Review [DW]: “Enlightenment”

20×5. Enlightenment
Writer: Barbara Clegg
Director: Fiona Cumming
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The White Guardian warns the Doctor of a strange race taking place between several groups of “Eternals” seeking a prize known as the Enlightenment, while the Black Guardian continues to pressure Turlough and plot to kill the Doctor.

Review: Most of the Davison era has been either in the average-to-pretty-good range or has fallen under the umbrella of “creative but flawed.” Unfortunately, “Enlightenment” proves to be the latest example of the latter. In theory, the concept of the Eternals has some promise: they are powerful immortal beings who sense something empty about their existence, they seem to welcome danger if only to break up the monotony (since they don’t actually die but are just “transferred”), and they find themselves drawn to mortals (or “Ephemerals,” as they put it) despite being unable to understand us. But only the Edwardian crew come across with the right air of aloofness and the appropriately detached reactions to the TARDIS crew and the humans on board their ship. Their main rival, Captain Wrack, is a Cackling Villain stereotype who really doesn’t belong here.

The first two episodes, before Wrack becomes more central to the proceedings, are strong enough, with what seems like an effective mystery for first-time viewers – at first, the Doctor and his companions seem to be on Earth, with the reason for the human crew’s lapses in memory left unclear, building to the revelation that they are actually in space. Turlough also continues to add an element of unpredictability through a more amoral character than we’re used to seeing from companions. Although the story charts his increasing resistance to the Black Guardian, culminating in his refusal to kill the Doctor at the end, he is in fact willing to betray the human crew by revealing their discontent to the Eternals. It’s less clear whether his attempt to ingratiate himself to Wrack by claiming that he simply wants to be on the winning side is entirely an act or if he is in fact trying to keep his options open, and the script probably should have made this clearer.

As for the Guardians, it’s perhaps for the best that they did not, to the best of my memory, make another appearance in the original series after this. They were acceptable enough as background plot devices for the Key to Time trilogy, and introducing a companion who’s initially been strong-armed into the role of would-be assassin was clever. But they tend to come across as slightly hokey in this installment, and between them and the inconsistent portrayal of the Eternals, this is not a high point for portrayal of alien superbeings on Doctor Who.

Rating: *** (out of four)

Review [DW]: “Terminus”

20×4. Terminus
Writer: Steve Gallagher
Director: Mary Ridge
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: Turlough’s attempted sabotage at the Black Guardian’s behest results in the TARDIS materializing on a shuttle bound for Terminus, a spacecraft where victims of Lazar’s disease are watched over by slave laborers with little apparent hope for a cure. Meanwhile, a malfunction on Terminus could result in a catastrophic explosion if the Doctor doesn’t find a way to stop it.

Review: “Terminus” plays like some sort of Mad-Lib that got mistaken for a screenwriting assignment – “Compose a 90-minute television serial using the following: potentially interesting ideas, half-baked development of said ideas, drawn-out scenes of people wandering around and chasing each other on a spaceship, and a threat to the entire universe.”

If there’s one thing that distinguishes “Terminus,” it’s perhaps the rather grim situation that the Doctor and his companions are forced to confront. Neither the Lazar victims (who suffer from a disease that resembles leprosy) nor the enslaved caretakers left at the mercy of a greedy corporation seem to have much hope of anything changing for the better. The Lazar victims are mostly just waiting to die, placing little faith in the promise of a cure, and the slaves don’t supply them with any real reason to think otherwise and are dependent on hydromel supplies from the company for their own survival. The cure itself is administered by the Garm, a strange creature that initially seems as though it may be a threat, but in fact has been doing its best to cure the plague victims and is perfectly capable of communicating with the other characters. Even at the end of the serial, it’s not as if everything is resolved perfectly. In fact, the reason Nyssa decides to stay behind is that she correctly perceives that it will take a lot of work to get Terminus running as well as it could and should, and she wants to be a part of that effort.

