Getting into a Lava

Posting this for something to do.  It's a tweaked version of something I originally wrote for Shockeye's Kitchen.  It's been rewritten to be more politically correct.


Several of the characters in 'Planet of Fire' are orphans (either literally or figuratively). Turlough and Malkon are literal orphans. You can look at the Sarns as the orphans of the vanished Trion colony. Peri also seems like an orphan in some ways. Her father is absent (dead?). She tells her stepfather Howard of her plan to travel to Morocco but doesn’t appear to have any plans to tell her mother about it. She goes to Howard for support and money, not to her mother. But Howard is too close to Peri’s age to properly serve as a father figure. Moreover, Peri seems attracted to him; she flirts with him by talking about "the God of love and fertility" and obliquely refers to the fact that he goes around displaying his washboard. Her decision to bunk off to North Africa with a couple of guys she’s just met is obviously a bid for Howard’s attention. Feverish after her brush with death, Peri has an intense dream about Howard abandoning her – a dream so powerful that it causes Kamelion to adopt Howard’s form.

(BTW, I dunno where this thing about Howard abusing her came from but there's precisely zilch in the televised story that either suggests or supports that reading.)

Talking of Kamelion, he’s actually a kind of nexus where the story’s themes meet.

He’s another orphan. Like the ancient artefacts that Howard and Curt dredge up from the sea, like the crumbling buildings and technology of the Trion colony on Sarn, Kamelion is an artefact left behind by a decaying civilisation riven with internal conflict. Kamelion is being torn apart from within by conflicting influences and allegiances… just like Turlough and Malkon. Just as Turlough fights his inner tendencies towards cowardice and selfishness, just as Malkon fights the orthodox conditioning of Timanov, so Kamelion fights his connection to the Master. Kamelion’s inner struggle takes the outer form of a literal struggle for identity, for form.

The fractured families depicted in the story mirror the fractured social connections. Sarn is a decayed Trion colony. The planet’s society and geology are both running amok because the Trions are no longer there to control either. The Trions used technology to control the volcano and siphon off the power of the numismaton gas (just like all colonial masters, their primary interest was in the theft of natural resources). Without this control the volcano becomes periodically unstable and the Sarns use myth to explain it. Sarn was a convenient place for the Trions to dump their unwanted elements (like Australia for the British Empire). Religion was probably used by the Trions from the outset. The tales of Logar took on their own life in the ruins left by the Trion withdrawal, much as Roman religious practices degenerated into new cults once the legions departed Britain. The Sarn legends of Logar, the Chosen Ones and the Outsiders are corrupted memories of Trion activity – vulcanology, arriving spaceships, etc. 'Planet of Fire' depicts religion as a degeneration of rational understanding, a sign of cultural decline and a force for social control.

"Since my father’s time," Timanov tells Malkon, "unbelievers have been put to the flames." So human sacrifice is a relatively recent development, a response to the increasing instability of the planet. Timanov doesn’t just burn unbelievers because he’s a mean old religious zealot; he does it because he believes that Logar must be appeased. Timanov explicitly blames the unbelievers for the degradation of their society into "a primitive settlement on the verge of extinction." This is a convenient diagnosis for an embattled leader: every oligarchy (or, in this case, theocracy) likes to use dissenting groups as scapegoats. Social order is maintained by saying that heresy is the cause of strife. The social crisis caused by the fall of the Trion colonial civilisation is blamed on the whims of a supernatural being, as are the caprices of the volcano. As Howard pointed out (though he was talking about Eros not Logar): "the personification of natural forces in an anthropomorphic deity." Social forces too.

'Planet of Fire' is bursting with references to religion. Sorasta seems to be named after Zoroasta, the founder of Zoroastrianism. The Doctor makes a crack about the Master wanting "to be born again". The flame that purifies, the flame that does not burn… both refer back to the Old Testament. In one of his few impressive moments, Anthony Ainley seems to be taking the piss out of American televangelists – note the wonderful body language accompanying the "Wretched citizens of Sarn!" speech. For the most part, however, the references centre on Judaism. The mountain upon which the Sarns live is reminiscent of Mount Zion, especially when you consider the resemblance of ‘Zion’ to ‘Trion’. The Doctor, when planning the evacuation of the Sarns, says "we’ve a full scale exodus to arrange".

And then you have the Misos Triangle, a symbol made up of two overlapping equilateral triangles. Rearrange it slightly (and hollow out one of the triangles) and you’ve got a star of David.

Who exactly are these "very special people" who were persecuted by the Trions? Were they criminals, dissidents or a religious/ethnic minority?  Perhaps the Misos Triangle can be seen as an echo of the Nazis forcing the Jews to wear yellow stars. If so, the transportation of the Trion "undesirables" recalls the lunatic scheme (briefly considered by the Nazis) to deport Jews to Madagascar. At the end of the story, the Sarns are a colonised people without a homeland, a race of refugees. If the Trion exiles were the Jews, the Sarns seem to have become the Palestinians... except that the Sarns don't seem interested in continuing to crush, exploit and humiliate them.

