Find and Replace

Jo Grant is just trying to get some Christmas shopping done when she is pursued by a man who constantly speaks as if he is narrating her life. At first Jo thinks he is just some holiday nutter until he starts to reference her time with UNIT – but the details are wrong. The Doctor is not in any of the narrator’s commentary, but he takes Jo to who he believes to be her true former travelling companion – a woman named Iris Wildthyme. Together Jo and Iris travel back into the past to search out the truth, back to a meeting with the Doctor.

First thing that grabbed me about this was why Jo after so many years married to a notorious hippie scientist was doing Christmas presents. So much for the stereotype, but really Cliff Jones and his people were never about ending capitalism, just being more responsible about how business is done at the expense of the environment.

The other biggie which was a real jarring moment was Jo not knowing who Iris was, despite them having met in the novel Verdigris establishing her as one of the Doctor's fellow Time Lords. Both were written by Paul Magrs so one would have thought he would respect his own continuity. The BBC Books and Big Finish overlaps were never forbidden so why they chose to go this route and wipe out the established first meeting between these two characters is a mystery. It would have saved a lot of time if they hadn’t; Jo could have immediately become suspicious of Iris and thought it was all some scheme of hers to wheedle her way into the Doctor’s life again despite Jo having been gone from it for so long. Iris for her part, though, is at a loss as to why the narrator is trying to set them up together and erase the Doctor from Jo’s life, and the more the narrator talks, the more the two start to fall under his sway. The only answer is to go back and find him, sometime during his exile, although Jo realizes this could mean meeting her younger self.

So if this were to be a rewrite of Iris’s introduction specifically for Big Finish, it’s not a bad one, it’s just at odds with what I already read before. And Iris is played by Katy Manning herself, giving the actress two roles to play and the dubious task of talking to herself a lot. Manning also does her impression of Jon Pertwee as well, giving her a third role to play but not, as the interviews afterwards suggest, at three times the paycheque. Iris does feature a lot in Big Finish in the future, crossing paths with the Doctor and company and even getting her own series, but she is also a feature in a few more BBC Books novels as well, but hopefully with less of a collision in her continuity.

NEXT EPISODE: THE MISTS OF TIME