Peri and the Piscon Paradox (audio story)

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Peri and the Piscon Paradox was the seventh story of the fifth series of The Companion Chronicles, produced by Big Finish Productions. It was written by Nev Fountain and featured Nicola Bryant as Peri Brown, the Fifth Doctor and Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor, the latter of whom spent the bulk of the story disguised as a Piscon named Zarl. Baker also very briefly voiced the "real" Zarl, albeit with "dialogue" that consisted solely of a few grunts and a scream.

It was the first Companion Chronicles release to feature an actor who regularly played the Doctor, with Colin Baker playing his role of the Sixth Doctor. However, Nicola Bryant provides narration as well as the Fifth Doctor's dialogue.

Publisher's summary

The Doctor and Peri journey to Los Angeles 2009 to do battle with a Piscon. His name is Zarl, and he's a fish of utmost evil.

Zarl is going to steal all the water of Earth and sell it to the highest bidder. Or blow up the San Andreas fault. Or the planet. Or something like that. He's a bit vague on that point.

Fortunately, to stop him there's help from an unexpected source: a future version of Peri. She knows Zarl's dark secret.

But should the future Peri be on Earth at all? Something smells fishy — and it's not just Zarl.

Plot

Part one

The Fifth Doctor's plan of tagging aggressive alien life forms on his Vortex page to more easily learn of schemes requiring his attention results in him finding out about Zarl intention to steal water from Earth to sell to his fellow Piscons. He flies the TARDIS to a Los Angeles shopping mall in 2009 and he and Peri chase a signal across the city, during which Peri spots a woman she feels she recognises wearing sunglasses and watching her. The Doctor finds Zarl in a department store and offers to show him another source of water, but Zarl suddenly becomes angry and runs away after Peri, for whom he shows some concern before escaping, intervenes in their fight.

Noticing a coat on the floor of the department store which did not belong there, Peri sees the woman in sunglasses, whom she correctly suspects is her future self, and is invited to speak with her alone at a coffee shop in an hour. The future Peri claims to be part of a quasi-governmental alien incursion organisation and confirms that she married Davey Silverman, whom she was in a relationship with before and during college and claims to have since had two sons and a daughter just as she had always wanted. The younger Peri is suspicious, but her older self goes to the bathroom and a Piscon smashes through the window.

The Piscon, Zorn of the Piscon Law Enforcement Squad, is searching for Zarl and the younger Peri realises that he is using a device which detects fish. She picks up a tuna sandwich to get Zorn to chase her instead of her older self and runs into several other Piscons with electrical nets, but her older self gets Buretor to drive into them and pick her younger self up. The two Peris return to the department store where the older Peri tells the Doctor how the Piscons have discovered that they are reincarnated as humans when they die and that Zarl, unable to commit suicide because of a limiter in his brain, wants the Doctor to kill him so that he can be reunited with his wife, who has been reincarnated as Buretor.

The older Peri gives the Doctor a Piscon warrior blaster to use against Zarl, but he refuses and takes her off to one side to talk privately. The Doctor returns to the younger Peri on his own to work on alien machinery whilst the younger Peri thinks about how different, self-assured and open to violence her older self is. Hours later, Zarl sneaks in and attacks the Doctor before brandishing a clothes rail as a weapon and approaching Peri, telling her to die.

Part two

The Doctor knocks Zarl out by throwing a mannequin head at him, but he and Peri both note that Zarl had more than enough time to kill her and that the older Peri must have been telling the truth. He detains Zarl using timecuffs, the combination for which is the date of Peri's mother's wedding anniversary, and informs him of his intention to hand him over to the Piscon police along with a to-do list of crimes he found in his pocket, agitating him. The older Peri returns and guards Zarl with her younger self whilst the Doctor finds Zorn but, unlike her younger self, she believes that Zarl should be allowed to die.

The Peris hear a strange sound and the younger Peri finds Buretor, who has come to see Zarl and believes that her life make sense now she knows that she is a reincarnated fish. When Peri returns, she finds that her older self has released Zarl by removing the timecuffs and the Doctor, having arrived with the Piscon police on his trail, leaves again to find him. The younger Peri joins her older self in going after Zarl on their own, with her older self claiming that she had to release Zarl per her organisation's policy on jurisdiction and that she intends to kill him if the Doctor is refusing to.

