Inspirations - Kinda

For many years a rumour was going around fandom that Christopher Bailey didn't actually exist. Some people were convinced that the name was just a pseudonym for someone else - someone already famous for something else. One popular theory was that the true author of Kinda was reclusive pop diva Kate Bush. Playwright Tom Stoppard was another contender. With its Buddhist trappings, even outgoing exec-producer Barry Letts was in the frame, as he had form when it came to writing Doctor Who stories under a pen name.
One of the reasons for this speculation was that the real writer was a bit reclusive himself. Christopher Bailey didn't give any interviews until one for DWM in 2002, and only finally appeared on camera in the "making of" documentaries for his two stories for their joint DVD release in 2011. In these, Bailey states that he did not have a happy time working on this first set of scripts, with new Script Editor Eric Saward asking for a number of rewrites. Even then, once completed, Kinda was found to be under-running and so some additional material had to be written, which was recorded during the making of Earthshock some time later.

One of the main inspirations for this story is a novel which Bailey claims not to have read. If this is the case then there is a remarkable degree of synchronicity going on. Ursula Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest was first published in 1976. It tells of an idyllic forested planet - Athshe - where the inhabitants live peaceably and know no violence. They have learned to control their dreams, entering them at will and deriving healing from them. Into this world come people from another planet who want to harvest its trees. Conflict arises between the aggressive colonisers and the non-aggressive native people. The natives resort to violence, as one of them leads a revolt to protect themselves from the invaders - and so their idyll is shattered forever.
Kinda also tells of a peaceful, non-technological people - the Kinda tribe - whose planet of Deva Loka is covered in lush forest. Dreams are important to their culture as they can share them, and never dream alone for fear an ancient evil might gain a foothold through an unshared dream. This evil is known as the Mara. A colonial expedition from an unnamed planet (probably Earth or one its colonies) arrives with a view to surveying Deva Loka to see if it suitable for full colonisation itself.
It is another alien visitor to the planet who releases the Mara into this world - the Doctor's companion Tegan, as a result of falling asleep and dreaming by herself. The impact on the Kinda is that one of them leads a violent revolt against the colonists - although Aris is possessed by the Mara, rather than leading an opposition for it has become a necessary thing to do.
Both Le Guin's novel and Kinda end with the colonial party realising the error of their ways and departing, intent on ensuring that the planet and its people are protected from further interference from outsiders.
(By the way, if you're thinking Avatar, do please remember that James Cameron has history when it comes to "borrowing" ideas. Allegedly).
Playing the leader of the expedition in Kinda is noted British actor Richard Todd - best known for his portrayal of Guy Gibson in The Dam Busters. Another film role of his was as Harry Sanders in the 1965 film Death Drums Along the River - based on characters from an earlier movie called Sanders of the River. These movies are prime examples of adventure tales of white Englishmen being the only ones possibly capable of sorting out problems for black African men. They typify the old racist imperial attitudes of their day. Todd's career faltered in the 1960's when he failed to adapt to the new social realist film-making which became the norm, and one wonders if he thought about the anti-colonial themes in Kinda and reflected on some of his earlier movies. (Probably not, as he didn't really understand Bailey's script). Todd's character in Kinda is the similarly named Saunders, by the way, and - just to confuse things - Nerys Hughes' character is called Todd.

