Forest of the Dead (TV story)

"Spoilers"

- River Song

Synopsis
As the shadows rise, the Doctor forges an alliance with the mysterious River Song. But can anyone stop the Vashta Nerada?

Plot
River Song uses her gun to blast a hole in the wall, enabling her, The Doctor and the others to escape the shadow-possessed Proper Dave.

Donna wakes up in an ambulance with no memories of her past life. She is treated in a facility by Doctor Moon and life quickly flies by. Before she knows it, she is married to her ideal man Lee, who has a stammer, and has two kids of her own. She is then approached by a hooded figure in a playground, who turns out to be Miss Evangelista. She warns Donna that the world is not real. Donna soon observes that all the children in the playground have the same face.

The Doctor squabbles with River Song, but is soon stunned when he learns that he tells her his true name at some stage in his future. The Time Lord tries to reason with the Vashta Nerada and finds out they came as microspores in millions and millions of books and then hatched.

The Doctor figures out that the library computer's hard drive - CAL - is the key to bringing Donna back, for it has literally saved her to its hard drive. The team travels to the core of the planet to locate the computer. It transpires that the little girl is in fact the hard drive, and was originally a relative of Strackman Lux.

River Song knocks The Doctor out to prevent him stopping her sacrificing herself to bring back Donna and the others. In order to restore those who have been saved, she has to provide memory to Cal, which burns out her mind. She dies, as the Doctor looks on, handcuffed to a wall.

Donna and the other saved people return, but she cannot find Lee and thinks that perhaps he didn't exist after all. Lee sees her but his stammer prevents him from calling out to her before he is teleported away.

The Doctor realizes in the nick of time that, knowing River's fate and having years to think of a way to save her, his future self must have given her the screwdriver for a reason. He finds that, like the data ghosts, her consciousness has been saved in her sonic screwdriver. River Song comes back to life in the fantasy world of the hard drive, meeting Miss Evangelista and the rest of her team again.

Cast

 * The Doctor - David Tennant
 * Donna Noble - Catherine Tate
 * River Song - Alex Kingston
 * Doctor Moon - Colin Salmon
 * Lux - Steve Pemberton
 * Proper Dave - Harry Peacock
 * Other Dave - O.T Fagbenle
 * Charlotte Lux - Eve Newton
 * Anita - Jessika Williams
 * Miss Evangelista - Talulah Riley
 * Lee McAvey - Jason Pitt
 * Dad - Mark Dexter
 * Ella McAvey - Eloise Rakic-Platt
 * Joshua McAvey - Alex Midwood

The Doctor

 * The Doctor says "Who are you?" to River Song, ironic because he is always the one being asked that.
 * River Song whispers the Doctor's name in his ear to convince him to trust her. Later, the Doctor states that there is only one reason why he would have told anyone his name; this reason is not revealed.
 * River Song indicates that "her Doctor" is a future version of the Tenth Doctor. It remains to be seen how this will reconcile with later adventures of the Tenth Doctor up to and including his eventual death and regeneration.
 * The Doctor learns the fate of River Song, and retains this memory through to their "first" meeting in the future. The future Doctor will adjust his sonic screwdriver in order to preserve Song's consciousness so his younger self will be able to preserve her within Cal.
 * If you look closely at the wall in Charlotte's house you will see two of her drawings are of a blonde girl and a wolf.

Story Notes

 * The working title for this story was: River's Run
 * In River Song's voice over, she mentions the "skies of all the world may just turn dark" in another mention of the new series' recurring reminder about darkness.
 * CAL was also the name of the computer graphics company that created the title sequence used between 1987 and 1989 for the Seventh Doctor's TV adventures. A result of this work was the creation of the first photo-realistic CGI TARDIS, featured in DW: Bad Wolf (TV story) d The Rani]].
 * In the girl's house, on a drawing on the wall, there is a picture of a blonde haired girl and a wolf. This may be a reference to Rose and Bad Wolf as they are one of the same

Ratings
to be added

Myths
Following the broadcast of Silence in the Library there was much discussion in the Doctor Who fan community over the identity of River Song, with speculation that she might be a future incarnation of Romana or an alias of Bernice Summerfield being two of the ideas put forth. (The episode, ultimately, leaves her origin ambiguous.)

