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| Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd |
In the citadel of Peladon there is a tower; in that tower is a room where an ancient evil is held captive. When murder stalks the refugee camps of the exiled Martians, King Peladon's mind turns to that old superstition, and even the presence of his old friend the Doctor is little comfort.
Mark Wright and Cavan Scott's The Prisoner of Peladon is set between Curse and Monster, with Troughton playing an older and wiser King Peladon. The Doctor's failure - especially without the anchoring influence of a companion, as he is between Jo and Sarah-Jane in this story - to recognise this change in the short-lived humans he loves so much is a key factor in the story. In the framing narrative, Peladon tells his daughter that the Doctor is a friend and protector, yet his impatience with the Third Doctor's pucking nature is apparent in the main story.
Lying between the story which established the Ice Warriors as a noble race and the one which dropped them back to being axe-crazy psychos - and lying in between is what Prisoner does best - the play also makes mention of the explanation retconned into the Who timeline; a military coup on New Mars.
Troughton's voice work is good (his Alpha Centauri must have been almost painful to achieve), and ably assisted by Nicholas 'Monster Voices' Briggs as assorted Martians.
The Prisoner of Peladon takes advantage of the Companion Chronicles format to analyse the Doctor more critically than usual, exposing some of his flaws in the process, and for that alone is worth a listen. The whodunnit aspect is only partially successful, however, as the one-hour format makes it difficult to insert a sufficiently varied cast to maintain suspense.
Next up is a Fourth Doctor space opera, with Lalla Ward in The Pyralis Effect.
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