way.
The concepts are left vague and open to interpretation but as Eric Saward himself said, you can't have an open ended narrative and expect everyone to extrapolate the story from it themselves - it's just boring TV. Hindle, whilst providing entertaining viewing for his over the top reactions and memorable quotes, is just a sideshow and the kinda in pith helmets just show how absurd it all is.
The TSS is no better, being appallingly realised, along with the original version of the mara snake.
The Doctor is reduced to the role of a companion for much of this story, having to ask all the questions and not really being pro-active until the end, and Adric seems to have retained all the annoying traits he picked up from Four to Doomsday.
The best thing about this story, is Tegan's dream sequence which is actually quite effective and the Durrkha is chilling. Other than that, this is unfortunately a quite forgettable story for me that does not deserve the attention it often receives.
Rating
4 out of 10
Rewatchability Factor
3 out of 10
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