Audio Review: Doctor Who: The Companion Chronicles - Prisoner of Peladon

[wshaffer]

The Prisoner of Peladon by Mark Wright


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
There's nothing really wrong with this story, but it somehow manages to be less than the sum of its parts. Maybe it's because I haven't seen either of the televised Peladon stories in ages, but I found myself not really caring very much about Martian politics, Peladonian politics, or Federation politics. Which still leaves us with a decent enough mystery story, but it felt like it could have been more.

There's also a bit of a misfired character moment, where King Peladon basically has a go at the Doctor for being an insensitive jerk who prefers to make himself look clever rather than be honest with people, and, echoing Donna Noble's words to the Tenth Doctor, suggests that he needs a companion to stop him from going too far. Perhaps this is intended to play into elements in the other Peladon stories, or in Pertwee's later stories in general, and I'm just not picking up on it because it's been so long since I've watched those stories. But it feels out of place here: In this story, the Doctor prioritizes investigating a murder over respecting the feelings of the family of the victim (although the only person we see complaining turns out to have reasons to want to impede the investigation), and once he figures out what's going on, he doesn't tell King Peladon everything straight away, but strings things along a bit like the sleuth at the end of an Agatha Christie novel, eventually forcing the bad guys to expose themselves. Even admitting that this ends up putting the King (and the Doctor himself) in a bit more danger than was probably necessary, it wouldn't even qualify for the "Top 25 Times the Doctor Was a Jerk" list.

I'll probably come back and have a listen to this again after the Peladon stories come out on DVD, and see if watching them again changes my opinion of this.

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Comments

[wshaffer.livejournal.com]

There's no denying that Pertwee's Doctor can be unpleasant, and it's not so much that Peladon's comments were inaccurate as that I couldn't see quite what it was about that particular story that triggered that rant. Though I am a big fan of Pertwee's Doctor (or at least of Pertwee's era), despite recognizing that he can be a jerk, and that probably colors the way I interpret the Doctor's actions.