Kinda Part Four

The one where the Mara takes corporeal form...

It gave me an itch of recognition towards the end of part 3, but I didn't realise until the reprise that Peter Howell's score during the vision scene, reflecting the ticking and clicking of clocks and the passing of time, reminds me heavily of his work on The Five Doctors, in particular Borusa's theme. The ticky-clicky theme works better here, but I can't separate it from The Five Doctors in my head!

Panna isn't dead at all, at least not her spirit. Her aged and decrepit body might be lifeless, but all of Panna's great knowledge and experience has passed into young Karuna, in a form of reincarnation where the souls merge as one, rather than exist consecutively. Sarah Prince is fantastic in the way she portrays this, walking with more maturity and genuinely seeming like an older woman in a young girl's body. I'm not sure how old Prince was at this time, but she'd been acting for a good five or six years by Kinda, so also had the experience to pull it off. She's an overlooked gem among so many in this story.

Kinda Part Three

The one where the Doctor is branded an idiot because he hasn't gone mad...

So, what's in the box? Turns out it's your common or garden jack-in-the-box, with a ghoulish Green Man twist, so Todd's ear-piercing scream of horror was slightly over the top. But opening the box leads to more than just a jack, as the lights in the dome begin to falter, the cell door miraculously slides open, and the Doctor and Todd share a bizarre vision in which Panna and Karuna beckon them to a cave. Later, we discover this "message" was meant only for Todd, not the Doctor, because Todd is a female. The Doctor and Todd leave Sanders behind, crouched on his knees and weeping (perhaps happy tears?). It's a sad sight to see this previously proud and bombastic man reduced to a mere child, and all credit to veteran film star (and Oscar nominee) Richard Todd for carrying this role so truthfully.

The Doctor and Todd make a cracking team, the younger Doctor and the older female companion. Nerys Hughes is so real in the part, treating it with respect and intelligence. There isn't an ounce of send-up in her performance, she plays it utterly straight, and as a result the pairing works so fluidly. There are many moments of charm between them, but it all begins with the scene where they escape the dome. As the ramp slowly begins to close on them, Todd exclaims (rather pathetically) "Ohhh!", and the exasperated Doctor growls "Well, jump!"

Kinda Part Two

The one where Tegan is (briefly) possessed by a serpentine entity...

That TSS prop really is a clunker, isn't it? It's not been designed with a jungle planet in mind, either within the fiction or without. If these colonists knew they were coming to a highly vegetated planet, then why bring something so boxy and unwieldy to travel through the undergrowth? You can see the leaves gathering at the machine's base as it bumbles through the jungle. It's a good job the jungle floor is so smooth - as smooth as a BBC television studio, it seems - as it would get nowhere fast if it were to encounter a fallen tree, or even a pile of twigs. Designer Malcolm Thornton thought he'd come up with a cracking design most probably, but in truth it has virtually no practical aesthetic (just look at the way Sanders uses those little arms to take the box from Karuna, and then finds he can do precisely nothing with it!).

Anyway, Sanders is encouraged to open the box, and he is engulfed by some kind of mental force, which appears to regress him to a childhood state. Whatever is in the box has infantilised him, stripped him of both his life experience and his complexities.

Kinda Part One

The one where Tegan goes on a journey into her own psyche...

Warning: this is Kinda, so there's lots to say...!

After fainting at the end of the last episode, Nyssa has apparently passed out a second time, resulting in the Doctor taking the TARDIS to the peaceful, idyllic jungle planet of Deva Loka (known as S14 to some). It's lovely to find the regulars hanging out together, and actually getting along at last. Adric and Nyssa cheerily play chess, while Tegan cheekily tries to intervene. They come across as a family, with the Doctor, despite his youthful appearance, being the father figure.

The Doctor rigs up a gadget called a delta wave augmenter to try and ease Nyssa's headaches. To benefit, she has to sleep for 48 hours, which means the others have a couple of days to kick back and explore Deva Loka. Amusingly, Tegan still has one eye firmly on getting back to Heathrow, staying in her now probably very smelly air hostess uniform and moaning about having to stay while Nyssa's snoozes.

Four to Doomsday Part Four

The one where the Doctor uses a cricket ball to propel him through space...