This is somewhat darker material than typical Doctor Who fare, and while it makes for a more challenging setup, it leaves some pretty glaring questions unanswered. In general, I found it hard to understand how this situation arose in the first place. Where did the Garm come from and who put it in charge of administering the cure? If the cure actually works more often than not, why does one of the slaves tell Nyssa that nobody ever comes back from meeting the Garm – has it been secretly arranging to transport them off the ship? Then there’s the issue of the entire universe being threatened. Apparently Terminus used to be a time-ship, and the pilot time-jumped the ship forward just after dumping fuel that resulted in a massive explosion, with the explosion itself becoming the Big Bang – and now a similar explosion is impending if the Doctor can’t stop it, causing another Big Bang and wiping out the current universe. I won’t bother quibbling with the science here, but this is presented in an oddly perfunctory manner. If you’re not only going to reveal the origin of the universe but threaten its complete destruction within the space of 90 minutes, you ought to build up to it convincingly, not relegate it to a subplot in between scenes of people running around and hiding in air vents.

The beginnings of a good story are present in “Terminus,” but too many aspects of the premise are left unexplained, and none of the guest characters emerge as particularly interesting or compelling. As has been the case in a number of serials since the show adopted a new style under John Nathan-Turner in Season 18, it feels like the script is taking on too many things at once and ultimately doing justice to none of them.

Other notes:

– Tegan and Turlough do in fact spend the majority of the serial running around and hiding in air vents, to the point that the Doctor doesn’t even realize until close to the end that they’d left the TARDIS at all.

– That said, their conflict at the beginning – where Turlough proves himself capable of lying and manipulating to cover his tracks – is one of the more interesting scenes. Although Turlough clearly doesn’t want to go through with killing the Doctor, he’s definitely more self-centered and less moral than your typical companion. While this obviously makes him less likeable, it does introduce an effective element of unpredictability into the series.

– I commented in my review of “Mawdryn Undead” that it was unclear whether the other characters realized that Turlough is an alien, but it’s evident from the dialogue that they’re aware of it at this point.

Rating: ** (out of four)

Review [DW]: “Mawdryn Undead”

20×3. Mawdryn Undead
Writer: Peter Grimwade
Director: Peter Moffatt
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: While the Black Guardian attempts to manipulate the alien schoolboy-impostor Turlough into killing the Doctor, the TARDIS crew become embroiled in a crisis involving two separate time periods, a group of alien criminals whose theft of Gallifreyan technology has backfired and left them in a state of eternal mutation, and retired Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, now teaching mathematics at a local school and initially unable to remember the Doctor.

Review: “Mawdryn Undead” is probably the best serial yet of the Davison era, weaving together a labyrinthine but logical time travel plot with the right mix of suspense, solid characterization, and occasional humor. While it has its missteps, this is a story that proves sufficiently engaging that most viewers will enjoy the ride even though it takes a few questionable turns.

The Brigadier is back for the first time since “Terror of the Zygons,” and while it’s a bit unusual to see him outside of a UNIT story, Doctor Who could certainly do worse than to drop in on his post-military career. He may no longer be commanding a clandestine international organization, but his intelligence and take-charge manner are on display in both timelines, and the Doctor is clearly pleased to see him, greeting him with an exuberant, “Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart!” Giving him partial amnesia could have backfired, if only because it’s such a worn-out plot device in fiction. Here, however, it works for a couple of reasons: (1) it doesn’t linger for very long, with the Doctor helping him recover his memories shortly after encountering him at the school; and (2) it ties into the serial’s twisting plot, with his younger and older selves accidentally crossing paths towards the end and thus presumably inducing his younger self’s memory loss due to shock.

“Mawdryn Undead” also manages to work without a clear villain driving most of the story – the Black Guardian shows up, but that’s as much a pretext for introducing Turlough as anything else. Instead, what we have are competing priorities and viewpoints. Mawdryn and his colleagues on the ship are not trying to regain the power they once had, or acquire a mutation-free form of immortality, or exploit Earth – rather, they want to be allowed to die a natural death. Their methods are certainly manipulative and dishonest at times, but for the most part, they don’t deliberately set out to harm anyone else. Turlough, meanwhile, is introduced as an intelligent but somewhat amoral character: he’s self-centered, certainly, and initially willing to kill the Doctor if it will get him off of Earth (which he claims to hate), but he starts to have second thoughts when he realizes that the Black Guardian was lying when he claimed that the Doctor was some sort of evil and dangerous person. And the Brigadier, for that matter, made his mark as an ally of the Doctor who isn’t always on the same page with him, and we see some of tht here too. His younger self rather chauvinistically suggests that the “girls” (Nyssa and Tegan) let him handle things, at which they rightly bristle, and one gets the sense that he is among the more traditionally-minded, disciplinarian teachers at the school. There is, however, one scene in which he threatens Mawdryn that seems a bit over the top – maybe it was a bluff, but even so, it felt like it might have been thrown in to create context for Mawdryn’s subsequent expository dialogue. Tegan and Nyssa, meanwhile, are at first unsure whether to believe Mawdryn’s ruse of pretending to be the Doctor’s latest regeneration after a supposed transmat capsule accident, not realizing that they have traveled back to 1977.

