Big Finish Reviews+ The Diary of River Song Series 7 by Tony J Fyler

Tony’s putting his feet up on the desk

 when this dame walks in…

Whereas Volume 6 of The Diaries Of River Song had a distinctly Doctor Who sensibility, with River popping in here and there to have adventures in the gaps the Doctor left behind, Volume 7 is very much River set loose from the Doctor altogether, having particularly criminal-flavoured adventures of her own, in (for the most part, at least) her Melody Malone guise. And if you’re going to have the big-haired investigator on the case, why not take the opportunity that affords to write takes on various different kinds of crime thriller? So these are not so much The Diaries Of River Song as The Casebook Of Melody Malone.

Up first, we’re in Scandi Noir territory with Colony Of Strangers, by James Goss. Most of the conventions of this comparatively new genre of crime fiction are here for the referencing on the particularly Nordic colony of Bondar – it’s damn cold, people are mostly exhausted and miserable, there are murders, or at the very least bodies (#ItsComplicated), there are cover-ups and connivings based both in the vested interest of would-be beneficiaries, and the ordinary grimness of people being people. There are frightened people too, afraid of strangers and interruptions to their established pattern of life, and afraid, sometimes, of each other, aware that something’s going on that shouldn’t be, but often uncertain exactly what it is. As such, the atmosphere is set for uncertainty, misunderstanding, mishap, murder and bloody-minded endless grimness. That said, between them James Goss and Alex Kingston wring some humour out of the set-up without ever going wildly over the top and breaking the mood. There are classical sci-fi moments too, with people walking about who are most assuredly dead, odd bodies being dumped on the beach just when River’s due to have a nice cup of tea and a stroll, a classically tight-lipped mayor (Wanda Opalinska), and a police chief (Charles Armstrong) surprisingly unskilled in the art of solving crimes, for the simple reason that there more or less aren’t any in his world. It’s all balanced on the knife edge it needs, creepy, funny, with a high stress note and, just beneath the permafrost, lashings of fairly traditional science-fiction underpinning the Scandi Noir setting. As such, what you get is River Song does The Killing (at least almost never literally), but without the sense of ennui and desire to go and sit in the fridge that the original brought with it.

Abbey Of Heretics, by Lizbeth Myles, takes us to the time and very nearly the place of the Brother Cadfael mysteries, by Ellis Peters. For those criminally in the dark, Brother Cadfael is a Benedictine monk during the period in British history when, notoriously, ‘Christ and his saints slept’ – the war for the English crown between Stephen of Blois and Empress Matilda. If you’re still none the wiser, think 1139-54, just over a hundred years after the Norman Conquest. Where Cadfael solves crimes that step inside his cloisters or worry the lawmakers of his local town of Shrewsbury, Sister Melody, to be fair to her, just wants to have a night in with a very good book. A very…specific very good book, to be sure, and one where, if she’s absolutely honest, she’s more interested in the pictures than the words, but you’d be amazed at the trouble a girl can get into in the 12^th century for reading the wrong sort of literature. Especially if there’s a mysterious plague creeping through the abbey. And a monkish ghost popping up to scare something-absolutely-other-than-the-willies out of the inhabitants. Melody runs foul of three nuns in particular, each of them in their way possessed of extraordinary powers. Sister Ursula, played by the vocally spot-her-in-a-noisy-room distinctive Jaye Griffiths, is the librarian and illuminator, and is keenest to give the new novitiate some words of friendly advice. Sister Patrick (Aurora Burghart) is the keeper of the infirmary, and very definitely just a healer,  not a miracle worker, damnit, while Sister Magdalene (the unsurpassable Janet Henfry) is a nun with a recognisably austere objection not just to the book Sister Melody’s looking for, but to all potentially salacious literature and history, a would-be whitewasher of the souls of those in her care.

