Big Finish Review: The Tenth Doctor and River Song

After 12 years since they first met, the 10th Doctor and River Song are finally reunited for three new adventures, courtesy of Big Finish – corresponding across time and space, hunting treasure and visiting an eerie planet, there’s a lot of fun to be had. But is there more to it than that? Should there be?  

David Tennant has certainly had a productive time in lockdown – another series of his podcast with a diverse range of guests from Stacey Abrams to Billie Piper, a series of Zoom based sitcom Staged with another on the way and quite a lot of Doctor Who. A quick scan of Big Finish’s website shows that he’s recorded at least 15 brand new audio adventures as the Tenth Doctor, and one audio for the Timelord Victorious range. And that’s before we even get into the multiple comic strips, novels and audiobooks that feature the Tenth Doctor which will continue to be released long into 2021.  

Perhaps it’s a side-effect of the closure of theatres and scaling down of film and television production necessitated by the Coronavirus pandemic. David Tennant does have five kids to feed after all. Or maybe there’s been some conscious decision by Doctor Who licence holders to bring the Tenth Doctor back to the fold. Is this some sort of subtle, untrumpeted commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Tenth Doctor’s regeneration, or the 15th anniversary of his arrival at the end of The Parting of the Ways? There’s a larger discussion to be had about the unintended impact of all of this on the parent show, and on the Thirteenth Doctors position in both expanded media and the public eye but that’s for another, longer essay. Whatever the reasons, there’s a hell of a lot of Tenth Doctor stuff for fans to enjoy this year.  

This month’s David Tennant release is The Tenth Doctor and River Song, a long-awaited boxed set of three new adventures for the pair. It opens with James Goss’ Expiry Dating which acts as a series opener, re-establishing where we left the Doctor and River at the end of Silence in Library. It’s the sort of light, breezy adventure we were used to during the RTD era, albeit with a lot more temporal chicanery.  

The Doctor still doesn’t quite trust Professor Song, and Expiry Dating mostly takes place via a series of letters between the pair as she tries to convince the Doctor to join her at the ominously named Apocalypse Vault. There’s a lot of fun to be had here, and David Tennant and Alex Kingston are clearly having a whale of a time recording this from their makeshift home recording studios during a period which has been anything but fun. So, it would be churlish of me to have a little bit of a moan, but here goes.  

Goss is obviously a skilful writer with a unique voice and one who can also pitch-perfectly capture the tone and style of a particular era. He did it with his terrific novelisation of The Pirate Planet and he does it again here with the deceptively free-wheeling, narratively tricksy style of a Steven Moffat script. And yet, this is both a blessing and a curse. Whilst the Tenth Doctor’s naïve underestimating of River lends the story some decent comic mileage, the central conceit of the back-and-forth correspondence and the pair outwitting and one-upping each other does begin to feel stretched. This would have been a fantastic short story but as a full-cast audio, it does feel like a Steven Moffat era pre-titles sequence that lasts for the majority of the episode until a rather sweet, touching conclusion.  

Lizzie Hopley’s Precious Annihilation is a more robust adventure story, which finds the Doctor and River on the trail of some very deadly alien jewels. This is the sort of time-hopping, globetrotting adventure that we’ve seen in the most recent series of the show. Once again, it’s a lot of fun and the Tenth Doctor and River’s relationship is developing rather nicely. The easiest comparison would be to something like the Fourth Doctor and Romana 1 – the bombastic hero who’s forced to play second fiddle to someone who is, at the very least, an intellectual equal. It’s clear that the Tenth Doctor’s nose is put out of joint by no longer being the smartest person in the room and Tennant plays this well, neatly balancing charisma, arrogance and vulnerability. 

Fundamentally, Precious Annihilation is a tragic love story with a planet threatening sci-fi plot which feels rather peripheral by comparison. Thematically, it fits perfectly into where we are in the Doctor and River’s complicated timeline – not long after the library but lifetimes away from the happily ever after. One of them knows how in love they’ll become whilst the other knows how tragically it’s all going to end. 

Death casts a long shadow over Jonathan Morris’ Ghosts, which brings the boxed set to a close. There’s something strange in the neighbourhood on the most haunted planet in the galaxy, and who ya gonna call? The Doctor and River arrive to solve the mystery of what’s happening to the ghosts, banding together with some fellow tourists also lost in the mist-shrouded wastes of the planet. By this third play, the Doctor and River are working well together, very much the equal pairing with Professor Song on hand to puncture the Doctor’s bubble every now and again. The guest cast, however, mostly feel like fodder and they become increasingly indistinguishable as the story goes on. 

There’s a terrific sci-fi idea at the heart of this and quite a neat twist that takes you by surprise, but a lot about Ghosts feels like things we’ve seen before, there’s shades of Under the Lake/Before the Flood, Midnight, Army of Ghosts and Silence in the Library (although those last two are probably deliberate). Overall, it amounts to enjoyable enough Doctor Who which is raised by a strong concept and central pairing and let down by the execution.  

Enjoyable enough Doctor Who neatly sums up The Tenth Doctor and River Song. Now that we’ve solved the mystery of River Song, there is a risk that any additional adventures become superfluous and disposable. The stories in the set are, like I say, a lot of fun but without that central mystery, they lack the potential for a relisten with which to pick apart clues. What this set does do, however, is allow us an insight into how the Doctor and River’s relationship developed between Forest of the Dead and The Time of Angels. The Doctor’s distrust and disapproval begin to give way to genuine emotion and perhaps even love. It suits David Tennant well; he is perhaps the most romantic leading man of Doctors. There’s more than a hint of a Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn screwball comedy to Tennant and Kingston’s initially uneasy partnership and they imbue their characters with heaps of charm and wit.  

We waited 12 years for this, and with such a long wait it’s hard to pin down exactly what it was we were expecting. It’s undoubtedly fun Doctor Who but it all feels rather disposable, perhaps because we’re hearing River from the Doctor’s perspective long after her central mystery has been solved. As a result, I found the set lacking an extra edge. However, if you just want more of the Tenth Doctor (and many people clearly do) having adventures with River Song then this is definitely for you. There are breezy capers, doomed romances and spooky science fiction – proper bread and butter Doctor Who of the era it’s replicating.