Doctor Who/Recap/S19/E03 Kinda



"The Doctor: An apple a day keeps the... Ah, never mind."

The TARDIS arrives on the planet Deva Lokka, where the peaceful native Kinda are being screwed with by an evil imperialist human expedition. The expedition has been reduced to three people after three disappeared: Sanders, the bluff leader; Todd, the rational female scientist who sympathises with the Kinda; and Hindle, the security guy, a jobsworth who is being bullied into utter insanity by Sanders.

Nyssa is suffering from a mysterious mental clouding, and gets to stay in the TARDIS for the whole story. Tegan falls asleep under some wind chimes, and finds a sinister guy called Dukkha invading her dreamscape. He proceeds to Mind Rape her for two episodes until she finally agrees to let him possess her body.

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Adric encounter the explorers. Sanders leaves to explore, and Hindle promptly goes utterly batshit and has the Doctor and Todd imprisoned because he thinks the plants are plotting against him and the Doctor and Todd are in on it. Adric goes over to Hindle's side, although at least this time it's clearly because he's humouring Hindle and hopes that he can stop him from doing anything too horrific.

Sanders encounters Panna, a Kinda shaman (the Kinda are matriarchal and only the most powerful women can speak, the men and weaker women communicating by telepathy), and her apprentice Karuna. They give him the Box of Jhana, a Kinda artefact that they think will hopefully communicate the Kinda worldview to him and make him and the other humans leave. However, it regresses him emotionally to the age of about ten. He takes the box back to the base. Hindle forces the Doctor to open it to see what it will do to him. It gives the Doctor and Todd a vision of how cool and deserving of respect Kinda culture is.

The possessed Tegan encounters a Kinda man, Aris, and transfers the possession to him. He develops the ability to talk and incites the Kinda to violently assault the human base. Meanwhile, Hindle and the childish Sanders have wired the place to explode rather than let themselves get taken. They then start playing like little boys with a model city.

The Doctor and Todd escape from the base and meet up with Panna and Karuna. Panna tells them that the evil force that has taken over Tegan is the Mara, an evil entity that feeds off destruction. It also turns out that the Mara will take over any non-telepathic entity that uses the wind chimes for visionary dreams, so it's all the Doctor's fault for letting Tegan sleep under them. She shows the Doctor and Todd a vison of the horrible things that will happen if the Mara isn't stopped, and then drops dead. Fortunately, thanks to Kinda telepathy, Karuna gets her memories and some of her personality.

The Doctor, Todd and Karuna find Tegan and wake her up. She thinks she just had a horrible nightmare, but they explain to her how badly things are messed up. They all reach the human base in time to see Aris and the Kinda attack it, and Adric hold them off using a cyborg device that Mind Rapes him because he doesn't know how to use it properly.

Todd manipulates Hindle into opening the Box of Jhana himself just as he is about to blow everyone up, and the experience shocks him back to sanity. The Doctor and Karuna then get the Kinda to help them trap Aris in a circle of mirrors (solar panels from the base) and the Mara leaves his body, materialises as a snake, and dies. Because evil can't take seeing itself reflected.

A now sane Hindle and Sanders reconcile with one another and decide to be nicer people in future, and all the humans decide to declare the planet unsuitable for human colonisation so the Kinda will be left in peace. The Doctor declares that the Mara has been defeated, a bit prematurely. The Doctor and companions leave for further adventures.

Watch it here.

Tropes

 * Absentee Actor: Nyssa only has cameos in episodes one and four, due to contractual issues related to her having been a guest character the previous season.
 * Actor Allusion: Richard Todd, who played Sanders, was known in his younger days for playing straight versions of the kind of stiff-upper-lip British hero who Sanders and Hindle are parodies of.
 * Back From the Dead: Panna gets reborn in Karuna
 * Blind Seer: Panna
 * Care Bear Stare: the Box of Jhana is meant to have this effect, although it turns out that the effects on male humans can be more extreme and unpredictable.
 * Cool Old Lady: Panna
 * A Day in The Limelight: Each of The Doctor's companions was given a story where they could take a bigger role this season. This is Tegan's. She gets to get possessed!
 * Demonic Possession: The Mara does this using, of all things, a set of wind chimes.
 * Distressed Dude: The Doctor spends an entire episode being locked up in a cage.
 * Does Not Like Shoes: all the Kinda, even when Hindle forces some of them into partial human uniforms.
 * Doomsday Clock: Panna's vision of what will happen if the Mara gets loose has many, of different technological levels
 * Everybody Lives: the only person who definitely dies in this story is Panna, and she partially survives thanks to her Mental Fusion with her apprentice.
 * Innocent Aliens: The Kinda.
 * Insane Equals Violent: Hindle.
 * Man Child: Sanders for a while after he opens the box, although it's suggested to be the effect of shock.
 * Mental Fusion:
 * Me's a Crowd: In Tegan's nightmare, she is surrounded by illusory clones of herself, until she begins to doubt her own identity enough for the Mara to dominate her.
 * Noble Savage: subverted a bit: it's implied that the Kinda used to be a hi-tech race, but manipulated their biome to the point that they could give up technology and live a blissful hunter-gatherer idyll with no fear of predators, famine or disease.
 * One Word Title
 * Only Sane Man: Adric. For most of the latter half, he's the only person inside the base who is not going insane or believes their soul to be trapped inside a mirror.
 * Psychopathic Manchild: Hindle eventually ends up like this when Sanders leaves him in charge. The effect is chilling.
 * Red Right Hand: People possessed by the Mara, or dream manifestations of it, get a snake tattoo on their arms and red-stained teeth.
 * Shout-Out: The Word for World is Forest by Ursula K Le Guin is a definite influence.
 * The Siege
 * Single Biome Planet
 * Take That: Sanders is named after the central character of Sanders Of The River, a now-notorious series of stories by Edgar Wallace glorifying the British Empire as wise, benevolent rulers of childlike Africans.
 * Ultimate Evil: The Mara qualifies for this.
 * Walking Shirtless Scene: all the male Kinda wear only sarongs and go bare-chested.
 * What Happened to The Mouse?: it's never explained exactly what happened to the three missing human explorers, although it's implied that Panna tried to use the Box of Jhana on them and they either went completely insane, or went completely native and joined the Kinda.