Death Comes to Time

Chapter the 322nd, is like an alternative universe version of a favourite science fantasy franchise (but probably not the one you're expecting). 

Plot:

The Doctor and an android companion he's made for himself, Antimony, are sent a message (in a weird way) by another Time Lord, the Minister of Chance. Two Time Lords (the Time Lords don't seem to live on Gallifrey anymore and are only a few in number scattered around the universe) have been killed on Earth, and the Minister wants the Doctor to investigate. The Minister in turn will return to the planet Santine where the Doctor was previously, and help its people against the invading General Tannis, an evil Time Lord. Ace is a prisoner of Tannis but another Time Lord Casmus rescues her, and trains her to become a Time Lord. The Doctor and Antimony work with a UNIT operative Speedwell on Earth, discovering that two vampires are behind the killings of the Time Lords and some other massacres of innocent people in London. The Doctor kills one vampire by allowing him to drink a little of his blood after secretly eating some garlic (yes, really). The other is killed by Speedwell. The Doctor and the Minister then both separately help the rebels of Santine; well, that's the plan, but neither are very effective. Tannis is a step ahead of the Doctor and kills Antimony. The Minister in anger at the rebel leader getting killed lets rip with his superpowers (the Time Lords have superpowers now), destroying many of the invading troops. Tannis has already left, though; he's planning to invade Earth. Tannis finds and kills Casmus. Ace has been given a TARDIS to travel to a planet where she faces a test. She fails, but this is all part of her training. The Doctor meets her and they travel to Earth. The Brig, Speedwell and UNIT have spaceships now and are ready for the invasion. Tannis confronts the Doctor near Stonehenge. The Doctor uses his superpowers (see above) to destroy Tannis at the cost of his own life.

Context:

So, the blog is again veering away from the resolutely canonical, and therefore I must ask some questions of the next story up for consideration: Does it star the Doctor? Yes, he's a little bit sidelined but he's definitely there. Does it have visuals? Yes, they may be basic, but they are present. Was it released as an official Doctor Who or official spin-off story (i.e. its not an unofficial fan-made proposition)? Yes. Is there a dramatic context to the story (i.e. it's not just a skit)? Yes. Was it released with the intention of being the main attraction for audience engagement (i.e. it's not just an extra on a DVD or Blu-ray)? Yes. Have I already covered it in passing with another connected story? No. With a full house of correct answers, Death Comes to Time was cleared for viewing. I watched from youtube where all the audio episodes are presented with Lee Sullivan's accompanying art. This was over the course of a week in February 2025. I didn't try to get anyone else from the family to watch with me; the story is a bit too niche for that.

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now closing in on the point where I finish everything and catch up with the current stories being broadcast serially (which also might be the end of Doctor Who if you believe what you read in the tabloids!). Beyond the handful of blog posts like this one that cover notable spin-offs, I have completed eight Doctors' televisual eras proper (the third, fourth, seventh, eighth, ninth, eleventh, twelfth and fourteenth Doctors) and 34 out of the total of 40 seasons to date (at the time of writing): classic seasons 1, 3-5, 7-18, 20, 21, 23-26, and new series 1, 2, 4-11, 13 and 14).

First Time Round:

In 2001, I was an enthusiastic reader of and contributor to Doctor Who online message boards (see the Deeper Thoughts section of my 2024 blog post on The Scream of the Shalka for more details). The news that a pilot for a new Doctor Who radio series was being made was much discussed there (the driving force behind Death Comes to Time Dan Freedman who produced, wrote, and directed it, as well as his script editor Nev Fountain, were regular presences on the boards at that time). The news was received with much excitement and anticipation. The disappointment when BBC Radio 4 made the decision not to develop a series was short lived, if I remember correctly, as the announcement that it instead would be developed into a webcast on the BBC's Doctor Who website came very soon afterwards. In July of 2001, I struggled with the realplayer software and my dial-up connection and managed to watch all of the first episode. I thought it was okay; nothing that blew my socks off, but I held out on forming an opinion as it was incomplete. The rest of the story landed between February and May 2002, with chunks of episodes two to five becoming available weekly. The real player often crashed, or timed out; again, I may be misremembering, but I believe I then tried an option aimed at those like me with bandwidth challenges to stream the story audio-only. I found the story difficult to follow without the pictures, and I wasn't particularly enjoying what I was able to see or hear; so, I bailed on the webcast version. I tried again with the audio version when it came out on CD in October 2002. It was still a bit hard to follow everything that was going on, but I made it to the end on that go. I have not listened to or watched the story again until now.

