Doctor Who: The Burning Prince

The first part of a trilogy of stories in which consecutive Doctors (all sans companions) visit an interstellar empire at different points in its history. This first part is a fairly straight action adventure story, which isn't something that always works well on audio, but here, is reasonably successful.

We see relatively little of the Drashani Empire itself, beyond the fact that it employs some unusual weaponry, although we do discover that it's emerging from a decades-long civil war between rival branches of the ruling family. (It's described as ‘feudal' at one point, but from the little we can tell, that's probably not accurate). The efforts to end the war by uniting the rival houses through marriage forms the backdrop to the story, although most of it really involves running from monsters set loose on and around a number of different spaceships.

Which is fairly well done, but doesn't leave us with a particularly deep plot, beyond trying to guess who, of the ever-dwindling list of suspects, might be the one letting the monsters escape. However, this is offset by a story that keeps moving, with the threat never letting up for long, and by a sense of fatalism as things progressively go from bad to worse. For all the action, this isn't an upbeat story, and the nature of the ending is unusual for Doctor Who (though not unprecedented). The lack of companions, which is also unusual for a Fifth Doctor story, also helps in this regard.

Despite the lack of depth, and the title character being a bit of an eejit, and taken together with some good soundscaping, that's enough to nudge it up to four stars for me. I'll note that this is a standalone story, although the ending is clearly setting up events for the sequel, where we'll see some of the longer-term fallout to what happens here.