Doctor Who: The Legends of River Song edited by Justin Richards

Book #60 of 2024:

Doctor Who: The Legends of River Song edited by Justin Richards

The year is 2016. The latest episode to air on the show Doctor Who was the recent holiday special The Husbands of River Song, which brought back the titular time-traveling archaeologist for her single on-screen adventure alongside the Twelfth Doctor, following a string of appearances opposite Eleven (and her memorable introduction with Ten). It remains, to date, the last time she’ll ever appear on the program.

Several months later, BBC Books releases this volume, a collection of five licensed short stories about the character. All assume an existing audience familiarity, which seems fair — although the professor was originally introduced with plenty of mysteries surrounding her, by this point, there don’t seem to be any big secrets left unexplored. So this book will spoil details like the identity of her parents and her precise relationship with the Doctor, if for some reason you’re the sort of reader to pick it up without seeing all the relevant episodes yet.

Each tale is told in first-person from River’s perspective as a diary entry about a different escape from Stormcage, which is a distinctive (though not totally unique) choice for Whoniverse fiction. Some are better than others, and I’d particularly highlight the opening “Picnic at Asgard” by Jenny T. Colgan and the closing “River of Time” by Andrew Lane as doing interesting things with the assignment. The former fleshes out a brief reference from the television dialogue for a River/Doctor encounter that also has her privately evaluating him as a partner and wondering if she wants to have kids, which is an aspect of her character that hasn’t been dealt with in canon before. And while the latter isn’t so personally insightful, it takes our heroine to a fraught place in the franchise history, investigating the ruins of one of the ancient races that coexisted with the Time Lords in their prime.

The remaining legends* are fine as filler plots, but not especially noteworthy. “Death in New Venice” by Guy Adams is the worst, for both getting the character voice subtly wrong and unnecessarily subjecting her to multiple occasions of ‘wandering hands,’ but the primary charge I can level against all three is that they don’t really tell us anything new about their subject and aren’t clever enough in their premise or execution to be compelling in their own right otherwise. It’s a wasted opportunity, which is why I’d honestly only recommend reading the two entries that bookend this text.

*It’s a weird title, yeah? Legends don’t usually come straight from the horse’s mouth, and it’s not like these stories are framed as retellings of popular but inaccurate accounts. One suspects that the publisher might have gone with The Diary of River Song instead, if Big Finish hadn’t snagged that name for the series of full-cast audio adventures that they launched in 2015.

★★★☆☆

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