#5 Destiny of the Doctor: Trouble in Paradise

Luna Romana was the first four-part story I've written about for this blog, and it was a very twisting tale indeed. My next hit of Randomoid Selection leads to...

Destiny of the Doctor: Trouble in Paradise

Starring: the sixth Doctor (narrated), Nicola Bryant as Peri and as narrator
Format: one narrated two-actor CD (or download) with no episode breaks
Silly? A serious historical event is handled seriously early on, but otherwise very silly.
Standalone? Yes. There are no important connections to earlier episodes of the Destiny of the Doctor series, and the ending does not lead into following episodes.
Recommended? If you like silly sixth Doctor and Peri and you don't mind Nicola Bryant doing both voices.

My reactions to this story include spoilers for itself and for the overall arc of Destiny of the Doctor.

Before listening

This is only sort of a Big Finish production, having been officially a co-production between Big Finish and AudioGo, but I got it in a Big Finish Humble Bundle after AudioGo had ceased to exist. Destiny of the Doctor is an eleven part series in which each of the first eleven Doctors gets a disc, narrated by a companion. There is less of an arc than a running gag: the discs are essentially unconnected adventures, but each Doctor gets contacted by the eleventh in mid-adventure with a request to retrieve an item or make a trivial change to history. These requests apparently add up to the eleventh Doctor being able to save the universe somehow.
I forget how much of Destiny of the Doctors I've already listened to, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't all of it, and I might or might not have heard this one. I see that Trouble in Paradise is written by Nev Fountain (of Peri and the Piscon Paradox and The Widow's Assassin) and narrated by Nicola Bryant, so I'm expecting good Doctor/Peri banter and possibly a bit of Peri backstory weaving.

After listening

Despite many moments of heightened melodrama that would have made perfect episode cliffhangers, this was a full-disc story with no episode breaks. The style was similar to a Companion Chronicle, except that the narrator was just Nicola Bryant, not in-character Peri. This is honestly a good thing: I wasn't looking forward to listening to Nicola's American accent for a solid hour. (I gather that she intentionally keeps it authentic to the way she did it on TV in the 80's. It does work well in smaller doses.) Peri was the viewpoint character for scenes where she was present, but in the third person, and Bryant also narrated most of the scenes without Peri. Bryant did the Peri voice for Peri's actual dialogue lines and also did a voice for the sixth Doctor's lines, with enough of Colin Baker's cadence and mannerisms for it to work well in my opinion. She also did a slight voice for the eleventh Doctor, which was quite a sufficient voice for his brief appearance.
I had in fact heard this before. I remembered having heard it early on, when the Doctor talks to a tethered goat just in case they've landed on a planet where goats are the dominant life form. Trouble in Paradise has quite a lot of that sort of thing in it. Other than some moments of seriousness early on about the bloodthirstiness of Christopher Columbus's governorship, it is a very silly story, more like The Kingmaker than like the other Nev Fountain stories I mentioned earlier.
Something that's more common in Doctor Who than out of it, though not unique to Doctor Who, is stories in which humans are the real monster and also there's a real monster. This is one of those, with Columbus in the one part and a time-traveling psychic buffalo in the other. The preservation of history means that, in this case, the Doctor only gets to stop one kind of monster and not the other. There's no point at which Peri or the Doctor considers preventing the European conquest of the Americas, but the question of how much the Doctor is willing to change in the smaller details of history does come up. The question is used as a source of interpersonal tension between the Doctor and Peri, rather than to ask a philosophical or moral question that would have any real-world resonance.
If you like silly 6/Peri, and you don't need Colin Baker to be voicing the Doctor himself, then Trouble in Paradise is well worth hearing. It works completely standalone and neither depends on, nor spoils, other parts of Destiny of the Doctor or any other audios.