A story like “Mawdryn Undead” is naturally going to play a bit fast and loose with science, and ironically the final episode offers clear examples of both the right way and the wrong way to do this. It turns out that the only way to free Mawdryn and his colleagues from their state of immortal mutation is for the Doctor to interface with the equipment on their ship in a way that will use up his remaining eight regenerations. He actually refuses at first, agreeing only after it emerges that Tegan and Nyssa have somehow been “infected” by the condition that afflicts Mawdryn and the others and now cannot leave the ship. All this is probably about 1% “sci” and 99% “fi,” and the script never acknowledges the fact that, with Tegan and Nyssa in the equation, the procedure ought to cost the Doctor ten regenerations (which he doesn’t have) rather than eight. And yet it works because it requires the Doctor to make a meaningful choice and demonstrate just how much he is willing to sacrifice, and for whom. The one aspect of this that could have been improved would have been to elaborate on exactly why the Doctor refuses until Tegan and Nyssa are endangered. I can think of several reasons why he might – their dishonest and deceptive methods, the fact that their own crimes are what caused their predicament, a general distrust of anyone who tries to manipulate nature to achieve immortality – but it’s never spelled out, and for a character who does tend to be relatively selfless, it could have used some explanation.

While I wouldn’t have expected the serial to end with the Doctor actually losing the ability to regenerate, the script gets him out of this predicament with a bit of a cheat. After a series of near-misses between the two Brigadiers, they wind up in the control room together just as the procedure is about to take place. The older Brigadier, despite having been warned by the Doctor that they must prevent this from happening, reaches out to touch the h nd of his bewildered younger self, causing some sort of energy discharge that “shorts out the time differential” and cures Mawdryn and the others without the Doctor having to lose any regenerations. What had been a character-driven narrative in which the Doctor’s choice is the critical turning point becomes a technobabble-driven narrative in which the Doctor’s choice is rendered irrelevant by what amounts to dumb luck.

I object to this partly there has been an awful lot of this kind of plotting in recent serials, such as Nyssa just happening to be the spitting image of a human woman in the 1920s in “Black Orchid,” the Cybermen’s technology accidentally causing a ship to travel 65 million years back in time in “Earthshock,” pretty much the entire plot of “Time-Flight,” and the labored justification for the use of Amsterdam as Omega’s headquarters in “Arc of Infinity.” But perhaps more to the point, there could have been a much better (and still character-driven) ending even within the confines of this concept. If the two Brigadiers meeting really would have this effect, why not have the Doctor and/or Mawdryn deduce this and then let the Brigadier make the tough choice, accepting that he’ll suffer six years of partial amnesia in order to spare his friend an even greater sacrifice? I do think the Brigadier would do this, especially since he would know that he’ll eventually recover, and it would preserve what I did like about the ending, which was how it tied the Brigadier’s memory loss into the other intersections of the two timelines.

Other notes:

– Tegan seems the most skeptical of Mawdryn’s claim to be the Doctor, whereas Nyssa and the younger Brigadier are more open to the possibility. Perhaps they’re just more used to thinking outside the box given their past experiences (Nyssa as an alien who left her homeworld and the Brigadier as a UNIT veteran)?

– I’m not a believer in assisted suicide, and at times I was a bit uncomfortable as I wondered if the script meant to draw any parallels to that issue. On the other hand, Mawdryn and his colleagues have what might be considered the exact opposite of a terminal illness (since they can’t die), and ended up in this condition because they *weren’t* willing to let nature take its course.

– One thing that was left unclear to me was whether anyone – the Doctor, Tegan, Nyssa, or the Brigadier – became aware at any point that Turlough is an alien. He clearly demonstrates more knowledge of the technology at work than a British teenager would logically have, but it’s never addressed in the dialogue.

