Tony welcomes a masterful return for River.
The Diaries of River Song,
as a series concept, can, like its parent show, both have its cake and eat it –
it can run a box set on the basis of a single story-arc across four stories, or
a shorter arc across fewer stories with some add-ons or cut-away stories, or,
as here in its fifth series, it can simply pluck episodes from across all of
River’s timeline.
Here, in little more than
a couple of introductory lines at the top of Episode 1, The Bekdel Test by Jonathan Morris, it sets out its stall simply
and effectively. River is married to the Doctor. When you’re married to
someone, even in their distinctly complicated temporal manner, you take on
their baggage, because their baggage becomes your baggage. And so we’re off, picking
instances from River’s diary when she ran into four incarnations of the
Doctor’s biggest baggage – his one-time friend, regular enemy, now…something
slightly more complex than either. These are four glorious adventures in which
River Song meets the Master.
In The Bekdel Test, what
we have are people – or at least, people-like constructs – who imprison the
evil, the stark raving bonkers, and the deeply useful. Which is how you get
noted psychopath and Doctor-killer River Song into catfighting distance of
Missy, the quixotic, comedic, unpredictable incarnation of the Master played by
the quixotic, comedic, unpredictable Michelle Gomez. Cue hilarity – no really,
it’ll make you laugh out loud – when River mistakes her for a range of other
potential Time Ladies, and then they team up to try and break out of the
unbreakable prison. There’s more to The Bekdel Test than simply trying to
escape from a prison of course – there would have to be, to justify the
presence of the two time-twisters, and there’s a deeply cryptic clue as to
what’s really going on in the title. Good luck with that one. You could argue that the plot beneath a plot
beneath a plot…beneath a plot is a touch too twisted for most human brains to
cope with, but that’s the point of getting these two together. They’re both accustomed to being the cleverest
life-form in the room – if you’re going to face a problem that can give the
pair of them their money’s worth, it has
to be twistier than the average paradox. Getting Alex Kingston and Michelle
Gomez together in a story is absolute verbal dynamite – you simply have to
light the fuse, run away to a bunker of your choosing and listen to the
explosions. Too much of these two together might prove to be exhausting, but
here, there are enough sharp edges to their relationship to stop it falling off
the cliff of smugness, meaning The Bekdel Test is a sparkly game of mad
invention which ends jussst the right side of that fun/exhaustion borderline,
resulting in a story that will come back to you for the quality of its lines weeks after you’ve listened to it.
Animal
Instinct, by Roy Gill, brings
us River the archaeologist and professor – both of which elements of her
personality it’s sometimes easy to forget. Ancient ruins, vicious beasts, and
Geoffrey Beevers’ more aristocratic, burned, less playful Master combine to
make this particular expedition rather less straightforward than it might
otherwise have been.
Technically, Animal
Instinct is a Jumanji episode – River, her student, a couple of locals with a
useful ship…and the Beevers Master have to get from A to B without dying along
the way at the hands, claws, teeth and other appendages of destruction of the
indigenous fauna. As such, it’s perhaps not the most innovative use of Beevers’
Master, but Gill’s writing of the character, and Beevers’ performance, do
enough to keep you interested in him – and in his reaction to and relationship
with River, from start to finish. It would undoubtedly be a spoiler to tell you
if they all survive. But it is the
Beevers Master, waking up here from quite a long cryo-sleep, so you can
probably do the body-count mathematics unaided.
The
Lifeboat and the Deathboat,
by Eddie Robson, is a real landmark moment for Big Finish, because having
resurrected TV Masters Beevers, Jacobi and Gomez, and invented a couple of its
own, in the likes of Alex Macqueen and James Dreyfus, this story brings the
Eric Roberts Master from the Eighth Doctor TV movie back for a second story.
And you know what? In
Robson’s hands, what you get is a fantastic Master, absolutely in some ways the
antithesis to the showboating version who likes to drezzz for the occasion in
the movie. This is a Master in deep cover, playing a time traveller with some
sincerity and dedication, revealing the almost casual callousness of his incarnation
only briefly and when necessary to get the job done.
The job, this time out, is
to keep his daughter safe – yes, you read that right – in the vortex, salvage
scrap, and keep out of trouble while a timey-wimey version of Moby Dick plays
out around him. As events catch up to him, and River cottons on to who he is
and what he’s actually up to, a
secondary plot emerges which would have had no problems fitting in on Star
Trek: the Next Generation, as neither the Roberts Master nor almost anything or
anyone else, is what they seem.
Roberts is a revelation
here if you mostly know him from the TV movie, and more from him at Big Finish
would be a joy. Oh, and just in case you were wavering over the ‘Add to basket’
button, yes, you absolutely get an explanation here of what happened after the TV movie that let the Master
survive.
And River Series 5 ends
with Concealed Weapon, by Scott
Handcock.
Ooh, the craftsmanship
here. It’s the same sort of feeling as when you read a really good book, find a
painting or a piece of music that opens up the windows in your mind and shows
you its artistry, so you nod at it and smile. What a Chippendale is to chairs,
Concealed Weapon is to Master stories. And indeed, River stories. Set during
the Time War, this is River getting by as a crew member on a deep space exploratory
spaceship. The crew emerge from cryo-sleep, and then things start going oddly
wrong. There’s an intruder down in the bowels of the ship somewhere. The
computer starts getting properly HAL-style uppity. And all the while, from the available
evidence, River believes her husband is coming to save her and explain things
and be infuriating.
He really isn’t.
This is a match-up of
River and The Man With Black Holes In His Eyes, Derek Jacobi’s War Master. What
he’s doing there is revealed in an exposition-heavy rush at the end, but there
are two necessary caveats to that. The first is that his late reveal in the
story allows him to be what this Master has historically, on TV and in audio,
been – a force of hidden pollution, striking like a cobra when necessary.
Knowing he’s there before River does gives his presence an unspoken threat here, before the reasons for his presence are even
actually relevant, and that gives you an elevated heartbeat throughout much of
the story, like watching a horror movie, knowing the stalker is out there in
the dark and watching the innocent encounter him cluelessly.
And secondly, the forced
march of an ending allows River to reclaim the right to her story – it’s always
a danger when you have a Master in your story that they’ll overpower your
presence. But the ending shows River in all her compassionate, bloody-minded,
psychopathic, never-play-chicken-with-ME-Sweetie glory, stealing the War
Master’s thunder and turning his tables in a gloriously River style, leaving
her a latecomer to the party of his presence, but an unconquerable badass once
she knows what’s what.
The fifth series of The Diaries of River Song is a full-on
power-chord of writing and performance, with four great Masters pitting their
different wits and styles against the phenomenon that is River. The
straightforward episodic nature of the stories allows them each to be a breath
of fresh air and a punch of new energy, and the different ways in which River
engages with them all make for a whirlwind waltz of fun and danger. For our
money, this freshness, energy and punch makes The Diaries of River Song Series
5 a joy, both for the match-ups with the Masters, and as a River series in its
own right.
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