Contrary to reviews you may have read about this production, as a single piece of work it's excellent. I'm not a big Sylvester McCoy fan, but even though the environment may not be traditional Dr Who, he is instantly recognisable as the Doctor, (a somewhat world weary one), and shines in this series of arcing story lines in a way he never did on television I feel.
I can understand why this splits fans of the original straight down the middle - in this scenario there are few Timelords left and they each have God-like powers they're forbidden to use, lest they destroy themselves. At the end of the recording, as the title suggests, the Doctor apparently dies, (another tranche of TV series fans switch off).
Don't let any of that disway you. 'Death Comes to Time' has a real richness to it: beautiful, cinematic sound and quality performances from the likes of Stephen Fry. It's true that the Gallifrey mythology has been surgically replaced root and branch, but that gives this performance a unique character of it's own which works well. Some bits are tacky: the stereotype police characters; John Sessions camp villain; and a rather tinny rendition of the theme tune considering the lushness of all the other audio content, but these really are minor exceptions.
The idea was originally to carry this on into a season, although the unique aspects of this idea may have lost quite a lot if we were going to go from an interesting one-off to a new way of telling 'Who. Stephen Fry's character, The Minister, was to star in a series of adventures with Ace, now a trained novice Timelord. The Doctor never truely dies of course, and at the end of the envisioned sequence he would be resurrected by his friends in a sort of 'Search for Spock' type moment. All in all then I'm glad 'Death Comes to Time' remains a unique divergence - Dr Who in another dimension perhaps.
Such a pity RTD has said nobody over 45 will ever play the Doctor again most likely, 'Death Comes to Time' demonstrates well that Stephen Fry would have been brilliant in the role.