Rating: *** (out of four)

Review [DW]: “Snakedance”

20×2. Snakedance
Writer: Christopher Bailey
Director: Fiona Cumming
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The Mara, having maintained a hidden presence within Tegan’s mind, begins to take control of her again, diverting the TARDIS to its original homeworld of Manussa, where it plans to use the legendary Great Crystal to effect its return. The Doctor and Nyssa have to contend not only with the Mara’s manipulations but with the skepticism of the local populace, many of whom now regard the Mara as a myth and are preparing a festival celebrating the story of its banishment.

Review: If “Kinda” straddled the line between science fiction and fantasy, “Snakedance” pretty much leaps across it. While there are traces of conventional Doctor Who pseudoscience (the Doctor invents a gadget to try to block the Mara from interacting with Tegan, and there’s a line positing the importance of the Great Crystal’s molecular structure), the Mara’s plan is essentially the performance of a magic ritual. The Mara itself also gets more of a backstory, having been created out of the negative emotions of a group of people who made an ill-advised attempt to harness the Great Crystal’s power hundreds of years ago. The Doctor defeats the Mara at the end not by using any sort of technology, but by finding the “still point” within himself and countering the negative psychic energy of the Mara, as advised by the Manussan ascetic Dojjen. This ending, incidentally, transformed a story that seemed like it might be out of place on Doctor Who into one that might *only* work on Doctor Who. The meeting with Dojjen, in which he and the Doctor communicate telepathically, is the most memorable scene in the serial, but the idea of the protagonist suddenly being able to understand all this and find his or her “still point” when there are just minutes left might seem like a stretch on most television shows. When the protagonist is the Doctor, however, I actually have no trouble buying into this idea.

Manussa doesn’t rank among the most interesting alien societies that we’ve seen on Doctor Who, but I did appreciate that the Doctor’s confict with the locals arises not because they mistakenly think he’s behind whatever evil scheme is under way, but because they don’t believe there’s an evil scheme at all. The Mara is apparently now regarded by the Manussan establishment as a myth, and those who still believe in it are seen as crackpots: Dojjen has been exiled, and the Doctor is seen more as a disruptive nuisance than anything else when he tries to warn everyone what’s happening. The Mara is able to operate partly by appealing to the vanity of Ambril, Manussa’s Director of Historical Research who sniffs at the Doctor’s lack of academic credentials and who is persuaded to retrieve the Great Crystal with the promise of getting credit for an archaeological discovery.

While the Davison era had yet to produce an absolute clunker (though “Time-Flight” perhaps came close), it’s hovered mostly in the average-to-pretty good range so far. “Snakedance” does take some chances by venturing further into mysticism and the supernatural than is typical for Doctor Who, but it also just barely gets away with it, and neither the underlying concepts nor the details of plot and characterization are strong enough to make it a top-notch serial.

Rating: *** (out of four)

Review [DW]: “Arc of Infinity”

20×1. Arc of Infinity
Writer: Johnny Byrne
Director: Ron Jones
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The insane Time Lord Omega plots his return to Gallifrey, setting up a power center underneath Amsterdam and using stolen bio-data on the Doctor to engineer the creation of a matter-based body that could exist in our universe. The Time Lords attempt to execute the Doctor to prevent Omega’s return, but Omega and his co-conspirator, the High Councillor Hedin, interfere, while Omega holds Tegan – who came to Amsterdam to meet her cousin – as a hostage to manipulate the Doctor.

Review: I’m starting to think that “less is more” might be a wise rule regarding visits to Gallifrey. While the Time Lords featured in two classic serials, “The War Games” and “The Deadly Assassin,” the former left their appearance until the very end and the latter was set up partly to illustrate that, despite the Time Lords’ power, Gallifrey could be just as corrupt and regressive as many of the other declining, aristocratic regimes seen on other alien worlds. But in “The Three Doctors,” “The Invasion of Time,” and now “Arc of Infinity,” the creative team have sometimes seemed to struggle with the sheer scope of any narrative involving such a powerful civilization.

