The Unknown written by Guy Adams and directed by Ken Bentley

What’s it About: A planetary anomaly. A scientific impossibility. A mystery to be solved. Of course, River Song expects to be consulted. She expects her valuable knowledge and experience will help the crew of the Saturnius unlock the strange phenomenon that has appeared in Earth’s solar system. But what River doesn’t expect is a stowaway. An infuriating little man, calling himself the Doctor.

Hello Sweetie: If there’s one thing she knows, its prison etiquette. For once she hasn’t a clue what is going on and she’s not used to that. How very refreshing, River could have used a little more of that on the television. She has a reasonable amount of knowledge when it comes to temporal anomalies. In one of the few moments to actually grapple with the idea of the seventh Doctor and River meeting, he questions her principles and she tells him to grow up and face the reality of the situation. Thank goodness the Doctor is amnesiac in this story because if he wasn’t and he was questioning anybody else’s principles after what he has done in this impish incarnation it would be most hypocritical.

The Real McCoy: Is it a smart idea to try and tick off every incarnation of the Doctor for a meeting with River? It cocks up television continuity, for sure. In The Silence in the Library the inference is that the tenth Doctor is the youngest version of the Time Lord that she meets. And yet, for marketing purposes it is certainly a good draw and was probably the salvation of these sets in their early days. The idea of one character meeting every single Doctor is cute and seeing how she gets along with each version. In concept it’s fun but flawed, so, I guess the success of this experiment comes down to the individual quality of each release.

Standout Performance: McCoy and Kingston together had no effect on me at all. But I fear that is down to the distance that the amnesia brought to the script.

Sparkling Dialogue: ‘Reality is fracturing, Doctor Song, and it’s taking our minds and our memories with it…’
‘You were happy to eat it when it wasn’t complaining’ is the wittiest line in the entire script, and it involves something that is a complete side issue from the plot.

Great Ideas: Long range scans show that this planet is riddled with temporal anomalies (if you look up from the surface you can probably see Voyager from Star trek flying over to check it out). Time seems to be in flux on the surface. The Earth government rushed the Saturnius into operation, a ship that can withstand entering damaged space/time. It’s based on hyperspace technology, the shield shifts the ship out of physical space without being affected by local conditions. Temporal anomalies aren’t in physical space though and the shield should not work at all. A planet riddled with anomalies, a shielded ship and the TARDIS makes for an explosive combination. That’s three bodies half in and half out of physical space causing casual fracture. Three objects colliding linked both to physical space and the vortex: a multi-dimensional singularity. There is a potential extinction event with the shockwaves rippling through the vortex and physical space. Temporal division is when people are divided into copies. That’s rather a tasty idea, an army of temporal duplicates.

Isn’t it Odd: This really is what a Doctor Who script would be like before if it were written by Brannon Braga. A bunch of ridiculous technobabble disguising itself as drama (because it’s certainly delivered with plenty of gusto). Mind you when River attempts to play the tenth Doctor in Steven Moffat’s hands and boil the science down to its simplest level for her audience I think I actually winced out loud. There must be a happy medium between the two. I don’t think it would have been so bad if this story had taken hold of its huge SF ideas and explored them intellectually. What this ultimately boils down to is some crazy shit happening and people going ‘No!’ and ‘Argh!’ a lot. Hmm…the idea of selective memory is very cheeky indeed. It means the Doctor and River can remember things when the plot needs them to (like the sonic screwdriver) and forget about things when it needs to too (like either of them remembering meeting one another). His last scene where the Doctor absent-mindedly finds himself of the Amazon and rivers for no apparent reason sums this story up perfectly.

Standout Scene: River rediscovering the TARDIS has more emotional impact than her rediscovering the Doctor. It’s a terribly well realised scene. ‘I can see the stars again!’

Result: ‘Can we do this without the need for a physics degree, professor Song?’ Amen to that. It feels more like an episode of Voyager than…I was about to say Doctor Who but of course this isn’t Doctor Who and at this stage in the game the River Song series can emerge with whatever formula it wants. Let’s just hope it isn’t like Voyager because temporal anomalies, amnesia and reset buttons all get tiresome very quickly. The key point in this episode is that the seventh Doctor was never going to remember River because his head is in something of a fog. If there’s going to be no impact to the character, what is the point of meeting them? This story has the get-out clause firmly in place before it has already began. Perhaps Big Finish should be brave in a Terrance Dicks/Robert Holmes fashion and just decide to fuck continuity and tell the stories they want to tell. Rather than slavishly adhering to continuity like this and ultimately damaging their output because of it. This should be rather more fun than it ultimately turns out to be; it’s got big science fiction ideas in it and interaction between the seventh Doctor and River. The former is handled in a sterile and unapproachable fashion and the latter is treated as exactly what it is; a marketing strategy rather than exploiting the situation for its dramatic, romantic or humorous worth. If you paused to ask the question ‘is this story worth telling?’ I think you would find about a third of Big Finish’s output wanting, and this release would be added to that list. It’s a handsome production, well-acted and directed but the two things that would ultimately make it worth listening to – storytelling and characterisation – are lacking. The best moment is all set up for the next story, which tells you everything you need to know. I know Guy Adams is better than this: 5/10