The Husbands Of River Song: Ranking - 98

     The Husbands Of River Song

(Christmas Special, Dr 12 with River Song, 25/12/2015, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Douglas MacKinnon) 

Rank: 98

'Even after twenty- four years this date wasn’t long enough! Where can we go next after the singing towers of Derilium? The yodelling menhir of Yodelenzia, a whistling walls of Wallawallawoozia and the custard pie flinging of Pierovilia?'
 
‘I’m afraid the only place open is Spicedystopia, a tribute night to the Spice Girls featuring tribute acts from races all over the universe. The Judoon version of ‘Wannabe’ is great! The Abzorbaloff sure captured their dance moves. And as for the all-stars I think Erato really captures their essential blobbyness’
 
‘You know what? Death suddenly sounds good right now’ 

 

Following the end of series 9 Steven Moffat was preparing to hang up his sonic screwdriver and move on to other things but he’d hit a snag: his planned replacement Chris Chibnall had just been commissioned for a third series of ‘Broadchurch’ and wouldn’t be ready to take over yet for at least a year. Rather than let ‘Dr Who’ go off the air over Christmas (when the ratings tended to be highest) or have a ‘caretaker’ showrunner fill in for the series (see ‘The Caretaker’ for how well this might have gone!) Moffat was persuaded to write what was surely going to be his one last episode, honest. As things turn out that’s not quite going to be true (there’s going to be another two year gap and another full series, which must have led the showrunner to think he’d  never be rid of this show) but as far as Moffat knew at the time he had one last unexpected coda he wasn’t expected to write. For the first time since taking over the show five years earlier Moffat had no ideas, no great burning issues to write about and had completed all the character arcs he could think of, with the 13th Doctor a confused ‘good’ man and Clara simultaneously dead and having adventures of her own (it’s confusing: wibbly wobbly timey wimey…) 

Oddly it hadn’t been part of the original plan to tell River Song’s time-travelling story all the way to the end, err I mean, beginning, err whatever it is (past participles don’t work with time travel), even though it seems a natural thing to do. Moffat confessed his dilemma to his predecessor and longtime friend Russell T Davies: what could he possibly talk about now that he hadn’t already said? Then Davies remembered a conversation from years earlier, during the making of ‘Silence In The Library’ (when Moffat had first been approached about taking over Who) in which he invented River Song and joked that it would be a pretty neat arc if he followed her story all the way to the end as showrunner. By this point River had already been given her send-off, as a ghost in ‘The Name Of The Doctor’ (not to mention the small matter of dying in ‘Library’, her first appearance), but as Moffat quickly realised her story didn’t necessarily need to be told in order and with Davies egging him on (‘just think of it, Alex Kingston and Peter Capaldi together –it will be a sex storm!’) he set to write a coda that wrapped up his time on the show with one of his favourite characters, one last trip back in time for his characters before new-boy Chibnall inevitably created a set of characters of his own. Suddenly the pressure was off: for the first time since taking over the show Moffat had no long series arc to follow, no big picture axes to grind, he’d already done deep and heavy (with ‘Heaven Sent’ – ‘Hell Bent’) and was being actively encouraged to write a story that was as silly and as frivolous and self-indulgent as he liked. River’s story was always supposed to have ended with Matt Smith, as a ghostly projection on Trenzalore. But the great thing about time travel is that you don’t have to tell a story in order and so we get to meet River all over again and see how she behaves around yet another regeneration (her third on TV, though she's met most of the others now on Big Finish audios. There are too many to list here but I particularly like her contrast with the 6th and 7th Doctors in the second volume of ‘The Diary Of River Song).