 

Peter Wyngarde portrays Timanov with dignity and sincerity which emphasises his contradictory qualities. His desire to kill the heretics seems at once a matter of convenience and conviction. Timanov’s belief is sincere but his motives are often far from pure. Timanov uses his ability to improvise with religious explanations for his own political advantage. He is not above bullying Malkon to retain his influence, even though his affection for the boy is obviously genuine. He interprets Logar according to his own wishes. Interestingly, Malkon learns this trick and turns it back on his teacher, aborting a burning because he claims that "by sending us the Outsider, Logar has shown his favour".

In the end, Timanov chooses to die rather than accept the new reality that dawns for his people. ‘Logar’ removes his helmet to reveal a heretic underneath. The irony is bitter and Amyand’s compassion is moving. But Timanov cannot relinquish his delusions or his power. He prefers to die; a gesture that mixes the noble with the cowardly.

I also really like Turlough’s leaving scene. Turlough is visibly shamefaced, stricken by the Doctor’s coolness. The Doctor is sceptical about Turlough’s motives. "Better to go back while you’re a bit of a hero, eh?" he suggests.

This is exactly the kind of homecoming that the Doctor refused in 'The Five Doctors'.

For all that, 'Planet of Fire' is undeniably marred by moments of inexcusable gormlessness. For example: if Kamelion/Master isn’t hurt by a kick in the shins, how can it/he be knocked out by a bit of falling masonry? The clanging sound you hear isn’t just the brick hitting Kamelion’s bonce, it’s also the sound of some very basic plot logic being carelessly flung by the wayside.

The wonderful Barbara Shelley is wasted - they really should have scrubbed Amyand and given all his lines to Sorasta. Having a prominent older female character might also have made the whole thing slightly less intensely gay (though that isn't a problem in itself).

And I’m still puzzled as to why the Trions took it into their heads to imprison Turlough in a public school. That is real judicial sadism if you ask me.

The element that fails most completely is the Master. The necessity of including him hamstrings Grimwade’s script. Grimwade does his best… the idea of an incapacitated Master using Kamelion as an avatar is a fundamentally good one, but it should have been because the Master was once again in a regeneration crisis, withered and decaying. The Doctor’s glib remark about the Master wanting to be "born again" would take on new pertinence. But, as it is, we get Mini Master. To put it bluntly, the whole thing sucks. For a start, why didn’t the Tissue Compression Eliminator turn him into a dead Action Man like everybody else?

The reduced Master’s threats to Peri, as she glares down at him from on high, are absurd. Is even the Master mad enough to threaten somebody 15 times taller than him? Luckily for him, Peri succumbs to a fit of sneezing and is unable to splat him with her shoe, which is clearly her intention.

(It is, of course, a well known fact that women are always seized by sneezing fits whenever they encounter small, scampering mammals… I’m surprised Peri didn’t leap onto a stool, scream "Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!" and try to swat the Master with a broom.)

The image of a young woman, chasing a 4 inch high man, declaring "There you are!" in a dominatrix voice and trying to squash him with her shoe is a sad commentary on the vagaries of 80s Doctor Who and the dubious subconscious desires of Peter Grimwade.

"There you are!"

Freud would’ve had a field day. "So," I imagine Freud saying as he gazes across at Grimwade, lying on the couch, "you fantasize about being chased and tvatted with shoes by gigantic vimmen, jah? Hmmm, interesting… vell, you know, many men who call zemselves ‘Master’ turn out to be neurotic about being too small…"

Oh well, sometimes a Tissue Compression Eliminator is just a Tissue Compression Eliminator.

One problem for this story (as it has been for several good stories) is that there are no monsters. There’s no indelible image of evil; no Emperor Dalek, no half-mutated Keeler, no bitchy trampoline. This is because 'Planet of Fire' isn’t about evil or monstrousness. It’s about abandonment, delusion, disillusion, social strife, cultural degeneration and scepticism versus faith. At it’s heart, it’s a serious, earnest and thoughtful story. Which is why the Master, parachuted into it, sticks out like a (very small) spare prick at an orgy.

Oh. Yes. One more thing.  I'm a socialist, which - as far as I'm concerned - entails feminism as a baseline requirement.  I try to be as much of a feminist as a man can be.  But there are limits to how much control the intellect (still less the political conscience) can exercise over the inner beast. Nicola Bryant in a bikini? Well, it's needless, exploitative, gratuitous, a perfect example of the 'male gaze' in the framing of a shot (despite being directed by a woman)... but all that being granted, I don't exactly dread the scenes in question and avert my pious eyes.