Reaction:

At one point during Death Comes to Time, the words of Tim (as played by Simon Pegg) in the TV comedy Spaced where he says "Jar Jar Binks makes the Ewoks look like Shaft" came to my mind, which led to me thinking the following: Death Comes to Time makes The Phantom Menace look like The Empire Strikes Back. Unfair? Maybe a tad, but the comparison wouldn't leave my mind. This is probably because every moment of Death Comes to Time made it clearer and clearer to me that the mythology of Star Wars was its blueprint. The story is replete with space battles, rebels fighting invading troops and the like; those genre trappings are plentiful in many a Doctor Who story before and after Star Wars was invented, of course; Death Comes to Time, though, builds that material into the tale of the dying days of the final few Time Lords (Jedi), who have magical powers because of their connection to time (the Force), with one of their number Tannis (Vader) having turned to the dark side, but there is hope for a future generation as Ace (Skywalker) is being trained to become a Time Lord (Jedi) by old, beardy mentor Casmus (Obi Wan). There is no equivalent to Ewoks included, but this is a con not a a pro, I think, as some additional levity might have better offset the rather doomy tone. The story emerged from plans for a new Doctor Who radio series; as such, it should and did have free rein to be its own thing and not slavishly follow how Doctor Who had been done before. I've tried to bear that in mind when watching. It's complicated, though, by the inclusion of Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred as the Doctor and Ace. They are a direct link back to a version of Doctor Who that came before with wholly different continuity, set-up, rules and tone.

Another complication is that rather than being on the radio for a mass audience where this break from the past might not have mattered so much, it ended up as a webcast on a website made for fans. Fans want Doctor Who to be like Doctor Who, because they like Doctor Who. It's disconcerting as a fan viewer therefore when Time Lords are depicted as a few nomadic souls wandering the universe, bound by a code that prevents them using magical powers; Time Lords were never ever like that. It's mildly irritating when the Doctor and other Time Lords use those magical powers to resolve plot complications rather than their ingenuity, because one key aspect of the Doctor's appeal is his ingenuity. The Doctor does a bit of investigating in the second episode, but at its denouement the villain essentially gives themself up. He does a bit of planning to rescue a child later in the story, but that comes to nothing as the tables are turned on him. The climax of the story and defeat of the Big Bad just involves the Doctor using a magic off-switch to end the plot; it's imbued with a significance that it doesn't deserve, as it's essentially a cheat, by the Doctor sacrificing his life with that action. This ending is another source of discombobulation to the fan viewer, as it means they have to mentally edit out the Paul McGann TV movie from existence. A lot of those fans didn't like the Paul McGann TV movie, and have likely been trying to mentally edit it out of existence since they first saw it; if it were an easy thing to do they would have done it long before. All this adds up to make Death Comes to Time difficult to watch; and, as mentioned above, the technology already presented something of a barrier, so the difficulties are compounded.

It's fascinating in its way too, looking at an alternate universe take on the show; but. it would only be worth the effort if this new take was truly original, or at least engaging. Unfortunately, it's neither. Breaking with the past sets up the expectation that we'll get something new not just a tired spin on Star Wars, and engagement is undermined by there being too much going on. The action is split between the Doctor and Antimony's bits, the Minister of Chance's bits, and Ace and Casmus's bits. The first two of those are populated with far too many characters, most of whom have silly names that aren't enunciated well as dialogue is usually in haste or with explosions happening over the top of it. The battle that's depicted through most of the story's running time is between the Saltines and the Canestens - is that right? That's what it sounds like, but they are a type of savoury biscuit and a brand of thrush cream respectively, so probably not. The third set of bits with Ace's training is terribly dull; nothing happens in that subplot until the final episode, but that doesn't stop the other action from being interrupted through the first four episodes to cut to another sequence of Casmus being gnomic and irritating. Sometimes, often when they were just getting interesting, a subplot disappears for a long period while the others become the focus; elsewhere, though, there are sequences that restlessly cut back and forth between them after only one or two lines of dialogue (this kind of intercutting is a tell tale sign that someone on the production was trying to make two dull sequences seem interesting by chopping them up). Unnecessary cameos by good actors (Jaqueline Pearce, Anthony Head and David Soul each pop up at different points, say a line, then disappear) further muddle things.

