Kinda doesn’t make it easy for you. Normally even the most intricately plotted classic-series Doctor Who story will at least work superficially as an adventure story, but – even with a ticking clock, a giant monster and a madman in charge of a colonial base – Kinda is clearly more invested in symbolism and exploration than it is thrills. It stands alongside Warriors’ Gate and Ghost Light in a slim canon of classic Who stories where “I like it, but I don’t get it” is a valid response, and many people have responded to it in precisely that fashion. It was voted the worst story of Season Nineteen by Doctor Who Magazine readers in 1982, and history repeated in that same magazine’s “World Cup of the Fifth Doctor” forty years later. In an extraordinary coincidence, Kinda ended up facing off against Earthshock, the story that won the 1982 readers’ poll, and once again Earthshock won the showdown.
Granted, that’s a less egregiously wrong result: the 2022 DWM readers were simply saying they preferred Earthshock to this, while the 1982 readers were saying they preferred every Season Nineteen story, up to and including Time-Flight. The former opinion is one I disagree with, the latter is one that should be grounds for a psychiatric intervention. Even so, for all Kinda‘s fortunes have turned around a little since it was first aired, it’s still clearly not the consensus classic it deserves to be, so it’s worth taking that opinion seriously and asking why fans still find it hard to love.
The most obvious problem someone might have with Kinda is that they don’t understand it. The narrative is cryptic and fragmentary, the titular tribe are mostly non-verbal and therefore refuse to define themselves and their powers, the monster is more of a looming threat than a character with goals and clearly delineated abilities. On the latter point, you could say the same thing about previous Doctor Who monsters like the Nestene or the Great Intelligence, but their non-corporeality is played as a kind of Lovecraftian incomprehensible horror, which fans of this series are used to dealing with. The Mara seems to be doing something else, something that’s harder to pin down. So what is this story about?
Frankly, any era of the show would benefit from more scripts with this much genuine depth and sophistication.
Faced with an unusually dense set of metaphors in an unusually exposition-free script, fans normally point to the biographical detail that writer Christopher Bailey was a Buddhist. Even this, though, is not the route through the jungle it appears to be. If Kinda was the 1:1 Buddhist allegory some critics have treated it as, those characters who are possessed by the Mara would be able to absorb its influence. It would be treated as something similar to the shadow of Jungian psychology, rather than a monster that needs to be vanquished. Perhaps the Mara, as an entity, should be interpreted as anti-Buddhist, in that its horror is rooted in its failure to operate by Buddhist philosophy. Throughout the story there is a motif of mirrors as a metaphor for self-knowledge; the Kinda embrace this, Hindle is misled by it, and the Mara is actively destroyed by it. But you can, as my mention of Jung shows, get to this philosophical point without studying the Buddha. The folkloric motifs in Kinda – the Mara infiltrating Tegan’s dreams, the importance of Lee Cornes’s Trickster as a guide between worlds, the karmic inevitability of the new dark age that Panna fears – are found in Buddhism, but they are not unique to it.
Following this lead, Kinda might be seen as a story about storytelling, and how different tellers can render the same story unrecognisable. The Mara breaks Tegan’s will by forcing her to question whether she is the dreamer or whether she’s a character in someone else’s dream. (The same question is repeatedly asked in Twin Peaks: The Return, which is not a reference point you can use for much classic Who) This prepares the viewer to accept the multiple perspectives that are required to interpret the rest of the drama. The story’s first big perspective shift – the revelation that the Kinda aren’t primitive savages, as the colonists believe – is a twist the show has done plenty of times before. Previously, though, this has been demonstrated by having the tribes deploy superior technology, or Godlike powers. Kinda, by contrast, has the Kinda repeatedly demonstrate psychic abilities that serve the same, mostly prosaic, functions as the gadgets used by the other characters. They’re not operating on a higher plane than everyone else, they’re just tackling the same problems differently.
It’s only when the Mara has corrupted them that the Kinda start to act like stereotypical primitives, building a cargo-cult version of the exploration machines the colonists use. Elsewhere, they’re doing the same things for the same basic human reasons as anyone else, just in different costumes and without talking. The Doctor specifically identifies the Kinda’s sacred Box of Jhana as operating through high-frequency sound-waves, the exact same method he uses to cure Nyssa’s illness in the first episode. It’s a subtle parallel that’s easy to miss, but it’s there.
