TV Club: Doctor Who, Kinda
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 theyve got guns welded into their midsections and theyre eager to use them. Nobody expects a Dalek to conquer by winning over its enemies psychologically. Kinda takes a different tack: Though theres 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 ones 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 its 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 badgood because theres more here to appreciate than is immediately apparent, bad because the story doesnt really gel on the most basic level of entertainment. And Im not really sure that it really works on that deeper level either, just that its thought-provoking.
Originally published Oct. 30, 2011 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.
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