#50 Doctor Who: Year of the Pig

The Randomoid Selectortron departs the house by the sea, trailing teeth and shadows, and lands in...

Doctor Who: Year of the Pig

Starring: Colin Baker as the Doctor and Nicola Bryant as Peri
Format: Two full-cast CDs (or download) as two 1-CD episodes
Silly? Yes, though somewhat to deeper thematic effect rather than purely for comedy.
Standalone? Yes.
Recommended? If you are comfortable with Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant being silly.

My reactions to this story contain spoilers for it and possible spoilers for Peri and the Piscon Paradox.

Before listening

The Year of the Pig is intensely a Proust tribute. The Doctor meets Proust himself very briefly in it, in a tangential event that has no direct narrative connection to the main plot. It is a story about the mutability of memory and the quest to recapture one's past. It is also a story in which the Doctor and Peri chase a delusional talking pig, but the reasons why this happens turn out to be emotionally weighty ones, after some comic digressions.
I've heard this one either once or twice before, not recently. I remember the circumstances of the pig and the degree to which the story is about memory, but not how it manages to occupy four episodes. I don't remember it feeling padded out, so there must be some interesting events and I look forward to relistening.

After listening to disc 1 of 2

Unusually for a monthly range audio, The Year of the Pig is in two episodes rather than four. This is more appropriate for a sixth Doctor and Peri one than for any other Doctor or companion, since the TV show tried out a double-length episode format for one of their seasons.
The summary of this story on the Big Finish website is strange in that some of the things it says are already negated before others of the things it says come up, so there's no point in the audio at which the entire summary is simultaneously accurate.
The Year of the Pig takes a lot of time setting up the flavor of the story before there's any clear conflict. The Doctor and Peri are vacationing in a nice hotel just before the first World War. The Doctor is finally getting around to read Proust's masterpiece, which he had bought in his first incarnation and wasn't interested in after other regenerations. Meanwhile, a mysterious wealthy individual who considers himself the "last human" is also staying in the hotel, as are a man claiming to be a detective and a woman who is writing a book about the vanished heyday of traveling freakshows. By the end of the first episode, the pig has come into the story and there is a definite conflict that leads to a life-threatening cliffhanger for Peri, yet it is still not clear what the reason for the conflict is, why a rain of cows have splattered to death on the beach, or what any of this has to do with Proust if indeed it does.
I had not remembered how much this story took its time before the Proust connection really came into play. It doesn't feel padded out at all; like some other Big Finish stories and the early parts of the TV story Black Orchid, it's showing us an incident that happens during the Doctor's downtime rather than going directly into an overt adventure. I enjoy Big Finish's interplay between the Doctor and Peri and this is a great showcase for it. I am looking forward to the next episode, and now that serious action has started I expect there to be a lot more excitement.

After listening to disc 2 of 2

On my initial listen to Year of the Pig,  the earlier portions of the story led me to expect a silly quasi-historical romp, and the turns towards the end that made the more emotionally-driven Proust homage clear were the thing that hit me hardest, so I was left with an overall impression shaped by those Proustian elements. This time around, I went into it expecting the Proust and was surprised at how much of it was, in fact, just a silly quasi-historical romp. There is nearly as much The Island of Doctor Moreau in it as À la recherche du temps perdu. The fact that these two influences can fit together in one story is either blind luck or a testament to writer Matthew Sweet's skill. I haven't experienced enough else of Matthew Sweet's work to be sure one way or another, but Voyage to the New World did a similar job of putting some depth into an aliens-amusingly-juxtaposed-with-history story.
There is a similarity to another audio with the sixth Doctor and Peri, Nev Fountain's Peri and the Piscon Paradox. In both stories, a runaround after a funny alien of dubious provenance turns into an exploration of hidden parts of a character's past. This might be a bit of a reach, but there is for me at least some similarity of mood.
There are a couple odd leaps of logic in the script. One very silly scene has the Doctor talking about an accident in the future somehow bringing into being impossible objects from comic-book advertisements, such as working X-ray spectacles. This felt disconnected from the rest of the story, but enough time was taken on it that it wasn't just a quip. Possibly there is some hidden significance to it, or possibly it's a relic of an earlier draft in which it would have fit better.
I would recommend this audio to anyone who is okay with hearing Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant get silly, although in the rankings of such audios it goes below Peri and the Piscon Paradox.