570 Kinda Part Three

EPISODE: Kinda Part Three
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 570
STORY NUMBER: 120
TRANSMITTED: Monday 08 February 1982
WRITER: Christopher Bailey
DIRECTOR: Peter Grimwade
SCRIPT EDITOR: Eric Saward
PRODUCER: John Nathan-Turner
RATINGS: 8.5 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who - Mara Tales (Kinda / Snakedance)

A green figure pops out of the box like a jack-in-a-box, causing much humour but moments later the power fails taking the lights with it and the cell door opens. The Doctor's face is bathed in light then he, Todd & Sanders experience a vision of the Kinda people with Panna & Karuna beckoning them to a cave. Taking advantage of the power loss they leave the dome. Now convinced of a threat Hindle has the domed rigged with explosives to destroy it in the event of an attack. The Doctor & Todd encounter the Kinda tribe and then Aris, who empowered by the Mara has become the first male Kinda to speak. Karuna leads the Doctor & Todd away to the cave where Panna lives but Aris follows them and telepathically coerces Karuna to come with them. Adric attempts escape from the Dome using a TSS. The Doctor & Todd experience a vision of time pieces nearing midnight at which point the clocks stop and they awaken to find Panna dead.

All sounds quite simple doesn't it? And yet that's just not the whole story, there's so much more going on that I'm just not getting in terms of meaning of what I'm seeing. And that's a little off putting.

Playing Sanders is veteran actor Richard Todd. The story has it that Matthew Waterhouse offered him advice on television acting during the making of this production. Confusingly there's also a character called Todd, played by Nerys Hughes, formerly of The Liver Birds. Putting in superb performance as the unhinged Hindle is Simon Rouse later to find fame as Detective Superintendent Jack Meadows in The Bill. As well as Rouse and Jeff Stewart (PC Reg Hollis in The Bill & Dukkha in the first two episodes here) a third Bill regular appears in this serial, Graham Cole (PC Tony Stamp), as a Kinda Tribesman. One of the other Kinda Tribesman is actor Glenn Murphy, later to appear as Dibber in the first four episodes of Trial of a Time-Lord and to find fame as George Green in London's Burning. It's recently come to light (via the DVD) that one of the Kinda children in this episode is actor Jonny Lee Miller of Trainspotting and ex-husband of Angelina Jolie fame. At the opposite end of the age spectrum is Mary Morris playing Panna. As well as appearing in one of the very first TV Science Fiction series, A for Andromeda she was a female Number 2 in The Prisoner episode Dance of the Dead. Adrian Mills, playing Aris, would later be a presenter on That's Life and has gone on to be a Children's TV producer. The Kinda Trickster is played by comedian Lee Cornes probably most familiar as the barman in Bottom, teacher Mr. Hankin in Grange Hill and Paranoia in the penultimate episode of the first series of Red Dwarf, Confidence and Paranoia.