Kinda

Chapter the 344th, is a gift for Christmas.

Plot:

The Doctor, Adric and Tegan explore the paradisiacal planet Deva Loka while Nyssa sleeps off a hangover in the TARDIS (a hangover from the end of the previous story where she fainted, I mean). Tegan falls asleep by some wind chimes and dreams of a mysterious figure who psychologically tortures her until she agrees to let him borrow her form: this is the Mara. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Adric come across a single-person armoured battle unit, the TSS. Operating autonomously, it escorts them to a dome set up by a survey party reviewing the planet for possible colonisation. Many of the survey team have gone missing outside the dome, leaving only three survivors. Commanding officer Sanders goes out to investigate, leaving the unstable Hindle in charge. Possessed by the Mara, Tegan finds Aris - one of the Kinda, indigenous people of Deva Loka - and the Mara transfers to him. Sanders returns to the dome a changed man, meek and smiley. He was given a wooden box by a Kinda, which he urges the others to open. It is a healing device for the mind, but Hindle refuses to open it. The Doctor and Todd escape and find that Aris is planning to attack the dome. The increasingly unhinged Hindle has wired the dome up with explosives, and an attack could mean the end of the world. Adric uses the TSS to stop the attack, but Aris escapes. The Doctor and Todd confront Hindle, who has regressed to childhood and is building a model city in the dome. Using reverse psychology, Todd gets Hindle to open the box, and his mind is healed. The Doctor disconnects the explosives. With the help of the Kinda, the Doctor traps Aris in a circle of mirrors. The Mara detaches itself from him in the shape of a red snake, and Aris is pulled free. The snake grows to massive size, but unable to face its reflection disappears. Tegan hopes she is free of the Mara's influence (she isn't, but that's another story).

Context:

Watched from the Blu-ray disc from the season 19 Collection box-set, a couple of episodes per night in mid-December 2025. I was accompanied for the whole thing by the eldest of my children, a young man of 19 years back from university for the Christmas hols. He enjoyed the story. I thought I'd adjusted the settings to select the version with enhanced effects, but when we got to the end it was the as-transmitted version. I had to pause the programme, go to the menu and flip the switch, so the eldest got to see the sequence of the Mara in the circle of mirrors both ways. He was very complimentary about Chris Petts's CGI work (as indeed he should be, it's magnificent).

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm very, very close to catching up. This story completes a season (the 19th of the classic era) and another Doctor's era. Blogging Peter Davison's final remaining story makes it 15 out of 15 Doctors and 41 out of 41 seasons completed to date (classic seasons 1-26, and new series 1-15). None of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War are left, just the 5-episode The War Between the Land and the Sea spin-off remains to be blogged.

First Time Round:

This is one of a few key watershed moments in my early history of Doctor Who watching. The first episode of Doctor Who I ever saw in full was from An Unearthly Child, first ever Doctor Who story (thanks be to a 1981 season of archive repeats for that symmetry). The first full story I ever saw was The Krotons, and the first colour one was Carnival of Monsters (both were later in that same repeat season). The first episode of Doctor Who that I saw on its debut broadcast was the second part of Castrovalva, in January 1982, a few weeks after the repeat season ended late the previous year (sarcastic thanks be to the scheduling of my weekly Cub Scout session for my missing parts of Castrovalva). The first full story I saw on its debut broadcast was Kinda. I had to pretend to be sick for two consecutive Mondays to get out of cubs and watch it in full, and I was mesmerised by it. I should say exaggerate my sickness rather than pretend, for I was already somewhat sick... at heart: you see, I already had an immense crush on Tegan Jovanka. It was a definite moment for the prepubescent me seeing Janet Fielding playing the Mara-possessed Tegan, with the smallest smidge of sexuality that she felt she could get away with, but that wasn't the main reason for the story's appeal. It had something that the young me could sense but couldn't identify. I now know it to be nothing much more than well-written drama, but it was mysterious at the time. Kinda was the story of the year for me. I was out of step with the fandom of the time, though - Kinda came bottom of the Season Survey readers' poll in Doctor Who Magazine that year. People voted Four to Doomsday and Time-Flight higher. You can't trust people, can you?

