Although Season 19 is, without a doubt, a very criticized season due to a new young Doctor played by the extremely talented Peter Davison and young companions, Castrovalva is one of those stories that is very enjoyable and not a dark story, like some of Tom Baker's episodes were. The Master returns in this story, evil as usual, and trying to destroy the Doctor, like he always tried before; although he was the reason why the Fourth Doctor regenerated.

Peter Davison portrays all the previous doctors marvelously, especially the Second Doctor. Tegan is actually very mild-mannered in this story, and is written quite well. Adric may seem like he is against the Doctor by setting those traps on the TARDIS, but it is against his will, because it is actually the Master's doing, not his. Nyssa is well written as well, but she tends to show off her knowledge quite a bit. 

When seen, Castrovalva seems like a well-ordered place, and also seems like an actual place as well. But yet again, the Master has something to do with this...he built it using Adrics mathematical skills. 

The Doctor finally regains some of his wits towards the end of Part Three and is able to fight the Master and save Adric. Shardivan gives up his life by helping the Doctor by shattering the web the Master created so that the Doctor is able to jump in and grab Adric. Castrovalva, without the web, falls apart and at the end of the story, we see the Master is trapped...or is he?

This story had good acting by all, and the storyline is very good for Peter Davison's first story as the Doctor. It takes a lot of good acting and skill to replace Tom Baker, but Peter Davison did a wonderful job and he truly deserves the credit which few people do not give him.

After the dramatic demise of the fourth doctor at the Pharos project on earth, there was much speculation on what his replacement would be like and an agonisingly long time in which to do so. Not since the recent abrupt ending of Blake's 7 had a tv show been so exciting. Castrovalva came along, finally, and it exceeded all my expectations by being so wonderfully different from any other dw show I'd previously seen.

The fourth doctor had been a part of my life for so long that he had seemed virtually indestructible. For seven long years it had been jelly babies, scarves and toothy grins, and we still weren't tired of it! But Peter Davison was everything the fourth doctor was not - polite, uncertain about things, generally befuddled, his voice tended to go a bit high when stressed out and I think he used to wag a finger at recalcitrant monsters. In short, a complete change of character and a welcome one. The 1980's were just starting, so why not start them with a new doctor utterly unlike the old one? Splendid! The programme was on a completely new track and I for one was captivated.

The Master came across brilliantly as well in this story, even with Anthony Ainley playing him. He wasn't for once into taking over the universe, there wasn't a doomsday machine or a Chronovore waiting on Castrovalva for him; he purely and simply wanted to destroy the Doctor. Nothing else. It was a marvellous idea, focusing his character on revenge and nothing more. And from Terror of the Autons onwards, the Master had a lot to feel vengeful about.

I loved the simple setting of the town, the cast, the forest scenes, the fact that almost half this story actually takes place within the Tardis itself (another innovative idea not used for some considerable time) and no, at the time I had no idea of the Portreve's real identity. I know it looks bloody obvious now, seeing the thing on video again. So this, the first fifth Doctor story, became my favourite one for a long time, even beating Earthshock as it was so groundbreaking. Brilliant!

The opening sequence of 'Four to Doomsday' is remarkably effective: an ominous and enigmatic score accompanies a series of panning and tracking shots of a dark, mysterious, and (presumably) gigantic spaceship; a tone both mysterious and threatening is established. The viewer (this viewer, at least) is not disappointed by what follows, for whatever the flaws of 'Four to Doomsday' it manages to work as an intriguing, textured, and sinister piece of science fiction. 

Although on a plot-only level 'Four to Doomsday' is a bit long, and a bit of a drag at times, it does succeed in telling a story tinged with engaging ideas and concepts. The first two cliff-hangers rely not on a terrible fate for the Doctor, but on a revelation: the drama for much of 'Four to Doomsday' is the discovery of more and more of the details of the science fiction set up. One theme which emerges from this SF set up is that of 'difference' and 'alienness': the themes split. Perception, and the different ways different people view 'others', is everywhere. There is Adric, in his usual, petulant self-important tone, making notably bigoted comments about what he sees as being the difference between men and women and girls. The whole premise of the plot is the fact that the spaceship is full of different cultures and races, collected from Earth at various points in history by the Urbankans. And although they are not fully developed, 'Four to Doomsday' touches on questions of how we define 'cultures', and whether it is possible that cultures can be recorded, and stored, and preserved in stasis. What the Urbankans fail to see is the speed with which culture changes: their ability to alter their appearance to become 'like' other cultures is flawed, because it does not allow for natural evolution and change, and also because it is only skin deep. Culture is more than just accent and clothing and native dances. 