Reportedly, Freedman had planned a 13 episode season for radio; perhaps trying to condense down all the ideas he had for that length of run to five parts created some of the problems I've described. The best section is probably the majority of the second part set on Earth with the Doctor hunting vampires. It has no superfluity of characters (arguably, it has too few as it is very clear who will secretly turn out to be undead given that there are no other suspects); it has a nice, grounded character in Speedwell (he's one of a small number of characters in the whole story that's not a Time Lord, alien, vampire or robot). It sees an honest to goodness mystery, albeit a bit of a gory one, that the Doctor has to use his wiles to investigate and address. If it was standalone, was tweaked a bit to make the Doctor more active in the denouement, had Ace swapped in for Antimony, and didn't have such an overpowering tone of pretentious ennui, it would make a great pilot for new Doctor Who for either radio or online webcast. What actually got made is neither fish nor fowl, a duck-billed platypus of a story. If one wanted to avoid doing something traditional, then it should not have starred Sylv and Sophie. It could potentially have worked if it just had the Minister as protagonist, but changed his name: a story with Stephen Fry playing the Doctor is better than one with him playing someone a bit like the Doctor. It also might just have worked if Paul McGann had starred in it, and died handing the baton over to a newly appointed Time Lord companion or the Minister or both (I can't see McGann wanting to star as the Doctor once more just to get killed off, mind). Anyway, time has passed, Doctor Who's back on TV and Death Comes to Time is what it is. It's probably worth it existing just to have the late great John Sessions in Doctor Who. He is having so much fun, unlike any of the others in the doomy cast of characters, and many of his lines are deliciously evil.

Connectivity:

Death Comes to Time and Day of the Daleks both have titles of four words starting with a 'D', and both feature Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier, plus other UNIT personnel who report into him. Both see significant elements of the series return after five years away from viewers' screens. Sylvester McCoy returned as the Doctor in 2001 after last having been in the series in the TV Movie in 1996, the Daleks returned in the 1972 story after last having been seen in Doctor Who in 1967.

Deeper Thoughts:

Seriously? After being an early adopter of online social communication (see First Time Round section above) I have now, as mentioned in posts passim, given up social media altogether. I occasionally google "Doctor Who" just to check I'm not missing any news about the show, and that recently led me to see an online article published in February 2025 on the Spectator's site, titled "Doctor Who fans - and its writers - need to grow up". Prepare your Max Max Fury Road GIFs because obviously 'That's bait', but I clicked on it anyway. It was a very slightly more thoughtful piece than the usual clickbait; it also wasn't banging on about Doctor Who being woke, as I'd half expected (for those unaware or outside the UK, the Spectator is a weekly news and reviews magazine that's aimed at a highly conservative segment of the market). The writer can't resist a mention of the programme's "woke agenda" but at least has rectitude enough to put the phrase in distancing quotation marks. Mostly, though, the comment piece is a rant about "trash TV" or "pulp TV" (the writer uses both phrases) being taken too seriously. It was prompted by interviews done for the announcement of new writers that worked on scripts for Ncuti Gatwa's second season due to air in spring 2025. One of these writers, Juno Dawson, was quoted saying "Scripting the best TV show of all time is truly a dream come true"; another, Inua Ellams that "[Doctor Who] invited me to dream, to live beyond my reality" and added, "Getting to write for the show felt like touching God". Without social media, I don't know if there was a backlash from the online fan community to the Spectator article (as might have been the intention, at least of the sub-editor creating the headline), but the piece doesn't talk much about fans, anyway. Blame is reserved for the BBC.