Reaction:

Doctor Who didn't have any real competition for the affections of UK children until 1977. Star Trek was popular, sure, but back then comprised only three seasons played in endless rotation - it wasn't something new, which reduced the excitement quotient significantly. None of the other competitors (from Land of the Giants to Space:1999) even got close to Star Trek's level, let alone Who's. But then there came Star Wars. From that point on, there was a dividing line: once Star Wars was there as a good-looking, high budget option for the straight-laced kids, Doctor Who became the thing the strange kids loved. There had always been a certain strangeness in Who and its fan audience, but the programme seemed to embrace it increasingly as the 1970s ended and the 1980s began. Kinda might just mark the apotheosis of that process. It is downright weird in many places: the dream sequences where Tegan encounters mysterious characters in the landscape of her own mind, for example, are visually interesting and cryptic, but they're also abrupt. They have clearly been cut down from longer sequences as the episodes were overrunning, but this manages to make them even more unsettling. The climax of the third episode is a bravura sequence where an apocalypse is represented, simply but with devastating effect, by an alarm clock going off and an oversaturation of the picture leading to a white screen. A few stories later - with the same director - the show would begin a period starting with Earthshock (which then became a template for future stories) where it tried to ape sci-fi action movies. It was enjoyable, but it was also a bit safe. Maybe it would have been better to leave that sort of stuff to George Lucas: I don't think Lucas would or could ever produce something like Kinda.

The biggest action sequence in Kinda sees two people in wooden boxes dancing around each other for a minute or two in a cramped studio. It's all the better for that, in the opinion of this reviewer at least. The cliffhanger ending of episode two is one of the best in the history of Doctor Who, and all that it requires is a small box plus engagement with viewer imagination. The staginess on display in places somehow seems apt. Kinda is not aiming for naturalism: it is a didactic morality tale told using symbols and artifice. The irrepressible dynamism of director Peter Grimwade has to have an outlet, of course, and he creates Kinda's fireworks in character and performance. To do this he assembles one of the best guest casts ever put together for Who, and they all respond well to an excellent script from writer Christopher Bailey. Stalwart British stars Richard Todd and Mary Morris are as good as one might expect, but this is true of everyone down through the credits list, no matter what the size of the role or the experience of the performer. The stand-out performance is Simon Rouse as Hindle. I have seen the moment in the final episode where he holds up the broken cardboard figure of a man and says "You can't mend people" dozens and dozens of times over the years, but it never fails to be spine-tingling. Doctor Who has definitely been guilty in the past of egregious use of mental health issues for antagonist motivation. It can be an easy catch-all just to call a villain insane; but Hindle's nervous breakdown is played with sensitivity and is grounded in reality. The subplot of his worsening mental health and its eventual healing links thematically with Kinda's central idea about the power of the mind. Ultimately, the story champions the power of community and shared ideals in opposition to the individualistic thinking of the colonist, which was quietly radical at the time and remains so now.

The regular cast are also firing on all cylinders. The ones that are not written out, that is. I believe the reason Sarah Sutton's Nyssa does not appear for the majority of this story was contractual rather than dictated by the story, but reducing the number of regulars having to share out action and dialogue is a good move. Peter Davison, in some of his earliest work as the Doctor, is unshowy but strong. Janet Fielding gets an opportunity that's rare in Doctor Who to do challenging material as the companion, and she is pitch perfect. Her turn as the Mara-possessed Tegan casts a long shadow: Tegan's only possessed for two short scenes, but Fielding burns through the screen in both of them. It is no surprise that a sequel (Snakedance) was quickly commissioned that leans in more to the 'evil Tegan' premise, and lets Fielding play the antagonist throughout. Her earlier scenes where she struggles to keep her sanity through various nightmare scenarios are great as well. Even Matthew Waterhouse's turn as Adric isn't too bad in this story: the character's more adolescent immaturity is a nice counterpoint to Hindle's mental regression to a younger childhood. As if following a Doctor Who 'conservation of sexism' rule, Tegan being given more interesting material is balanced out by another female actor having to do the thankless scenes of wandering around with the Doctor asking questions. This falls to Nerys Hughes as Todd, but her more mature approach and the quality of the dialogue make it a rather nice guest performance, all in all. She does at least get to save the day by getting Hindle to look in the mysterious box and be healed.

