Day 564: Kinda Part 3

I'll make a deal here. There is rather a lot to talk about regarding Part 3 of Kinda. However, there are two things that get in my way. One is that a lot of what I want to talk about for Part 3 is used in better ways in Part 4, and so I do want to leave a lot of that for Part 4. Another is that I begin my Uni exams tomorrow, and there's a large part of me that wants to study for Statistical Mechanics for the rest of the night. So today's entry will be a short one, but tomorrow's will be far longer, covering an awful lot of the themes and characters within Kinda.

So what to talk about then? Adric springs to mind, because he's intelligently written within this story. His interplay with the Doctor, for instance, is spent being a little bit of a cheeky young lad, getting them both into scrapes such as being captured by the expedition of Deva Loka. He's a little bit lighter than usual, spending their time locked in a cell to teach the Doctor a magic trick, just to pass the time as both he and the Doctor know that it's relatively worthless at that point to attempt an escape.

But this is all something that another writer could do, just from the brief character description. What Christopher Bailey does is put Adric into an interesting position. He feigns an alliance with the deranged leader of the expedition in order to gain his trust, and better help the Doctor. This, for a start, is already an improvement on what occurred with Four to Doomsday, whereby we saw Adric as the type of character who would go evil at the drop of a hat. This time, he analyses the situation and attempts to put himself in control of it, making for a far more interesting character movement and one that is far more beneficial to the plot.

This, of course, backfires. The leader of the base has passed the point of no return with respect to his derangement and Adric is forced to play along, knowing full well that he needs to escape at the earliest possible opportunity. So he's trapped by his own plan, stuck in a base where he is watched at every turn. Thus, it allows for the audience to be a bit more emotionally invested in what happens with this particular plot strand, because a character that we are growing to care about is trapped there. But that's not the whole reason why we're so engaged by that part of the plot. Tomorrow, we'll look at the characters on the base, as well as the Box of Jhana, and the Mara. But for now, I've Got Work To Do.