Stirring from her impassive state, Nyssa uses her scientific ingenuity to short-circuit the blade-wielding assistor's control device, as well as that for Adric's captor. This is the ideal way to demonstrate Nyssa's cleverness, rather than the usual method we get of her spouting on about everything she knows. Nyssa's ploy enables Adric to wriggle free and stand between the Doctor and Persuasion's gun, demonstrating a level of self-sacrifice akin to Jo Grant.

Persuasion laboriously itemises the contents of the Doctor's pockets, which shed some unexpected light on this new Doctor. He carries a magnifying glass because he's short-sighted in his right eye, which also explains the "brainy specs" he sometimes wears, while the cricket ball he carries urges him to remember the time he played for New South Wales. The moment where the Doctor boasts of bowling "a very good chinaman", and catches the eye of the Chinaman next to him, is hilarious! However, all this crickety talk compounds my opinion that it's not the Fifth Doctor who's the proper cricket fan, it's an earlier incarnation (see my discussion of this in Castrovalva part 1). This is so early in this Doctor's lifetime that he can't be talking about his current self.

Oh, and luckily Nyssa may keep the pencil.

Four to Doomsday Part Three

The one where we learn about Monarch's true plans...

I don't care what anybody says, Monarch's scientific achievements are very impressive, even if they are lacking in humanity somewhat. He's managed to throw off the shackles of flesh and blood and condense a person's entire being into a tiny silicon chip. The people of Urbanka are not the green froggy creatures we see in Monarch. They have actually become "fully-integrated personalities with a racial memory". Monarch's science records a person's entire lifetime, thoughts and feelings and transfers it into one microchip, which can then travel around in a synthetic body, enabling immortality. Brilliant! It's also reminiscent of what Davros achieved with his travel machines...

The fact the bodies are disposed of as fertiliser for the floral chamber is a grim side-effect, on a par with Harrison Chase's psychotic gardening tips in The Seeds of Doom.

Four to Doomsday Part Two

The one where the Doctor and Tegan enjoy a cultural exchange...

Janet Fielding is so good in this episode. The way she has Tegan react to situations makes me laugh, but it's also because it's a truthful depiction of how a highly-strung Australian air hostess who's been whisked away to the other side of space and time against her will would react! Tegan speaks her mind, with no airs and graces, she just says what she thinks without filter or forethought. I appreciate that, and I think it's long overdue in a companion. We've not had this sort of blunt honesty since Leela left the TARDIS.

As soon as it's confirmed that the Sapphire and Steel versions of Enlightenment and Persuasion are extrapolated from her sketches, she wants out. "I want to go," she demands of the Doctor. It's just too weird for her, and who can blame her? She never asked for all this. Fans sometimes criticise Tegan for moaning too much, never stopping to enjoy the wonders of the universe around her, but look at it from her point of view: she never chose this life, and right from the get-go she's made it clear all she wants to do is go back home. Intergalactic mathematicians, block transfer constructs and shape-shifting space frogs are not her kind of normal. 

Four to Doomsday Part One

The one where the TARDIS crew meets a frog king...

Another story which opens with a valiant attempt to be like Star Wars, with an "epic pan" over a spaceship in flight, before seeing it cruise over the camera, powered by fiery thrusters. It may not be George Lucas, but it's a fairly good attempt and you can't knock Doctor Who for trying.

Rather wonderfully, the story opens with no messy precursor or establishing scene, we're just straight into things alongside our heroes. There's a brief glimpse of a deserted alien laboratory before the familiar sound of the TARDIS materialising brings the police box into shot. The Doctor has arrived, and the adventure can begin immediately! It's quite a refreshingly simple opening.

Castrovalva Part Four

The one where Castrovalva folds in on itself...

I really like the idea behind this episode - or rather, behind the idea of Castrovalva as a place - because it plays with time thematically, in keeping with the story as a whole. The Doctor gradually works out that The History of Castrovalva (all 30 volumes of it) consists of books which were bound 500 years ago, but which chronicle the rise of the township up to the present day. Oops! That's a major boob, Master! But I do like the slow realisation that these old books contain new information from after the time they were created, like "time books"! The entire history, and by association the entire existence, of Castrovalva is a fiction!

At first it's considered that Shardovan the librarian has invented the history himself, a further example of writer Christopher H Bidmead trying to distract the viewer by making them think the man in black is the bad guy here. Actually, he's far from the bad guy, he just likes to dress that way.