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.

Big Finish Reviews+ Counter-Measures Series 4 by Tony J Fyler

Tony Fyler takes a lap of honour.

The end of Counter-Measures, Series 3 genuinely sounded like it might be the end of the team – gunshots behind enemy lines (not to mention Berlin walls), people impersonating other people, two of the team actively brainwashed to accept the fictions of a group conducting espionage – it felt like all it needed was one big push and the whole Counter-Measures experiment would fall into the abyss.

Series 4 doesn’t by any means dispense with that threat – in fact it carries it right on, with two of the team brainwashed by chips in their head and two trying to break out of a prison that’s custom-built to be inescapable. But somehow, the fact that it takes what feels like a victory lap before the end squanders what felt like a genuine sense of threat and replaces it with something which feels like business as usual until it’s very pointedly not any more. I’ll tell you what it’s like – it’s like that stomach-lurching moment in The End of Time, when the Doctor has won out against the mad schemes of the Master, and the return of the Time Lords, and he believes for a moment he’s going to survive the day. And then you hear Wilf knocking, gently, on the door of the Vinvocci machine, and both the Doctor and we the viewer know he’s not going to triumph after all, but everything’s going to go spectacularly wrong. That moment is echoed in the whole tone of Counter-Measures, Series 4.

Episode 1, New Horizons, by Mark Wright and Cavan Scott, gets another 60s techno-trope into the series before it ends, with work on a gloriously energy-efficient new monorail system taking Alison and later Rachel into the realms of Indiana Jones and mythic fantasy, with things getting a bit Viking before the end and super-substances abounding as a power source and a brain enhancer. Nazi scientists, ancient arctic writing, multiple factions running about the place like a ‘who’s on whose side’ game of Find The Traitor - it’s all very good and interesting and not a little Curse of Fenric, and it’s certainly an absorbing enough listen with Alison in particular sounding more like herself than she has since she went home to see her father in Series 3, but it takes a while to come to the conclusion that yes, this really is how we’re carrying on after the taut and climactic events of the end of Series 3. In terms of the tension, it’s a fairly big step down, so you’re going to want to take it gently in case you break your expectations.

Episode 2, The Keep by Ken Bentley switches focus somewhat, taking us mostly to Sir Toby and Gilmore, who, being significantly less dead than we’d thought they might be, are busy getting their Great Escape on and revisiting a previous villain who this time has no cunning plan as such. Alison and Rachel are here, and they’re becoming more and more like themselves as the episode progresses, exposing the cover-up that’s kept them blinded and performing at least a little light brain surgery, and by the end of The Keep, Counter-Measures is looking more like itself as a cohesive group again. But whereas Counter-Measures has always been rooted firmly in government and the Establishment, after the events of The Keep, it’s quite clear that the group is out of favour, out of control and it seems, almost out of options.

John Dorney’s Rise and Shine, the third episode of the series, takes Counter-Measures right back to its very beginnings, or near as damnit, with the resurgence of a threat we haven’t heard from since The Assassination Games. While less in the market to destroy power-blocs than it was back then, the orchestrators of the Games still have it in their power to make things increasingly difficult for the Counter-Measures team, and here, if anywhere in this series, begins their trial by fire. With so many sides and sub-sides to choose from, leaving any old enemy alive at the end could be the last mistake you make. Arguably, it’s a mistake that’s made here.

And the threat comes back to haunt the team in Matt Fitton’s series finale, Clean Sweep. There’s coldness and ruthlessness aplenty here, but there’s also the opportunity for Counter-Measures to prove itself one more time – an opportunity the team more than takes. Gilmore, Jensen and Williams prove themselves more than a match for the skullduggery merchants who want them silenced, even after their base is blown to smithereens and the group go effectively on the run. Counter-Measures is triumphant, victorious, back to business as usual.

Remember those four knocks?

The ending that Fitton gives the series is a very ambivalent thing. You could argue it doesn’t work because it comes entirely out of the blue. You could argue that’s precisely why it works so well. I can see the point of both sides, but if you ask me for the emotional pitch, the taste it leaves in the mouth, I’d say it’s off-kilter and unfortunate. It feels like it makes a tragedy out of everything we’ve been through with the Counter-Measures team for four series. We understand of course there’s a ‘New Counter-Measures’ coming next year, and it could well be that the bleakness of the ending here is undercut in that series. Personally, I hope so, as the ending of Clean Sweep seems less fitting an exit than such a team has deserved over the 18 hours of their audio lives.

In essence then, Series 4 feels like a lap of honour, touching on villains from the past that Counter-Measures has made for itself, proving the worth of the people who get to serve in such a group, and then leaving us with what is probably the only way to conclusively bring the series to an end, without necessarily proving that such a move is necessary. If the series was going to end, it would perhaps have been better to end it on the notes of mystery which closed Series 3 than the tacked-on seeming certainty at the end of Clean Sweep. Again, we’ll need to see what comes in The New Counter-Measures to understand that ending entirely, but as it stands, it feels like an odd and unfortunate end to a great series.