The result is ‘The Husbands Of River Song’, a sweet indulgent love song to the Moffat era that may well be my favourite of the festive stories, big on the emotions yet higher on the humour than any other Moffat story. Though there’s barely any festive references in it (besides a cute gag of the Tardis holovision censors insisting on giving the grumpy Doctor some festive antlers) somehow it feels right in the Christmas slot – it’s the sort of family feeling, self-indulgent warm hug that a series like Dr Who can only get away with once a year, far better suited to a timeslot of casual fans and drunken party games than the more sombre specials Moffat had been writing lately, like ‘A Christmas Carol’ (‘a ship of people are all going to die if a miser doesn’t open his heart!’) ‘The Snowmen’ (‘we really like Victorian nanny Clara, but now she’s dead, sorry Kids!’) and ‘Last Christmas’ (‘where every Christmas is last Christmas to a brainsucking slug that gives you hallucinations!’) By his own admission Moffat always struggled with the Christmas slot (at least compared to Davies), which nearly always followed on from some deep dark twisted series finale, but here by laughing at his characters and himself Moffat nails it. The story is one long farce, a genre Dr Who doesn’t normally do well but which works brilliantly here. Back in ‘Silence In the Library’ a lot of the drama came from the fact that the Doctor (and us at home) didn’t have the first clue about this mysterious woman who clearly knew him well, who shared a Tardis key and notebook and acted as if the Doctor was her other half. When she dies at the end of that story you mourn not for what you saw in the past 100minutes so much as everything you know she is going to mean to him one day. This story pulls the same in reverse, giving us a scenario where the Doctor knows everything about River (including how she’s going to die) but she doesn’t know him at all. Only this time the big difference is that the audience have all the answers alongside the Doctor and instead of being a puzzle its all a big joke that’s on River Song. What’s more it all makes sense of what comes later, (err earlier?) As a result the seriousness of ‘Silence In The Library’ as seen through the Doctor’s eyes (who is this mysterious woman that knows him so well and hints that they’re married?) turned on its head so that the Doctor and we at home know everything River doesn’t, one of the smartest characters ever seen on Dr Who, that always seems to be one step ahead of us, totally oblivious to the real story going on in front of her eyes. Peter Capaldi, no stranger to comedy across his film career, is far far happier with the jokey mood than he is at being grouchy or angry and Alex Kingston delights in coming up with a version of River that’s usually kept hidden from the Doctor, one whose naughtier and on the fuzzy boundaries of legal. 

What’s more ‘Husbands’ doesn’t feel out of place, despite being a last minute job, as it covers so many of the themes Moffat keeps raising across his time in the showrunner’s chair. For a start there’s the time travel: River thinks she knows about all her meetings with the Doctor thanks to her diary but the Doctor lands here by accident and she doesn’t know to look out for him. The idea of lost memories too is very Moffat: though not strictly what happens to River there is a gap in her knowledge of this event which surprises her; we’ve had so many episodes about the Doctor and Clara forgetting each other and have just had an episode where both risked forgetting the other (Clara wins) – this story redresses the balance by having the Doctor know something River doesn’t. There’s a sly reference to ‘Time Of The Doctor’ in that River doesn’t recognise the Doctor because she knows the Matt Smith Doctor was his last regeneration and she’s seen all the others (another reason why having past Doctors, as per ‘The Timeless Child’, just doesn’t fit in with past continuity). River finally gets a present of her own sonic screwdriver, so the 10th Doctor would recognise it in ‘Library’. Most of all though is the theme about being a ‘good man’ and how all of us are good and bad all the time, behaving differently we behave depending who we’re with. The Doctor, of course, changes who he is and how he re-acts to people with every regeneration, with different emphasis on different aspects of his personality, but more than that we get to see how the Doctor changes the people around him. River could have been like this the whole of her life, the quasi-criminal seeing what she can get away with (she is in prison the second time we meet her after all, even if it turns out to be because she was a walking murderous trap set for the Doctor…long story), but the Doctor made her good simply by being around him. Here she’s reverted back to being everything he normally tries to save the universe from: at best a thief, at worst a murderer (even if King Hydroflax is not exactly the most salubrious character himself). It feels slightly wrong this episode, as the Doctor stares on in disbelief, like accidentally reading someone’s post, or overhearing a conversation between two people you know really well who act differently to how they are when they’re around you, but it finally answers his regeneration-long question about whether he’s a good man. After all, there’s no better judge for how good you are than how you shape the people around you. It would have been easy to make this early prototype of River all-bad but instead she’s just what she always was – an opportunist who happened to fall in with a bad crowd. Had she never met the Doctor this might have been River’s life forever-more, a series of robberies and hi-jinks that waste her intelligence and bravery.  It’s also hilarious, as River tells the Doctor over and over again not to tell ‘The Doctor’ and reveals all the things she’s been up to on the sly, like hanging round with thugs and assassins and hiding booze in the roundels of his Tardis like a naughty teenager. On first watch it seemed like the sub-plot of ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ (typically a sub-plot Moffat made the entire thrust of the series when he adapted it for TV): the idea of seeing someone before they knew you, when they’re ‘half-cooked’. But of course it isn’t: from River’s point of view this is her third-last appearance, before her death in ‘Library’ and appearance as a ghost in ‘Name’. You only realise, on re-watching, that River’s been dealing with her grief too, this story being set right after losing her parents in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’:  the boozing and wild living seems like a response to grief and a vacuum that needs filling and, rather than help her out with it or spend time with her, the Doctor just retreated to a cloud and sulked (‘The Snowman’). 