Ghost monks, unusual signals, and a book that absolutely shouldn’t exist in a 12^th century abbey lead Sister Melody to uncover alien plots, though they’re nothing like the traditional ‘Earth invasion’ palaver in which they Doctor invariably finds himself involved. This is smaller, more intimate dabbling, though there’s still at least one corpse too many by the end of the adventure, innocents sacrificed to an alien ambition.

Lizbeth Myles’ script is neatly full of intrigue and secrets, echoing conclaves, almost Da Vinci Code style mysteries, a dash of The Name Of The Rose style murder and a not inconsiderable body count. With mysterious plague among the sisters, ghost monks, hostile powerbrokers, savers of souls prepared to go to extreme lengths and a wholly remarkable book, there’s never an overt ticking clock in this story, which is absolutely to Myles’ credit, but there’s certainly a sense of intensifying danger as time goes by and death follows death.

There’s also something more than a little glorious about River Song, who’s worn the habit before more in eyebrow-raised pastiche, actually donning it and living among the sisters as one of them, an undoubted sinner by the standards of the age, but resisting the urge to bring her greater knowledge to the fore in a mocking way – there’s very little of the exuberant ‘Oh, Sweetie, the things I’ve seen…’ about her here, and it’s refreshing to hear River in a truly immersive cover, never mocking the sisters’ faith or obedience to what is of course a patriarchal system, despite the reality of her own freewheeling universal life. In that acceptance of who they are and why they’re here, in, to use an obvious word, that sisterhood, there seems to live a River Song more real than her legend, more compassionate than her gun-toting record, and more righteously furious than the wider universe generally lets her be. In that wider, futuristic universe, River Song meets life and death, as we do even now, as inevitable elements of her ongoing story. In the cloistered environment, it’s as though the innocence of some souls is brought closer to her emotional core, and she reacts, in response to all the wider universe’s normalization of death, with a more sharply moralistic flame than we’re used to from her, to protect and to avenge those who died before they needed to. We all love River in her striding, cocky, universe-is-her-oyster style, but here, there’s a sense of what it’s like to really be River Song, to know a lot and to have to make that knowledge count for something.

After which, we’re back on relatively familiar River territory in Barrister To The Stars by Big Finish newbie James Kettle.

We point out his newbie status because it’s the only point at which such a thing is noticeable in this script, which is really a clashing together of worlds and legends. Without ever naming names, this is River Song meets Rumpole Of The Bailey – a crime-solving lawyer on a UK TV show (and subsequently a series of hilarious novels) written by John Mortimer. Both Horace Rumpole and Roger Hodgkiss (who takes his place in this story with a neat inversion of their initials) are curmudgeonly barristers at the Old Bailey, describe themselves as ‘Old Bailey hacks,’ have formidable wives and an interest in claret, and face particular nemeses on the bench. In Rumpole’s case that nemesis is at least initially a judge nicknamed ‘The Bull.’ Hodgkiss’ arch-enemy is a judge played with formidable fire and a similar mindset by Annette Badland (familiar to most Who fans as Margaret Slitheen).

All of this is fine and dandy and in itself gloriously funny, but what, we hear you cry, has any of it to do with River Song?

Very simple. River’s been accused of murdering a warlord at an interstellar conference. She needs a defence lawyer. She zaps Roger Hodgkiss (played by the force of voice acting nature that is David Rintoul) out of his 20^th century practice at the Bailey to come and both defend her, and if at all possible, to find out who really killed the Duke of Ferrox (Think Brian Blessed’s career, played with a Scottish accent by Clive Hayward). What you essentially get from this story then is River Song…meets Rumpole Of The Bailey…set in something like The Curse Of Peladon.

You know that’s going to be fun, right?

Fun is absolutely the order of the day. Hodgkiss is chosen by River to represent her in the space court (presided over by a computer with what turns out to be the personality and voice of Badland’s Earth judge character), while investigating a giant sentient puddle of acid with a protein fixation, a telepathic seductress with low self-esteem, the Duke’s faithful homicidal retainer, a being who’s dislocated in time by about half an hour, so you just have to have your half of the conversation, go and make yourself a cup of tea, come back and wait for them to give you the answers you asked for, and a workforce who share a personality and a skills base, so they’re all the same person, but yet can share the skills to do any of the work you need them to, from maids to plumbers to reception staff and more.

