Peri hasn’t been
travelling with the Fifth Doctor long.
Erimem has come and gone but the Doctor takes her to 2011 Los Angeles to
track a Piscon criminal Zarl. Everything
seems fine until the Doctor and Zarl get into a fist fight in a disused
department store and Peri notices a woman across the street that looks exactly
like her, but older. Sure she’s had nose
work done, but it’s definitely her so they go out for coffee. This older Peri reveals she works for a
government agency that tracks down alien life on Earth, married her high school
sweetheart, has three children, and lives a pretty happy life. It’s everything Peri would want for herself
and now they’re trying to track down Zarl.
You see according to Peri the Piscons believe that after death they reincarnate
as select humans and Zarl is a king looking for his dead wife who reincarnated
into a friend of the older Peri. The
Doctor tries to find another way instead of killing Zarl, who wishes to
reincarnate to be with his wife, but older Peri has other plans. She shoots Zarl and reveals to her younger
self that her life is in shambles. She
has no children, is incredibly vain, married several times, and has nothing
going for her. Nicola Bryant does an
excellent job narrating the story of Peri and convincing the audience, but it
still leaves a lot of questions to be answered as the audience knows what
happened to Peri. The older Peri has
become the complete pessimist when it comes to life while the young Peri resolves
at the end of the story to stay the optimist always, no matter what the
cost. You would never guess but it is
Colin Baker under heavy ring modulation in the role of Zarl and he gives a
humorous performance. You really feel
for the guy with how far he wants to go to be with his wife and you question if
even Peri is doing the right thing in killing him. Fountain writes an excellent script for the
story and we get a lot accomplished in the time it has.
Alternatively…
Pei never travelled with
the Doctor, having him take her home after the events of Planet of Fire. She left
home after getting her degree and a divorce from her high school sweetheart,
moving to Los Angeles, California to become a famous relationship councilor on
daytime television. She is successful
but unhappy, that is until the Sixth Doctor shows up to tell her that something
has gone wrong with the web of time.
Peri should have died on Thoros Beta, or at the least become a Warrior
Queen, not the Worrier Queen on daytime television as seen here. Things get complicated further when the
Doctor accidentally kills a Piscon called Zarl who the Fifth Doctor is coming
to get. Thinking quickly the Doctor and
Peri decide to stuff the Doctor in a fish costume while Peri pretends to be an
agent of the government sent to stop Zarl from causing harm. They tell their younger selves that they have
to kill Zarl with a gun, which actually transports the Doctor in a fish costume
to the TARDIS, to be reunited with his dead wife. They even get Peri’s friend in on the act
telling her it’s for a reality show. The
younger Peri of course catches on to the ruse eventually and the sky is falling
as Peri is rejected by her younger self.
The plot leaves Peri even worse off when it is revealed she is one of
five Peri’s created by the Time Lords after the events of The Trial of a Time Lord to seal up the Web of Time. Nicola Bryant gives an excellent performance
as Peri, keeping emotions high as you feel for the poor woman she’s become, and
she has amazing chemistry with Colin Baker who is excellent as the Sixth
Doctor.
How do you pad out a
story to four parts when you only have enough material for two parts? Well according to Nev Fountain you just
retell the same story from two different character perspectives, but that
sounds rather boring on the whole so Fountain writes Peri and the Piscon Paradox from the perspective of Peri at two
different points in her life. The first
is from a point where she is travelling with the Fifth Doctor while the second
half of the story is devoted to a version of Peri who has become a “Worrier
Queen” in Los Angeles, California. The
story then tells two narratives with two very different developmental outcomes
that mean very different things. The
complex nature of the story was perfectly realized by director John Ainsworth
who commissioned a score to sound like it was from the 1980s when concerned
with young Peri and a score from 2011 when concerned with an older Peri. It’s an easy trick to pull off, but it
increases the quality of the story exponentially as it gives each half a very
different feeling from each other and because of this Peri and the Piscon Paradox gets 100/100.
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