The Husbands of River Song

Chapter The 196th, a (very) little bit of Christmas during a heatwave.

Plot:

The Doctor is hiding from Christmas celebrations on the planet Blah-blah-doesn't matter in the year Five Thousand and Arbitrary. In a case of mistaken identity, he is asked to perform surgery on the vicious but seemingly well-loved cyborg King Hydroflax to remove an expensive diamond from his brain, while all his people hold vigil and watch the operation on TV. Hydroflax's queen, who has organised all this, turns out to be River Song. She doesn't recognise the Doctor in his Peter Capaldi form, convinced that the Matt Smith version is the last ever one. River's pulling a con, planning to steal and sell on the diamond. She didn't want a surgeon to remove the diamond but rather to remove Hydroflax's head. As luck would have it, his head is detachable from his robotic body, so the Doctor and River escape with it in a bag. Getting a glimpse of how River is when he's not around, the Doctor accompanies her as she borrows his TARDIS and goes to a spaceship full of villains to sell the head, with the headless robot body following them. Unfortunately, the villains are Hydroflax's followers too. Finally realising who the Doctor is, River shares her escape plan based on her knowledge of future history: the ship is just about to get struck by a meteor. The Doctor, River and the TARDIS survive the crash, and have arrived on the planet Darillium, scene of their last ever date. The Doctor gives the diamond to someone to build a restaurant just so he and River have somewhere to go, and zips forward in the TARDIS to when it's been built. The Doctor and River enjoy their last night together. Luckily, the nights on Darillium last 24 years...

Context:

After a nice day by the beach during a spell of hot weather in the UK, we needed a bit of shade. Since my childhood, in such circumstances, I've found refuge in the living room with the curtains closed on the sun and the TV on. So it was this time. I was accompanied by a couple of the family (son aged 11, daughter aged 9 - everyone else was out) watching the episode from the Blu-ray in the series 9 box-set. They both enjoyed it very much, but were a bit disappointed early on. All the talk of the Doctor meeting River's husband set the expectation in both their minds that another version of the Doctor was going to appear, and they had a few fun moments speculating on which one before they found out that it was just Greg Davies in an oversized robot suit. The youngest thought the alien that could peel his head apart was "Yuk!"

First Time Round:

The Husbands of River Song was one of the earliest stories to be broadcast after I'd started this blog. As some long-term readers of the blog (pause for the obligatory "Hi Mum!") will know, I often have trouble remembering the situation of my earliest watch of such stories. You'd think, particularly as it was early on, that I'd have been minded to pay extra attention, but alas not. I think I can be forgiven for this one, though. There's always loads going on on Christmas Day. Based on the usual pattern of years around this one, on December 25th 2015 we would have had my in-laws round for lunch on the day, would have said goodbye to them around 8pm, then would have put the kids to bed before the Better Half and I watched time-shifted programmes from the PVR. This year, I think I probably bowed to pressure and let the BH watch the last ever Downton Abbey first. I think that made it too late to catch up with Doctor Who on the big day, so I would have first watched it sometime on Boxing Day with the rest of the the family.

Reaction:

Is The Husbands of River Song the least Christmassy Doctor Who Christmas special ever? Murray Gold has to put actual carol singers on the soundtrack for a few seconds at the start, or else the audience could easily miss the other couple of tiny festive references altogether. I haven't seen the following Christmas story The Return of Doctor Mysterio recently, but I seem to remember it was similarly unconnected to yule. Writer and showrunner Steven Moffat had clearly reached the point that John Sullivan did with Only Fools and Horses (which had a similarly long run of specials broadcast on successive December 25ths in the UK in the 1980s and 90s), sick of the tinsel and trappings (Sullivan started setting his stories in the Summer and didn't even pay the minimal lip service that Moffat does). Perhaps Moffat is also a bit tired of writing Doctor Who stories in general. He'd done five full years worth of episodes at this point, more than his predecessor Russell T Davies, and still had another series and two Christmas specials still to do. He has something of a break for this story. The jolliness of the season allows him to present what is essentially just a set of comic sketches, rather than a structured adventure story: a comic conversation with Matt Lucas, having to perform surgery in front of loads of people with hilarious consequences, River not knowing who the Doctor is much to his annoyance, larks with a head in a bag, japes with a headless robot. The whole thing is held together just about by a screwball energy and the chemistry between Alex Kingston and Peter Capaldi.