For starters, there’s simply too much contrived plotting here. The reason for Omega using Amsterdam as a sort of headquarters is strained at best (it has something to do with the city’s below-sea-level location and some quirk of the Arc of Infinity, itself a purely fictitious concept), and Tegan apparently stumbles into the midst of this purely by coincidence. The science fiction elements underpinning the conspiracy on Gallifrey are only marginally better developed. There’s some pseudoscience invoked to explain how Omega is attempting to form a “bond” to the Doctor, why the Time Lords think killing the Doctor might be the only way to stop it, and how Omega and Hedin interrupt the execution while making it appear as if the Doctor has died. But it doesn’t amount to much more than a fancy way to say “because the script said so.” Meanwhile, a character is murdered at the very beginning without anyone acknowledging it until the third episode, when a line of dialogue implies that everyone knows that he’s dead. But didn’t anyone even notice him missing before that, and shouldn’t that have prompted an investigation of its own by the time the Doctor’s TARDIS is recalled to Gallifrey?

What makes this especially disappointing is that there actually could have been an interesting story here about conflict within Gallifrey’s political establishment. Some amount of contrived plotting is perhaps inevitable in a story dealing with hyperintelligent aliens and a being trying to cross over from an “antimatter universe,” and I’d be happy to just accept the premise for what it is if the characters’ reactions, and the decisions they face, were interesting and understandable. But Borusa, Thalia, and the Castellan rarely strike a pose other than cold, bureaucratic aloofness, and the Council is surprisingly slow to accept that there is a traitor within their ranks – surely they should be aware of their vulnerability after the events of the last two Gallifrey serials. Meanwhile, Hedin and Damon are introduced as friends of the Doctor even though we’ve never seen either of them before, while the Doctor’s actual allies from past Gallifrey serials are absent. Even if none of the previous actors and actresses were available, why couldn’t the producers just do what they did with Borusa in this serial and use regeneration as the pretext for recasting a second Time Lord character as well, such as Spandrell or Engin from “The Deadly Assassin”? Or why not at least show a stronger sense of regret or guilt from Borusa himself, who must feel something for his former pupil even if he thinks he can’t let it influence him as President? Instead we’re left trying to feel invested in the decisions and motivations of characters whom we mostly haven’t seen before and who don’t show much personality.

I don’t want to sound too negative about this serial, because the script does seem to engage with these issues at some level. While the fine points could have been better, the general sense of Gallifrey as a society not to be envied for its power is still present. Clearly all is not well when the Time Lords’ power can be manipulated from within to the point of threatening such a catastrophe that their leaders feel justified in executing an innocent man as a method of preventing it. Commander Maxil (played, interestingly enough, by Colin Baker) is the sort of hard-nosed authoritarian who flourishes in this sort of environment; as the Doctor points out, he may just be following orders, but he seems to find a bit of relish in them. The tragic aspect of Omega’s character also comes across more effectively here than it did in “The Three Doctors.” Hedin’s motivation for his betrayal – that Omega deserves to return to Gallifrey – nicely avoids simplistic villainy (though it would have been good to learn more about how he came into contact with Omega and decided on this course of action). Omega was originally trapped in the antimatter universe by accident and, as far as we can tell, had done nothing reckless or unethical leading up to this. It’s clear that the Doctor would have preferred to try to help Omega – just as he also would have preferred in “The Three Doctors” – if Omega weren’t so dangerously egocentric and unhinged.

A show like Doctor Who has a fine line to walk. Since the concepts in play often have little basis in realistic science and the main character is far more experienced and intelligent than anyone in the audience, we need to know what’s at stake for the characters – both literally and psychologically – even when we (and the writers) don’t entirely understand what they’re talking about. In other words, contrivances can be excused as long as the story isn’t primarily *about* the contrivances (or else you end up with another “Time-Flight”). “Arc of Infinity” gets part of the way there, but ultimately the guest cast isn’t strong enough to carry it through its more strained moments.

Other Notes:

– The absence of past Gallifrey characters is especially noticeable given that Leela is mentioned at one point. Again, I don’t know whether any consideration was given to having Louise Jamieson and/or Chris Tranchell (who played Andred in “Invasion of Time”) make a guest apperance, but it reinforces the sense that the writers are inventing new personal history for the Doctor rather than building on what we already know.

– I’m just as confused about why Tegan was left behind at the end of “Time-Flight” as I was at, well, the end of “Time-Flight.” The Doctor and Nyssa aren’t talking about going back for her when we catch up with them, but then she rejoins the crew after announcing that she’s lost her flight attendant job. So her only options are working as a flight attendant or going on an extended and frequently dangerous trip through space and time?