No.  No picture.

Darkness in the Garden 2.0

To celebrate the DVD release of 'Kinda' (alongside its sequel 'Snakedance') here is a guest post by Rob, also known at Gallifrey Base as vgrattidge-1.

ADDITIONAL: The text below is different from that originally posted, having been revised and expanded by the author.  25/4/11.



‘Kinda’ raises a lot of questions and embraces an unusually (for Doctor Who) complex approach to its subject matter. It’s a rich script by Christopher Bailey – one that looks at invidualism vs collectivism in two (very different) societies; colonialism; propaganda; History; male aggression, and madness, while drawing on Freudian theory, Christian imagery and Buddhist concepts in order to explore these ideas in multiple ways. A stylized theatrical piece, if one inflatable snake and a pot plant jungle gets in the way of some of the most interesting writing (not to mention performance, music and direction) of the classic series, then that’s to lose sight of one of its greatest, most thoughtful and arresting serials ever.

‘Kinda’ is about many things. It’s about the power of the community over individuals (in this case men, reversing a convention but avoiding the ‘Planet of Women’ trope), so as to prevent aggressive, warlike behaviour. This is couched in the idea of an alien tribe who, if they don’t share everything (especially their dreams), are prey to monsters who will use them as mediums to pass into the real world from the darkest corners of their Id.

The Mara (the Buddhist word for temptation) is certainly a “real” creature here, but is the evil it revels in to be found within us or beyond us?  Is it a demon of our minds, or something that uses our minds as a way of gaining access to the material world?

Bailey bats around psychosis, the Oedipus complex and paranoia both within the parameters of Freudianism (the scenes with Hindle in the base) and via several Buddhist concepts (the scenes in Tegan’s dream and with Panna, the wise woman of the Kinda tribe) in order to explore this dichotomy. Brilliantly, he sticks to posing questions without offering pat answers.

Initially, this seems like a reactionary message about war-like men needing to be contained and about a pre-agrarian community being superior to a high-technological society; essentially, the message of the egregious Avatar with its noble savages and BIG BAD COLONISTS. But while the Kinda are indeed a bunch of “serene dream catchers” (winks at Jack Graham) with odd bits of knowledge (they are aware of DNA – perhaps a leftover from a time before the Mara was first unleashed), they also have to halt progress and exist in a state of enforced servility in order to survive. The ‘ideal’ they most certainly are not! Dr Todd may see innocent children in a Garden of Eden but this is a romanticized view of a society forcibly held in stasis in case the wheel of History starts up and brings the conflict that Panna fears will change things irrevocably on Deva Loka; we should note how her vision of the Mara’s return is brimming with nuclear-era countdowns to apocalyptic destruction (‘Kinda’ being a near-contemporary of Threads and Z For Zacharia).

Meanwhile, the colonists are an example of what happens when rampant, imperialist aggression asserts itself. And while the satire of colonialism might be blunt (pith helmets galore!), Bailey shows its own inherent destructiveness – Hindle has been brought up to see a world of order and structure and simply cannot deal with Deva Loka. And he is as caged as the Kinda – part of a structure and a colonial machine that alienates him and denies him the sense of innocence he craves. Meanwhile, the Kinda’s attempts to cage their men-folk in case they should give into their destructive impulses has given rise to other, quite subtle ways of dealing with outsiders.

The Box of Jhana is a propoganda device designed to make aliens see things the way the Kinda do; in itself, this is not such a bad thing – but their fear of the return of the Mara (which is a metaphor for the return of rampant male aggression and expansion through conflict and land-grabbing) means they (as is key in Buddhism) are trying to negate History. As in ‘The Keeper of Traken’, History is brought back to a society that has tried to do without it. But, even though the Doctor is on hand to repel the Mara that successfully makes it through to the material world, only his benign individualism seems to get the thumbs-up come the end, while the colonists and the Kinda are both criticized, although sympathetically because they are both caught in different but equally devastating traps, which make the people in their societies lose their individuality, even their dreams and desires.

When Hindle and Sanders go native, they have just exchanged one trap for another (or one box for another)...the Kinda are just better at war – using propoganda; the Box of Jhana is said to heal – to drive away darker thoughts through a shared communion with the Kinda – but doesn’t it actually condition people to accept their way of life? Is this not a highly successful cultural invasion of the mind, in place of the expensive cultural invasion of the environment by the technological might of the colonists (ideology over military might)? Essentially, this is a war that the Kinda win and, at the end, Sanders and Hindle reject their own culture. But have they actually been coerced to do so?

The thing is, at the end, the Kinda are denied History once more (something the Doctor seems to lament in a cryptic remark before he leaves in the TARDIS). They will not progress. They will not change. They are stuck until the Mara returns to start the clocks of History, no matter how devastating that might potentially be.