There’s a gorgeous amount of free-range imagination in the creations Kettle brings to this story, while still focusing on the Rumpole riff and not being afraid to give River some dubious motives of her own – not least when she, the accused, becomes Hodgkiss’ junior solicitor, investigating her own case.

After the bleak Nordic crimefest of Colony Of Strangers and the more intimate, emotionally engaged River of Abbey Of Heretics, Barrister To The Stars, (or Barrister Galactica, as Big Finish writer Matthew J Elliott suggested to me it should be called – and you’ve got to be honest, you can see his point, can’t you?) gets back to kickass semi-comic River and delivers a real pick-me-up. The smashing together of these ingredients, and doing it with this level of aplomb, makes the idea of a return engagement for James Kettle something to be contemplated with joy and impatience.

Speaking of return engagements, Roy Gill’s Carnival Of Angels brings back not only classic Melody Malone, Private Eye, but sets its story just a little way outside of Manhattan (Coney Island, to be exact), and finds something new to do with the Weeping Angels. As if that weren’t enough returns, it also brings back Timothy Blore as Luke Sullieman (If you need the shorthand: alien werepanther, and student of Professor Song’s) from his previous River story, Animal Instinct. We know of course that Angels zap you and live off your time energy. Carnival Of Angels is both a glorious and a deeply twisted use of that fact – imagine someone had found a way to give the Angels a kind of…fast food. Fast food like you find at every carnival in the world…

Mm-hmm.

Stylistically, there’s fun here too, with a very Philip Marlowe vibe to the introductory narration, and a character who talks like Marlowe but lacks his investigative chops, leaving the field clear for Melody Malone to solve the mystery of the carnival, and allowing Luke a way to progress out of River’s formidable shadow.

The Diary Of River Song, Volume 7 is a collection of stories that focuses more than usual on the idea of Melody Malone, and on the adventures that focus on her involvement in solving very particular kinds of crime. While it’s by no means the only way to go with future River sets, enough is done here to establish the idea of Melody-solving-crimes as a viable way to at least add to the broad spectrum of adventures she can have. Imagine a future in which Miss Melody Marple seeks out sinners in St Mary Mead, where River does Columbo – ‘Oh, and one more thing, Professor…’, where she sings a Midsomer Melody, or where she of course goes back to visit the Great Detective of Paternoster Row…

As an idea, using River in her detective guise for the length of a whole box set might initially have raised eyebrows among some listeners. What the writers and actors who bring this set to life have done is prove the concept has legs, little grey cells and a sonic magnifying glass. The next time Melody Malone gets a box set, the same eyebrows will be raised in excitement.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Diary of River Song, Series 5 by Tony J Fyler

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.

Big Finish Reviews+ The Diary of River Song #4 by Tony J Fyler

Tony needs a lie down in a darkened room.

‘I’m sorry, this is all very complex – which for me is saying something.’

So says Professor River Song at one point in this fourth instalment of her diaries – and she ain’t just whistling Dixie. You’re going to need your special anti-paradox boots to make it through this one with your brain intact. But more than any previous River Song set, this instalment has a self-contained story-arc, with a beginning, a what-the-hell, a staggering diversion and an end.

Time In A Bottle, by Emma Reeves and Matt Fitton is the story of the beginning (or at least the resurgence) of a Big Bad in the universe, the impressively named Discordia. They are, or at least can be thought of as, the Anti-Time Lords. A species with the awesome power of time travel and the social conscience of Donald Trump. A bunch of thugs with a certain Douglas Adams quality of giving not a single fig for the laws of time, the web of time, the any-damn-thing-else-you-care-to-mention of time. Whatever you do to beat them, they naff off back in time, change things so the circumstances were different and you failed, and then zap back to the point where you beat them, more or less to gloat.

So, they’re a bunch of happy chaps.

