4. "Only enough for you"
Now, normally this is the kind of thing that fans say that sort of makes me want to punch them in the throat, but bear with me on this one for a moment. If you were not there when the 5th Doctor dies live on the Telly, then time and Big Finish have done you a grave disservice in understanding what exactly that moment was really about. Take a moment here for throat-punching, I'll wait. Here's the thing - We tend to see all of this in rosy-retrospect and Peri was around for long enough after this point that it seems strange to think of her as ever being a stranger. Add to that that the Big Finish audios have inserted roughly 47 billion intervening adventures between Planet of Fire and Caves of Androzani so that it's safe to imagine Peter Davison and Nicola Bryant with gigantic BFF tattoos on their backs by this point. But that was not the way it was at the time. The whole point of that scene was that - and I may be inadvertently quoting the About Time series here because they got this bit exactly right - he was giving up his own life for someone who was
still more or less a complete stranger. The thing about a successful series finale of any show (and the final story for any Doctor is more or less the series finale for that version of the show) is that it finally resolves the underlying question or issue of the entire series. If I might take a terribly fashionable example - The finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of the most satisfactory series finales of the modern age (oh yes it was.) because it very clearly re-asked and then finally resolved the essential question of the entire show's run - How do you live your
own life when the lives of so many other people depend on you sacrificing your own interests to save them? (The answer turned out to be that you share the power you have so that we all are responsible for saving one another, which squares the circle quite nicely.) To take a contentious counter-example, the finale of Lost came in for a great deal of criticism. Not because it failed to answer the show's essential question as much as that it made it clear that the people making the show simply never thought of the series as
having an essential question. The essential question of the Peter Davison era was - Can you fight and defeat monsters and still be a good man. And somewhat surprisingly for an adventure series, the answer turned out to be, 'No'. The best one can do in a universe of monsters, Caves of Androzani concluded, was to be willing to sacrifice everything for even someone you barely knew. That the answer lay in knowing the value of kindness and compassion. In seeing that ultimately it was less about you than it was about others. Which sums up the era nicely. Bad people will do horrible things to you. Help people when you can anyway.