Start to Finish: 5.08 - The Perpetual Bond

Image (c) Big Finish Productions Ltd

Okay, I lied last time. Peter Purves was a less convincing American than Nicola Bryant in his brief cameo as a Texan tourist in infamous time trawl The Chase, but here he is on steadier ground as Steven Taylor in Simon Guerrier's The Perpetual Bond.

People are seldom what they seen. City gent Oliver Harper, sought by the officers of the law, knows that all too well. When his employer suddenly appears to him as a being of mushroom-like glass, however, it all seems a bit too strange for words.

The Perpetual Bond is a play about freedom, choice and pretence. It is also a play about Oliver Harper, a man with a big secret (not yet revealed), who wants to travel in the TARDIS for fear that that secret has been revealed. The alien plot - to sell humans into indentured labour - is all the more horrifying for the civilised manner in which it is done; all in accordance with galactic law, we are told, and with the full connivance of the government. It evokes its sixties setting with a Henry Mancini-inspired score and its depiction, not of a flower power haze, but of a close, controlled society of bowler-hatted city traders, all pretending to be something that they are not.

Tom Allen turns in a tightly controlled performance as Harper, while Purves' Taylor (and his Hartnell) remain strong. The story captures the sometimes alien motivations of the Doctor, and his tendency to seem cold even to his companions. This is especially true because the pay is set in the wake of The Daleks' Master Plan, and the deaths in quick succession of short-lived companions Katrina, Brett Vyon and Sara Kingdom.

Oliver Harper's secret will have to wait for the end of this series. Next up is a Second Doctor adventure for Polly and Jamie in The Forbidden Time.