Tony feels the
burrrrrrrn.
The Burning Prince is, not
to put too fine a point on it, a total cracker.
It takes the Fifth Doctor,
who frequently suffered from having a full Tardis, and having to share the
dialogue out amount two or more often three companions, into a universe of his
own while Nyssa and Tegan muck about with tulips and pots in Amsterdam in the
wake of their Omega experience. Set free from his full Tardis, John Dorney
gives us the kind of Fifth Doctor that would have set the screen alight, Peter
Davison ramping up his performance to beyond eleven. Even in the first few
minutes, when faced with the usual inevitability of being in the wrong place
and time, and being immediately captured and marched to a cell, he’s witty,
sarcastic, and very much in control of his universe – he’s as much and
definitively the Doctor as Tom Baker or Jon Pertwee ever were, and it’s
electric to hear an ‘early’ version of the Fifth Doctor who would eventually
dash about the place in his third season.
Instead of meeting up with
Nyssa and Tegan, the Doctor finds himself on a spaceship of the Drashani empire
– Game of Thrones In Space, where the young Prince Kylo is set to marry the
Princess Aliona to unite the warring families of Sorsha and Gadarel, bringing
peace back to a warring empire that spans a galaxy.
Kylo, it turns out, is a spoiled
and gullible pyrokinetic, who, when he gets stressed or angry, sets fire to
things. Rooms. People. Aliona, meanwhile, has been lost when her bridal ship went
down on a hostile planet.
And then there’s the
Igryss. The Igryss is an 8 feet tall natural killing-engine, brought on board the
ship taking Kylo to search for his beloved for experimental purposes.
You’d be right in thinking
that’s a fairly stupid thing to do, and if you’ve seen any sci-fi movie ever,
you’ll know that before very long, the ship is being sabotaged, the Igryss is
released and the crew of the ship are fighting a valiant rearguard action to
try to stay alive.
Imagine the whole of the
Alien movie, but with laser crossbows and the Fifth Doctor, compacted down to
25 breathless, arse-kicking minutes, and you’re more or less there on the first
episode of this story.
Episode 2 largely focuses
on lessons in How Not To Crash And Die In A Deeply Shonky Escape Craft, and the
pace barely slackens at all. And Episodes 3 and 4 respectively cover How Not To
Die On Planet Australia, and, as foreshadowed, Game of Thrones In Space. The
body-count is insanely high, the treachery is varied and the tension twisted,
the pace hits you like a pinball hammer within minutes of the opening credits,
and only stops for a breather when you know you absolutely need one if you’re
not to pass out. In other words, Dorney takes a lesson from some of the very
best Fifth Doctor stories like The Caves of Androzani, gives the Davison Doctor
fewer companions to worry about and sets him free to be active, and clever, and
disapproving, and sarcastic, and what turns out to be an Androzani-style bad
day for the Fifth Doctor results in one of the best-paced, most effectively
characterized audio stories Peter Davison’s had in a long time. Perhaps
perversely of course, that underlines a form of flaw in the Fifth Doctor –
usually uncertain of his own abilities, frequently when he sheds those
uncertainties and starts taking charge of situations, people die, as they did
in great profusion in Earthshock, Warriors of the Deep, Resurrection of the
Daleks and the aforementioned Caves of Androzani. The Burning Prince is another
in those object lessons for the cricket-playing Doctor not to take his control
of situations for granted, and it stands alongside any of them – yes, really, any of them – as a class act that repays
relisten after relisten.
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