Peri's unfair death and highly improbable rescue

[kristinking]

I've always been bothered by Peri's death in "Trial of a Time Lord." First the Doctor starts acting very un-Doctor-like and turns on her. Then she ends up having her mind switched into another body which is then killed. Then the Time Lords force a warrior king named Yrcanos to shoot her body

Comments

[ryo_chan]

if you rewatch trial, at the end it shows that peri wasn't killed, but was instead rescued (we know tampering with the matrix was ongoing) so the doctor left her with yrcanos, and wandered off to drop mel off so he could meet her later.... it IS in the virgin NA books that later on peri was ever so slightly annoyed by all of this.

Hope this helps

[tenthrose]

What you're looking for is 'Peri and the Piscon Paradox'. It's by Big Finish (so it's canon-ish), and it's utterly brilliant and explains everything quite satisfactorily. It's well worth the ten dollars.

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/peri-and-the-piscon-paradox-495

[huggyrei]

Yes, I was going to mention that one. I've listened to it many times by now :)

[kristinking]

Thank you, thank you! That's easily worth the money.

[londonkds]

The idea was, I think, that the whole apparent death was a fake created by the Valeyard tampering with the Matrix. As well as the Big Finish mentioned below, there are other futures for Peri (not necessarily compatible) in the Virgin New Adventures novel Bad Therapy by Matthew Jones and in a comics story by Colin Baker himself called "The Age of Chaos".

[rhiannon_s]

Right at the end of "Trial" after all that business with the Master and the Valeyard is wrapped up it is teased that what they saw during the "Mindwarp" section is a fabrication and Peri has fallen in love with Brian Blessed and has gone off to be his warrior queen. However it is left ambiguous in the televisual canon. Big Finish and the Virgin books opt to have Peri lived (with varying degrees of happiness) and settled into married life.

Whether you accept them as canon, or go with the original ambiguous ending, is up to you.

[drhoz]

Unfortunately, a lot of the problems with that entire season had to do with the producer and script editor being at odds with each other. The actors and directors went to ask them what was actually supposed to be happening, and both told them to go ask the other guy :(

[kristinking]

Yeah, sounds like the whole season was a mess, starting with the BBC changing the format and all the scripts having to be thrown out as a result. And the writer who was supposed to write the last episode dying.