Signs

"You have strange dreams when you're dying..."

Writer: James Goss

Format: Audio

Released: December 2015

Series: The Diary of River Song 1.03

Featuring: River

Synopsis 

River Song is on the trail of the mysterious, planet-killing SporeShips.

Nobody knows where they come from. Nobody knows why they are here. All they do know is that wherever the SporeShips appear, while civilisations are reduced to mulch. 

But River has help. Her companion is a handsome time-travelling stranger, someone with specialist knowledge of the oddities and dangers the universe has to offer. 

For Mr Song has a connection to River's future, and he would never want his wife to face those perils alone...

Verdict 

Signs was another excellent audio adventure in The Diary of River Song boxset and continued along the series and overlapping story very well. I loved the style of the adventure very much and I must congratulate Alex Kingston, Samuel West and James Goss for giving us such a good adventure with just two cast characters. It's a brave move with an hour to fill but everybody involved rose to the occasion and gave us a marvellous story to behold. I was thrilled with it and the consistency of the series has been magnificent. I liked the way the link from the last story wasn't really revealed until the end of this adventure and it actually worked really well. I loved the start of it where River was desperate to hear one last story before she died. She wanted it to be pretty simple with just a nice beginning, middle and end. That's the best type of story when those are clearly illustrated and they all come together. That structure seems to have actually applied to this boxset as a whole which has been really great. The idea of cloning River and putting her in numerous scenarios is certainly an intriguing one but I must admit I was quite shocked by the fact the clones died! What made that impact hit home really hard was that River retained the memories of those clones. All of the respective scenarios seemed to have Mr Song in control and for obvious reasons I was never convinced that he might be the Doctor but a story teasing that is such a good idea and it's a shame really that this boxset couldn't have been released prior to the broadcast of The Husbands of River Song because some of the dialogue in this regarding the Doctor and his faces, with a nice reference to Let's Kill Hitler, was a bit contradictory. With the mass of Doctor Who adventures available now (I mean, this is my 672nd blog entry and there's still an absolutely stupendous amount of Doctor Who I'm yet to cover or even explore), contradiction is going to happen because not every writer is going to know what has happened regarding certain characters or events across different formats, so the timing was just off here but it didn't really affect the story too much, if at all. I loved the reference to The Web of Fear with Mr Song, who was of course impersonating the Doctor, referring to the time the TARDIS got covered in cobwebs. The way Mr Song knew so much about the Doctor and River was superb with him simply using the diary River keeps and replacing the cover with the more affiliated to the Doctor title of the 500 year diary. I loved that and it's clear that Mr Song is quite intelligent and his connection with the Rulers of the Universe seems intriguing and I'm looking very forward to seeing it unfold in what is set to be an epic finale. The reference to I Went to a Marvellous Party was superb and I wasn't expecting the revelation that River's presence on the ship was not to save the planet that she did, but simply to meet Mr Song. The interconnection between stories in this boxset is magnificent and I love how each story takes us into the next and in a way that we were perhaps not expecting. Overall, another great adventure for River Song and, as if it was in any doubt, it's clear that she's more than able to have her own spinoff. I now anticipate the finale greatly where she will actually meet her husband, but in an incarnation she has not encountered before. I really can't wait.

Rating: 9/10