Rating: **1/2 (out of four)

Review [Doctor Who]: “Time-Flight”

19×7. Time-Flight
Writer: Peter Grimwade
Director: Ron Jones
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The TARDIS diverts to Heathrow Airport after encountering a spacetime anomaly, discovering that the Master has kidnapped the crew and passengers of a Concorde back to prehistoric Earth, where he is attempting to use the nucleus of an alien race known as the Xeraphim to power his TARDIS.

Review: I’ve long contended that fantasy and science fiction narratives usually need a set of rules. Since such narratives operate outside the boundaries of the real world, we need to have some sense of what exactly can and can’t happen if we’re meant to understand what’s at stake and feel invested in the characters’ choices. The biggest problem with “Time-Flight” is that it doesn’t have a clear set of rules, just a set of vague concepts about the Master’s TARDIS and the unruly collective consciousness of the Xeraphim. Once we arrive in the prehistoric Earth setting, the dialogue becomes bogged down in discussions of telepathic manifestations, quantum whatchamacallits, and temporal thingamajiggies while characters appear, disappear, and generally jump through random hoops.

Plot contrivances can be tolerable if at the service of some interesting character development or subtext, but characterization is fairly weak here as well. At one point I thought that we were getting glimpses of the fallible Doctor that has sometimes surfaced since Davison took on the role, in that he’s unable to keep Professor Hayter from being absorbed by the Xeraphim and later seems to have given up on freeing the Xeraphim. In fact he has a trick up his sleeve that involves somehow “intercepting” the Master’s TARDIS and sending it to the Xeraphim’s home planet where the Xeraphim might conceivably escape, but this is all accomplished through more of the borderline-incomprehensible pseudoscience. Later, Tegan is left behind at Heathrow in a scene so perfunctory that I honestly wasn’t sure what to make of it. Does the Doctor think she’s decided on her own to stay? Is he just avoiding the airport authorities and planning to come back for her later? I’m not sure, and certainly the departure of a companion deserves a better explanation than what we get here. As for the rest of the characters, only Captain Stapley and his crew made much of an impression – they’re able to wrap their minds around what’s happening and improvise ways to disrupt the Master’s plans. Professor Hayter rarely strikes a note other than aloof arrogance, and the Master himself spends the first two episodes in disguise as some sort of sorcerer and then abruptly drops the act, with no real reason supplied for why he gave up on it or why he was doing it in the first place.

“Time Flight” is not entirely without its merits. It does address the crew’s lingering grief over Adric’s death, with the Doctor insisting that he will not use time travel to undo what has happened even as he joins Tegan and Nyssa in mourning their lost companion. And the first episode carries some nostalgic value in showing the Doctor working with the British authorities to solve a problem, even invoking his UNIT credentials to get himself out of trouble. Arguably the most interesting as a concept is the Xeraphim’s collective intelligence, which isn’t actually their natural state but rather the form in which they were forced to preserve themselves. It is possible for individual personalities to emerge from the collective, and at the same time, the Master is able to disrupt the balance between Xeraphim of different moral orientations. Unfortunately, this is only briefly explored, and in general the script is more occupied with arbitrary plot machinations than with characters, ideas, or even any effective suspense.

Rating: ** (out of four)

Review [Doctor Who]: "Kinda"

This is the first of my Doctor Who reviews that I’ll be posting here; hopefully, this blog will give me an added incentive to keep up with my re-viewing, and reviewing, of the series a little more regularly. You can view my website where I archive all my reviews here.

19×3. Kinda
Writer: Christopher Bailey
Director: Peter Grimwade
Script Editor: Eric Saward
Producer: John Nathan-Turner

Synopsis: The TARDIS arrives on the planet Deva Loka, where a group of human explorers have an uneasy relationship with the native Kinda and some of their personnel have recently disappeared. The Doctor and Adric are drawn into the conflict between Sanders, who commands the mission, and Hindle, his increasingly unstable subordinate, while Tegan is contacted and briefly controlled by the Mara, a malevolent entity that manifests as a snake.

Review: The long era of John Nathan-Turner as Doctor Who‘s executive producer has sparked considerable debate among fans, but one positive development at this point was that the show was starting to experiment a little more in both style and content. “Kinda” stands alongside “Warrior’s Gate” and perhaps “Logopolis” as one of the clearest examples of this: while we’ve certainly seen critiques of imperialism on the show before, I don’t think we’ve seen one quite like this.

