📝 SHOW NOTES | 'The Husbands of River Song'

MERRY CHRISTMAS Y'ALL!

Hope you're getting ready to tuck into your turkey/tofu glazed ham. If you don't celebrate Xmas, fair fucks to ya, more money to go around in December and less aggro, being forced to hang out with family! 

Anyway, we hope you enjoyed the first of our festive offerings, Ep69. 'The Husbands of River Song'. A bit of a revelation for the RoD Bois and a treat to go back and basically feel like you're watching a new/old episode of Doctor Who for the first time. Here are Billy's full show notes from the recording.

Ep69. The Husbands of River Song

First broadcast: 25 December 2015.

Written by Steven Moffat.

Directed by Douglas Mackinnon (did 3 episodes of Moff's Jekyll and the Sherlock special 'The Abominable Bride', all 12 episodes (thus far) of Good Omens for Amazon Prime and 8 episodes of Doctor Who including, 'Cold War', 'Listen' and 'Flatline').

Overnight: 5.7m / 7.2m FINAL

This was the last TV story before the dreaded production break of 2016. At the time, Private Eye reported,:

“BBC staff have recently been informed that showrunner Steven Moffat’s commitments to his other hit show Sherlock mean that there will be no full series of Doctor Who in 2016.”

We’ve reviewed this story already. Before watching, what did you remember of the story and what were your expectations going in?

• A big, red spaceship has crashed on a far, distant world on Christmas Day. King Hydroflax, husband of Dr River Song, has a diamond lodged in his brain and the Doctor is mistaken for the surgeon who’ll remove it and save the mad king’s life. In actual fact, River just wants to recover the rare stone and that’s the plot.
• The Doctor and River end up on a starship cruise liner frequented by rich lifeforms who have to prove they have a high body count (that’s deaths mind you, not how many people they’ve shagged). Even the staff have to prove they’re homicidal maniacs (this doesn’t really go anywhere though, save for the fact Flemming, the blue guy, rats 12 and River out, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with the setup).
• After the cruiseliner crashes on Darillium, the Doctor gives a random guy wandering around the wreckage the priceless diamond and encourages him to open a restaurant facing the two singing towers. He takes River there and they spend 24 years bonking, probably.

The 12th Doctor

• There is something cosmic about Peter Capaldi’s performance.
• So many lovely moments and lines, but here’s a few: his face when he first sees River, Nardole telling him not to cross his arms (“I’ve got cross arms”), “Don’t make puddles", overegging his reaction to seeing the TARDIS’ interior, "You can’t shoot the head in the face", 12 stalling giving the head to Scratch (“You can keep the bag as well”)

River Song

• Nice bit during her escape plan with the meteor shower, she’s asked how she knew it would happen, “I’m an archaeologist from the future. I dug you up.”
• River’s diary filling up; “The man who gave me this was the sort of man who'd know exactly how long a diary you were going to need.”
• 12 talks about her looking sad, and I get that. She’s like the Doctor in that she’s such a temporal mess, she can’t really stop moving. She’s an event in space/time and there’s an inherent tragedy in her existence, especially for the audience, who were introduced to the character by watching her die!
• That scene where River talks about loving the Doctor is like “loving the stars themselves, you don't expect a sunset to admire you back” is really beautifully written and acted. I love that she realises 12 is the Doctor without being told by another character.

Guest cast

• Greg Davies as King Hydroflax. I won’t say he’s miscast because that’s probably not right, but I think he should’ve been given a crazy Mohawk and a face tattoo to sell his insane, ranting, alien warmonger character – he just looks like someone’s Dad.
• Matt Lucas as Nardole. I said in our OG review that it’s a shame this story is his mark on Doctor Who. Crazy to think how wrong I was, but you couldn’t have predicted this would be his first of many appearances. He’s used well considering it isn’t the last we see of him, but is probably underutilised in isolation.
• Phillp Rhys as Ramone. He’s only there to add the plural to the episode’s title and make the Doctor feel jealous.

Misc. bits I liked

• The head swapping stuff - it’s pretty grim for teatime on Christmas Day, especially when Scratch from the Shoal of the Winter Harmony splits his head open at the dinner table. The comedy with the head in the bag is funny too.
• Nardole’s head being held at gunpoint by his own body.
• The Doctor taking a bit of a back seat and watching the story unfold around him, with various characters referring to him not knowing he’s right there.
• The stuff with the restaurant – very Curse of Fatal Death. 12 lands on the planet’s surfaces, tells a guy to build a restaurant with the money from the diamond, goes forward in time, tries to book a table, is told their full until Christmas Day in 4 years’ time, books in and then pilots the TARDIS to the correct date and time. I really like the way that whole scene is shot and scored, going back and forth between the console and the door.

Misc. bits I didn't like

• That fucking theme song is so grating. Wow. Where they going for a bagpipes sound? Were they trying to make the theme as abrasive as 12 in his first year?
• This era of Doctor Who is so fucking horny. It honestly needs to get a room. Does Steven have a humiliation kink? He loves writing about how weak, feeble and easy to conquer men are. That might be true, but sometimes it feels very forced and unwarranted. I don’t think that’s me being a prude, mind. I doesn’t feel very Who to me.
• 12 is formulating a plan. River: “Are you thinking? Stop it, you’re a man. It looks weird.”
• The “And they both lived happily ever after…” bit. The point had been made rather beautifully in that final scene, this just felt like an unnecessarily on the nose addition in case everyone in Row Z didn’t get the point they were making.

General points

• The set from the previous season’s ‘Face the Raven’ (Trap Street) is reused here.
• The projectile-lodged-in-the-brain thing is totally ripped out of Renard from The World Is Not Enough, even down to the hologram scene where River shows the object in his head and the line about it still moving inside his head.
• There are 4 different Sonic devices featured; Sonic Sunglasses, Sonic Trowel, the Sonic Screwdriver and River’s Future Sonic Screwdriver.

- RoD 💜💚