'Doctor Who – Kinda' (1982)


Happy Bank Holiday if you're lucky enough to live somewhere that does Bank Holidays and you don't have to be at work today. If you're not, or you do have to be at work today, erm... sorry about that. Maybe just pretend that this post starts at the next sentence or something ;o)

It's only been a couple of weeks since I last did a 'Doctor Who' post but somehow it feels like a lot longer. Well, the last couple of weeks have been pretty busy... Half the fun in these posts is going round the charity shops, and second hand music & DVD places, and seeing if there are any 'Doctor Who' DVDs that I haven't covered yet. Given how long the show has been running for, you'd think that there would always be something 'new' for me to pick up but it always seems to be the same old stuff that I keep running across. So when I saw 'Kinda' on sale for a quid, I had to quickly grab it before someone else did ;o)

I was all of about six years old when 'Kinda' first aired and if it wasn't for my having owned the novelisation, for a few years, it would be one of those shows where I'd think, 'oh, wasn't that the one with the big snake?' but not really remember much else. As it is, I knew most of the story already but still wondered how that story would hold up these days (what with '1982 production values' and all). As it turned out, I think it holds up pretty well.

The TARDIS brings the Doctor, and his companions, to Deva Loka; a tropical planet where the native Kinda are friendly but tensions are rising within the Terran Survey Expedition, an expedition that is steadily losing members of its team. The Doctor must fight to save the expedition, from potentially explosive consequences, but it's in a small grove of windchimes where something far more serious is about to take place. Tegan falls asleep in the grove and her unguarded mind lets something onto the surface of Deva Loka that the Kinda fear above all else...

Damn, early eighties 'Doctor Who' could be pretty dark when it had a mind to... Tegan is taken apart by a malevolent alien entity and the show lays it all on the line for us to see. Watching the Mara play with Tegan, and then leave her alone in the dark until she agrees to let it possess her, scared the life out of me as a kid and it's still pretty unsettling even now to watch. Then you have an already 'on the edge' Hindle being brutalised by Sanders untl he snaps, Hindle's subsequent collapse into megalomania and Adric blaming Tegan for everything (seriously, fuck you Adric, you make it really easy for me to dislike you) and you've got a story that explores the affects of manipulation and control and how people react to it. It all feeds into the air of paranoia, in the Dome, anyway but it also makes for some vicious little undercurrents that contrast with the peaceful air of the planet itself.

Once you get through all of that, 'Kinda' still has a colonisation theme to explore and does so both dilligently and, I thought, fairly sensitively as well. It could have heavy handed but it's slightly understated which made me want to focus on it even more, just so I could get a feel for what is being said. There are no surprises here but that's kind of the point really and I thought it was handled well. No-one knows a land (or planet) better than its indigenous people.

Once you get through that, we still have the Mara to deal with as surprisingly well done giant snake. You know it's plastic and I know it's plastic but it really looks like they did a decent job with it and that's always a good thing. My favourite parts though were when the Mara got to possess various people. Janet Fielding in particular, really made the most of her chance to 'be a little evil for a change' and I wouldn't have minded seeing her do that for a bit longer here. Never mind.

Adric though... He gets on alright with the Doctor but as I said earlier, has a nasty habit of laying the blame on others without looking at his part in it all. And we all make mistakes, it's just his willingness to unload on Tegan really left a bad taste in my mouth. Not his finest moments here then.

There is a lot going on in 'Kinda' and it all comes together to make a story that is engaging and unsettling in equal measure. Now I'm going to have to see if I can find a copy of 'Snakedance'...

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