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A Perfect World

SEPTEMBER 2008

(1 EPISODE)

Just as I was starting to get rather attached to the mischievous old mudlark, his creator is brought in to pen his fond farewell. A Perfect World supplements Time Reef’s audacious, visceral imagery with a gentle contemporary character piece about love, imperfection and the perils of botched “existential maintenance”.

Jonathan Morris’s tale sees the Doctor and Nyssa take Brewster to England in 2008, where he’d fallen in love with a girl named Connie back when he had adverse possession of the Doctor’s TARDIS. The trouble is, Brewster’s terrible TARDIS piloting had caused some sort of breach in the fabric of space-time that a couple of Brummie plumbers – pardon me, an existential maintenance team – had to fix. The trouble is, Nicholas Farrell and Sean Connolly’s funny plumbers go a bit too far with their repair job - they plug the hole, but in doing so make a few superficial tweaks to Connie’s world, creating a “perfect world” for her which, naturally, she can’t stand.

“For some people small, pointless blunders are what life is all about!”

Peter Davison clearly relishes the opportunity to misquote that “small, beautiful moments” line from Earthshock that he so loathes; quite the quirk of fate given that here, just as he was in Time Reef, his Doctor is every bit as cantankerous as some of his less cordial incarnations. The Doctor even manages to find insult in Brewster’s relatively swift departure. Davison is outshone though by the performances of John Pickard, who does a delightful job of revealing Brewster’s softer side without smoothing his appealing rough edges too much, and Rebecca Callard, who only had a peripheral role in Time Reef, but excels as plain old 21st century gal Connie.

As Connie herself observes, “It’s not every day that the world turns into a Richard Curtis movie”, and in Doctor Who it’s even rarer. Just for once though, it’s nice to see a companion gifted a comparatively happy ending - but it would be even nicer to see that companion return some day.

On a final note, I really enjoyed being treated to stories from two different writers on this release. It really makes you feel like you’re getting more for your money - especially when you consider just how disparate Time Reef and A Perfect World are.

Copyright © E.G. Wolverson 2008

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