Doctor Who: Kinda

[andraste]

To get the elephant (or, rather, the unconvincing giant snake) in the room out of the way first: Kinda is not a good-looking Doctor Who story even by the standards of the moment it was created it. The Kinda costumes are terrible, many of the props are rubbish, they absolutely did not get away with the jungle set where you can see the studio floor, and the Mara is one of the least special effects in the entire history of the series. (Which is saying something. It does not help that Adric exclaims 'it's fantastic!' when he sees it.) It also spends several minutes awkwardly shoving Nyssa off-stage with technobabble because of contract negotiations behind the scenes. (Although at least that means we get the delightful Todd in the effective companion roll, since Tegan is asleep and/or possessed most of the time and Adric is too busy being a little shit.)

All problems aside Kinda has got something that redeems all its flaws: ideas. Great big lovely piles of them stacked all the way up to the ceiling. Not all of the ideas are good ones - it could just as easily be called Planet of the Noble Savages, and the gender essentialism is wince-inducing here in 2020. But in terms of Doctor Who stories that use the show's format to actually be ABOUT something, it has few rivals.

Going through these stories in order of favourite-ness throws up some interesting thematic parallels: last time it was Satan, now we get the serpent and the apples. But the Mara is lifted from Hinduism, the 'people' Tegan meets in the dreamscape from Buddhism (they're named in the credits as Dukkha, Anicca and Anatta) and there's a whole scoop of shamanism in here as well. And pop anthropology. And everything that had been said about colonialism since circa. 1947. And British sitcoms like It Ain't Half Hot Mum and Dad's Army. And Star Trek. And The Word For World Is Forest. And lots and lots and lots of New Wave music videos. (A popular fan theory at one point was that Christopher Bailey was actually Kate Bush. Which almost makes sense when you think about it.) Most of all it's about human psychology, identity, the separation between self and other.

That all of this somehow falls together into a coherent Doctor Who story says something about how flexible the program is, not only on the level of its endlessly revolving settings and periodically revolving cast but also on the level of the kind of stuff you can shove in the story box and still have it work. The saddest thing about Kinda isn't the terrible snake effect or the fact that you can see the studio electrical cables at more than one point, it's that so few other Doctor Who stories are this brave.

Comments

[astrogirl]

I have a genuine fondness for that giant snake. Maybe partly because the story is so interesting and the symbolism works so well that I end up not caring that the snake looks terrible, and that fact in itself sort of delights me.

[andraste]

I feel just the same way about the giant rat in Talons - so cute and fluffy! I think I like it so much because everything else in that story looks so great the fact that they could not get the rat to look scary charms me.