Peri and the Piscon Paradox (audio story)

 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.

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.

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 Carburetor 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 Carburetor.

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 Carburetor, 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 a 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 Carburetor. 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
to be added

Part four
to be added

Cast

 * Peri Brown - Nicola Bryant
 * The Doctor - Colin Baker

Cultural references from the real world

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

Music

 * Peri wonders if Frankie Goes to Hollywood is still popular in 2009.
 * Peri remembers the Dolly Parton song "Islands in the Stream".

Films and TV series

 * Peri mentions the game show Jeopardy!
 * On seeing her older self for the first time, the young Peri wonders if she is an actress who used to play the Fonz's girlfriend in Happy Days.
 * Peri compares the future Peri to Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
 * Peri nicknamed her first boyfriend "Curious George".
 * The younger Peri is totally unaware that The X-Files is a science fiction television series from the 1990s. The Fifth Doctor comments that it was never as good after David Duchovny left.
 * Carburetor says the explosion of the car is like an Industrial Light & Magic special effect. She says it is almost as good as Star Wars.

Literature

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

The Doctor

 * The Doctor wears his Half Moon Spectacles, possibly for the last time.
 * The Doctor is able to defeat Zarl by throwing his cricket ball.
 * Peri compares the Doctor's accent to Prince Charles's.
 * The Peri of 2009 wonders if the Doctor could regenerate into George Clooney, and compares regeneration to the reinvention of Madonna.

Peri

 * Peri's parents, Janine and Paul Brown, were married on 21 November 1962.
 * Peri's aunt Mona dresses in a similar manner to the Sixth Doctor. She collects golliwogs, which she orders from England.
 * Peri has a degree in botany.
 * Peri has previously worked as a Samaritan.
 * Peri eats Doritos.
 * Peri has a Spaniel called Whisky.
 * Peri has a Blockbuster membership card.

Theories and concepts

 * Both the Fifth and Sixth Doctors mention the Blinovitch Limitation Effect.
 * The Sixth Doctor mentions the web of time.

Continuity

 * Peri is told of her multiple fates by a bowler-hat-wearing Time Lord messenger, who previously warned the Third Doctor about the reemergence of . (TV: Terror of the Autons)
 * The Fifth Doctor compares the Piscons to the Pescatons. However, he believes the Pescatons are more violent. He says that they both originated from the Piscos star system and that their world was destroyed by an expanding sun. (AUDIO: Doctor Who and the Pescatons)
 * The younger Peri wonders if her mother Janine Foster is still alive in 2009. (AUDIO: The Reaping)
 * The older Peri claims that the disappearance of the crew of the Mary Celeste was caused by Piscons wanting to take over human forms. This was later revealed to be completely made up. In reality, the First Doctor and his companions Ian Chesterton, Barbara Wright and Vicki Pallister were indirectly responsible for their disappearance. (TV: The Chase) The Doctor had discovered his own involvement with the crew's disappearance by the time of his second incarnation. (AUDIO: The Forsaken, The Rosemariners) Earlier in his personal timeline, the Fifth Doctor told Alan Fitzgerald, a student summer intern at the Gogglebox, that he was "sort of" responsible. (AUDIO: The Gathering)
 * Following their encounter with the older Peri, the Fifth Doctor and the younger Peri travel to Androzani Minor in the Sirius star system. (TV: The Caves of Androzani)
 * In an attempt to jog the older Peri's memories, the Sixth Doctor mentions Sil (TV: Vengeance on Varos, AUDIO: Mission to Magnus, TV: Mindwarp), the Tractators, (AUDIO: The Hollows of Time) the Borad, (TV: Timelash) Ice Warriors (AUDIO: Red Dawn, The Bride of Peladon, Mission to Magnus) and Davros. (TV: Revelation of the Daleks)
 * The Sixth Doctor claims that he has been having difficulty with his memory since his most recent regeneration. This could account for the fact that he did not remember meeting Kathy Chambers for the first time in his personal timeline in Brisbane, Australia in September 2006 while in his fifth incarnation (AUDIO: The Gathering) when they met for the second time (from his perspective) in Baltimore, Maryland in September 1984 while in his sixth incarnation. (AUDIO: The Reaping)
 * The older Peri remembers her first encounter with the Doctor involving a "robot with an identity crisis", "some religious types", a "" and Turlough. (TV: Planet of Fire) She only remembers their first encounter because of interference from the Time Lords, as happened with Jamie McCrimmon and Zoe Heriot. (TV: The War Games)
 * The Sixth Doctor remembers his previous incarnation and the younger Peri encountering the older version of Peri defeating Zarl in Los Angeles in 2009. This is similar to PROSE: Cold Fusion in which the Seventh Doctor remembers the events of the novel from the perspective of the Fifth Doctor and uses this knowledge against his younger self.
 * An unidentified Doctor, likely the seventh, would later visit the version of Peri serving as princess, who would not forgive him for abandoning her. (PROSE: Reunion)
 * The Doctor says that humanity had conquered half the galaxy by 2050. (TV: Kill the Moon, The Waters of Mars)
 * Peri wonders if Earth is being invaded all the time by 2009. (TV: Aliens of London / World War Three, The Stolen Earth / Journey's End et al.)
 * The Doctor offers the older Peri a chance to travel with him in the TARDIS again. He would later give the same offer to the version of Peri on Krontep. (AUDIO: The Widow's Assassin)
 * The Time Lord messenger tells Peri that the Peri living with King Yrcanos has three children, something she wanted but could not have as this version lost the ability to reproduce through abuse from her husband Davey Silverman, and was content that a version of her was able to have it. In another version of events, Peri had been rendered infertile through her exposure to spectrox toxaemia on Androzani Minor. (AUDIO: The Widow's Assassin)