Emma Reeves

A River Song box set is always good fun, but this is probably my least favourite set of the series. Part of this could be chalked up to a coincidental burst of apathy or listlessness under our current global circumstances, part to my challenges with understanding modulated or synthesized voices, and part to my perhaps inaccurate expectations. Given that Tom Baker was on the cover of this set, I think I was expecting All Tom Baker All the Time, and he doesn’t appear until the fourth story in the set.

The set started off pretty well with Time in a Bottle, by Emma Reeves and Matt Fitton, which sets up the series-long arc about the Discordia, the total cheats who treat the universe like a video game, constantly going back in time and rewriting their history so they always win. Very timey-wimey. Fenella Woolgar makes an appearance in this set, and she was fun.

I lost focus in the second story, Kings of Infinite Space, by Donald Macleary, because there were more synthesized or modulated robot voices than usual, and I sometimes find it hard to understand those kinds of voices. Android River was my favourite character in this story; she’s just as sassy as the original.

The third story, Whodunnit?, by Matt Fitton, was trippy, as you would expect from a murder mystery drafted by Franz Kafka. I pictured the country house like the one in Murder by Death, and the story plays with those sorts of tropes a bit. I didn’t really follow what was going on, but I was multitasking while listening to this story and I may have ended up devoting more attention to the other task.

The final story, Someone I Once Knew, by John Dorney, was by far my favourite of the stories in the box set, and really the one I came for. I get that the other stories had to build up the threat and context to this point, and it wouldn’t have made sense to have this story on its own, but I would have LOVED more Tom Baker. Nevertheless, this was an excellent conclusion to the set, and I was definitely crying at the end.

Overall, this was a good box set, certainly production-wise. I guess for me, I found the Discordia such cheats that they weren't fun to read about, and I wanted more Tom Baker. I still had a good time listening, though.… (more)