He's playful and committed to justice and clever, and improvising so much he impresses himself he just happens to be confined to one planet. But if the Doctor did live on Gallifrey and try to work within its structures, this is how he would do it. This is the kind of thing Doctor Who writers often struggle with- on audio, when the Doctor becomes someone else, you often wouldn't even recognize them as the Doctor except for the actor playing them. More than that, this story does a good job of maintaining the Doctor's essential Doctorishness in a non-Doctor situation. You can hear Paul McGann saying the lines. I'm not sure, but I do think Parkin does a great job with the (kind of) eighth Doctor. Why tell this story in that world? What is Parkin trying to say about a Doctor who lives on Gallifrey? It's very epic- but on the other hand, it feels like just another adventure in a storyworld where the Doctor lives in Gallifrey. Why tell a story about the Doctor not leaving Gallifrey? What kind of point is this book making? I'm not quite sure. On the other hand, I did kind of wonder what the point of it all was. The book is chock-full of great ideas I loved the Needle and its inhabitants I thought the Sontarans and the Rutan have rarely been so well depicted. You get an amazing sense of scale and power at the same time you see how and why a Time Lord can never actually do anything: a group of people whose power is so momentous they can never make use of it.
The details of how the Capitol operates, the Citadel, the relationship between the Time Lords and other Gallifreyans, the details on the technologies they possess, they're all so well done.
But Lance Parkin does a great job with the Time Lords and Gallifrey, arguably better than anyone ever. When I was a young Doctor Who fan, I was fascinated by the Time Lords after years of mediocre Big Finish stories about them, I've come to think that killing them off was the best thing that ever happened to them, and I'd happily go a decade without going to Gallifrey or hearing about the Matrix or transduction barriers. The real pleasure of the book is in the worldbuilding. Is it a Doctor who returned home? Or one who never left? Or one who has yet to leave? There are hints that would indicate it's a Doctor who's settled down after a long time traveling the universe there are also hints that indicate the tv adventures we know didn't happen. The Doctor seems to be the one portrayed on screen by Paul McGann, but he lives on Gallifrey the Time Lord we would call the Master is a government official called the Magistrate, and they are friends.
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