The Diary Of River Song - The Unknown

Starring Alex Kingston & Sylvester McCoy.

Written by Guy Adams & Directed by Ken Bentley.

A planetary anomaly. A scientific impossibility. A mystery to be solved.

Of course, River Song expects to be consulted. She expects her valuable knowledge and experience will help the crew of the Saturnius unlock the strange phenomenon that has appeared in Earth’s solar system.

But what River doesn’t expect is a stowaway. An infuriating little man, calling himself the Doctor.

While I had a couple of issues with the first series of The Diary Of River Song, I thought that, for the most part, it was a modest surprise, with it's last two episodes in particular being great highlights. Big Finish had found a way to integrate River into her own bit of the Doctor Who universe really well, and her interactions with Paul McGann's eighth Doctor were really enjoyable, once the workaround was explained. So when Big Finish announced the second series of The Diary Of River Song about a month after the first was released, I was looking forward to seeing where Big Finish were going to take River. After all, now that she was established, it would be nice to put her in a regular rhythm of adventures, and partnering her with the sixth and seventh Doctors was a great idea that had so many possibilities. So, when I popped The Unknown into the CD player, I was surprised by the story that greeted me. For one thing, Big Finish had gone back to being tentative and unsure with regards to River on her own. And, I felt what damaged this story most of all, was a complete lack of interesting elements regarding the relationship between River and the seventh Doctor. To say The Unknown surprised me would be correct, but it wasn't a pleasant surprise.

The main plot of the story revolves around the crew of a spaceship (River included) investigating a mysterious planet that's mysteriously appeared at the edge of the solar system, but they all seem to be suffering from some kind of memory loss. Now immediately, I can see a problem with this: this story seems, in the first half at least, to be trying to go for the trippy dreamscapes and fractured narrative that Signs from the first set did so well. And while James Goss was a clever writer who was able to pull that off well, Guy Adams just doesn't have the same writing skills to be able to carry it off. He makes the characters frustrated with their memory loss, but I didn't feel that. Instead, I just felt that the memory loss was just there in order to have a clever hook in order to try and draw the listener in. There are moments where this could have been effective, but I just felt that it was just there as a way to keep the characters blind to what is really going on. The second half peels all this away for us to discover what's really going on: the TARDIS with the seventh Doctor (who up to this point has been locked in the brig) has collided with the Saturnius and the mysterious planet that River is investigating. Now, this could have been a potentially very interesting scenario, and certainly for the first ten minutes after the revelation, I was engrossed in the story. However, by the time the Doctor, River and company had decided what to do to get out of the situation, the whole story descends into meaningless technobabble and scientific jargon, so much so that when one of the characters points out needing a physics degree to understand what's going on, I burst out laughing. By the end, I found the whole thing a little bit strange, and rather uninterested. And what was with the computer? Why was it trying to persuade Murphy to kill the other crewmembers? I have to admit that I did really like the idea, it was well presented and made out to be utterly sinister and creepy. But it seemed to be building up to something that didn't quite pay off, which was a shame, because out of all the ideas that the story is dealing with, this was most definitely the most interesting one. The Unknown plays out like a more recent Steven Moffat episode: it's lots of really good ideas thrown together, but they never really quite meld together. It's a shame, because I do want to like this episode: there's plenty of good elements. But they never quite come together in a script that isn't quite sure what it actually wants to be.