River’s a character whose always cared what the Dr thinks of her though and what with being older (in terms of looks) fans forget how young she is in age: beneath the flirting and the charm she’s actually a lot more needy than either Amy or Clara, a lot less independent. ‘Husbands’ makes clear, after hints in lots of other stories, just how much she loves the Doctor – and how much she fears he doesn’t love her back. She compares him to a rock at one point: brilliant, but immovable. It’s a joyous piece of writing that she gets closure too, just before her last hurrah in ‘Library’ (from her point of view) and sees how much the Doctor really does care for her and has been distant just because he was sad (and knew about her demise to come). A lesser writer would have filled this story with endless references to ‘Library’, setting up the archaeological team and the dig at the library, but Moffat is more interested in his characters being ‘safe’ than he is in closing the plot arc and making the timelines neat for once. Instead he shows River both as she is without the Doctor and how she is when he’s by her side so that, by the time of ‘Library’ (her last appearance, but first from his point of view) she is a Doctor substitute, saving the day heroically and making a group of disparate people feel better. ‘Husbands’ is the closure River needs, a last bit of recognition and love from the man she so adores that makes everything she’s been through worth it.

 

In many ways ‘Husbands’ is the closure the Doctor needs too after Clara’s story arc (which he can’t remember now anyway): for Clara being around the Doctor and copying him led to her death.  But it was Clara’s choice to follow, in full knowledge of the risks and in ‘Hell Bent’ she slowly talked the Doctor out of seeking revenge or blaming himself for her actions. Following the Doctor brought out the best in River though, as he well knows after seeing the side of her in this story that could have been her full life without his influence. Though happy to show her naughty side River is always desperate to be the better person he made her to be and her look of horror when she realises what’s going on, forty-five odd minutes into the story (in the middle of an impassioned speech about how the Doctor would never be stupid enough to be there) is one of the funniest scenes in the series, closely followed by her telling the enemy aliens to shush as the main plot becomes subservient to her bickering with her sometime husband. It’s the sort of story no other show could do: after all, what other show has someone you know really well turning up with a completely different face? For my money no other non-regeneration story uses the concept, one of the best in the series, as well as this one. More importantly, though, ‘Husbands’ is a worthy end/beginning to her character that would always have felt a bit empty without it and its somehow very DW to do the sort of character arc from bad to good other scifi shows do, but backwards, one of the cleverest ideas any writer for the show ever had. However until the tearful ending this isn’t some big character piece but an all-out comedy: River hasn’t got a clue why this odd alien keeps hanging around her dropping hints and gets crosspatchy in all the ways the Doctor did in ‘Library’ but worse, while flirting uproariously with every alien she meets and even marrying some of them. There are many larks to be had from the misunderstanding that River has requested any old ‘Doctor’ to do the surgery on King Hydroflax’s head, not realising that she has her Doctor instead. 

That bonkers plot is straight out of the mad Dr Who comic strips of Moffat’s youth, something that’s not to be taken too seriously and which doesn’t outstay it’s welcome. It is the weakest aspect though. Greg Davies feels mis-cast as King Hydroflax, the headless cyborg husband that River’s trying to kill off but who just won’t stay dead. I can see why they cast him as the script needs Hydroflax to be authoritarian and that’s Davies’ whole shtick as the excellent improvised ‘Taskmaster’ shows such fun, a series that was all of five months old when this episode went out but already felt like an institution and even has guests competing for a model statue of Greg’s huge head, just like in this story! (Oh to have a Dr Who spin-off special one day! Matt Smith dancing, David Tennant laughing, Peter Davison bewildered, Colin Baker arguing over point scoring, Sylvester McCoy either winning everything or losing it all, it would be such fun. Maybe for the 70th anniversary they can make one?) However with no actors to bounce off and just a head in front of a green screen (and not all that successfully done – it looks like a man with his head sticking out of a table, which in some long shots it is) Hydroflax never becomes more than a stereotypical bully. Greg is at his best when playing a ‘head in a bag’, improvising muffled off-camera insults that rumble throughout the episode and really should have been mixed much larger! Matt Lucas’ Nardole too kickstarts two years of being under-used, writers never quite sure whether to make him dark and brooding or the comedy relief, and Matt Lucas hasn’t yet decided which side of the fence to land on so doesn’t seem as natural with his delivery here as he’ll become. The shoot must have been super tough for him too: he took the job to pay tribute to his ex husband Kevin McGee who’d adored Dr Who and turned Lucas on to the show until he became a fan too, to the point of requesting a Tardis as his luxury item on ‘Desert island Discs’; McGee had committed suicide in 2009 after their divorce. For now Nardole disappears midway through the story (appearing again only as a severed head for most of it – presumably the Doctor builds him a body before ‘The Return Of Dr Mysterioso’) but he was instantly popular with fans, with an alien nonchalance that makes him quite different from all the other Doctor’s companions (particularly River, to whose big dramatic emotions he’s a useful comedy foil).   

