2005, Special Release IV
This is an odd tale because it starts kind of part way through the beginning. The Doctor and Peri are aboard a ship and things are already happening. It seems like an episode was cut off of the front end to make it fit on one CD, perhaps… I like the mermaid characters but the girl Amy, she’s seems pretty weak. Why couldn’t she just take the first chance she gets and escape? She uses the reason that if she and her baby aren’t around, then DeRequin will find others of her kind. But at the end, he is totally surprised by the amount of merpeople and even the concept of having tons of them around is amazing to him. Of course, he’s completely insane by then anyway. But if she escaped into the ocean, De Requin would have nothing and wouldn’t be able to capture them again. There’s the problem of her child but if she was clever, she could just act dumb and weak until a plan to escape came to her and she got them both out of there.
But that isn’t her forte, the thinking thing, and she loses her life for it. At least Peri can oppose the Chief Mate and keep the baby safe. Then the merpeople can take their revenge on her captor and survive intact as a people. With the whole ocean to live in, I would think they could have more than a few hundred merepeople living there. They wouldn’t be discovered by sonar because there was no sonar in this timeperiod where sailing ships rule. But they do have pumps and a motor… So what time period is it? hmmm. That’s not very clear, making the story a bit muddled. Overall, it works and perhaps that’s because we, the audience, are thrown into the middle of everything. The captain’s a bit wacked, though. Accuse the Doctor of killing people to throw his first mate off the scent? Huh? It’s not a very strong story. So if there was less drama, it would be a two jelloid story but instead, it slips into the three jelloid “zone.”
Colin Baker and Nicola Bryant
writer: Elliot Thorpe
director: Gary Russell