Oh, River Song, you are lovely sometimes. So she gets herself to the Royal Collection, still in 5145, on the Starship UK, which is another brilliant idea it's nice to see pulled from the tapestry: This idea of an entire culture dragging its artifacts behind itself. (Even if it's still annoying to be reminded of how little sense Liz 10's society makes.) She shows up and of course gives another badass little speech about how awesome she is, but that's fine since it's Moffat and only one of the women needs to be an empty caricature at any given. For the first time, our sympathies lie with River, so we're standing at her side as she begs the bloody Queen to let her steal the mysterious painting and take it to the Doctor, and that's all there is to Liz 10, who is looking lovely as usual. And terribly, terribly sad, at whatever she is seeing there.

Now over to a scummy factory-issue arms dealing location called the Maldovarium (which word is funny if you're a Farscape person because the guy she's talking to looks eerily like the fat gay version of Zhaan that one time). He's named Dorium, and he's going to sell her a vortex manipulator, which is one of those wrist-cuff time machine things that always comes up when Jack Harkness is around. In this case, it's still on the severed wrist of whatever "handsome Time Agent" it once belonged to. River Song, as we will pretty much continually see for the next two hours, does not fuck around.

Still not sure how she's any different than Jack Harkness in drag, other than being infinitely less annoying and dimpled. In return, River offers Dorium a "Callisto Pulse" -- which takes the form of an earring, because all of her stuff is jewelry and makeup and magic shoes and teleportation tampons and if she ever had a TARDIS it would be Barbie Pink -- which he'll find useful for disarming the microexplosives she just dosed him with, that are now teeming through his gravid form. I think part of the actual -- not the endlessly explicit and told-not-shown, but the actual, the perceivable -- charm of River is her lovely smile when she's doing something really awful.