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.

This box is something of an enigma, offered to Sanders by young girl Karuna and very, very old woman Panna. These are the first Kinda people to speak, and both are female. Panna wants the colonists to leave Deva Loka, and wants Sanders to take the box back to the dome. Seeing as the box has some kind of all-consuming force inside, it's clear that she wants to wipe the invaders' minds in some way. It is stated that only a woman can understand the box, so perhaps when a man opens it, he is incapable of comprehension, and so is reduced to a childlike innocence?

Mary Morris is fantastic as the craggy-faced sage, and gets across the character's blindness with sensitive skill, looking blankly into the middle distance, never focussing on anything in particular. Amazingly, Morris was only 66 when she recorded Kinda, but she looks about 20 years older. She always had an interesting face, and is perfect to play some kind of spiritual witch in Doctor Who!

Panna and Karuna encounter Kinda himbo Aris, whose brother is one of the two Deva Lokans inside the dome. Kinda men cannot speak, but they can communicate telepathically. Of his brother, Aris asks Karuna "why has he gone from my mind?", which is a wonderful way to express the absence of someone among telepaths. This also makes me wonder why the Kinda in the dome aren't given names, especially whichever one is Aris's brother. Is it prolific Doctor Who extra Mike Mungarvan, whose boyish presence graced 31 episodes between 1972's The Mutants and 2005's The Christmas Invasion? Or is it the doleful Barney Lawrence, who appeared in 18 episodes between 1980's Full Circle and 1984's Warriors of the Deep (including, appropriately, Kinda's sequel Snakedance)?

Much of the rest of the episode takes place inside the dome, where Hindle has seized control, of both the base and the Kinda captives. Simon Rouse is magnificent as the mentally fracturing Hindle, giving one of the very finest performances in all of Doctor Who. Rouse's subtlety is breathtaking, you utterly believe this man is unravelling before your eyes, and are never in any doubt that Hindle is a dangerous man. Hindle has completely flipped, and Rouse's wild-eyed mania is carefully tempered by a layered performance in which he lurches from gentle to raging within seconds. Every time Hindle rants "SILENCE!" you really feel that he could do something very dangerous. Rouse's performance gives me Games of Thrones levels of anxiety!

Peter Davison is also wonderful in the way the Doctor reacts to Hindle's state. The Doctor is very careful in the way he handles Hindle, mindful of his mental health issues, trying to deal with the madman on his terms in order to keep him calm. He doesn't succeed, of course, because Hindle is explosively volatile, but Davison's considered performance means the Doctor does not treat Hindle as a monster, only the threat that he is. There's no way of reasoning with a man as cracked as Hindle ("I'm onto you, you know"), and when he reveals his plan to use fire and acid (acid and fire) to raze the jungle to the ground within a 50 mile radius, everybody really does know they are in trouble!

Hindle believes the vegetation of Deva Loka to be the enemy. He is disturbed by the disorder (it's "higgledy-piggledy"), the way the plants and trees feed the Kinda, but then how the plants and trees come back. He's utterly mad, but somewhere within the madness, you have to wonder whether he's onto something. Is there something sinister out there in the jungle? The trees have no mercy...

In an effort to allay the dangers posed by Hindle's loose cannon, Adric pretends to side with him, which is now becoming peak Adric behaviour. In both State of Decay and Four to Doomsday you could argue he was genuinely swayed by the bad guys' plans, but here it's obvious he's pretending to agree with Hindle so that he can gain an advantage of freedom, outside the cage that the Doctor and Todd are put in. Matthew Waterhouse does this really well, and his mock-surprise at seeing something outside of the dome to distract Hindle is lovely. Sadly, his attempt to smuggle the cell key to the Doctor is scuppered, but it was a nice try.

I've said it before, but Waterhouse really was great as Adric. His critics do not see what I see, which is a very young, enthusiastic actor almost embodying the role. Waterhouse 'gets' this cheeky little orphan (in some ways he is him), and you can tell he really enjoyed being in Doctor Who, which he was a fan of himself.

