“Time in Office” is a rather fun anthology audio from Big Finish, which explores the idea of how the Doctor would deal with actually having to take on the Presidency of the High Council of Time Lords, of which he was appointed at the end of “The Five Doctors” (before he ran away again).  Each of the four episodes is a separate little story, all taking place during the Fifth Doctor’s reign in office.  Peter Davison, Janet Fielding, and Louise Jameson star, all of whom give a fun performance within.  

 

The Doctor and Tegan are heading back to Frontios to pick up Turlough, when they are taken out of their time stream and returned to Gallifrey, as the Time Lords have decided to force the Doctor to take his place as the President.  As you'd expect, the Doctor is wholly unwilling to accept this position.When he is confronted with the chaos that could ensue due to the mess Borusa left behind, he reluctantly accepts in order to prevent anyone else abusing the powers that Borusa had put in place before his disappearance.  So the Doctor gets inaugurated and must battle his way through a variety of tedious problems and bureaucracy before he can reach Tegan and stop them wiping her memory of him and sending her back to Earth.  The anthology starts off well, with lots of humour and a breezy pace, which is surprising considering how little is actually happening in this opening episode. Eventually, he manages to keep Tegan on Gallifrey by appointing her Ambassador to Earth (which despite not having any formal relationship with Earth, works out much better for the Doctor than accepting Leela's plan of marrying her). The episode’s main focus is just to put the pieces and characters in place for the following tales of the Doctor’s reign as leader of the Time Lords. 

 

The second episode opens up with The Doctor's first real task as President. is to deal with is to clean up a mess he didn't really make.  Two warring factions on a planet both believe themselves to be truly righteous in the eyes of their God, but their God is an alien being that feeds off the worship.  The Doctor and his presidential company travel to speak with the God in a Military TARDIS (or WARDIS) and hope to attempt to clean up this mess...but when the god realizes that Leela and the Doctor killed his Brother years ago, he vows revenge.  So diplomacy isn't an easy sell.  I enjoyed the concept of the second story...godlike beings that feed off worship, the idea of diplomatic relations falling apart because of one of the many adventures the Doctor and Leela taking down a despot backfires on them.  I also liked Tegan's solution to the problem.