The Tertiary Console Room: Review - Doctor Who

"You must prepare his path to death and give him every reason to follow it..."

Considering that the Sixth Doctor spent almost all of his brief spell on television with Peri as his companion, its surprising that Julian Shortman's Her Final Flight is only the third time the partnership has featured in five years of Big Finish's Doctor Who series. And as this story's anomalous production code hints, this is by no means a typical adventure for the duo either as it examines their relationship from a very unusual viewpoint.

Shortman makes it clear - far too clear - immediately that the Doctor is travelling alone and that the Peri he meets on Refiloe is an older and wiser person than the one he was forced to leave on Thoros-Beta nineteen to twenty years previously in her time. Since Peri's unceremonious resurrection at the conclusion of The Trial Of A Time Lord, there have been many possible explanations in other media as to what she did next. These have ranged from the bizarre (Philip Martin's novelisation of Mindwarp suggests she returns to Earth as Ycarnos' wrestling manager) to the improbable (the matriarch of a warrior dynasty in the Doctor Who Magazine graphic novel The Age Of Chaos) to the more realistic, but clumsily done, resentful version depicted in Matthew Jones' 1996 New Adventures novel Bad Therapy.

The Peri of Her Final Flight is shown as more rounded, with her maturity suiting Nicola Bryant well as she can play her character with a voice closer to her own without having to introduce the eager exuberance of youth that sometimes distracts from her performance in the Fifth Doctor and Erimem stories. If it wasn't already obvious what the main twist of the play was, then Peri's muted reaction to meeting the Doctor again may have been enough to give the game away as it's so unlike her to be so accepting. Experience can temper a personality but can Peri really be so blasé about meeting the man who was responsible, even indirectly, for the course her life has taken over the last twenty years?

The sub-Medieval society of Refiloe is presented in very generic terms with its culture based around religious devotion to their goddess ultimately luring them into danger being very familiar and predictable. Shortman cleverly uses this typical characterisation with his village full of stereotypes as an important plot point and had he displayed a similar subtlety with the integration of the apparent reality with the real one as what lets Her Final Flight down is its obviousness.

The opening prelude is intriguing enough by itself, but it clearly establishes that there is a paid assassin out to kill a target (obviously the Doctor) and she plans to do it using some kind of device that induces hallucinogenic visions. With this in mind it doesn't really require too great a leap of imagination to realise what the strange distortion effects surrounding Peri's voice when she first speaks signify with regards to where the boundaries of reality are being drawn. As with Zagreus, the difficulty with putting characters into clearly defined artificial situations is that it's very difficult to sustain tension and interest in the false situation when its synthetic nature is obvious. With the Doctor's true fate being decided away from the apparent main narrative - something which Shortman repeatedly emphasises with Rashaa's frequent intrusions - it's difficult to really care for the plight of its people or indeed Peri which severely undermines the drama as the only question that really matters is when the Doctor will realise the real gravity of the situation.

With the ability to surprise conceded almost immediately, Her Final Flight is left as something of a character study of the Doctor to show how he would react in certain conditions and what he'd be prepared to sacrifice and endure to save the lives of others. It's an interesting notion that the Doctor's heroic qualities could be subverted, becoming weaknesses so that as he believes he's helping the citizens of Refiloe, he's actually sealing his own destruction. But for it to work to its full potential, we need to believe that the danger is real which is never true in Her Final Flight. You could argue that Shortman's plotting is recognition of the universal factor in all Doctor Who stories that the Doctor will always survive to fight another day, but by doing so, it renders much of the story rather pointless which is a shame when there is clearly potential in the main idea.

The play's suspense comes from witnessing the Doctor's unwitting instigation of his own downfall, but, as ever when basing the plot around danger specifically to the central character, it's only a matter of time before this happens. Once occurred, the play gathers momentum quickly as the Doctor acts quickly to stop what he almost sacrificed and discover answers about why he (and the listeners) has suffered this ordeal. Disappointingly, the answers to the latter never arrive as Her Final Flight is the latest Sixth Doctor Big Finish story to leave the plot unfinished for a hypothetical sequel just like Real Time and Medicinal Purposes before it. While the Doctor confronts and defeats Rashaa (who has conveniently gone walkabout when he wakes up, just at the moment of his demise) there is no attempt whatsoever to identify the mysterious Agent who has set everything up, which leaves things feeling very unsatisfying as there is no dramatic payoff.

The cast acquit themselves adequately with Baker displaying a wide range of emotions convincingly, as always, and Bryant delivering an ironically genuine performance when her character is not. Heather Tracy impresses as the Doctor's foe, making a fair stab at the mission that "many people reasonably consider impossible" before bowing to the inevitable, while Conrad Westmaas shows good variation to make Damas a charismatic and imposing spiritual leader that never once reminds us of his other regular Doctor Who part.

What is so disappointing about Her Final Flight is that it is a story that clearly has potential that Shortman squanders because the Doctor's situation is presented in such straightforward terms that leave no room for ambiguity as to what is actually happening. With a change of emphasis to create greater uncertainty, so the listener isn't always ahead of the Doctor, this and a more conclusive resolution would have made this play far more satisfying. As it is, Her Final Flight is nothing more than a wasteful and unsatisfying curiosity.