In a serial like “The Power of Kroll,” for example, we see a conflict between an opportunistic human leader and some locals with strange religious practices, but there isn’t any big mystery as to what’s really happening and why. It’s difficult to imagine any of the earlier eras of Doctor Whoattempting something like Tegan’s nightmare, in which she encounters a sinister young man who seems to represent the Mara and finds herself arguing with her own duplicate over which of them is real. Prior to “Warrior’s Gate,” I’d have to go all the way back to “The Mind Robber” for a serial that involves a similarly bizarre alternate reality sequence. The Kinda themselves are suitably alien, with most of the population communicating only through telepathy and actual speech as a mark of advanced wisdom. And while the giant rubber snake at the end is a little embarrassing, such things are perhaps inevitable on Doctor Who‘s budget, and the concept of the Mara – an entity that takes control of others by manipulating them through dreams – adds to the sense of Deva Loka as a very strange place.

“Kinda” earns points for taking a creative approach to what could have been a formulaic imperialists-vs.-indigenous-people conflict. Unfortunately, the characterizations are more of a mixed bag. Hindle is the most interesting guest character, in that he’s gone insane due neither to egotistical hubris nor to the manipulations of the Mara, but because he’s simply cracked under pressure. Unlike the one-note villains we’ve seen in weaker Doctor Whoentries, he’s genuinely unpredictable, going from bellowing at the Doctor and Adric to panicking at the notion that the trees and vegetation pose a threat to even calling out for his mother. Sanders and Todd, on the other hand, seem unfazed by the situation to a curious degree. Todd acknowledges that the mission is in trouble, but the tension and dread we’d expect from someone in her situation aren’t there – instead, she mostly acts as a sort of substitute-companion for the Doctor when his actual companions are separated from him. Sanders, meanwhile, is so blithely unconcerned that he might as well have “imperialist doofus” written across his forehead, stating matter-of-factly that they’ve taken two Kinda hostage out of “standard procedure” and that he never thinks twice because it’s a waste of time. I realize that the character is supposed to be arrogant and out of touch, but some of his behavior verges on a complete absence of rational thought or common sense (even before his mind is affected by the mysterious Box of Jhana).

Overall, I’m relatively content with this new incarnation of the Doctor. Peter Davison, at 29, was the youngest actor to take the role at the time, and the Fifth Doctor does display a sort of breezily personable and curious manner that I might well call “youthful,” while still displaying a mix of wisdom, whimsy, and occasional irritability that reflect the character’s vast experience and unique intelligence. When Adric accidentally activates a robotic survival suit that takes them both prisoner, for example, the Doctor observes that “[t]here is a difference between serious scientific investigation and meddling.” However, there are a couple of instances where it’s unclear whether what we’re seeing is a deliberate quirk of characterization or the same sort of oddly laid-back attitude that seems so inappropriate from Sanders and Todd. Specifically, he seems to think both Tegan and Adric are okay on their own at one point, and he is quite clearly wrong on both counts. Tegan falls asleep in the woods and becomes prey to the Mara’s psychic attacks, and Adric finds himself in the midst of another crisis at the colonization team’s headquarters. Without any direct acknowledgment of this issue, we’re left to guess as to whether the Doctor is actually meant to be seen as making a mistake.

“Kinda” gets a positive recommendation for its creative approach and underlying concepts. Still, it definitely could have been better when it comes to telling a coherent story. The effort to stop the Mara only develops at the end and feels like it’s over rather quickly, and it’s never explained what happened to the three missing personnel. I’m all for weird flights of imagination when it comes to Doctor Whoand science fiction in general, but after “Four to Doomsday” and now this, I’m hoping to see a little more structure to the narrative next time around.

Other Notes:
– Nyssa’s sudden fainting spell at the end of “Four to Doomsday” really amounted to absolutely nothing. She’s out of the action recuperating for most of “Kinda,” but it turns out to have nothing to do with Monarch, the Mara, or anything else that the TARDIS crew have encountered. (Reportedly, the script was developed before a firm decision had been made to make Nyssa a companion.)

– I couldn’t help but snicker a little bit when the Doctor constructs a device to help Nyssa recover around the sonic screwdriver and casually dismisses Adric’s concern that they might need it. Right, because none of the seemingly benign situations the Doctor encounters ever turn out to be the least bit dangerous.

Rating: *** (out of four)