Mostly, though, ‘Husbands’ gives Moffat the closure he needs (prematurely, as events turn out). Freed of the need to impress us, just like his character, Moffat gets a bit naughty and plays around with all sorts of things that he wouldn’t normally be able to get away with, giving this episode a sort of end of term giddiness. The feared baddy, who would usually scare everyone up to and including the Doctor, becomes the butt of the jokes, with the solution to his shouting to have his head removed, as much as in plot terms its for the diamond. Rather than a tense emotional drama about heartbreak we aren’t meant to feel for Hydroflax: instead his body breaking is a gag about how the Tardis can’t take off when someone is counted as being both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the Tardis doors. Moffat would never normally have solved a plot in such a clumsy way, with the sudden arrival of a meteor storm out of nowhere and having River and the Doctor be perfectly placed to escape it (plus the gag that, being an archaeologist from the future, River not only knew about it but ‘dug you up’). There’s a fish-alien waiter at what is essentially ‘The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe’, Moffat going one better than even his hero Douglas Adams by having the Doctor suggest the idea for building it, then zooming forward to book a table, finding out its booked for four years, then zooming forward in time again without skipping a beat (usually Adams has such a distinctive voice that writers don’t like playing up to the influence in case they get accused of copying but this is the single most Adamsy plot of the 21st century, with impossible brilliant inventions like time travel and meteor storms a backdrop to petty human concerns like romance and petty thieving, albeit straight out of Adams’ ‘Dirk Gently’ equally excellent Holistic Crime novels rather than ‘Hitch-Hiker Guide To The Galaxy’ or his Dr Who work). We don’t often think about Moffat as a comedy writer, so intense are the darker emotions he wants to make us feel, but he’s brilliantly funny when he wants to be and so many of the lines from this story are my favourites of the era: ‘I think I’m going to need a bigger flow chart’ ‘You’re probably going to need a mop’  ‘An archaeologist is just a thief – with patience’, on River learning Hydroflax is a cyborg ‘No wonder you wouldn’t let us share a bathroom!’ and paraphrasing Oscar Wilde as she refers to her diary as how ‘I always like to have something sensational to read on a spaceship’. I love the gag that River keeps photographs of her ‘beloved’ in her pocket the way anybody would – only they’re all of different Doctors (and as an in-joke most of them are the publicity photos the BBC used to have actors sign and send out to fans, the closest the series came to ‘glamour shots’ of the actors looking at their best, although the modern series doesn’t do it so much these days so John Hurt, for instance, technically never had one). Best of all is the scene where, for the first time ever, the Doctor gets to go inside a Tardis and gives his own speech about how it’s bigger on the inside’, milking it for all he’s worth and getting more and more carried away with every line (easily my favourite scene of the 12th Doctor run it might well be one of my favourite scenes of the entire show). Where River came in, during ‘Silence In The Library’, the mood was impressively grim, but River was always a funny character lurking underneath the surface who tended to get most of the best lines and here she’s done all the hard work Moffat needed the character to do and now she can go play; so can he and so can us. 