So, we have one society that has free rein to conquer through its technological might but has men who exercise power without judgement (Sanders misreads the situation and Hindle can't deal with it) and another that must contain its darker impulses and effectively castrate the males (by denying them the right to speak) in order to prevent self-destructive violence. However, although women are not punished for possessing knowledge and wisdom (which neatly subverts the Christian symbolism on show), it is Tegan who is the first to be “possessed” and then manipulated to pass the Mara onto (a male), Aris, to start the clocks of History (and therefore, empire, conflict, progress, creation and destruction). Interestingly, Janet Fielding’s performance plays up a sense of sexual satisfaction when she is “infected” by the Mara, suggesting that this is one more impulse that the Kinda must suppress, given its destructive and aggressive power. And, as Freudian theory is nothing without sex, the circle is squared once again!

Bailey’s script is intelligent and dialectical: while he seems to be saying that men are the destructive element that should be contained, he also shows how the social passivity that results from this makes the Kinda superstitious (they believe their souls can be captured by mirrors), sheep-like (they seem to possess little or no individuality) and simultaneously gullible and fickle (they follow Aris because he is the only male with voice; essentially defeating Panna’s ultimately flimsy control just because he gets a shot of Mara-assisted testosterone!). They suppress their desire to shape the world around them - but what's the first thing Aris does when he gains voice? Yup, he gets the Kinda to build (in this case, a replica of the TSS Machine).

At the same time of course, the Kinda are presented as more sophisticated than the colonists because of that enforced lack of aggression and their unique understanding of their environment... So, which is Bailey criticizing – the destructive capability of men such as the colonists (or, potentially, the males of the Kinda tribe), or the stasis that occurs if societies attempted to dam progress (the Kinda have no ambition of any sort)? In a sense, he’s criticizing women (certainly Panna) for ending History, but he’s also giving them wisdom...Hm, don’t come here looking for clear answers!

The Doctor says “Paradise is a bit too green for me” and one senses that he has the measure of the Kinda and their problematic society, just as much as he has the measure of the colonists and their drive to shape everything in their own image. We can assume he pities the trappings of both groups, while he himself has attained a certain kind of freedom.

So much is at work here that it is a credit to Bailey that he manages to weld it to a fairly traditional Doctor Who base-under-siege-come-monster-story. As mentioned, Freudianism is a big theme, with Tegan’s inferiority complex about her companions allowing her neurosis, or (if we slide from the Freudian to the Buddhist frame of reference), a 'demon of her mind’ to make her aggressively and sexually powerful enough to infect a male Kinda, whose re-masculation drives him to want to make war on the colonists, which will feed the Mara/psychosis in his head.

Added to this is the Buddhist concept of life as suffering underpinning the Kinda society; this tribe are continually on guard against the evil impulses that curse us all, except theirs can be made material because of their telepathy.

Bailey makes a collage of psycho-analysis and Buddhism yet more complex by creating an overlap with Christianity. But Dr Todd’s perspective of Deva Loka as Paradise is false because this is a world in which its native population are basically acting as a dam against evil impulses by suppressing their individuality; as such she fails to see the metaphorical serpent in this Garden of Eden until Aris makes that serpent real (well, sort of...). That Hindle also goes mad as a result of his Oedipus Complex regarding Sanders and his culturally-inherited inability to accept (what he sees as) disorder on Deva Loka - our Hindle's not much of a pluralist, is he? - allows Bailey to explore yet another aspect of madness without the Buddhist symbolism.  Out in the jungle we have spiritual metaphors for madness, while in the base we have a more formal, western reading.

While the production has been vilified it seems fitting that Deva Loka (a place of subtexts, memories and dreams), is this artificial world that is clearly symbolic; the various perspectives of what it represents can be projected onto it without the ‘concrete’ identity of a genuine location getting in the way. So, to the Kinda, this is a world with dark dimensions that must be held in check; to the colonists it is a chaotic jungle that must be ordered, and to Dr. Todd it is Eden – three attempts to organize the world rather than see it as essentially chaotic. But each approach has its problems and this examines the “human” need to organize against the chaos of existence – we all project a world onto the world (or a map onto reality) and here the viewer gets several alternative maps of Deva Loka to project onto the mere suggestion of an environment created in Television Centre!

I should leave the last words to the proprietor of this blog when he says that 'Kinda'...

...is the end of an extraordinary run of stories. Everything from 'Full Circle' to 'Kinda' is either a masterpiece or near-masterpiece. Even the weakest of these stories ('Four to Doomsday') is chock-full of amazing ideas and fascinating concepts, sophisticated wit and off-the-wall imagery. Sadly, from now on, the great stories will come in fits and starts. There's some amazing stuff on its way, but that run of consistently-excellent stories is now over.