Filming Locations
to be added

Discontinuity, Plot Holes, Errors

 * It is never explained how the Doctor got out of the handcuffs as it was shown that he couldn't reach the sonic screwdriver and there is no evidence that anyone freed him. ''There were 4,022 people in the Library. There is a very high chance that one of them found him and handed him the screwdriver. This well may have been Donna as the Doctor knew straight away that she was looking for Lee the first time we see them properly together in this episode.
 * What happened to the Vashta Nerada? The Vashta Nerada agreed to give the Doctor one day to free the saved souls in return for the planet itself. It will be interesting to see if the "recovery" of River crops up in a future season... Why do they do that? How can they survive on an empty planet? Remember, they survived an entire century without meat while the people were 'saved'
 * When River Song says goodnight to her "children" there are three beds in the room, but when Donna is in the bedroom there are 2 beds. An extra bed was put in the room for Cal.
 * If the Vashta Nerada are now living on the planet, does that not mean that CAL and its hardrive will be destroyed? Even assuming they could destroy the computer without physical bodies, they have no reason to - they cannot feed on CAL.
 * It is curious how in this episode, a click of the fingers opens the TARDIS doors whilst in The Long Game, when the Doctor and Rose clicked in close proximity to the TARDIS, nothing happened to the TARDIS. Presumably with the TARDIS being telepathic, it has to do with the intent the Doctor has in mind when snapping as well.
 * The Vashta Nerada give the humans a day to leave the planet after they are retrieved from CAL. They're last seen being teleported -- but teleported to where? It's unlikely River Song's ship, now crewless, would be large enough to hold more than 4,000 people. (It's the 51st century, the human race have expanded into the stars. There could be countless planets they were taken to. It could even be the Doctor Moon, where a long-distance teleport relay or spaceport could be situated.)
 * When the Doctor opens the trap door to escape, we see him fall and there is no ledge beneath him, but when we see him again he is hanging on to one. We only see the trapdoor door fall.
 * During the scene when everything goes white, when Lee bursts through the door - he shouts Donna! But Lee could not say her name properly because he had a stammer.He doesn't have it all the time. It seems to come and go, as there were several scenes in which he spoke without the stammer

Continuity

 * At the end of Planet of the Ood, Ood Sigma says that the "Doctor's song" may soon end.
 * The Doctor says that the auto destruct in The Library could 'crack the planet open like an egg' the Seventh Doctor said the same about what the Imperial Dalek mothership's weapons could do to the Earth (DW: Remembrance of the Daleks).
 * River Song says the Doctor has taken her to the "end of the universe", suggesting the Doctor at some point returns to the general time period seen in Utopia which is also described as being at the end of the universe.
 * The question of the Doctor's real name dates back to the earliest days of the series (DW: An Unearthly Child, Silver Nemesis), though in more recent episodes (DW: The Girl in the Fireplace, The Shakespeare Code, The Fires of Pompeii, etc.) the fact his name is a mystery has been amplified. When River reveals that she knows his true name, this marks the first time anyone on screen has shown this knowledge.
 * At the end of this episode, River shouts that "Everybody lives!". This is very similar to what the Doctor says at the end of another of Steven Moffat's episodes, The Doctor Dances ("Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once — everybody lives!").
 * The Doctor says to River Song "history can be rewritten" to which Song replies "not one line" a reference to DW: The Aztecs.
 * The Doctor has previously spoken his name in EDA: Vanderdeken's Children and also EDA: Interference
 * The teleport system is similar to that used in DW: The Ark in Space in that it is limited to three at one time.
 * The squareness gun used by River Song to blast a hole in the wall of the Library is the same gun used by Jack Harkness when he first met the Doctor. It was left behind in the TARDIS when Jack Harkness was teleported out with the Doctor & Rose into the game shows on Station Five. (DW: The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances/Bad Wolf) (Per Steven Moffat, Doctor Who Confidential: "River Runs Deep")

DVD and other releases

 * It will be released on the Series 4 boxset DVD in November 2008.
 * It will be released as Series 4 Volume 3 alongside Silence in the Library and Midnight in August 2008.