The Piscon Law Enforcement Squad capture the two Peris in an anti-gravity beam to take them to their ship, but they are suddenly dropped and the ship leaves the planet. They then join the Doctor in chasing Zarl along Santa Monica Pier, culminating in a stand-off in which the Doctor declines to shoot him and states that it is not in Zarl's nature to kill everyone in the vicinity as he threatens. The older Peri snatches the gun and shoots Zarl after a fight with a younger self, apparently disintegrating Zarl as well as Buretor. The younger is disgusted and checks her older self's wallet, dropped in the fight.

Before Peri and the Doctor depart in the TARDIS, the older Peri arrives and the younger confronts her about the lack of photographs of her children in her wallet, forcing her to admit to having fabricated a story as the Doctor forbade her from telling herself about her life. She accuses her older self of leaving Davey so that she could be an action hero, a mistake which she does not plan to repeat as she wants children more than anything. She leaves and the Doctor takes her to Androzani Minor, on the way to which she wonders if her relationship with the Doctor will be the same again after he met her future self.

Part three

In 2009 Los Angeles, Dr Perpugilliam Brown finishes recording an episode of Dr. Peri Brown: Worrier Queen and goes for brunch with Buretor, her producer and best friend. She is approached by the Sixth Doctor, whom she noticed in the audience and who asks for her help, but she does not recognise him nor remember anything about their adventures together aside from the TARDIS, which she only remembers seeing once. The Doctor invites her to the TARDIS and she accepts that the Doctor is the same man that she met in Lanzarote and whom she remembers returning her there following their adventure.

The Doctor explains that he remembers having an adventure involving this Peri which he believes will cause her to have two contradictory futures and which is about to begin. They find Zarl at Santa Monica Pier, but the Doctor's attempt to get his attention causes him to fall to his death and they put his body in Peri's car until they can dispose of it in the sea. To avoid a paradox, the Doctor makes a Piscon costume fitted with a ring modulator so that he can impersonate him and be defeated by the Fifth Doctor just as he remembers. The Fifth Doctor offers to help "Zarl", however, so "Zarl" attacks him and Peri is discovered watching by her younger self.

Peri arranges to meet her younger self at a coffee shop and, in the meantime, she and the Sixth Doctor decide that they will give "Zarl" a death wish to convince the Fifth Doctor to shoot him with a Mogarian blaster adapted with a Time Ring, safely transporting him to the TARDIS but giving the appearance of disintegration. She tells her younger self that she hunts aliens for a living and cries in the bathroom after lying about having children, finding Zorn in the coffee shop when she returns and initially mistaking him for the Sixth Doctor. The younger Peri gets Zorn to chase her and the older joins Buretor in the car, getting her to follow her younger self and claiming that she is her long-lost daughter.

The Fifth Doctor apparently believes Peri's story about the theory of Piscon reincarnation, although he knows that the organisation she claims to be working for is fictional and suspects that she is working for UNIT or Area 51 instead, and he asks her to make sure not to tell her younger self anything about her future. She leaves and sees somebody in a fish costume in the street being targeted by the Piscon Law Enforcement Squad. The Piscons advance on them and throw their nets, melting the costume and killing him the person inside.

Part four

Peri sees the Sixth Doctor outside a coffee shop and realises that the Piscons have killed somebody who was giving out flyers in a fish costume. They decide to present the Piscons with Zarl's body to keep them from killing anybody else, but Buretor has taken the car to the TV studio and they make their way there, with the Doctor unable to get out of the costume. They find Buretor in the car, crying about being a reincarnated alien, and Peri explains it away by claiming that the reincarnation story is part of the TV show. When the Piscons arrive, having detected Zarl's body, they shoot and destroy the car and believe that they have killed their target.

The Sixth Doctor decides that the best way to get the Fifth Doctor to shoot him will be to attack the younger Peri, but the Fifth Doctor places him in timecuffs and Peri has to call in Buretor to distract her younger self so that she can release him. His next plan is to threaten to destroy the city with a defused Sontaran fragmentation grenade and he tasks her with getting the Fifth Doctor and her younger self to the pier, which is briefly obstructed by the Piscons' anti-gravity beam before they confirm that the corpse in the car was Zarl and let them go. "Zarl" threatens to detonate the grenade unless the Fifth Doctor shoots him, but the Fifth Doctor believes that the limiter will prevent him from carrying out his threat.

