This was the sixth release in the Destiny Of The Doctor arc, created in cooperation with AudioGo for the 50th anniversary.
The Sixth Doctor and Peri receive a recorded message from the Eleventh Doctor. After gushing about Six's truly cool coat for a bit, Eleven tells them to go find an omniparadox in 1492. The TARDIS follows the coordinates and ends up on the Santa María, where they meet (a) a goat and (b) Columbus himself. Peri demands to wrap up the plot and get the hell out as soon as possible, because she knows that Columbus wasn't so much a hero as he was a ruthless murderer guilty of genocide. Also, Peri sees the devil himself roaming about the ship. The omniparadox itself (a ball of shiny light) is found quickly enough with the Doctor's detector, which mimicks its signal, but disappears soon after.
Columbus mistakes the two for a half-naked nubile savage and an exceptionally colourful shaman. Being too egotistical to spend much time thinking, he accepts their mastery of his own language with a bit of a Hand Wave and enlists them to come cure one of his ill sailors. The Doctor realises that the sailor is dying from tuberculosis and, scared that he may damage the web of time if he saves the man's life, tells Peri there's nothing they can do. Peri storms off in a huff and ends up accidentally falling off the slippery deck and into the ocean... losing the TARDIS key (which the Doctor gave her for a few minutes) in the process.
Columbus really takes a while to catch on to the fact that this wasn't some kind of native sacrifice ritual, and gets the shock of a lifetime when the entire sky turns inside out and begins to swallow up planet earth. The disappearance of the omniparadox is causing a massive tear in the web of time. The Doctor is able to stall it by mimicking the paradox signal with his detector, and panicks hard, trying to get back into his TARDIS to save Peri's life. But since the key is somewhere on the floor, he ends up tortured a bit by Columbus and his men instead.
Peri washes up on an island, where the hypnotized natives take her to the "devil" she saw earlier: a giant, ancient buffalo intent on saving his own species. As a herd creature, the buffalo needs a large group of his own kind in order to retain his sentience as the "queen bee". Since the Native Americans have been murdering buffalo for centuries, the herd is about to die out... so he steered Columbus to the island, hoping that the white explorers would murder the natives and save the buffalo. With millions of buffalo roaming the earth once again, the race's intelligence could be saved.
The Doctor eventually figures out that the goat ate his TARDIS key, and solves the problem by holding the goat against the TARDIS door and establishing a goat-based psychic connection. He drags Columbus into the TARDIS and sets off to save Peri. By the time they arrive in the buffalo base, the Doctor is all too happy to commend the villain on his plans, citing the equally successful introduction of cane toads to Australia. Unfortunately, that's when a future version of the buffalo decides to pop in, travelling back in time to warn his younger self about how spectacularly his plans will fail. Fortunately, Columbus picks that exact moment to try and kill the Doctor, hits a bit of Applied Phlebotinum from the present-day buffalo's time machine thing instead (thanks to Peri), and prevents the whole thing from happening in the first place. Since the present-day buffalo never had working time-travel technology, he never travelled back in time to warn himself, and America is free to be colonized by Columbus and see the mass genocide of both the natives and the buffalo. The omniparadox promptly returns.
In the aftermath, Peri is happy that she was able to cause the existence of her entire culture, Columbus goes back to travelling, the ill sailor is cured after all (with a bit of prodding from Peri) and the Doctor insists that the goat would make a fine companion.
Tropes:
- Author Appeal: Nev Fountain (who's dating Nicola Bryant) lovingly includes a few lines about Peri's soaked clothes. The buffallo also comments on her "fatty deposits". (This is of course, all true to how Peri was portrayed in the series.)
- Call-Back: The 11th Doctor mentions he has "a fez now".
- The 11th Doctor also mentions his GPS sounds "like Davros".
- Peri mentions that she and the Doctor have met big time celebs in their travels such as George Stephenson and HG Wells.
- Call-Forward: The Doctor, by aiming considerable psychic pressure through the TARDIS key can activate the lock without the key touching it directly. With a lot more practice, he thinks he might be able to open the doors by just by thinking about it.
- Chaste Hero: Peri thinks the Doctor never shows any interests in women.
- Disproportionate Retribution: Columbus does this a lot.
- Extreme Omnivore Goat
- Fetch Quest: The 11th Doctor sends the 6th Doctor out for one.
- Finger Wag: Peri does one to the Doctor when he's happy about meeting Christopher Columbus, and she expresses her dislike for the man, because of his horrible actions in slavery.
- Fore Gone Conclusion: The Bovine tries to get the Europeans to kill the native Americans, because he assumes they would then leave and leave the buffalo alone. .. yeah.
- Funny Animal: The talking buffalo.
- Fun with Acronyms: The 11th Doctor has a GPS. A Galactic Positioning System.
- Giving Radio to the Romans: The Doctor's reasons why he can't cure someone of Tuberculosis because he'd introduce the cure 400 years too early.
- God Guise: The buffalo has been mistaken for the Devil throughout history.
- Historical Hero Upgrade: Peri points out this happened to Columbus, saying he was a cruel man who exploited the natives.
- Human Bovine
- Human Sacrifice: Columbus thinks Peri falling of the ship was this.
- Insistent Terminology: Christopher Columbus describes himself as the greatest explorer in the world repeatedly in his journals. Until he sees the insides of the TARDIS and sees how easily the Doctor can travel about.
- I Was Quite a Fashion Victim: Subverted. The 11th Doctor loves the Sixth Doctor's coat.
- Mistaken Nationality: Columbus believes Peri and the Doctor are (American) natives.
- No Sense of Direction: Columbus.
- Planet of Hats: The Doctor mentions a planet dedicated to the rhymes of Dr. Seuss.
- Rhymes on a Dime: The Doctor does one with boat, goat, coat and throat.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The villain's main goal.
- Space "X": The "Space Buffalo".
- Species Surname: A Bovine called ... Bovine.
- Take That!: The Doctor and Peri come to the conclusion that America should never have existed in the first place, because its existence in current state is due to the events of this story. And compares the Europeans to Cane toads in Australia.
- The Tape Knew You Would Say That: When the Doctor frowns and leans forward on the console after having heard a message from his future self, the message pops back up and the 11th Doctor says "Now I know you're leaning forward and sighing"
- Temporal Paradox: A massive one that covers the entire continent of America.
- Tricked Out Time: The Doctor pulls a one temporarily, when the web of time starts dissolving because the Omni-Paradox is missing, he uses his Omni-Paradox detector to emit a signal that is similar to it.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: Unsurprising, in a story that features something called an omniparadox, but okay, so when Peri fell off the ship, the Omniparadox disappeared because it "thought" she was dead, which meant she couldn't interfere with the Bovin's plans. Something she was only able to do because she fell off the ship. And then the absence of the omniparadox meant the universe started ending because it "thought" whatever Eleventh was doing to save it wouldn't happen, but then Sixth tricks it with a fake omniparadox. Apparently time itself is not just sentient but unobservant and prone to jumping to conclusions.
- Warts and All: Peri, who's done her research, knows that Columbus was not a nice person.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Peri, remembering her high school teachings, remembers that the natives Columbus met were friendly. So when she encounters them, she remains calm, and doesn't scream. At least until she notices the alien control devices.
