More than a decade after their respective exits from <em>Doctor Who</em>, two companions from Matt Smith’s years as the Eleventh Doctor will reunite for their own spinoff adventure.
Arthur Darvill’s Rory Williams and Alex Kingston’s River Song were two of the most important supporting characters during Smith’s era of the Doctor Who revival. The former made his last appearance in the 2012 episode “The Angels Take Manhattan,” and the latter hasn’t been seen on the TV show since the 2015 Christmas special “The Husbands of River Song,” which starred Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor. Now it’s been confirmed that Rory and River will cross paths again, albeit in a different medium.
As shared by Radio Times, Darvill and Kingston will respectively reprise Rory and River in an audio series titled The Death and Life of River Song: River and Rory from Big Finish. This story will consist of four episodes: “Bog Man,” written by Lizzie Hopley; “Life Lessons” written by Karissa Hamilton-Bannis; “A Most Dangerous Game,” written by Robert Valentine; and “The Tashpa Stone,” written by Shai Hussain and John Dorney.
These episodes take place between the Doctor Who season 6 finale, “The Wedding of River Song,” and the season 7 premiere, “Asylum of the Daleks.” At this stage of the show’s run, Rory is separated from Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond and living with a friend in Birmingham. River, who was revealed to be Amy and Rory’s daughter in the episode “A Good Man Goes to War,” checks in on him for some bonding time, only for the father/daughter duo to go on the run from “vicious enemies” who are after River.
This will be the first time Darvill and Kingston have appeared in a Doctor Who project since “The Angels Take Manhattan” aired. Both Rory and Amy were sent back to the 1930s in that episode by a surviving Weeping Angel to live out the rest of their days. The Doctor was never able to see them again because of the paradox it would cause with the TARDIS. It was later revealed in the short “P.S.” that Amy and Rory adopted a son in 1946.
As for Kingston, 2013’s “The Name of The Doctor” marked the last time she and Smith shared screen time on Doctor Who. The actress appeared as a post-“Forest of the Dead” River, whose consciousness had been downloaded into a supercomputer by that point. Then in the aforementioned “The Husbands of River Song,” a younger River met the Twelfth Doctor for the first time and went on to spend a 24-year-old night with him on Darillium. This would be her final time seeing the adventuring Time Lord until crossing paths with David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor in “Silence in the Library.”
Despite her absence from Doctor Who since then, Kingston has continued to voice River at various points in the character’s personal timeline in several Big Finish audio productions, with The Death and Life of River Song: River and Rory being the latest installment. Darvill previously reprised Rory in the audio format for the 2020 series The Lone Centurion, which chronicled the 2,000 years that Rory guarded the Pandorica from season 5.
The Death and Life of River Song: River and Rory will be released in January 2027. As for Doctor Who’s TV run, while it’s still unclear if the next Christmas special will be ready in time for a December 2026 release, showrunner Russell T. Davies recently said that “some sort of press release” is currently being worked on regarding “a new Doctor.”