Kinda has a little something extra beyond the good performances, good script and - for the most part - good visuals. The Discontinuity Guide by Paul Cornell, Martin Day and Keith Topping - a touchstone of fan opinion for those enthusiasts of the show that were around in the 1990s - is almost surprised to find that beneath the allusions and parallels Kinda is at heart "a very original piece of genuine SF". It is rare for Doctor Who (and Star Wars for that matter) to tackle science-fiction ideas head on; usually they're just used as set dressing for an adventure story. Not so here. So much careful thought and depth has been put into the society on Deva Loka and the legends of the Mara. No matter how bad you might find the final realisation of the snake in all its papier-mâché glory, this is a world and set of characters that seem real. There is so much clever world-building in every line and moment such that the story lives long in the imagination after a viewing. The Kinda, for example, refer to anyone who is not Kinda (a tribe that commune telepathically, let it not be forgotten) as the 'not-we'. This is just so beautifully right. It has also become a way that fans refer to the uninitiated in the real world (in a similar way that Harry Potter fans use 'muggle'). Little details are tossed lightly away like seeds in the breeze, but they take root: the box of Jhana, speech only being something that women can do, the consciousness of the tribe's wise woman passing to their young apprentice on death, etc. Depending on how the mood takes me, Kinda could well be the answer to the question of what is my favourite ever classic era Doctor Who story, so it was a good one to come up as the final classic story to blog. It's weird but it's wonderful. I don't know of any story in any big TV sci-fi franchise that has ever tackled similar material, nor done it so well. Take that Star Wars!

Connectivity:

Both Kinda and Wish World / The Reality War feature real world physical manifestations arising from the thoughts of humans; they also both feature an antagonist who is one of the Pantheon of Discord (The Mara is the Pantheon's "God of Beasts" according to Harriet Arbinger in The Legend of Ruby Sunday).

Deeper Thoughts:

The Christmas List. The shallow surface reading - and I've been very guilty of thinking this way myself, believe me - is that after only a single Christmas special in the entirety of the classic Doctor Who era, a Christmas special for our favourite programme then became a mainstay only when the series returned in a blaze of glory for the 21st Century. The smallest bit of research, though, gives the lie to this: Doctor Who had a presence in the Christmas TV schedules almost all the way through the classic era (and then triumphantly built on this once the show was back on TV from 2005 onwards). In the early days, Doctor Who was on almost all the year round, so couldn't avoid yuletide. Christmas TV was handled slightly different back then, though; the only day that really had any significance was 25th December; any broadcast on a day around the main one could go out as normal without the makers having to prepare anything different. This, though, proved to be a good thing for Who. On its third Christmas after staring in 1963, the regular Saturday broadcast of Doctor Who happened to fall on Christmas Day, the only time this happened in the 20th century. So, as seemed traditional with all types of programmes, an episode was broadcast that was much less good than usual. Instead of doing what Doctor Who normally did but being more epic or more accessible or both, the episode (The Feast of Steven, sixth episode of story The Daleks' Master Plan) broadcast on 25th December 1965 was composed of a string of lame gag-free sketches. Even worse, the Christmas Day episode of this Dalek story, didn't feature any Daleks. This was during the height of Dalekmania, when any episode featuring the metal meanies would have been perfect festive viewing for families.

This was doubly unfortunate, because every Doctor Who broadcast during the festive period up to The Feast of Steven had been a Dalek episode, but these ones with actual Daleks. In 1963, 28th December saw the broadcast of The Survivors, second episode of story The Daleks. The following year, Who went out on Boxing Day with Flashpoint, the sixth episode of The Dalek Invasion of Earth. The timing was no doubt accidental, but they couldn't have been chosen better as a gift for viewers of the time: the poisonous pepperpots' first on-screen appearance, and the big finale of their return adventure. At least The Daleks' Master Plan's seventh instalment on New Year's Day 1966 saw the Daleks return to the show again. Each of the remaining 1960s seasons saw a story broadcast that bridged Christmas and New Year, but none were Dalek stories. At the end of 1966, Patrick Troughton's first story The Power of the Daleks was slightly earlier (starting on Bonfire Night) and so was done with before the end of December. Christmas Eve saw the second part of following story The Highlanders instead. The Enemy of the World's first two parts aired on the 23rd and 30th of December 1967, and The Krotons kicked off on 28th December 1968. None were Christmas themed, but any new Doctor Who episode has got to be better than none at Christmas time. December 1969 fell during the longer than usual gap between Patrick Troughton's last story and Jon Pertwee's first. For a few years from Pertwee's debut, though, the twelve days of Christmas period coincided with the excitement of the launch of a new series of Doctor Who. This was the case for six seasons, all of Jon Pertwee's five runs and Tom Baker's first set of episodes. Usually the seasons would start early in the New Year (with part one of Day of the Daleks airing on the 1st January 1972), though later on the seasons slipped forward a little to a start in the last days of December.