To be honest, I could probably overlook these issues, if the story didn't contain two other flaws that seriously cripple this story. One - that the guest characters have very few interesting traits, and second - there is virtually zero chemistry between River and the seventh Doctor. I don't mean between Sylvester McCoy and Alex Kingston, but just in the script. There's nothing that sets this dynamic apart, just a general need to sort out the situation, and the Doctor occasionally disagreeing with her shooting the copies of Murphy. It could be the eleventh Doctor at some point after A Good Man Goes To War for all the difference that it makes. In fact, that would probably be more interesting, since at least River and the eleventh Doctor have a flirtatious back and forth in their stories. Here, though, there was nothing really interesting about the dynamic between them, and I found myself wondering what was the point? The point of putting River alongside the classic Doctors is that it brings out a different side of her, and it's fun to see them interact, and find out what the interplay between the pair of them would be like. Here, however, it's so devoid of anything remotely resembling character interaction, I found myself wondering what was the point. Coupled with the fact that the seventh Doctor was removed from the story a good five minutes before the end, I felt that, to be honest, there was not much point in putting the seventh Doctor into this episode at all, especially as, at times, River just falls into the 'asking questions like an assistant' role. I think this story would probably feel a lot less cluttered had the Doctor been taken out, and River had just solved the mystery herself. It would have also set River's character out a lot more strongly, because here I felt like we were back on the same ground I thought the first box set had covered: River's characterisation was simply too inconsistent to be interesting. Across the first few stories, it took some time to work out the kinks in River's character (which had been left behind by Steven Moffat), but by the time of the third story, they'd settled into a steady rhythm. But here, they are yet again trying to cover too many bases with the character, and I don't feel that it puts River in the best light. It just feels like only a couple of writers are actually sure what to do with River's character, and the rest just seem to be working from a sheet of stock clichés that don't quite gel together. The seventh Doctor fares better in the characterisation stakes: at first, he seems like the chess master like he was portrayed as in Season 25 and 26, and the Big Finish Hex audios. However, as the story progresses, that front falls away, and he turns out to as just at sea as the rest of the characters. It's a nice idea (not necessarily novel, but certainly nice), but unfortunately with this sea change, the Doctor's character seems to slip back into the inconsistent blank he was in season 24. That isn't helped by McCoy's performance, which veers alarmingly from scene to scene, in a way I've never heard before from a Big Finish audio featuring him. When he's dark and brooding, he's excellent, really stunningly good. He manages to play against the dark dialogue really, really well. I think if this was a prose story, we'd perhaps be saying the Doctor is too dark, but McCoy always makes the material work. However, during the more light-hearted moments of the second half of the story, McCoy is excruciatingly poor, sounding as if this is the first time he's read this far into the script and is just guessing the tone and mood as he goes along. I think the Big Finish writers need to stop writing for McCoy like he was in season 24, or if they are, they need to be really careful with it. What defined McCoy on television was his physical presence: during the more light-hearted moments, it was his physical slapstick, during the darker moments, it was that piercing stare. On audio, however, the physical is lost. And while McCoy can (and has) recreated the 'Dark Doctor' excellently, he's always struggled with that more innocent of seventh Doctors. When the writing combines the two (say during The Fires Of Vulcan or We Are The Daleks), it often does so to great effect, but at others, it can lead to painful results. It's a shame, because he and Alex Kingston do try and inject their scenes with some energy, and for the most part create a strong bond between the pair, that I can't wait to see developed properly in The Eye Of The Storm. Kingston is as great as always: she's in command of the situation, and, despite the fact that River barely has anything to do in the second half of the story, she carries it out excellently. Sadly, the guest cast fair less well. They're all perfectly decent, especially The Bletchley Circle's Anna Maxwell Martin as the Saturnius' captain, but sadly the roles just aren't sufficiently written to be interesting. While that's partly to do with the memory loss aspect of the plot, it's mostly just because they're underdeveloped and uninteresting. I would, however, like to congratulate Dan Starkey for being utterly terrifying as the ship's homicidal computer. Seriously, who would have guessed Starkey (mostly well known for playing shouty potato-headed aliens) could be this sinister and creepy? He gives an insidious performance that gets under your skin in a really effective way.

As for the direction, I felt that Ken Bentley seemed a little unsure of the material, and possibly decided to just leave it to the actors. While all of them were excellent (bar McCoy) and could carry off the material, it feels like Ken was either unsure how to proceed, or just didn't think the story was that interesting. There are some good little flourishes, but for the most part it just feels like he wasn't at all comfortable with the script he'd been given. Fortunately, Big Finish got Howard Carter to do the music and sound design, and he produces a highly-polished product that manages to covey a lot of the story that Guy Adams' story fails to do. His score is quite subtle to begin with, but by the end he ramps up the orchestra, as the tension rises and the situation deteriorates. I also loved the sound design, which conveyed some very subtle changes in settings between the Saturnius and the TARDIS supremely well. It certainly made the moment when River separates the two ship's at least intelligible. In the hands of a lesser sound designer, it might have ended up just sounding like a load of noise, but Carter makes sure that it's perfectly clear what's going on at any given time. Finally, Tom Webster's cover art is fantastic, with a particular highlight being that some of the wall shots look like they've been pulled from Frontios, a story which in itself saw the TARDIS' interior scattered about all over the place. They seem to have that rock/roundel look that 's unique to that story. It's just little details like that that make me appreciate his work all the more.

However, while I feel that The Unknown does have some positives, it just feels a little bit aimless on the part of the writer. I could forgive it it's rather confused story, poor secondary characters and aimless direction if the key reason why this story exists (to bring the seventh Doctor and River together) wasn't so botched and, frankly, boring. The Unknown certainly feels like one step forward and two steps back for River Song, and, while I hope the rest of the box set can improve upon this, I have to say that it's a rather disappointing start to the set.

Rating - 5/10

Other Reviews of Big Finish Products:
The Boundless Sea - http://fandoctorwhoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/the-diary-of-river-song-boundless-sea.html
I Went To A Marvellous Party - http://fandoctorwhoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/the-diary-of-river-song-i-went-to.html
Signs - http://fandoctorwhoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-diary-of-river-song-signs.html
The Rulers Of The Universe - http://fandoctorwhoproductions.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/the-diary-of-river-song-rulers-of.html