It’s also a tale of an archaeological expedition with River and her old college rival, now-Professor Jemima Still, and a cast of odd-bods, into a realm where the only time is that which you bring with you. Which is theoretically fine if you’re a complex space-time event like River Song, and altogether less fine if you’re not. There are, it seems hardly necessary to explain, shenanigans here, which lead River to make a very big mistake, and lead the Discordia to laugh their knickers off as things go Badly Wrong for the universe, and rather splendiferously right for them. The actions in this story are what power the rest of the box set, because once the Discordia get started, they’re like a stubborn stain – you can scrub and scrub but you can’t get rid of them, because, in a marvellously paradoxical fashion, as soon as you’re on their radar as wanting to get rid of them, they’ll nip back to the Pleistocene era of your planet and nuke it into slag, just to stop you. They’re really that kind of thug – they’re Vogons with time travel.

Time In A Bottle delivers all that, but also rather faffs about with the story of an insectoid species taken unawares by the Discordia, who have one final egg left, one queen, and one worker. This story-thread, while serving as an example of what the Discordia can do, never feels like it punches at the appropriate weight, and can leave you with a hope that the stories get more concise as they go on.

Oh well.

Kings Of Infinite Space by Donald McLeary is a kind of River Song version of Dinosaurs On A Spaceship – it’s River, but with a gang. Mostly it’s a runabout guerrilla warfare game in time and space, against an opponent that can snap causality just as easily as they can snap your spine, and won’t hesitate to do either. That does leave the story feeling like it’s – to coin a phrase – mostly harmless, though, as well as mostly pointless. There’s love, hate, friendship, death, ocean voyages, exploding heads, you name it, McLeary gives it to you in this story. The only real issue is that we’re not entirely sure why, or really how it advances the story, beyond giving the main mass of the Discordia time to get up and running in terms of blowing planets out of the sky – Daleks, Time Lords, Human Beings, pick a species, they’re all members of the ‘planets blown to smithereens by the Discordia’ club, while River and her gang are leading one particular, important sub-group of the Discordia a merry dance and blowing them up. Sort of. If nothing else, it’s a story about the importance of not letting yourself get obsessed with minutiae if you happen to want to conquer the cosmos, but as a listen, it’s a touch exhausting.

Whodunnit?, by Matt Fitton is a much more condensed affair, and as such is a more relaxing listen. A pastiche of every classic detective thriller, including of course, The Adventures of Melody Malone, it brings Melody to a mysterious house in the country late one night, where there are murders, mysteries, snobbery, sex, deception and a monster in the attic. There’s also, just in case you were lacking an element, Franz Kafka, who appears to be mostly invisible.

So – fun! Solve the mystery, catch the murderer, avoid being eaten by the monster, and perhaps survive to sleuth another day. What could be simpler?

Almost anything, as it turns out. Oddly enough given what initially seems like a mad introspective diversion from the whole Discordia plotline, this story does actually make sense, even within that Discordia arc. In fact, it makes so much sense you’ll probably guess it pretty early on, but who’s who, what’s what and why the hell any of this is happening – those will take you longer, especially because Matt Fitton throws in a couple of end-zone quirks and curves to tie the ending up.

And then there’s Someone I Once Knew by John Dorney. Tom Baker’s Fourth Doctor, and Alex Kingston’s River Song. Together. Can you imagine the Flirt-ometer?

Stop imagining, start listening. Even for listeners who love them both, Someone I Once Knew might push the banter level into nauseating territory, though there is some fun to be had with normally spoiler-conscious flirtmistress River being wrong-footed by a Doctor who knows more about her, and about their times together, than she does. Besides the fun though, this is the most directly to-the-point story in the set, with the Doctor and River determined to defeat the Discordia once and for all. There’s an interesting split in this story – the Doctor going to the Discordian homeworld to foment rebellion (as he says, ‘it’s something of a speciality of mine’), while River…erm…well, River deals with a kind of outer space incel, and gets the chance to lay some feminist truth on his ass about how power, used or restrained, cannot engender love when love is simply not there. The power of love is actually central to the plot of this fourth story though, and in fact to the story of the Discordia as a whole, again with an incel twist (never heard the word? Google is your friend). What happens when devotion is spurned and turns to anger, coupled with power? Basically, you get a species intent on violence, force and making the world in their own ugly image.

