Monday 5 February 2018

Big Finish Reviews+ The Diary of River Song, Series 3


River Song.

Possibly the character most ‘like’ a female version of the New Who Doctors before there was a female version of the New Who Doctors, she was a character born in complexity: the child of two Tardis companions, imbued with the regenerative properties of Time Lords, but stolen from her parents at an early age, and trained to be a Doctor-killing psychopath, who eventually fell in love with her prey, gave up her remaining regenerations to cure him, and went on to marry him, serve time for his murder and eventually die to save his life in the Library. River Song was the ultimate Steven Moffat instance of having your cake and eating it too – she was everything, killer of the Doctor, wife of the Doctor, time-travelling psychopath redeemed by love and ultimate hardcore fangirl.

Series 3 of the Diary of River Song from Big Finish deals more directly than ever before with the part of her psychology that is frequently ignored since her redemption - her relationship with the woman who stole her away from her parents, Madam Kovarian, and how her existence and her use for the fulfilment of a psychotic goal impacted the universe.
As draws for an audio series of River Song stories go, that’s pretty high up there, giving River more in-depth character context than she’s often allowed.

In The Lady In The Lake, Nev Fountain poses the question of why, if you were Madam Kovarian, you’d settle for one proto-Time Lord assassin when you could have a whole stable full, and what such socially-dislocated proto-Time Lords might think about their ability to apparently cheat death.

In a story that’s death-heavy but manages to punch at a solid comedy weight into the bargain, Fountain pulls the threads of his central story tight in both the first and final reels, delivering a body-blow of emotion that deepens the reality of the world of River and Kovarian far beyond anything that appeared on TV, while showing how important River’s redemption was, by the sharp contrast of showing us what life is like for those who are like her, but who never found their way past the psychopathic religious zealotry of their wicked foster mother.

A Requiem For The Doctor, by Jac Rayner, is more of a traditional Doctor Who story, with a few River bends along the way. River joins up with the Fifth Doctor and his companion Brook to investigate whether Mozart finished his Requiem, and whether in fact he died of natural causes or was poisoned. The story quickly moves on to uncover a market in special poisons that help battered or abused wives to deal with their repugnant husbands, and there’s at first a seeming murder mystery which evolves into something rather deeper and more meaningful.

There’s no real disguising the fact that Peter Davison’s Doctor and River Song feel like an odd pairing, with nothing like the chemistry of Colin Baker’s Sixth Doctor and River in the second box set. As he himself says in Rayner’s episode, ‘River doesn’t need me. And I quite like to be needed.’ He’s the young Doctor with the grandfatherly soul, more comfortable acting as a guide to the universe for younger ingénues (like Nyssa, Peri and Brook), than he is dealing with the ballsier type of women who occasionally plague him (like Tegan and River). It’s an awkwardness that is thrown into sharp relief in My Dinner With Andrew by John Dorney, as Davison plays a number of roles in what is essentially The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, only with more attempted assassination. It’s a comedy romp with a funny French waiter, numerous versions of several people all in the same place at the same time, only hiding in different rooms, and for most of its length it plays distinctly as trans-temporal farce, only occasionally slipping into pathos as innocents are drawn increasingly into the dance of Kovarian and River over whether the Doctor lives or dies.
Oh and as an extra-special bonus for Hitch-Hiker’s fans, it has Peter Davison eschewing meat and ordering a green salad. It’s the little touches that matter.

The lightest episode in terms of tone, it’s by no means a straightforward one, and the phrase ‘timey-wimey’ might have been invented to describe it, but in terms of episodes to re-listen to, My Dinner With Andrew is probably your go-to on this box set because of the speed at which the farce is played.

Matt Fitton’s capstone to the set, The Furies, is a curious story that brings River home to her younger self’s bedroom, complete with disembowelled teddies and throwing stars. It shows an aspect of her character frequently forgotten or thrown away – the training she received as a child in the art and mentality of psychotic killing, so she’d be able to destroy the Doctor at any opportune moment. The chance to meet up with the ‘next generation’ of River-alikes, including H1, H2 and O (yes, really) shows us the different ways in which elements of her essential personality, before it was broadened by experience of the Doctor and his universe, were foregrounded. It also shows us Frances Barber’s Kovarian in fuller flight than at any point in the box set so far, as she experiences not only the likelihood of destruction by the main branch of her own church, but rebellion in her ranks, the possibility of a poltergeist and the personal hell that is bad dreams. There’s lots to enjoy in The Furies – including the apparent breakdown of Kovarian’s always edgy personality, taut as it is on the very edge of religious terror every second of the day. That taut determination is tipped over into madness in The Furies and it feels like the right complement to everything we know about River and Kovarian from their on-screen adventures.

Series 3 of The Diary of River Song is a slick production that sees Alex Kingston increasingly at home in the audio medium, and takes River back if not all the way to her roots, then to the place where her early psychology was formed. It gives her origin an expanded reality that you only realise it needed once you’ve heard it. More than either of the previous box sets, it feels like part of the TV chronology of her story, just a part we never got to see on screen. That makes it a set you’re going to need to listen to if you’re any kind of River fan, because you currently don’t know all of the story.


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