Take the scene between Waterhouse and Davison in the cell where Adric tricks the Doctor with sleight of hand. It's a lovely, warm exchange between the two characters, and when the Doctor then tries to show the trick to Todd, you can see Waterhouse in the background between them, watching gleefully, giving that impish grin when the Doctor fails. There's a momentary connection here between the Fifth Doctor and Adric that is too often absent, but which was far more natural with the Fourth Doctor. There was just something missing between Davison and Waterhouse, which is such a shame because Adric suffers as a result, coming over as precocious rather than cheeky. It's almost like the section of the audience who disliked Adric at the time were brainwashed into it by the cooler relationship between Waterhouse and Davison.

Meanwhile, in Tegan's head things are getting out of hand, with first two Tegans arguing over who's who, and then no fewer than ten Tegans! It's all something to do with split personality and the different iterations of the id (probably), but what's important is that Dukkha (representing suffering) wants to "borrow" Tegan's body for a while. Whatever Dukkha really is seems to be inside Tegan's mind, and wants to get out. Is it her darker side, or is there genuinely something hibernating inside her psyche which wants corporeal form? Maybe Dukkha is suffering because his jeans are so tight?

Threatened with the option of not existing at all and being left alone for ever and ever, Tegan gives permission for Dukkha to use her body, and there's a rubbish effect where Dukkha's snake tattoo wriggles its way from his arm and onto Tegan's. It's a great, unsettling idea, but sadly not realised very well, the snake looking like a lumpy sausage as it makes its way from arm to arm!

And then Tegan is released from her mental void-space and is back in the jungle, although now she is truly possessed, her eyes and mouth reddened like she's missed several months of sleep and has been drinking that stuff dentists use to highlight plaque on your teeth. Janet Fielding is wonderful at being evil ("Boo"), and she uses a slightly sensual (sexual?) body language to portray the fact there's something else using Tegan as a mouthpiece. Possessed Tegan has a deeper voice, and bares her teeth like a caged animal. But this animal is not caged, it is free. "I am a Mara!" she announces to Aris.

Note the use of a Mara, not the Mara. In Buddhism, a mara is a demon associated with death, rebirth and desire, which sent three daughters to tempt the Buddha (unsuccessfully, of course). It's interesting that over time, this individual Mara has become known as the Mara, as if there is only one all-consuming entity, but at this very early stage, the Mara that possesses Tegan is very much just one of a number, rather than the only one.

The Mara doesn't hang about inside Tegan for long, choosing to hop across into Aris instead (cue another dodgy snake tattoo effect), who runs off into the jungle, seemingly now able to speak. He'll be the first male Kinda to have a voice, and seeing as he wants to rescue his brother from the dome, those inside had better beware.

Back at the dome, Sanders has returned in the TSS. When Hindle sees him trundling through the jungle, his mental state deteriorates somewhat as the risk of his supremacy is threatened. "Mummy, make him go away!" he screams. Now, this sort of dialogue could be handled very badly by some actors, but Rouse makes the right choice again by playing it not as a gibbering child, but as a man in mental collapse. He is saying childish words, but not playing it as a child. It's an interesting choice, and one that works in that it's not embarrassing to watch, but ever so slightly unsettling.

But Sanders' return does not go the way everyone's expecting, because Sanders is not the man he was. He's been mentally suppressed in some way by whatever is in the box, and he's bought that box back as a gift for Hindle. The rising anxiety around what's in the box is expertly done. It is the fear of the unknown, it's the not knowing what's inside the box that frightens. But the only way to find out what's inside is to open it, and so the fear lies within the box.

Hindle wisely gets the Doctor to open the box from a distance, and as he pulls on the lid, an hysterical Todd screams in horror, and the end titles crash in. What has she seen? What lurks within the box? We'll have to wait to find out, but there's no denying that Nerys Hughes gives that scream some welly. Whatever's in the box had better be worth the terror.

First broadcast: February 2, 1982

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: Simon Rouse is fantastic as the mentally unstable Hindle.
The Bad: The wriggly snake tattoo effect.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★☆☆

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Three; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site.

Kinda is available on BBC DVD as part of the Mara Tales box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Tales-Kinda-Snakedance/dp/B004FV4R4K