Saturday 31 May 2008

River Song

Ok, this weeks episode of Doctor Who introduced a character played by ER actress Alex Kingston. The character goes by the name of River Song, but who is she?

Ok so the important things:

The Doctor and Donna arrive at "The Library." The biggest library in existence, because someone (it later turns out to be River Song) sends him a message on his psychic paper.
This library contains a copy of every book in the universe up to that point- Most of which Donna is not allowed to look at because they don't exist yet. No Spoilers, warns the Doctor.

Ok, so the message River sends the Doctor has a cute little x at the end.
As Donna pointed out, who sends messages with little x's unless they know the person?
When the Doctor and River meet, she is clearly surprised that the Doctor doesn't recognise her, and some of the dialogue from this episode clearly implies that River and the Doctor have some sort of history with one another, from Rivers perspective at least. Its a sort of "future history" and for the Doctor, it hasn't happened yet.

Oh! Very quickly! The swarmy things!

When the Doctor arrives, as per Rivers instruction -to the library- there are some pretty odd things going on. Specifically, little creatures that live in the darkness and feed on flesh are swarming. Bad news for those of us who are made of flesh. So the swarmy creatures go around killing off the other guys on River's expedition, people who I'm sure are only there to get killed off? Because other than that, their purpose is lost on me, as they don't really do anything.

And the little girl..

And of course there is the little girl who apparently has some sort of connection to the library, it seems, that she's able to appear in the library, and has some control over what happens there.
In the real world, the girl is being seen by a psychiatrist, because of course her parents think her library is all in her head. So, her Doctor is trying to fix her little problem and get her back into the real world, or so it seems.
It later because obvious that there's a little more going on when her Doctor tells her (paraphrased) "There's the real world and the nightmare world, your nightmare world is the real world, the library is real and people need your help" etcetera etcetera.

Ok, so back to River.
She's the most exiting thing in this episode, the mystery that is River Song. The rest just seems kind of, meh!
As she later explains, she's accidentally summoned the Doctor too early in his timeline, so, she knows him but she doesn't know her.
And then there is her little book.. Which is -weirdly- TARDIS-ish in design -not that it uses any sort of chameleon/timelord technology- it just looks like the outside of the doctors tardis. Anyway... The Doctor is not allowed to look in this book, its against the rules, his rules apparently. No Spoilers Doctor.
The dialogue seems to imply that she travelled with the Doctor, or will travel, to be more precise. She knows who Donna is, she has her little diary- "Today the Doctor and i went all around the universe and it was so much fun!"
She even has her own sonic screwdriver, which the Doctor gave her, and its also identical to the one he currently uses..
She is definitely the "big thing" this episode, forget the little girl and the swarm and the Whovian version of redshirts, and the fact that Donna gets turned into this weird mechanical thing with a face- apparently she's been saved. Oh and the hundreds of people that disappeared in the library and probably got turned into mechanical face robots. Actually that reminds me, maybe the little girl is one of the library victims, and she befall the same fate as Donna and the other library "assistants"? Maybe we'll se Donna in her own little fantasy world next week.
All of that feels kind of irrelevant though, it doesn't matter because it'll all be resolved next week.

Doctor Who seems to be more "monster of the week-y" than ever. Not necessarily a bad thing, but i live for those big moments. Those glimpses of the future. This episode had me giddy, for that reason.
So, River, one of the Doctors future companions? Probably..
Most likely an important one. His next one, maybe.

Is it bad that the only thing i care about from this episode is River? That the rest is kind of... mediocre television. The story was, unfortunately pretty dull. Doctor Who used to have me gripped, but this episode was far from on par with the greats.

I'm hoping that next week will have me unable to tear my eyes away from the screen.

T'Leisha

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thank you!

The only part I was interested in was River Song & the Doctor...the rest of the ep was ok for me but the relationship between Song & the Doctor was by far the most interesting. I reckon she's his wife (of sorts) from the future...somehow...