One word sprang to mind as I finished listening to this story: portentous.

This is a story which wants to be Doctor Who on a GRAND SCALE. This is Doctor Who that wants to be poetic. This is Doctor Who that wants to be ‘about’ something.

And it just doesn’t work.

However much we may dislike certain things RTD has done since bringing back Doctor Who in 2005, there is no doubt that he understood the show. For all the differences between modern and classic Doctor Who, the throughline from one to the other is clear. They feel like the same show.

Death Comes to Time - released 12 years after Survival and after Big Finish had already started making Doctor Who on audio - simply does not feel like Doctor Who in anything but the barest, most basic aspects.

Sylvester McCoy plays a Doctor which does feel, at least to start with, like a development of his TV characterisation - particularly the mysterious manipulator of Season 26. Sophie Aldred plays Ace pretty much as she was on TV with slightly more maturity. And the TARDIS is here.

But beyond that, this is a story about gods and the games they play. It isn’t really Doctor Who.

Reframing the Time Lords as beings of immense power - they can tell someone to die and they will die - is not something that works for me. I tried to rationalise it as an extrapolation of the Time Lords seen in The War Games where they are far more god-like than the petty bureaucrats that we see throughout the rest of the classic era but it simply didn’t ring true. The idea that the Doctor has spent 26 years hiding the fact he could end a life with a single thought isn’t even close to the character we know and love.

There are some interesting characters such as the Minister of Chance, played well by Stephen Fry but there is so much overracting across the cast (including Fry in later episodes) that the entire thing just feels like an overblown, melodrama written by someone who never understood what made Doctor Who work in the first place.

The worst offender for the overracting is John Sessions. I’ve never been a fan of him. He was always the least funny contributor to improv comedy ‘Whose Line is it Anyway’ and always seemed to carry himself with an air of superiority which was an unearned as it was irritating. As General Tannis he doesn’t so much chew the scenery as make a five course meal out of it. The reveal that Tannis is also a Time Lord but a very, very bad one, doesn’t ever feel earned and seems to merely serve as a reason for the Doctor to sacrifice themselves to save Earth (and the universe or something - it all got a bit unclear at the end).

The story doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. We start with an invasion of a planet, but then we’re chasing vampires around middle England. Then we’re with Ace and her mysterious mentor because she’s becoming a Time Lord (and exactly how that is possible is obfuscated by a whole load of poetic nonsense about ‘what makes a person’). And then we’re formenting rebellion on the invaded planet and witnessing a massacre before suddenly Tannis is targetting Earth instead but gets defeated by the Brigadier.

Yes, the Brigadier. Suddenly, in the final episode, it is as if the story suddenly remembers its supposed to be Doctor Who so shoves the Brigadier and UNIT into the final episode to convince us it hasn’t been trying to forge it’s own narrative path, divorced from anything the original show gave us, for the previous four.

The 90s saw various attempts at re-inventing Doctor Who - the continually aborted movie, Leekley’s bizarre ‘bible’, even the later Scream of the Shalka. None of them really understood what was central to the show’s narrative success (although Shalka probably came the closest). Death Comes to Time is a result of that same era of uncertainty and experimentation.

For me, it really doesn’t work. It feels very much like a BBC Radio drama - the sound design and music in particular doesn’t even begin to compare to Big Finish - even at this early point of their production. A story which wants to repaint Doctor Who as something only tangentially connected to what came before is not going to win me over as a fan.