Needless to say, the Doctor and River, together – though mostly, as it’s her show, River – succeed in undoing the damage the Discordia have done, rewriting time and space, popping planets back into existence, and erasing the timeline in which the Doctor knew River much much earlier than he did in our TV-established universe. As a way of removing River from the Doctor’s pre-Tennant memory, it’s probably the most elegant explanation we’ve heard so far, not least because of the scale of the undoing it involves. The whole universe has to pop down another temporal trouser-leg to make this Doctor forget the wonder that is River Song. That makes it satisfying both as a River story and a Fourth Doctor story simultaneously, and is probably the highest point in the set.

You will need to pay full attention to The Diary of River Song 4, and you may well need a lie down in a darkened room and a cup of weak tea once you’re done with it, but in terms of believable adventures that River would absolutely get herself mixed up in, the creation or unleashing of a species that destroys the web of time is pretty high up there, and while the set will begin to make more sense once you reach episode 3, it’s a very engaging way to spend four hours in the company of your spoilerphobic favourite. Take a deep breath, have tea on standby, and open up River Song’s diary once more.

Who Reviews Forest of the Dead by DJ Forrest

Written by Steven Moffat

Broadcast 7^th June 2008

As you would expect from a Steven Moffat script, and let’s face it, from 2005 onwards when Moffat turned out some damned good Who stories, we were once again terrified. This time by the creatures that lived in the books in the library, that added extra shadows to the unsuspected victim in the space suit and that had a voracious appetite for chicken!

The second part of Silence in the Library saw a lot more action than in the first – the first episode establishing the cast, such as the little girl watching the goings on in her library from her own television screen. The apparent sinister behaviour of Dr Moon, and the secrets of CAL, along with the disappearance of Donna Noble that left the Doctor running out of clues on how to bring her back and Save the library, and of course, SPOILERS.

Professor River Song back in 2008 was a new character with a hell of a back story which unravelled during the tenure of the Eleventh and Twelfth Doctor. She demanded a return visit if only to uncover the Spoilers in her diary. Perhaps that had been Moffat’s idea from the start.

What was dramatically sad was that being the first ever story of River Song, it was sadly her last visit with the 10^th. The interesting part about Time Travel means that as far forward through the Time Lords that River went, who knows when she may appear in another 12^th story, or perhaps a 13^th Doctor???

The two-part story was a great two parter, it was impossible to condense it into only one episode. It gave some scary ass characters such as the dippy brunette who wandered off into the shadows only to be consumed in the first episode, but to come back in the second as the woman in black to scare the living daylights out of a dream state Donna Noble.

The scary slow walking space suited skeletons, (try saying that with a mouth full of marbles) now they were exceptionally creepy. Something from every child’s nightmares, and indeed a few of mine. The key phrases that would find themselves readily available whenever there was a powercut, or the regular check of shadows whilst standing in a library with ceiling lights. Oh come on, it can’t be just me that says – ‘count the shadows’ ‘hey, who turned out the lights?’ ‘Vashta Nerada’.

There are many stories involving creatures that you can see, that can scare the begees out of you, just by looking or lurching towards you, but the equally as scary creatures are the ones you cannot see. The Vashta Nerada are these. Tiny spores trapped in the pages of books stored in a library, that hatch out and attack without notice.

Imagine reading a book one minute and are completely consumed the next, without even noticing. *shudders* Ice…ice cream….ice cream….

An interesting piece of information for the end of the story meant that as River Song HAD travelled with the Doctor, she knew the TARDIS exceptionally well, and so, when the Doctor clicked his fingers right at the very end of the episode, something magical happened. What would that be?

Ahh, Spoilers!