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.