Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 590: Kinda, Episode One
Dear diary,
People often describe 1980s Doctor Who - the Peter Davision years and Season Nineteen in particular - as being a bit too much like a soap opera. I think I can see where they’re going with that, and it’s seen mostly in the way that every episode joins up relatively neatly with the next one. The Leisure Hive sees K9 damaged by sea water, and when Meglos begins, he’s under repair. That tale ends with a call from Gallifrey, which is where the Doctor and Romana are heading when they find themselves catapulted into E-Space in Full Circle. Adric then sneaks aboard the TARDIS, where we find him during State of Decay, and an attempt to return the young stowaway home at the end of that tale leads to the events of Warrior’s Gate, trapped in the void. When The Keeper of Trakenshows up in the Console Room, Romana has only just departed, and that story ends with Nyssa looking for her father, which she’ll contact the Doctor about in Logopolis.
The next one is obvious, with the Fourth Doctor taking a tumble at the end of that story, and those events picking up in Castrovalva. Four to Doomsday opens with the Doctor trying to get Tegan back home, and this story starts off with a discussion of Nyssa’s collapse at the end of the previous one, a device which will write her out of the next four episodes almost completely. Doctor Who hasn’t felt this much like a continuing adventure serial since the early days of Season One, when every story would feature a similar linking device from one tale to the next. I don’t think I mind it - it builds in a nice sense of continuity - but it does mean that all these adventures take place over a fairly short space of time. There’s one or two points of that narrative I’ve just outlined in which youcan find a bit of wiggle room, I think, but it’s tight.
But anyway! We’re on to Kinda, one of the stories that’s generally considered to be something of a ‘classic’, and another one of those ones that I’m not sure I completely understand. I’ve seen it before at one time or another, and I remember enjoying it but not being entirely sure about the nature of the Mara creature. I’m not one who really goes in for ‘fan fiction’, but the one time I did write a story for a friend’s run of fan fics, I chose to write one about the Mara, setting it in a jungle (because, well, that’s where this is set), and with a dome full of research scientists (um…), and a big snake turning up that could eat people. Because, frankly, I liked the image of a giant snake lurching out of the darkness and gobbling up one of the characters. So there. I also included a crystal that the Mara was trapped in (because I think that’s a plot point in Snakedance) and a cave in which the walls are covered with mirrors (because mirrors are the key to defeating the creature in this story). I love the idea of the Mara… but I don’t completely understand it. Here’s hoping that I’ll work it out on this viewing!
We’re certainly off to a good start. The writing out of Nyssa is a little clumsy to begin with, but once she’s out of the way, it leaves us with room for the Doctor to breathe a little, accompanied by only two of his companions. It’s not long before Tegan is taken out of action, too, and we’re left with the Doctor and Adric getting some quality time together. Aside from a brief period in yesterday’s episode (which was under considerable pressure), this pair haven’t had a great deal of time to spend together since the regeneration. It’s nice to see them given the chance to bond, and in such a nice environment, too. The jungle set for this story is really rather lovely, and it’s another thing that feels like a throwback to the 1960s - the Doctor and his companion being given a chance to explore their strange new surroundings.
I’m also absolutely loving the somewhat surreal edge that we’re being given in this episode, with Tegan trapped inside the dreamscape. There’s something about these scenes which puts me in mind of a 1980s music video (I think the make up and almost ‘new romantic’ feel to parts of the sequence help with that), and it’s really great to see the programme going off in this direction once again. The last time that I can really remember the show doing anything quite this triply is right back in The Krotons, when the Doctor and his companions were subjected to all the mind scans, so it’s about time we had more of it!
While I’m at it, I should update my thoughts on the way that Peter Davison is growing in to the part. Once again, we’re seeing him settle in a lot more here than he has done over the last few episodes, and his performance is starting to feel much closer to the one I think of when picturing this incarnation of the Doctor. What struck me most in today’s episode is the fact that he’s almost more like the Tenth Doctor than the Fifth in places - the moment when he describes the one-man travel machine as being ‘obviously an armoured suit of some kind’ is the one that sticks in the mind most clearly. I compared his anger in yesterday’s episode to the character we see in Time Crash, and I think that this is the closest we’ve come to seeing where the Tenth Doctor gets it from. When he tells his earlier incarnation how much he loved him… I think he meant he’d been watching Kinda!
