“Kinda” (season 19, episodes 9-12; originally aired Feb. 1-9, 1982)
The typical Doctor Who villain is a physical, recognizable threat. You immediately know that the Daleks are dangerous and evil because they’ve got guns welded into their midsections and they’re eager to use them. Nobody expects a Dalek to conquer by winning over its enemies psychologically. “Kinda” takes a different tack: Though there’s a monster, a giant snake called the Mara, in this story evil comes from within more than without. The greatest dangers “Kinda” presents are internal ones that exploit the hidden weaknesses and flaws of the characters. It does this via two plot threads which are at times so divergent that they seem like completely unrelated stories, but which do work together as part of a larger parable. The first, centered around Tegan and the Kinda tribe, weaves Buddhist-inspired ideas about struggle against one’s own self and repressed negativity into a story about an innocent Eden-like paradise threatened by the corruption of knowledge. The second is an anti-colonialist, Heart Of Darkness-style jungle-horror story about arrogant civilized people who come to conquer a primitive world which is bigger and wilder than they can comprehend, and which instead absorbs and destroys them. In the end it’s too muddled and oblique to be entirely successful, and its poor use of the main characters leaves the story badly unfocused, but “Kinda” is an interesting experiment in something a little more psychological than usual. The story has grown on me the more I think about it, which is both good and bad—good because there’s more here to appreciate than is immediately apparent, bad because the story doesn’t really gel on the most basic level of entertainment. And I’m not really sure that it really works on that deeper level either, just that it’s thought-provoking.
One of the chief strengths of “Kinda” is the way it behaves like an experimental stage-theater piece as much or more as a standard Doctor Who story. That’s also the source of some of its troubles—scriptwriter Christopher Bailey was more experienced as a stage playwright than a TV writer, and went through some culture shock that couldn’t have helped the story. (Also, if your tolerance for experimental stage-theater is low, you’re going to find the crazy-soldiers-regressed-into-children subplot excruciating.) He thought that a TV scriptwriter would have the same kind of script-change approval and access to the cast that a playwright often has in stage theater—by which I don’t mean to imply that he was being arrogant, but that he saw this as a standard part of the creative process where he’d continue to refine and clarify the story. The behind-the-scenes materials on the DVD make it clear that the production staff found Bailey’s script murky, overly cerebral, and hard to understand, even if they liked its idea-rich audaciousness. It also couldn’t have helped things that that “Kinda” was commissioned by one script editor who then left the show, worked on by a second script editor who also left the show, and finally completed by a third and final script editor who didn’t see the story the same way as the others had, and rewrote it to fit Doctor Who’s more typical monster-based mode, making the Mara a more physical threat than Bailey had conceived.
I called “Kinda” a parable earlier, and I meant that literally—Bailey intended the story to embody specific Buddhist spiritual concepts which are reflected in some of the names: “Deva Loka” roughly means “god world” or “spirit world.” The Kinda wise women Panna and Karuna’s names mean “wisdom” and “compassion.” The Mara is named for a demon that tempted Buddha. Dukkha, Annica, and Anatta, the Mara’s three associates (or aspects, or servants, or whatever they’re supposed to be) that Tegan meets in her dream state are named for concepts relating to states of mind that lead to unhappiness and unbalance.
Seen today, “Kinda” seems oddly similar to James Cameron’s Avatar in certain aspects—I doubt Cameron was lifting ideas from “Kinda,” but both stories draw from a larger, older common well of inspiration. Like Avatar, “Kinda” features a futuristic human colonial outpost on a backwater jungle planet. The militaristic, arrogant Earthmen are under siege by the natives, a tribe called the Kinda, who have a deep spiritual connection to their world that gives them control over their environment because they are so perfectly in tune with their place in it. This connection is implied to have its roots in the technology of the Kinda’s ancestors, meaning that their seeming primitiveness is actually a highly sophisticated and advanced culture. Where the two stories go their separate ways is that Avatar follows Dances With Wolves and “Kinda” follows Heart Of Darkness: Instead of this culture clash resulting in one of the Earthmen going native and assimilating into the Kinda tribe, they go crazy. Also, the Kinda are not computer-created giant blue cat people, and the sympathetic female scientist is not played by Sigourney Weaver.
The Fifth Doctor, Adric, Nyssa, and Tegan arrive in the middle of an atmosphere fraught with tension and paranoia. Crew members have been steadily and mysteriously disappearing for weeks, to the point where the complement now numbers only three: scientist Todd and two soldiers, the bullying and racist Sanders and his high-strung, rules-obsessed subordinate Hindle. Although the planet is not physically dangerous to the humans, unlike Avatar’s Pandora with its poisonous atmosphere, there’s still a not-entirely-unjustified fear of contamination that means all trips into the jungle are made in a sealed one-man vehicle that’s basically a deep-sea bathysphere designed for moving around a forest. Todd is open to trying to understand Deva Loka on its own terms, but the men have a more pernicious attitude. They’re basically the worst kind of European colonialists, there to take Deva Loka by force, and that point isn’t made with any particular subtlety. If the callous taking of Kinda hostages as a matter of standard policy, or Sanders’ calling the Kinda “just a bunch of ignorant savages” didn’t make that obvious, there’s the 19th-century pith helmets, just the thing for an enterprising young man off to subjugate Rhodesia. (Also, Sanders is pretty much plucked directly out of pro-imperialist colonial literature: He’s named for the main character in Edgar Wallace’s African novels of the 1910s and 1920s, and actor Richard Todd was well-known for having played Wallace’s Sanders in a 1963 movie called Death Drums Along The River.)
One previous story that’s been mentioned as a source for both Avatar and “Kinda” is Ursula LeGuin’s 1972 novel The Word For World Is Forest, though Bailey has said he hasn’t read it. In any case, the general themes in play here were common enough—postcolonialism was especially in vogue at the time, and there were a lot of stories about people going mad or being fundamentally changed by encounters with the primal jungle. LeGuin’s book may be cited for “Kinda” because of the sci-fi connection, but recent years had also seen the movies Apocalypse Now (itself a version of Heart Of Darkness) and Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, and the novels The Mosquito Coast and At Play In The Fields Of The Lord. There’s also the Russian sci-fi novel and movie Solaris, in which exposure to an incomprehensible alien world drives a group of human scientists mad. “Kinda” is part of that zeitgeist.
There’s little doubt that the human colonists here are being driven crazy by the mental powers of the native tribe, though it doesn’t seem to be something the Kinda are doing on purpose—or if they are, it’s not quite going according to plan. Hindle’s mind snaps after he forms a telepathic link with his two Kinda hostages, but they act like his zombie servants for the rest of the story, obeying his commands and showing no initiative of their own, so I doubt it was a conscious act of revenge or rebellion. Plus, he turns even more xenophobic than before, becoming obsessed with sterilizing the jungle by fire before it can infect him with its microbes and vines and things.
Sanders, meanwhile, has had his mind expanded by the mystical Jhana Box that the Kinda’s two wise women give him—that’s another Buddhist-inspired name, referring to the still serenity of meditation. In an instant, he’s changed from the bully we met earlier. It’s almost entirely for the better—but there’s a side effect. Sanders turns so benign and kindly that he’s kind of softheaded, and cheerfully helps Hindle wire up the explosives that threaten a 50-mile radius of jungle around them, assuring Adric that “he means well … We all do, don’t we, underneath it all?”