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The Bride of Peladon is the kind of Doctor Who story that staggers in wearing the hand-me-down robes of every “classic” serial your dad swore was good but you secretly fell asleep watching. It’s got everything: dusty castles, political intrigue, doomed weddings, roaring monsters, and the faint smell of 1970s polyester. The Doctor, Peri, and Erimem crash-land on Peladon, that perpetually dreary planet that seems to live in a permanent BBC quarry. Within five minutes, they’re knee-deep in a royal mess: a missing queen, an angry Ice Warrior with revenge issues, a wedding alliance on the rocks, and enough ritualistic pomp to choke a TARDIS console.
And look. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m saying it’s aggressively fine. It’s the kind of story that feels like it’s been sitting in a filing cabinet since 1976 labeled “Generic Planet of Kings and Tunnels.” The script tries for grandeur but lands squarely in “mildly competent pantomime.” There’s courtly squabbling, some ceremonial nonsense, and a few moments where I wondered if I’d accidentally started listening to Game of Thrones for toddlers.
Then we get the reveal. The true villain is Sekhmet, another of those Osiran deities, doing her best “space vampire goddess” impression. She needs four royal sacrifices to free herself, which is basically a mythic logic puzzle written by someone who didn’t have time to check if bloodlines actually make sense when the royals all intermarried six times over. It’s silly, but it’s entertainingly silly. At very least the writers didn’t decide to do to her what they did to Sutekh, at very least. I rolled my eyes, then pressed play again.
Erimem, though. Oh, Erimem. She’s had flashes of greatness across her run: the alien-queen-out-of-time schtick, the moral gravity, the curiosity. She deserved a send-off worthy of her complexity. Instead, she meets a mildly handsome prince and basically decides, “Yeah, I’m done, I’ll just marry this guy.” The whiplash was violent. It’s the most tragically 1970s kind of ending for a 2000s audio: “Give the strong woman a tiara and a man to kiss, roll credits.” It’s not offensive so much as boring, which somehow feels worse.
There are moments that work. Peri gets in some delicious snark. The Doctor is peak Davison: the universe’s most exhausted schoolteacher dealing with cosmic nonsense. The atmosphere is good, too, all echoing caves and regal reverb. Big Finish’s production team always makes this stuff sound lush, even when the script is just beige wallpaper.
Final Thoughts:
The Bride of Peladon isn’t a trainwreck, but it’s also not a triumph. It’s a serviceable B-tier adventure with some decent performances that just happens to completely fumble one of its best companions. Erimem deserved fireworks. Instead, she got a wedding invite.
Rating: 3 out of 5 royal blood transfusions, slightly congealed but technically ceremonial.