Peri takes the gun from the Fifth Doctor to shoot "Zarl" and fights her younger self over it. The older Peri wins and shoots "Zarl" as well as Buretor, sending them both into the TARDIS and making it look like they have both been killed. She stops her younger self before she can leave with the Fifth Doctor and has to admit that she lied about having children, which results in the younger Peri declaring that she will stay with Davey when she returns to her own time. Having run away to Los Angeles because Davey beat her during their relationship to the point that she was unable to bear children, she shouts at her younger self to run away and that Davey is not the answer, but her younger self cannot make out exactly what she says from inside the TARDIS.

Peri returns to the Sixth Doctor's TARDIS and a Time Lord appears. He explains that events were adjusted after Peri was killed on Thoros-Beta to cover up Ravolox by a faction who believed that this was too drastic, allowing a version of Peri to live alongside Yrcanos as his queen and have three children. Following the regime's overthrow, the new President had the CIA wipe Peri's memories of all but her first adventure with the Doctor and return her to Earth, which is the Peri that has been living in Los Angeles. Further readjustments have resulted in at least four other versions of Peri leading separate lives. This Peri declines the Doctor's offer to join him in the TARDIS and returns to work, unsure about whether to be comforted by the fact that a version of her got everything she wanted.

Cast

Crew

Worldbuilding

Cultural references from the real world

  • Peri says there was panic about diseases during the 1980s.
  • Peri compares the expression on Buretor's face to a face on a Picasso painting.

Music

Films and TV series

Literature

  • Peri compares the Fifth Doctor's actions to a character in a P. G. Wodehouse novel.

The Doctor

Peri

Theories and concepts

Notes

  • This story explains in more detail what happened to Peri after the Trial of a Time Lord story arc. Specifically, it reveals that there are no less than five versions of Peri Brown in existence, each created by Time Lord interference in her timeline - not including the original, who was killed in Mindwarp. One of the five rescued Peris married Yrcanos and became a warrior queen (TV: The Ultimate Foe, PROSE: Bad Therapy), while another version narrates Part 2 of this story, only remembering the events of TV: Planet of Fire. The nature of the other three versions is not revealed.
    • Another version of Peri who is only married to Yrcanos for seven days and rejoins the Doctor in his travels appears in the audio story The Widow's Assassin, as well as Masters of Earth and The Rani Elite.
    • The Seventh Doctor and Chris Cwej meet a version of Peri who seeks to get away from her marriage after two decades and is able to use a time portal to travel to Earth in the 1990s, (PROSE: Bad Therapy) but it is unclear if this Peri would be the same as the Peri who stayed with Yrcanos and had three children or a different Peri.
  • This story features several meetings and even a physical altercation between the Fifth and Sixth Doctors, though the Fifth Doctor remains unaware of his future self's identity.
  • Disc 1 tells the story from the Fifth Doctor and the younger Peri's viewpoint whereas Disc 2 re-explores the story from the Sixth Doctor and the older Peri's view. Although Nicola Bryant performs the voice of the Fifth Doctor, Colin Baker himself performs the Sixth Doctor, becoming the first Doctor actor to appear in a Companion Chronicles release. Also, befitting a story set in two different eras, Part 1 uses the Peter Howell theme arrangement in place at the time that Bryant joined the series during Season 21, and Part 2 uses the Dominic Glynn theme used at the time she left during Season 23.
  • The first and second halves of this story take place at the same time. The same is true of both Flip-Flop and The Veiled Leopard.
  • This audio drama was recorded on 11 and 12 November 2009 at the Moat Studios.
  • Coincidentally, Clara Oswald - who was introduced two years later - also has multiple versions/copies, two of whom (Oswin Oswald and Clara Oswin Oswald) died and many whom encountered the Doctor. (Asylum of the Daleks, The Snowmen)
  • From the Fifth Doctor and the young Peri's perspective, this story is set between Planet of Fire and The Caves of Androzani. From the Sixth Doctor's perspective, it's between The Trial of a Time Lord and Time and the Rani.

Continuity

External links

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The Companion Chronicles
 
First Doctor
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