N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

It still seems strange that Barry Letts would choose to set The Paradise of Death directly after The Time Warrior when there was plenty of room elsewhere for it slot into Doctor Who‘s eleventh season. Other than to add an introduction of Sarah from the Doctor to the Brigadier, there doesn’t seem to be any real reason for it. Still, shoehorning stories into non-existent gaps has kept Big Finish busy for the past two-plus decades and before that all those Virgin Missing Adventures and the subsequent BBC Past Doctor Adventures were doing the same thing, so who am I to argue?

It’s also a bit odd that they’d use the Peter Howell version of the theme tune. The imagination is torn between seeing the Season Eleven credits with the wrong theme tune or visualising what a starfield Pertwee would look like.

But all this is so much frippery. What of The Paradise of Death itself?

I remember being very excited about it at the time, forming as it did part of Doctor Who‘s thirtieth anniversary celebrations. Whilst I probably caught it on its Radio 5 broadcast, given this was around the time I was leaving home for university, it’s likely I had to wait for its commercial release on cassette in September 1993 before listening to it all.

“I think this could be the end of a beautiful friendship.”

Freeth, The Paradise of Death: Episode Three

In truth, it’s a bit of mess. There are some nice guest performances–Peter Myles’s Tragan is genuinely sadistic–but additional companion Jeremy is particularly irritating and after the first couple of episodes I found it a little uninvolving. That perennial cry of ‘perhaps if it had been a four-parter …’

Its main selling point and indeed its primary joy is derived from the fact that it re-unites Jon Pertwee as the Doctor, Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith and Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier almost twenty years after their last on-screen adventures together. It’s a cliché to say it, but it seems like they’d never been away.

Had Pertwee lived a few years longer, we would have almost certainly heard more adventures from him for Big Finish. As it is, all we have is this and The Ghosts of N-Space.

If only for that reason, The Paradise of Death is worth a few hours of your time.