Operatical

Prerequisites: None needed, although I'd recommend seeing the TV Movie beforehand to catch some references.

Puccini and the Doctor is... fine. Admittedly, it's pretty neat that Matthew Jacobs came back to Doctor Who all these decades later, but I'm reminded that the TV Movie was not a particularly well-written piece of film. Now, this audio is a definite step up, but I wouldn't call it great by any stretch. For starters, I'm just not interested in any of the background characters here. Puccini himself is boring enough that I wouldn't even have remembered his name if it weren't for the title, and Tura didn't really have much time to develop either, since her identity was only revealed in the third act. Still, there is a rather nice through-line of love that connects the characters thematically, and I do like the idea of an alien desperately trying to understand human creativity. This isn't a bad story, but it's quite forgettable.