Plight of the Pimpernel

Main Range #271

Released: 8 December 2020

Listened: 12/12/20

Placing this here because Peri seems rather older and more confident, and the Doctor seems calmer on the whole, less likely to fly off the handle. This seems like it would be a fairly typical historical at first, with the Doctor and Peri in the French Revolution, and encountering a historical figure, in this case the Scarlet Pimpernel. One hitch: The Pimpernel is fictional, and not based on a historical figure. He’s also been wounded by a distinctly alien weapon. The Doctor and Peri alternate between trying to figure that out, and playing the Pimpernel themselves, and discover a robot who’s trying to kill the Pimpernel. The whole story runs on the idea of identity and justice, and whether the good done in one persona outweighs the bad done in another. The Doctor seems to be showing his age (or maybe Colin Baker’s), in that he wanted to do something that was simple fun, and an easy case of right and wrong, but he’s disappointed to find it more complicated than he’d hoped. Peri is very much the partner in this story, a far cry from her TV persona, and she seems to be bolstering the Doctor quite a bit, carrying him along. If this is the start of a new direction for these characters, it’s a welcome one.