Or at least she can till the sad ending, which is just the icing on the cake. The moment when River finally catches on who this stranger is, why he knows so much about her – and what it means for what happens to her and to him – is right up there as one of the most emotionally charged scenes in all of Who and had me crying into my Christmas Dinner. The scene of River confessing that she’s cared, because she’s near the end of her diary and ‘it was given to me by the sort of man who would know exactly how long a diary would have to be’ is a scene that really gets to me too, even before River understands who she’s talking to. And then they get to go on their much delayed date night. For years we’ve heard passing references to so many unseen adventures, Fish waiter Flemming helpfully reading many of them out from River’s diary for us: a picnic at Asgard, an encounter with ‘Jim The Fish’ and a whole bunch of events that cover River’s life story: ‘The Crash Of The Byzantium’ in ‘Flesh and Stone’, the Pandorica opening from ‘The Big Bang’ and the sad events of ‘Angels Take Manhattan’ where she lost her mum and dad (it’s a small detail but note how River still keeps a trowel on her even though she’s no longer an active archaeologist, the way her Grandad Brian might have told her to). It all ‘fits’ too – the Doctor is wearing a suit and got a haircut (briefly reverting back to the short haired Capaldi of series eight) and does indeed cry (is this the first time we’ve ever seen him cry? Even if he blames it on ‘the wind’) there are metaphors galore here: the Doctor as a ‘rock’ that music still manages to pass through as the years whittle away at his rough outer edges and River ‘song’ as the melody that whistles through, bringing out his lighter side. They were a great partnership and especially here: Kingston teases out the 13th Doctor’s lighter side and while Matt Smith always seemed a century older than his years having an actor who really is older and weather-worn to play up to feels even more ‘right’ for their characters.  

The reference Moffat picks up on though is a hurried line thrown away in ‘Forrest Of The Dead’ (the second half of the ‘Library’ story) about the Singing Towers Of Derillium’. Again, a lesser writer would have made that the location for the whole story but instead Moffat finally lets the Doctor and River have the much-delayed date night they’ve been talking about for two whole regenerations now and have it as the coda to a story about something else entirely. The Doctor, knowing that he’ll in all likelihood never see River again and notoriously bad at farewells, finally delivers on all his promises about where he was going to take her one day. Even with all the time travel and meeting people in order its very much the Doctor doing the decent thing by giving a proper goodbye to the person he loved perhaps more than anyone else in the universe. This is some of Moffat’s best writing in the entire series, with every line a zinger, a poignant take on how painful it can be to say goodbye when you know its coming and can’t be avoided, of how they see each other and the fact that this pair really do love each other really. With some other stories it feels as if the Doctor and River are two ships that pass in the night, too often talking in cross-purposes given their different timestreams, but here they are both pointing the same way and flying in formation and its glorious. Even the typical Moffat twist that this last date night lasts a full twenty-four years on this planet (he really doesn’t like goodbyes does he?!) only adds to the joke and doesn’t undermine how special this moment is. And so what started off as a bit of a joke about time travel ends up one of the most powerful moments in the series. As grateful as I am Moffat stayed on to make series ten (his most consistent as showrunner in many ways) this would have been the perfect ending to his role on Dr Who, full of his characteristics and none of his faults (unlike his eventual goodbye ‘Twice Upon A Time’ which, as we’ll be seeing, can be a  bit…problematic. Only…spoilers…that’s another story). 

If the rest of the episode is really just comedy moments that set up that final scene rather than this being a brilliant story all the way through (it does rather drag in the middle, with the restaurant scene of people opening their heads up close to Capaldi’s debut in ‘Deep Breath’, right down to the slow pace of the episode) then, well, at least its genuinely funny: there are more laughs per minute in this story than probably any other and almost all the gags land this week. ‘Husbands’, a story that had the jokey working title ‘Bigamy In Space’, is a triumph in so many ways: it will make you laugh, make you cry, do things no other series could possibly dream of and plucks a beautiful poignant story about loss out of thin air that feels so at one with this era that you’d think it was always part of the great game-plan for River’s character. Of course the story won’t be for everyone and there are enough fans out there who find River annoying rather than funny or clever. There are episodes where I can see what they mean: she’s not at her best in ‘Time Of The Angels’ and is written all wrong in ‘Angels Take Manhattan’ for instance, while her origin story across season six goes through more cul-de-sacs than The Whomobile following an ATMOs sat-nav. At her beginning and end, though (at least in ‘our’ timeline) River is every bit worthy enough to be the Doctor’s only ‘proper’ wife, a badass with a heart of gold and a universe she can’t wait to explore. As for Moffat it’s an even better sort-of goodbye, a last bow for the characters he created and a chance to show off his particular brand of scifi, all big wild emotions told in the wrong order and very alien aliens seen through very Human eyes. As a Christmas special too, this one ticks every single box. No it’s not the deepest or the most consistent episode in Dr Who’s long run but when it’s brilliant it’s genius and side-splittingly funny. Still gutted we never got to see Jim The Fish, though.

