Hogan Reviews

“Peri and the Piscon Paradox” is a unique story in many ways, it deals with the continuity errors within Peri’s timeline, it deals with Nicola Bryant’s very real and unfortunate personal issues within the context of her fictional character, it’s a funny story with a lots of slapstick and well timed witty comments, it has two Doctors interacting (in a very unique way) but also ends on a very dramatic and sombre note. Somehow, despite all these things being so different, it’s a cohesive and really entertaining two hours. Let’s take a look!

The story is a companion chronicle, so one companion from the show and an extra voice performing a two-part story, except this time it’s a companion, Peri (Nicola Bryant) and the second voice is Colin Baker, playing his Sixth Doctor… oh and it’s four parts: two parts from the perspective of the younger Peri travelling with the Fifth Doctor and two parts with an older Peri and featuring the Sixth heavily, with both overlapping each other. It opens with The Doctor and Peri in the TARDIS and the latter checking some sort of time-based version of the internet for any hits on villains bragging about schemes they’re planning and he finally gets a one as a Piscon called Zarl announces his plan to steal all of the water on Earth in the year 2009. As arrive and walk around 2009 L.A. Peri feels somehow both at home and in an alien world given how far things have come since she left in the 80s, and a mysterious older woman keeps staring at her. Eventually The Doctor and Zarl have a fight in the middle of the store and after the fact the older woman tells Peri to meet her at a nearby restaurant.

The two meet and the older woman reveals herself to be an older Peri, a new nose and a bit more of an attitude but still her future self. Peri asks a bunch of questions, including about marrying an old jock boyfriend called Davey Silverman and if she has any kids, questions that make her older self feel uncomfortable, then they head off to meet The Doctor, who is immediately terrified of the Blinovitch limitation paradox energy that should be exploding as they touch each other, then equally as confused when it doesn’t happen. Older Peri claims she works for an Earth-based anti-alien group who have been tracking Zarl and that he’s on the planet because the Piscons believe when they die they reincarnate as humans and he wants to meet the reincarnation of his lost wife and join her, but their species have a built in defence mechanism that means they can’t commit suicide so Zarl’s plan is to get The Doctor to kill him. Somehow The Doctor believes every word and they head back onto solid ground to confront Zarl and have him carried away by the Piscon police that are now roaming the planet looking for him. When they finally confront the fishman alongside older Peri’s friend Buretor the two Peris get into a fight over the older one trying to use a gun, then the older one actually fires the gun and seemingly kills Zarl and her friend for good measure. The Doctor is disappointed and the younger Peri is mortified that she might become like that and tells her she’s going to marry their old love and have kids and live a happy life unlike her…

Great cover, and one that makes good use of the old Big Finish “Side Bar” template.

This is where we switch perspectives and find that the older Peri isn’t working for an anti-alien organisation but is in fact a Jerry Springer-style host of a trashy show where celebrities air their romance grievances live on air. After a show she meets The Sixth Doctor, who tries to jog her memory of all their adventures but she doesn’t recognise him or anything he says, at least until he mentions the TARDIS. She reveals she remembers the events of their first meeting but nothing after, which disappoints the Time Lord tremendously. Nevertheless The Doctor claims he knows he and the older Peri are involved with their younger selves and Zarl and asks for her help but as they arrive on an LA peer and The Doctor shouts Zarl’s name the large fish accidentally falls off the peer to its death. They stuff the body in Peri’s boot and The Doctor panics about changing his own past, so comes up with a plan involving a large fish suit while the Older Peri purposes a plan that involves her talking to her younger self…

Like I said, there are a lot of funny scenes and one-liners (especially once you know the Zarl the appears throughout the story is the Sixth Doctor in a suit and so the fight in the store is actually between two Doctors!) but get ready for a gut punch of an ending. Nicola Bryant does a great job of narrating, by the way. She does two distinct voices for the two Peris and her voice for the older Peri’s gullible friend Buretor always made me smirk.

The Continuity:

Obviously the main bits of continuity are Peri-related. Her debut story, “Planet of Fire”, and her final story, “The Trial of a Time Lord: Mindwarp” are obviously the main ones, plus the end of the Fifth Doctor side of the story has Peri mention they next arrived on Androzani Minor, making this set directly before the Fifth Doctor’s final story “The Caves of Androzani”. Another older Peri appears in the audio “The Widow’s Assassin” but it’s a different one to the one featured in this story and clearly a different one than the one from Sixth Doctor comic “The Age of Chaos”…

The Piscons are related to The Pescatons, who appeared in the first ever Doctor Who audio story “Doctor Who and the Pescatons” from the 70s.

Overall Thoughts:

“Peri and the Piscon Paradox” is a really good two hour story well performed by Nicola Bryant and features a great blend of humour and heartbreak. It ties up some loose ends and tells its own more personal story at the same time. Definitely one of the highlights of the Companion Chronicles range.

The rest of the story, barring the end, is basically all the prior scenes but from older Peri’s perspective. She meets herself and makes up the alien fighting agency on the spot and “had to run off and cry in the bathroom” after her younger self mentioned their Davey Silverman and having kids. She makes up all the lore on Piscons and why they head to Earth and was surprised when the younger Doctor believed it (though for the record he sees through her claims to be working for an agency but The Doctor thinks its to not disrupt the web of time rather than anything suspicious) and watches on as the Sixth Doctor gets into a fight with his younger self and is even captured by him, leaving the older Peri having to free him and bluff that it was for business reasons. The final confrontation is also played out and we see that rather than kill Zarl (a.k.a. The Doctor) and Buretor the gun merely trans-matted them away, but to keep things on-track the older Peri had to endure her past self’s disgust. The Piscon police find Zarl’s body in Peri’s trunk so leave appeased, by the way.

It’s here where we get the couple of big revelations as back in the TARDIS the same bowler-hatted Time Lord from the first Master story arrives rather randomly and reveals that the real Peri did in fact die on the operating table during Mindwarp but given all the Time Lord-assisted bollocks going on the President ordered her to be plucked out of time and placed to live a life with warlord Yrcanos where they had several children, but then the Celestial Intervention Agency also interfered and did a “Jamie and Zoe” and put another version of Peri back on Earth with only her memories of her first adventure with The Doctor, a.k.a. this Peri. He also reveals that there are even more Peris out there due to this hiccup, making five in total not including the original who died (so I assume the older Peri from “The Widow’s Assassin” is probably another one, given there is also a Peri who lived happily with Yrcanos) Peri then leaves the TARDIS, refusing to travel with the Doctor, and reveals that her ideal jock boyfriend ended up physically abusing her to the point where her new nose was because he broke her old one rather than a fashion statement, and a kick to the stomach meant she could never have children. She wonders if another Peri getting to live the life she wanted makes her happy or not…

Sadly Nicola Bryant herself has had issues with bearing children, making her heartache and teary moments all the more raw, but also gave the story far more power and impact.