Simply starting new seasons of Doctor Who just after Christmas was clearly not sufficiently feeding the audience's festive need for Who: from December 1971, a new innovation came along. Omnibus Doctor Who repeats were made and shown around Christmas, and proved popular. A cut down version of The Daemons aired on 28th December 1971, an omnibus of The Sea Devils on 27th December 1972, The Green Death got similar treatment on 27th December 1973 (airing in the middle of new story The Time Warrior's weekly screenings). On 27th December 1974, a Planet of Spiders omnibus including Jon Pertwee's regeneration aired the day before the new season started with Tom Baker's debut Robot's episode one on the 28th. For Tom Baker's second season the launch shifted forward to the autumn, but seasons ran every week for six months and would still cross the festive period. Usually, omnibus repeats would also nestle in the schedules in a short gap between the stories broadcast in one year and the next. The Android Invasion finished its weekly airings on the 13th December 1975, but on 27th December that year an omnibus of Genesis of the Daleks aired before the season resumed with The Brain of Morbius from 3rd January 1976. Towards the end of that year, the season - plus another couple of omnibus repeats - had paused by the 4th December, though the new stories resumed with The Face of Evil on New Year's Day 1977. Mid-season story The Sun Makers completed by 17th December 1977. After that, The Robots of Death - which had first aired near the start of that year - aired in two stitched-together 50 minute repeats on New Year's Eve 1977 and New Year's Day 1978. A week later, new Who broadcasts resumed with Underworld part one. The Robots of Death would be the last regular Doctor Who repeat shown for Christmas; after this, repeats aired during the summer instead.

The weekly airing of new Doctor Who episodes still happened around Christmas, though. The 23rd and 30th December 1978 were the days for broadcasts of the first two parts of The Power of Kroll; the 22nd and 29th December 1979 saw the first two episodes of The Horns of Nimon. Nothing aired in late December 1980 (the last episode of State of Decay aired on 13th December) but the current Doctor Who run resumed on the 3rd January 1981 with Warrior's Gate's first episode. At the other end of that year, Doctor Who's first ever spin-off K9 and Company aired on BBC1 on 28th December; it was set at Christmas and had K9 singing a carol and everything. From 1982, each new season of Doctor Who shifted to a start in the first week of January again, in the first few days of the year before Twelfth Night. Peter Davison's first season (including Kinda) started on the 4th January 1982. Things remained the same until Michael Grade put Doctor Who on hiatus in 1985. December 1985 to January 1986 became the first twelve days of Christmas period since Doctor Who started devoid of a new episode or a special repeat. It was a 22-year unbroken record. Don't anybody tell Michael Grade this; he loves the role of panto villain, and would no doubt revel in being the man who cancelled Doctor Who's Christmas. A quirk of scheduling delaying the start of Doctor Who's season in 1988 meant a couple of episodes aired in the Christmas / New Year period, and during the 'wilderness years' a few BBC2 repeat showings happened in late December or early January, but these were slim pickings. The party was over.

The party came back with a bang in 2005, though: Doctor Who was on the cover of the Christmas Radio Times, Doctor Who toys were big sellers for the kids that year, and the show had a special episode airing on the big day, 25th December. Doctor Who has proved very popular at yuletide since. From 2005 to 2017, 13 Christmas specials specials were aired, one a year, all of them on the big day. From 2019 to 2022, four more festive specials aired on New Year's Day. The specials returned to Christmas day again for 2023 and 2024. Even though there was an embarrassment of riches in this time, it didn't quite end there. In 2015, BBC4 showed The Face of Evil in two stitched-together 50 minute chunks on the 28th and 29th December, and the story was chosen deliberately because it had originally aired around the Christmas period. On 23rd December 2024, a colourised, edited version of The War Games aired, also on BBC4. Even a couple of years before, the idea that such a thing could happen would have been laughed off. This breathless rundown of Christmas past has been a real education: we fans have been so lucky, and the gifts continue. At the time of writing this is 2025, we have just reached the end of December airings of a spanking new Whoniverse spin-off, which is available as a box set on iplayer for the Christmas period (this century's version of K9 and Company?!), and we've been promised a Doctor Who special for Christmas 2026. After that, who knows, but I think it would be foolish to put any money against such goodies continuing in years to come.

In Summary:

Incidentally, a groovy Kinda Christmas to all of you at home!