Like with any sketch show, one isn't necessarily going to enjoy every part equally, but watching it one knows that another gag will come along in a moment to replace the current one. There's some lovely moments; one of the best among them is the Doctor finally getting to do his own "It's bigger on the inside" speech upon entering the TARDIS and going full-on operatic with his overreaction. A lot of the best gags are quite dark too, like the exchange between the Doctor and River: "You're talking about murdering someone" "No, I'm not. I'm actually murdering someone." If you still weren't convinced, the selection of guest actors clues one in that the piece as a whole was intended to be a comic confection. Greg Davies doesn't get to do much other than red-faced angry shouting, but he does do red-faced angry shouting very well. Matt Lucas as Nardole is similarly underused here, but it can be seen as an audition. His cute and funny Nardole would return the following Christmas and throughout the subsequent series. Rowan Polonski, as the Uriah Heap-like insectoid waiter Flemming doesn't get much recognition, but his performance stood out for me on this watch. There's chases, a bloke whose head peels apart, spaceship crashes - what more could one want on a Christmas day?

Then, towards the end, the story takes another turn and the final part is tragi-romantic. The guest stars have dropped away and it's all about the Doctor and River and their last ever 'night' together. On my first watch I wondered whether people would get the relevance of this sequence. There are lots of echoes throughout The Husbands of River Song to a speech from River's first appearance in the David Tennant library two-parter: "Funny thing is, this means you've always known how I was going to die. All the time we've been together, you knew I was coming here. The last time I saw you, the real you, the future you, I mean, you turned up on my doorstep, with a new haircut and a suit. You took me to Darillium to see the Singing Towers. What a night that was. The Towers sang, and you cried." Moffat finally depicts this in all its detail, seven years on from the character's first appearance. This is great fan service for the faithful, but everyone else? I think they get it from River's references to her diary being full, and they'll see it as a nice romantic scene, but it probably lacks the emotional punch for anyone not well versed in the backstory. Equally, the moment the Doctor gets to turn the tables on River who finally works out who he is, appropriating her catchphrase "Hello sweetie!" would not be nearly such a good moment for the uninitiated. It might be a little bit too fannish (River makes an oblique reference to a boxset extra at one point), and the backstory is very convoluted (River meets the Doctor at least two more times after this in her personal chronology) but it's forgivable as this is the final appearance of the character on TV. That's presuming that she never returns to meet her husband as played by Jodie Whittaker. 

 

Connectivity: 

For the fourth story covered by the blog in a row, this ends with an emotional goodbye. The first one of this cycle, The Name of the Doctor, like The Husbands of River Song featured an emotional final goodbye to River Song. Husbands, though, looks like it is the definitive end for the character on TV; she was very much Steven Moffat's character, and it seems unlikely that his successor Chris Chibnall will bring her back (but you never know, I suppose!).

Deeper Thoughts:

A change is as good as a rest? Nobody writes articles on how tired Silent Witness is looking, and whether it should be reworked or taken off the air. It's a BBC drama show, and it's been made and broadcast consistently since 1996 (beating Doctor Who's false start attempt at a relaunch, the Paul McGann TV movie, to air by a few months and carrying on ever since). The show has a few million regular viewers and no doubt has its die-hard fans too. I don't watch Silent Witness, they do; but, I don't begrudge them their programme, and wouldn't understand anyone who would go to the trouble of writing an article beating it up. Nobody ever would write such a thing, though. Of BBC shows at least, Doctor Who is the only one that seems to get this treatment; maybe that's flattering in a way. The Guardian website has had a habit recently of putting up click-bait articles in what seems to be a series with the loose theme of "You know that thing you've liked since childhood, here's why it's shit". Martin Belam's piece this week is calmer and more thoughtful in comparison to the one in May that dumped all over Shrek, but I'm still a bit bemused why it exists at all. The early thrust of Belam's argument is that Doctor Who is not as good as US shows. Silent Witness might not be better than The Wire, but does that mean that the BBC should stop making it, or start to make it in a radically different way?