Long-term Doctor Who fans are used to articles written by people who don't understand why anyone would like Doctor Who. I don't agree with the editorial slant of the Spectator, but I at least have empathy enough to understand other people might enjoy reading it. There is a nice line in the piece where the writer says "Part of the art of living... lies in knowing what to ignore". He couldn't manage that in this instance, though, because he feels that the BBC as "our national broadcaster" should not present Doctor Who as "a pinnacle of contemporary culture" or "a major artistic achievement" instead of the "mediocre kids' TV show" he feels it actually is. "Not everything need be high culture" he adds. As is often the case, though, he doesn't give examples of high culture, or even of any TV that is not trash; he gives examples instead of children's TV, Top Gear and moments in an old Doctor Who story that are nicely irreverent, not falling into the trap of taking themselves seriously. He also states that "Entertainment is low culture" damning everything on the box, because who is making anything for broadcast - even in news and documentaries - that doesn't aim to entertain the audience at some level? If all TV, including expensive scripted drama like Doctor Who, is trash, then  - guess what - it's all of a level, so comparisons are pointless, a kind of lively arts communism that I didn't expect to see espoused in the Spectator. One could put one's head above the parapet and make an argument that Dickens or Shakespeare are high culture even though they were the popular entertainments of their day, but someone can always disagree and set the culture bar higher. Qualifying high culture becomes such a vanishingly small selection that it ceases to have significance. High and low culture labels therefore have no utility, and the discussion boils down to things that one likes, and things that one doesn't like.

That leaves the question about whether the BBC is right or wrong to hype up the quality of Doctor Who beyond its natural limits. The criticism here I think makes two fundamental errors. The first is to imagine that the content of a single BBC Media Centre press release (let alone the comments of a couple of excitable freelance writers commissioned to work on a series) is in anyway representative of the views or approach of the BBC as an entity, or the people who make Doctor Who as a team. It's a press release, hyperbole is de rigueur. If they could have found a Doctor Who writer willing to say for the press release that they were very excited to be hired to write for a mediocre kids' TV show as they needed the money, I think the Spectator wouldn't hesitate to use that as a different stick to bash the BBC. The second error is in imagining that the content of any TV story, or any dramatic work, is in any way consistent with the process of its making. Creating a comedy requires exactly the same level of seriousness and graft, perhaps more, than making a tragedy. Doctor Who stories (even Death Comes to Time, which was tonally quite dour overall) contain moments of levity and even frivolity. But the people making them can't be frivolous; the massive budget for Doctor Who (a big give-away to those in the know that it's not just a kids' show) and the sheer number of people involved mean everything needs careful, sober management. There's probably moments of fun involved, but never frivolity. One could make up one's own clickbait headlines like 'Overpaid Doctor Who production team needs to take things more seriously' that would spring up over right-wing media if there was ever evidence to the contrary.

  

An instructive example of this was also written about online in February 2025: the Doctor Who story Fear Her had a voice role rerecorded, so it could be returned to the corporation's streaming service, the iplayer. This was because the original voice over was done by disgraced news presenter Huw Edwards, who pleaded guilty in 2024 to three counts of making indecent images of children. The decision to do this was no doubt treated with as much seriousness by those behind the scenes of Doctor Who as any considerations by those looking at any one item of BBC news and documentary archive where Edwards was a presence. Arguably, though, a more delicate job needs to be done by the entertainers. As mentioned above in relation to Death Comes to Time, metatextual distractions that impact an audience's engagement with a drama risk killing the drama altogether. Factual archive will at least have the distance of time and eventually history to potentially ease the sting of what is currently a raw issue. Taking out one acting performance and replacing it with another is risky; the situation with Fear Her was at least made easier by Edwards's performance being rubbish (the new voiceover is better) but it wasn't something that could be done in an offhand manner. In summary: Doctor Who's content should be - and is - relatively light and occasionally irreverent, but that can only be achieved if the people who make it treat it very seriously indeed.

In Summary:

A duck-billed platypus of a story, but not as fun as that sounds.