The metamorphosis of River Song: Requested by the brilliant @mewiet
river song
So exactly what happened during this “big fight” between the Doctor and River that we heard about in The Caretaker, which led to him
sulking with otters for a month?One night, at the end of an
exciting adventure where they broke a space casino, and freed some
cruelly treated horses, she made a slight criticism of him, that was not
only true, but insightful, helpful and loving. He took it like a man.Steven Moffat in DWM485
River & Donna
I just had a moment of fridge horror. In SITL/FOTD, River knows who Donna is and what happens to her. And the look on her face, and the quaver in her voice, just got a lot more excruciating for me. Because River knows exactly what it is like to have your memories stripped from you, your identity forcibly shaped by others. And she can’t do anything to save Donna from that.
I can only imagine how River reacted when the Doctor told her what he did to Donna. I hoped she slapped him well into the next century.
I wrote a fic about River doing exactly that several years ago. It was inspired by River’s FotD line, “Not one line, don’t you dare!” But until this post I never really thought about River’s heartbreaking reaction about Donna’s fate in the context of her own abusive and traumatic childhood with Kovarian and The Silence. Which in turn gives even more gravity to her “Not those times! Not one line, don’t you dare!”