The article compares Doctor Who unfavourably to some specific shows (The Mandalorian, Loki and WandaVision), none of which I've seen. The "budgets and production values" of these shows are apparently "upstaging Doctor Who". Well, they are spin-offs of multi-million dollar movie franchises, after all. Belam also says that WandaVision's story-telling is in "a different league", but what does this mean? He enjoys it more, obviously, but beyond that? A single serial with a strong theme - meta sampling of broadcast tropes, specifically US sitcoms - WandaVision couldn't sustain in that format for long, and wasn't designed to do so; there are currently no plans for a second season. It's unhelpful to compare this with a long-running series that comes back year after year like Doctor Who. Belam is of course suggesting that Doctor Who should cease to be a long-running series that comes back year after year (he suggests maybe trying a feature film, or an anthology series featuring characters from the Doctor Who story universe); but he also complains that "the BBC’s production pace is glacial compared with its streaming rivals". It's not the only contradiction in the article. Belam moans that Doctor Who's production values are lacking, but also says that it "looks better than it ever has". He says that Who should avoid getting too involved in telling its "self-absorbed meta-story", but also says that when Chris Chibnall tried to do just that in his first series as showrunner, it felt too low stakes. The pace of production point, though, is just inaccurate. Loki and WandaVision have created one series of less than ten episodes each so far; the Mandalorian has managed two series, but its third run has been delayed. Star Trek: Discovery, to pick another representative example, has made 42 episodes from 2017 to 2021, Doctor Who in the same period produced 35, with 8 more coming soon. Any sci-fi or fantasy show currently being made by a streaming service is roughly made at the same pace as Doctor Who.

I don't think I'm the only one who hasn't seen those Disney+ shows either. They're very popular in online chatter, but are still quite niche products on streaming services that don't share their viewing figures in the same way as big network broadcasters like BBC1 do. It's hard therefore to make comparisons, but I'll go out on a limb and estimate that a programme regularly being broadcast on a big mainstream channel on New Year's Day is going to have healthy numbers compared to a major cult spin-off show on a relatively new subscription service. Of course, shows like WandaVision will keep finding new viewers coming to them, but so will Who through the BBC iplayer, and it has very healthy figures related to the people consuming the show through that platform. The article says that Doctor Who "is up against the giants of Netflix and Disney+" but it isn't really. It's up against whatever's on ITV when it goes out, and it has much more in common with Silent Witness to my mind than WandaVision. I think that Belam has made a couple of easy-to-make mistakes in his reckoning. The first is to imagine that twitter is real life. He talks about "legions of fans [in] a frenzy, taking to their social media and YouTube channels to shout about “lazy writing”" but that minority has always been and always will be there, and nobody should care too much what they think. The second mistake is to fall foul of a kind of group hypnosis that invidious capitalism has performed on all of us over the years: the whiff of the municipal pool that lingers over anything provided as a public service, like Doctor Who and the BBC's output. We've been programmed to think that the municipal swimming pool is inferior to the privately run spa, because the latter costs more money. It's very often not true, just as it isn't necessarily true of the BBC versus Disney+ or Netflix.

I don't necessarily disagree with Belam regarding enjoyment of the current Doctor Who episodes; I've been a bit underwhelmed recently too. It's interesting, though, to compare Doctor Who now to how it was around the time of The Husband of River Song's first broadcast. I was underwhelmed with the run of episodes in 2015 too, but change was around the corner. Like now, a new regular was set to arrive in the next run, joining the two existing members of the TARDIS team. In 2017, this created a new dynamic, and the run of stories with Bill and Nardole was much more enjoyable for me than the final year with Clara. It didn't need a change of Doctor, or a change of format, for the show to be rejuvenated. Maybe 2021's change will be as good as, or better than, a rest. Not long to wait now.

In Summary:

A Doctor Who sketch show for Christmas.