On other levels, 'Four to Doomsday' is classic Doctor Who hokum. Questions of race, culture, and class aside, there is no doubt that the Urbankans neatly fill the role of the classic, unambiguous, atypical, nasty Doctor Who aliens we see so frequently, and hopefully will see more of soon! Monarch's eloquent, mannered, and 'civilized' English diction, rather than making him sympathetic, simply makes him more sinister, and more alien. There is a superb line during episode two (when Adric and Nyssa are suffocating) where Enlightenment notes that Adric and Nyssa "have lungs", and Monarch replies with sadistic pleasure: "Let them remember that." Chilling. 

Overall, deficiencies of plot aside (well, not 'deficiencies', as such'... there just isn't a lot happening), 'Four to Doomsday' is an entertaining story. And it has a brain. Recommended.

“You will agree to being me… This side of madness or the other.”

Few Doctor Who stories have raised such wild passions for and against them as Kinda. Yes, I was one of those ten-year-olds who helped vote it bottom of Peter Davison’s first season for DWM back in 1982, largely through a vivid last memory of ‘that snake’; at the other end of the spectrum, some fans have announced that anyone who disagrees with their assertion that this is the best Who story ever is an emotional Nazi. I shall leave it to your own judgement any irony involved in people who use ‘Nazi’ to decry those whose precise tastes do not absolutely accord to theirs…

I started a re-evaluation of Kinda through my wobbly audio copy, in those days before video. The old wise woman’s “Wheel turns” speech was quite hypnotic, and so I gradually found myself thinking Kinda was rather interesting – despite one of Uncle Tewwance’s least lively books trying to convince me otherwise. Nowadays, with repeated video viewings, I’ll admit that I can’t see how I ever thought the story worse than Four to Doomsday or Time-Flight, and I’ve got a lot closer to the adoring end of the spectrum than the embarrassed end I used to sit at. But will I go all the way? Well, I don’t think so, though I’ll waver between eight and nine out of ten. Let me explain.

On the whole, Kinda is interesting and refreshing, one of the Who stories with the most ideas, married to one of the Who stories that looks most like a pop video. The Dark Places of the Inside are fantastically imagined and realised, and the ‘time’ sequence is hardly less impressive. Resonantly, the subversive ‘menaces’ of the trees, the ‘primitives’, Hindle, Dukkha and The Dark Places of the Inside or wherever, all combine tantalisingly to disrupt expectations and are carried off brilliantly. 

In the story’s second half, however, and especially after the main hallucinatory effects sequences end, the action-based director and thoughtful script start to work against each other (notably from the blown cliffhanger to part 3 on), particularly as the author’s ideas become less successful. The fourth episode is definitely the weakest, despite quite a strong scene with Hindle’s toy madness and Panna’s consciousness passing on to demonstrate that no-one actually dies in the story (albeit the three ones who went missing…?). Studio floors, technobabble and ‘that snake’ summing up a glib and dull resolution – not to mention interminable Adric / Tegan bitching scenes - make it a curiously uninventive and unimpressive ending. This story is probably best watched as a whole, rather than an episodic let-down. 

I’ve recently taken to watching Who again on an episodic basis. Yes, that’s right – as god intended! As you might expect, with all stories written that way, most of them work much better that way. And it’s become clear that a key reason so many of us disliked Kinda on first watching – other than the shame of (all together now) “that snake” at school the next day – was that this story didn’t. For a few stories where not all the episodes work, the resolution is the killer. Watch a rather good story with a poor part 4 (Paradise Towers or The Creature From the Pit spring to mind to tease you with, or perhaps The Leisure Hive if you want one that fewer people hate so much), and it’s plain that only watching ‘the bad bit’ in one sitting leaves you with a nasty taste in your mouth that wouldn’t be so strong if you’d watched it as a ‘movie’. Watch Kinda episodically, rather than all of a bundle as video encourages you to, and it’s striking that it wasn’t just the increasing sophistication of the viewing fans that has led to Kinda’s shocking turnaround. It was the ‘poor part 4’ effect at work in a devastating way when we first watched it.

