Peri Brown - Other Appearances

Other Appearances

Peri Brown has the distinction of being the first humanoid television companion to appear in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip (previously the strip, which began in 1979, depicted the Doctor either travelling alone or with companions created for the strip, while the robotic television companion K9 was featured in several DWM comic strips featuring the Fourth Doctor). Her first appearance is in "Funhouse Part 1" (DWM #102) in which she appears in two panels as a scantily clad apparition manifested by a villain. Two issues later, in "Kane's Story Part 1" (DWM #104), she becomes a regular character in the trip, initially travelling with both the Sixth Doctor and his shape-shifting companion, Frobisher and continuing until the final part of "Up Above the Gods" in DWM #129. "Kane's Story" establishes that Peri at one point during her travels with the Sixth Doctor leaves the TARDIS for reasons left unrevealed and goes to live in New York City where she takes a job in an office, a job she angrily quits for reasons also unrevealed just prior to encountering the Doctor again and voluntarily rejoining him.

The epilogue to the Target Books novelisation of Mindwarp by Philip Martin states that Peri returns to the 20th Century with Yrcanos where the latter becomes a professional wrestler. This tongue-in-cheek conclusion is not reflected in any televised story, and is generally ignored by fandom.

In the Marvel Comics graphic novel The Age of Chaos, written by Colin Baker, Peri lives out her life on Krontep as Yrcanos's Queen and has at least three grandchildren, who are principal characters in the story.

The Virgin New Adventures novel Bad Therapy by Matthew Jones reveals that, although becoming Yrcanos's Queen, Peri blames the Doctor for abandoning her. In the novel, the Seventh Doctor makes peace with Peri after she finds her way back to Earth through a temporal rift on Krontep, and returns her to her time.

The Telos novella Shell Shock by Simon A. Forward reveals that Peri had been sexually abused by her stepfather. This is hinted at in the Past Doctor Adventures novel Synthespians™ by Craig Hinton, which also reveals that her parents were Janine and Paul Brown, and that her father died in a boating accident when she was thirteen. She has two step-siblings from her mother's marriage to Foster.

Bryant voiced the character of Peri in several audio plays produced by Big Finish Productions, alongside both Peter Davison as the Fifth Doctor and Colin Baker as the Sixth Doctor. In several of these stories, the Fifth Doctor and Peri are joined by another companion, the Egyptian princess Erimem.

In the audio play Her Final Flight, the Sixth Doctor finds Peri on a remote planet, where she apparently dies of a virus, although it is revealed that the entire story was part of a fantasy designed to make The Doctor kill himself.

One audio play, The Reaping, introduces Peri's mother, Janine Foster, played by American actress Claudia Christian (although in reality, Christian is three years younger than Nicola Bryant). The play, set in 1984, confirms Peri's late father's name as Paul and mentions that Howard and Janine Foster have gone their separate ways, but does not mention Peri's step-siblings. Janine is killed at the end of the play due to an accident involving Cyber-technology, cutting Peri's last familial tie to Earth.

Another audio play, Peri and the Piscon Paradox states that the Time Lords made several adjustments to her time line, resulting in at least five alternate versions of Peri with different fates, including one that thought she never travelled in the TARDIS, but instead moved to California and eventually hosted a talk show called The Queen of Worries.

The canonicity of these other appearances, like all Doctor Who spin-off media, is unclear.

Future show runner Steven Moffat mentions an unnamed "Warrior Queen on Thoros Beta" in his 1996 short story, "Continuity Errors".

Bryant played the role of "Miss Brown" in the first three installments of the BBV video series The Stranger, opposite Colin Baker as the Stranger; although the character is never explicitly identified as being Peri (much as the Stranger was never directly linked to the Doctor) there are nonetheless similarities in the two characters, with one major difference: Bryant uses her natural English accent for Miss Brown rather than affecting an American one as she did with Peri.