The Vanity Trap

The Sixth Doctor and Peri #3

Released: 13 August 2020

Listened: 8/24/20

This one is deeply timey-wimey, to the point where I had some difficulty understanding it, and so did the actors. The bulk of this story is set in 1972 on a movie set in England. Actress Myrna Kendal is worried that she’s aging out of her career. There’s a frame story, though, with an older Myrna meeting the Doctor and telling him about this adventure before he has it. What follows is a bunch of technobabble about paradoxes and temporal anomalies. It’s one of the ones where there’s not really a monster or a villain, just a bunch of people making questionable decisions. And there’s some friction between the Doctor and Peri, who isn’t as amenable to following orders without explanations as she used to be, which sets up the next story. As an aside, Peri convinces the Doctor that his usual outfit would be out of place on a movie set, so he decides to “blend in” by wearing what he wore in 1972, meaning the Third Doctor’s outfit. I really wish I could see that.