Friend of the Family: The Key to the Door

"I wish the ice would thaw again."

Writer: Tim Foley

Format: Audio

Released: January 2023

Series: Diary of River Song 11.02

Featuring: River

Synopsis

River Song decides to investigate a temporal anomaly after a Luna University expedition makes some odd discoveries in an old Earth house – pages of her own diary with an inscrutable riddle written across them.

However, her investigation goes badly wrong when she is transported back into the past of the house and gets trapped within its grounds.

The house is the home of the Mortimers and with a limited ability to travel back and forth in time across eighty years and multiple generations she finds herself witnessing key moments in their family history.

If she wants to escape, the words in her diary are not the only riddle she has to solve. But not everyone in the house will survive what's coming. And not everyone is on her side.

Verdict

The Key to the Door was another great episode to continue my way through the Friend of the Family eleventh series of The Diary of River Song! I thought this was a really strong continuation of the story that is arguably one concurrent adventure and whilst it did lose a little bit of the mystery that is natural to the opening episode, this was still really solid and did a good job in moving things forward. I thought it was good to get a lot more Hugo interaction and the timeframe for this story in River's timeline is fascinating. It's also something that is going to bring a lot of emotion as River's famed diary is running out of pages and that means the end of her travels with the Doctor, and ultimately the end of her life as seen in Forest of the Dead. That's a daunting prospect and it really sells the concept of River not wanting to use the pages in her diary to jot down the timeline of her bouncing around the Mortimer residence. I liked how Hugo was initially confused about her reluctance to use the pages in her diary, but he soon understood the significance of it. I thought the timeline being established as 1936-2014 was good last time out, but now the intervals were even at 26 years which is intriguing. What is the significance there? It's enough time for a whole generation of the family to grow up but it feels like there might be something more there. I liked the mystery of the locked door in the house and the family members not really being bothered by it was intriguing. How could you live in a house and not be interested or concerned by a room that was always locked? So it made perfect sense towards the end when the mysterious cook was inside it cooking up who knows what. I was a little surprised that we learned a bit about her and the fact she was the Kontron Crystal inside River's vortex manipulator, but that doesn't really tell us a huge amount at the same time because what does that even mean? I don't know the science behind it but I like the idea a lot of the manipulator itself causing chaos. It makes sense as to why the manipulator is limited in the times River can travel across and also spatially. This is very much a trap and River is at the heart of it. I thought Maddie was quite dark in this episode and purely just from the birthday gift of emptiness she wanted River to wrap. Talk about heartless and symbolising! I thought that was pretty spectacular in its message and being as part of its time. River forging references based on those she had already seen to get the job as governess was funny because she had to argue with Hugo about the bootstrap paradox. I love one of those. River being flung to 2014 was exciting and I found her interactions with Harry and Vinay very amusing. It's a good jump forward to see how quickly times have changed with them wanting to potentially get married but at least they were open about being in a relationship. As they mentioned, it was legal now! And it's scary to think just how badly that would be viewed upon at the different points in the Mortimer timeline that River has access to. I thought the humour that came from her watching Pride & Prejudice was good although the prospect of six hours of Jayne Austen does not sound ideal to me! I liked how her opinion changed on things before watching compared with after. The cliffhanger finish with River calling herself from the 1960s was exciting and with her seemingly stuck in 2014, I'm very intrigued to hear where things move from here! I'm certainly interested and look forward to exploring more mysteries. Overall, another great episode! 

Rating: 8/10