Visually, the inspiration for the look of Kinda appears to have come from pop music videos, which were becoming more and more sophisticated in the 1980's. This was the era of the New Romantics (just look at Tegan's hair and make up in this season if you didn't already know that) and we can see how videos by bands such as Duran Duran or Visage may have influenced director Peter Grimwade.
The sequences set in Tegan's dream are particularly redolent of something that might have been shown on Top of the Pops that week.
There is some debate about who or what the characters in Tegan's dream represent. They may be the missing members of Saunders' expedition. It is said that three of them went into the forest and never returned. If they are from the party, then it looks like Saunders' group was mainly composed of senior citizens, as two of the dream figures are elderly, whilst Saunders himself is no spring chicken. There's also the issue of the Mara not being active until after Tegan rouses it - so who abducted them?
The other theory, which most people go with, is that the three figures represent Tegan's travelling companions. Adric and Nyssa are seen to be playing a board game outside the TARDIS at the start of the story, whilst two of the dream people are seen to play chess. That would make the young tormentor the Doctor, whilst the strange metal construction they sit next to would represent the TARDIS itself. Does Tegan see Adric and Nyssa like a bickering old couple, and the Doctor as a young man who goes out of his way to annoy and upset her, whilst the TARDIS is simply a heap of junk?
These three characters are called Dukkha, Anatta and Annica - which brings us to another major inspiration for this story.

Kinda is a bit like Comparative Religions 101. A lot of the names and concepts derive from Buddhism and Hinduism, whilst other imagery comes from the Book of Genesis in the Old Testament. From the latter we get evil incarnated in the form of a snake, the setting being like the Garden of Eden, and even the personification of evil (the possessed Tegan) tempting an innocent from a up tree. It's more than coincidence that Tegan drops an apple on Aris' head. By having Tegan the possessed one, rather than the usually more clumsy and impetuous Adric, we also get the Biblical notion of evil coming into the world via a woman. Oh dear.
Deva Loka is the plane of existence where gods and devas dwell in Indian religions - places of light and goodness, not unlike heaven. It appears in Hinduism and Buddhism.
Dukkha, a Sanskrit word, means pain or suffering, or simply stress from the mundane world.
Annica means impermanent, whilst Anatta means the absence of the abiding self. These three concepts go hand in hand in Buddhist thought - sometimes representing the three stages of a person's existence - youth, maturity and old age, the stages we have to pass through on our earthly journey.
The wise old woman of the Kinda tribe is Panna, and this means wisdom. Her acolyte, who then becomes her, is Karuna - compassion.
Whilst it means joy in Arabic, or eternally beautiful in Greek, Mara is also a Hebraic word for bitterness or grief. Here, it probably derives from the word nightmare, inhabiting as it does the realm of dreams.

The other major inspiration for Kinda comes from psychology. If a big pink snake isn't something Freudian, then I don't know what is. Psychoanalytically speaking, it is to Carl Jung that we should look, however. Kinda touches on the Collective Unconscious and the idea of the Dreamtime, as the Kinda tribe engage in shared dreaming only. In studying different cultures across the globe and through history, Jung noted a number of common concepts amongst them - archetypes such as the Great Mother figure or the Wise Old Man, and the symbolic resonance of natural things like water and trees. In his 1916 essay on The Structure of the Unconscious, Jung diverged from the Freudian emphasis on the Personal Unconscious, which dwelt on sexual fantasies and repressed anxieties. Big pink snakes.
Jung posited that whilst we all have a Personal Unconscious, which is formed through experience, we also have a second Unconscious which we inherit, and which we all share even though we come from different cultures, as those archetypes keep cropping up.
(The Collective Unconscious might explain the similarities between Kinda and The Word for World is Forest...).
This being a Doctor Who blog and not a psychoanalyst's couch, so you'll have to look this stuff up for yourselves if you want to understand it better).
One final inspiration for Kinda might be Joseph Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness (the basis for Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now).
This can be seen with the character of Hindle, the neurotic junior officer who becomes increasingly deranged when faced with events he can't control. heart of Darkness concerns a member of a colonial power becoming deranged and turning into a bit of a megalomaniac, personally dominating the natives who seem to see him as a god-like figure. In Kinda, Hindle gains control over a couple of Kinda captives - turning them into his personal two-man army. He does this through the old notion of a mirror capturing a person's soul. Mirrors are eventually used to defeat the Mara, in its big pink snake form, as evil is unable to look upon itself.
Next time: no more big pink snakes, thank goodness, but instead a much more conventional pseudo-historical adventure. It's 1666, so expect Great Plagues and Great Fires, but with an extraterrestrial twist...