POSITIVES + That gorgeous last speech as the Doctor admits he can’t change fate and this really is the last meeting: ‘Every night is the last night for something – every Christmas the last Christmas. Nothing lasts forever. Happy ever after is just a lie we tell ourselves because the pain is too hard. ’ The very final words, that they ‘both live happily ever after’ with the ‘ever after’ crossed out to read ‘they both lived happily’ is one last great gag too. After all,  what better message to sum up the Moffat years can there be than making the most of the moment you have now and how happy ever after doesn’t mean forever, but ‘some time’. The Singing Towers themselves, too, have to be amazing after all that build-up across many years and thankfully they are: the CGI effects team ‘The Mill’ based them on ‘The Old Man Of Storr’ after a suggestion by director Douglas MacKinnon who had grown up nearby on the Isle of Skye and had heard legends that the rocks were formed by the fingers of a giant who was trying to create a sculpture but who perished in the sea before and whose body instead lies underneath. Even if you want to go for the scientific explanation, of wind and sea erosion, it’s still clever as the emotions that wear down impervious time travellers as (timelords and part timelords surely are). 

NEGATIVES - I’m willing to buy the idea that River Song married King Hydroflax to get to the jewel he keeps inside his body. Heck, I’m even ready to believe that he keeps his crown jewels inside his body (and not where you think either, naughty!) What I don’t buy is that River’s motivation is purely financial and the scenes of her selling the jewel to a man whose every bit as nasty as we’re lead to believe Hydroflax is seem wildly out of character. I mean, we’ve seen River’s darker side, mostly shooting at people, but I kept expecting there to be some hidden altruistic reason beyond ‘he doesn’t deserve the jewel so I’ll nab it’. I mean, just look at the Doctor’s refusal to let jewel thief lady Christina travel in the Tardis with him after the events on ‘Planet Of the Dead’ – just because he knows River well shouldn’t change his stance and yet he never ticks her off (it would rather spoil the festive fun mood of the story). I love the way it’s that diamond that funds the building of the towers though, the Doctor getting rid of the illicit gains by making them do some good, rather than merely handing it back to the crooks after them or leaving it with River (equally she never ticks the Doctor off for this, after all her hard work in stealing it because it’s not that sort of a story).

BEST QUOTE: River: ‘When you love the Doctor, it's like loving the stars themselves. You don't expect a sunset to admire you back. And if I happen to find myself in danger, let me tell you, the Doctor is not stupid enough, or sentimental enough, and he is certainly not in love enough to find himself standing in it with me!’ Doctor: ‘Hello, sweetie’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Last Night’ is the fourth of five straight-to-DVD minisodes included in the series six box set exploring the 11th Doctor’s romance with River Song. You can find the others on the review for ‘The Wedding Of River Song’, the nearest chronological episode. Why have we put this one here, in the ‘wrong’ era with the ‘wrong’ Doctor? It’s our second mention of the ‘Singing Towers Of Darillium’, the backdrop to most of the ‘Husbands’ episode where ‘he’s been promising to take me for ages’ – the first, in ‘Silence Of The Library’ mentions that it was their last date night together before her (sort-of) death. These two 11th Doctors think it’s this date night right here, but the circumstances in ‘Husbands’ will prove them both wrong  (presumably this is one of those times the Doctor cancels at the last minute mentioned in ‘Husbands’). This little snippet packs a lot into its three and a half minutes: it starts with River being apparently dead after an attack with Sontarons (she’s faking it to get some ‘mouth to mouth resuscitation’ and a far sexier snog than the one in ‘Wedding’), has her suggest some kinky foreplay (telling the Doctor he can spank her for being naughty!), has River accuse the Doctor with two-timing her with another woman (it’s her younger self) and hint at a threesome when she bumps into a younger Doctor. The pair have never seemed more like an old married couple than here and I wish we’d seen more of this interplay between them without a plot getting in the way. Closing scene: the Doctor struggles to think of a word to explain why he can’t give any info away to younger River and can’t come up with anything better than ‘spoilers’, a word she eagerly seizes on. Her closing statement: ‘You and your secrets – it’s going to be the death of me!’ 

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