Oddly, watching Kinda episodically, I’m also struck that it isn’t a Tegan story at all – more of an Adric story. He has quite a lot to do throughout the whole story (though achieving little, at least he only pretends to side with the villain this time. Clearly Hindle responds to another boy to play with), while her strong role in the first two parts vanishes almost completely later. She is superb when oppressed and then possessed by Dukkha (though an effective ‘rape’ scene apparently unlocking her sensuality is an unpleasantly disturbing message), but her appearance in part 3 is just that. Aris merely steps over her unconscious body at one point, and she neither moves nor speaks in a ‘blink and you’ll miss her’ cameo. As all the companions are buried way down in the cast list to start with, it seems particularly unfair on Matthew Waterhouse that he still gets later (and shared) billing than Janet Fielding for part 3, and that Sarah Sutton gets no billing at all for the middle episodes.

My other reason for recently re-evaluating Kinda is that I’ve now read the book that’s said to be one of its main sources, Ursula Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest. Now, this isn’t a story that can simply be explained by reference to any one of the mountain of references it makes, whether Judaeo-Christian Garden of Eden symbolism, Buddhist analogies or Vietnam-era sci-fi. However, as the Buddhism’s been written about in great detail, I found comparisons with Le Guin’s book intriguing, and they helped crystallise why I don’t think Kinda is quite as clever as many take it to be – or quite as enjoyable.

Despite some clear similarities in the setup, including a sophisticated sexual division of labour in the ‘primitives’, idiot (‘insane’) colonial military leavened by a sympathetic anthropologist, and dreaming, sophisticated ‘primitives’ (as well as blatant nods like Planet S14 in Kinda for World 41 in the book, Aris’ captive brother for Selver’s enslaved and murdered wife, or ILF – ‘Intelligent Life Form’ – for ‘hilf’ – ‘High Intelligence Life Form’), the story itself has remarkably little in common with The Word For World is Forest. Quite funny that the villain of the book is Captain Davidson, though, as it’s of course the Doctor who enables the snake to enter Eden! Kinda is far less successful in getting across an idea of the local people as sophisticated – with the dubious exception of Panna and the double helix jewellery, it’s merely told, rather than shown. How do they have access to molecular biology? On the face of it, nicking the necklaces from an alien spaceship crashed in the jungle would be more logical an explanation. Shouldn’t we have had some shared dreaming, or something to put the Box of Jhana in context? Instead, *these* ‘primitives’ are really telepathic, which even the Mara correctly notes is a very boring way to communicate. 

Instead of evidence of intelligent thought, the Kinda (surely everyone in this story bar the Doctor, Todd and Panna are just that – ‘children’?) follow Aris like sheep, and flee after a ludicrous attack on the Dome using a TSS-style ‘wicker man’ (instead, Selver’s attacks on the Terrans use their own bombs against them, as well as showing the lethal effectiveness of ‘primitive’ weapons. The Kinda merely appear stupid). Of course, the whole effect is engineered by the Mara to bring about their misery, but instead of a powerful, co-dependent, co-defending (“the dreaming of an unshared mind”) group intelligence, they merely combine into a herd. This is especially obvious in contrast with Aris and Panna / Karuna, who are intelligent and resourceful because they are individuals. The extremely collectivist ideological slant of the story is objectionable both because it isn’t to my personal taste anyway, and because the author’s clear wish to impose it on us has not led him to consider whether it works – in the context of the story, it doesn’t, and it fails even to make an attractive case. It seems not only philosophically disagreeable, but artistically unsuccessful. 

The message that progress is horrid and only leads to destruction, and that people are much better off as happy sheep, is despairingly poor. Even the ‘dangers of progress and exploration’ message of The Green Death, for example (which I rather like), is leavened by the saving grace of individuality. Even that other anti-questioning Buddhist parable, Planet of the Spiders, notices the danger of not having a mind of your own as well as of unrestrained ego. Again unlike The Word For World is Forest, which shows the destructive effect of progress on the Athshean culture, Kinda is a zero-sum game – there has been no effect on the tribe by the end; again, intelligent life is changed by experience, while the Kinda appear like drones. 

Perhaps Christopher Bailey should have read the author’s Introductions to The Word for World is Forest. Le Guin talks of art as the pursuit of liberty, ‘escapist’ from reality into the freedom of imagination. She also warns of the power an artist has over their characters leaching into desire for the power to influence other people. “The desire for power, in the sense of power over others, is what pulls most people off the path of the pursuit of liberty,” she warns, and notes that when artists believe they can do good to other people, they forget about liberty and start to preach. Bailey has failed to heed her warning, and has been “inextricably confusing ideas with opinions”.