Villordsutch reviews Doctor Who: Star Flight…
As a new or battle-scarred veteran Doctor Who fan, there’s no gatekeeping here; we all love a cracking Who tale. Sometimes it’s the sprawling, clue-strewn epics where threads dangle for weeks. From classic Who’s The Key to Time (Fourth Doctor), stretching gloriously across twenty-six episodes, to the Twelfth Doctor’s emotionally loaded run from Face the Raven through to Hell Bent, long-form Who has always known how to sink its hooks in.
But let’s be honest, sometimes you just want a quick Doctor Who hit. Those tight, beautifully contained episodes that live rent-free in your head for years: Blink, The Girl in the Fireplace, The Girl Who Waited. The ones you can throw on for forty-five minutes and come away feeling like you’ve had a full-course meal.
It’s exactly that lane that Star Flight, the latest audio release from BBC Studios and Penguin Random House UK, confidently pulls into. This is your rapid Who fix: no padding, no indulgence, just story. And it’s a proper little burst of it too.
The ingredients are delightfully simple: a spaceship, something important on board, ancient aliens with a grievance, escalating peril, and the First Doctor and his companions arriving so unexpectedly they start the whole thing off, well, it technically stops everything initially – bringing the Interstellar craft, the Cavis Sunliner Flight 307, to an emergency mid-flight brake. From there, things unravel at a pace as the Kleede, our ancient, wedge-shaped, occasionally oozy alien antagonists, board the ship to reclaim what they believe is rightfully theirs.
With the story clocking in at just over an hour, you are not getting a compressed version of Paul Cornell’s Human Nature. There simply is no space for sweeping character dissections. However, Paul Hayes knows exactly what he is doing. He drops in just enough to ground us: the First Doctor’s clipped authority, flourishes and quiet mischief; Ian with that understated nod to his wartime past; Barbara fondly remembering Susan’s excitement at school. It is subtle, but it is enough. This never feels like an interchangeable “Insert any Doctor here” adventure. It feels lived in. The restraint works.
Descriptions are painted with confident, economical strokes. When the Kleede ooze under a door, it’s described like a baking and bubbling blackcurrant crumble. That was it. Sold. Disgustingly perfect. I didn’t need a paragraph more. Onward we go.
One of the real joys here, aside from some frankly superb sound engineering (and I would strongly recommend headphones), is the wonderfully dry, bureaucratic Britishness of it all. There is more than a hint of Douglas Adams about the passengers’ reactions. Stranded in intergalactic space after a brutal, unexpected stop, their chief concerns revolve around missed connections, broken holiday gifts and potential compensation claims. As someone who has read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy more times than is strictly necessary, this absolutely landed with me.
Then there is Christopher Naylor’s narration. He never tumbles into parody or pantomime, yet every character, from Susan to the AI pilot PYM, feels distinct. That is not easy to pull off, especially in a brisk, tightly paced production like this.
Put it all together, Hayes’ efficient storytelling, the sharp production and Naylor’s confident narration, and Star Flight becomes exactly what it sets out to be: a sharp, satisfying slice of First Doctor era adventure. It is just over an hour long; a commute listen, a late-night “one more before bed”, a swift Gallifreyan fix. And sometimes, that is exactly what you need.
Rating: 8/10
Doctor Who: Star Flight is from March 5th 2026.
@Villordsutch