The support for indigenous people is not a new theme for Doctor Who, it just isn’t usually explored with this much sophistication, a verdict that also applies to Hindle’s growing madness. The episode one cliffhanger, in which Hindle bellows that he “has the power of life and death over all of you!”, makes him look like one of the show’s standard power-mad despots, but as the story goes on you realise that Kinda is more interested in the “mad” part of that description than the “power” part. Even in episode four, when the narrative is laser-focused on Hindle’s genocidal threat to the Kinda, Bailey makes room for that devastating scene where he seems to believe his cardboard cut-out figurines are real people. It’s an incredibly disturbing moment, second only to Vincent and the Doctor as the most convincing portrayal of mental illness in Doctor Who, and it is enough on its own to establish that the Mara’s psychological violence is scarier than most monsters’ physical violence.
Both Hindle and the Kinda, then, are recognisable Doctor Who types, just written with a greater sensitivity and depth than usual. This goes for the rest of the serial, too. Bailey, by his own admission, didn’t have an in-depth knowledge of the show when he came on board, but he knows enough to get that the series tends to go for a Victorian/Edwardian Lewis Carroll tone when it gets weird – the chess players at the start of Tegan’s dream are a wonderful example of that. He also understands the series’s cliffhangers well enough to subvert them, with the end of episode two a particular stand-out: it works as a horror scene, then resolves into a joke in episode three, then reveals that joke has a crucial plot twist hiding underneath it.
The show’s latest ingredients are integrated just as successfully. The experimental video effects that mark out Seasons Eighteen and Nineteen were never used more appropriately than they are in Tegan’s dream sequences. It’s once again reminiscent of David Lynch, specifically the over-exposed whites and impenetrable shadows of early shorts like The Grandmother and The Alphabet. Next year, Bailey will write a sequel to this story, which would be brought to the screen by Fiona Cumming, a director who delighted in helming unconventional stories. Here, he’s paired with Peter Grimwade, just before Grimwade directed this story’s recurring nemesis Earthshock. Grimwade is always at his best when he’s slightly at odds with the prevailing tone of the serial, though, and Kinda shows him fully applying his gift for dynamic Z-axis composition, fast cross-cutting and ambitious effects sequences to material which couldn’t be further from the action stories he’d later work on.
Like several other stories in Season Nineteen, Kinda feels like a route not taken. As it went on, Peter Davison’s tenure would lean more into action, which isn’t necessarily a problem – Doctor Who can do action perfectly well – but this shift frequently forced the Doctor into becoming an action hero. Most Doctors would struggle with that, but for Davison it suffocated what made his take on the character interesting. Kinda is a showcase for the things Davison’s Doctor can do better than any other occupant of the role. Faced with the matriarchal, mystical leaders of the Kinda, Pertwee’s Doctor would have patronised them, Tom Baker would have mocked them, Jodie Whittaker would have been mistaken for them and David Tennant would have tried to get off with them. Only Davison would be this honestly curious, always listening, always trying to figure things out and see things from their perspective even when he doesn’t yet believe their claims. It’s one of the most immaculate marriages of lead actor and material in Doctor Who‘s history, and I’ll take it over the Fifth Doctor trying to blow Davros’s head off any day.
Bailey’s superior grasp of this Doctor’s character also extends to his companions. There’s already been too many stories at this point where Tegan is merely irritable and Adric is merely irritating, but Kinda turns both of these faults into assets. Tegan’s frustrations and doubts open the door for the Mara, giving Janet Fielding a chance to play a very different side of the character which this story’s sequel wisely doubles down on. The first episode, meanwhile, teases us with the possibility that Adric has once again sided with the villains, before using his untrustworthiness as a weapon against the colonists. It’s a crying shame, given that last characterisation, that Bailey never got the chance to write for Turlough, but then it’s a crying shame that he didn’t write every Fifth Doctor story. Frankly, any era of the show would benefit from more scripts with this much genuine depth and sophistication. Kinda is a story that takes Doctor Who seriously, and it’s long past time fandom in general took it in the same spirit.
Next: The Visitation (1982)
