The Widow's Assassin

Main Range #192

Released: 31 October 2014

Listened: 8/18/20

If you’re going to bring Peri back after the events of the Trial, it has to be Nev Fountain writing it. Which means it’s going to be off-beat, and Peri’s going to be snarky. In this case, though, off-beat borders on silly. Turns out that this Peri married King Ycarnos and became queen, as we discovered at the end of the Trial. When the Doctor tracks Peri down, she’s still furious with him, and throws him in jail, where he stays for quite some time. Presumably Brian Blessed was unavailable, so King Ycarnos is likewise made permanently unavailable. I’ve never liked “so then the Doctor did a thing off-screen for several years” plot elements, and in this story it’s even more than it appears. There’s a big twist at the end of Part 2, which I won’t spoil, but it’s impressive. The remaining parts have a lot of exposition and running around in people’s mindscapes. It feels long, because it is. Almost all the minor characters are silly in some way, with special mention going to Guard 1 and Guard 2 (their actual names). There’s a definite Moffat-era feeling to this story, and since it came out in 2014, that makes sense.