∞ list of fictional characters → RIVER SONG (Doctor Who)
“When I first met the Doctor, a long, long time ago, he knew all about me… Trouble is, it’s all back to front. My past is his future. We’re traveling in opposite directions. Every time we meet, I know him more, he knows me less. I live for the days when I see him, but I know that every time that I do he’ll be one step further away. The day is coming when I’ll look into that man’s eyes, my Doctor, and he won’t have the faintest idea who I am.”
river song
I’m looking at River’s page on the TARDIS Wiki and
River’s diary showed she had met the First Doctor at 76 Totter’s Lane. When she heard Susan Foreman’s voice calling, “Grandfather?” she wrote, “My hand leapt to the manipulator and I got out of there in a shot. That is a conversation I am not ready for yet!”
and
River met the first nine incarnations that went by “the Doctor”, but erased his memories of her with mnemosine recall-wipe vapour to avoid corrupting his timeline. Her opinions on the Doctors were varied:
First Doctor – She considered this incarnation to be boring, because he spent his time hanging out with teachers.
Second Doctor – This was the incarnation that she held the most animosity toward, after he offered to show her “this cool place on Telos”. She angrily wrote, “I saw right through that (and I hope he chokes on that recorder).”
aND
Fifth Doctor – She noticed his obsession with the Eye of Orion, which she was misled to believe was a nightclub.
EVEN BETTER
River once encountered Zygons and taunted them by saying, “What’s up, suckers?”
ALSO NO ONE TOLD ME THERE WERE COMICS AND OTHER STORIES WITH MELS
Mels held the school record for confiscated property. She once had Amy and Rory cause a distraction so she could sneak her confiscated items out of the teachers’ supply closet and then escaped over the roof and through the window of the teachers’ loo.
REALLY THOUGH
One year, after Veronica stole Amelia’s Raggedy Doctor doll, Mels dressed up in a mask and proclaimed herself “the Sheep of Doom.” She successfully scared Veronica into giving Amelia her doll back, but not before beheading it.
COME ON
After the school nativity play in which her parents played Mary and Joseph, Mels presented her mother with her repaired Raggedy Doctor doll and agreed with her grandfather that Amelia and Rory made a “lovely couple.”
If anyone wants to read the Mels nativity story, I have it here!
Slightly peeved DW musing
You know, the more I see of the frankly excellent analysis of various monsters that’s currently on my dash, the more I dislike the assertion in that post tillthenexttimedoctor copied and pasted, that we should find River malevolent and disturbing for the fact that a Dalek was afraid of her.
I mean, the Daleks—they’re a void. Daleks are defined by the things that they don’t have: compassion, individuality, a face to talk to. When you think of all the things that humans spend their days on—art, conversation, work, food, saying, “Ooja booja wooja,” to largely indifferent cuddly animals—for all the myriad things that humans do with their time, Daleks substitute thinking about killing you, planning to kill you, or actually killing you. To make a Dalek, you start by subtracting things. Daleks are smaller on the inside.
Which is, of course, why being the enemy of the Daleks has become an incredibly important part of who the Doctor is. But the Daleks are not just the enemy of the Doctor; they’re the enemy of the universe. You could even say that they’re the enemy of the show; everything that Doctor Who is, from intellect and romance to weirdness and silliness, are all things that the Daleks want to shoot dead and replace with more Daleks. So I hope it makes sense that I’m bothered when someone declares the act of opposing and intimidating a Dalek to be frightening and horrendous—at least, so long as that person is a middle-aged woman and not the Doctor. Antihero, sure. (So is the Doctor.) But horrendous? Really?
I always go back to Terry Nation’s original concept for the Daleks:
Nation grew up during World War II, and remembered the fear caused by German bombings. He consciously based the Daleks on the Nazis, conceiving the species as faceless, authoritarian figures dedicated to conquest and complete conformity.[62] The allusion is most obvious in the Dalek stories penned by Nation, in particular The Dalek Invasion of Earth (1964) and Genesis of the Daleks (1975).
We (the BBC, the fandom, everyone) have sanitized them over the years – made them literally into cuddly toys and so on. Things have changed and evolved and that’s probably okay, I don’t know. But they’re still an alien robot stand-in for actual Nazis, or they started off that way, so I don’t think that anyone violently standing up to them should be a disturbing act. Or an act worthy of the condemnation it sometimes gets in the show (when Ten 2 kills them in Journey’s End, for example.) I even wonder sometimes if Dalek, good as it is, was a bit of a misjudged idea. Because as long as Nazis exist, and they do, the concept of Daleks is a threatening one. So we should be seeing characters stand up to them, even violently, even ‘disturbingly’, even though the show is pretty inconsistent on How You Should Treat A Dalek as well.
(I always thought it was interesting how it was a Jewish woman – Verity Lambert – who originally fought for the Daleks’ inclusion as a horrible enemy.)
I don’t think intimidating Daleks makes River Sue Frightening and Horrendous I think it makes her Ridiculous and Unbelievable. As has been pointed out, Daleks aren’t anything but rolling balls of Hate. They aren’t even scared of the Doctor and he MADE DAVROS BLOW UP THEIR ENTIRE PLANET! They’ve been fighting the Doctor since they were mutated from Kaleds INTO Daleks for crying out loud. They call him
Ka Faraq Gatri: The Destroyer of Worlds, the Oncoming Storm. If there was one individual in the cosmos they would beg mercy of it would be the Doctor. And we’re supposed to belive that River Sue did something WORSE than that?
Please. River Sue is Steven Moffat’s Wet Dream. No More, No Less.
It’s been stated in-show that they’re frightened of the Doctor. Also, they have at least once flinched when he yells at them (in “Parting of the Ways”). If River is ridiculous and unbelievable, so is the Doctor.
Remember I said I’d write this? I wrote this! It’s also available on AO3.
Amy
When Amy Pond was nine years old, her art teacher presented a replica of Vase With 12 Sunflowers to the class, and asked every child to describe how it made them feel.
“Happy,” said most of the pupils, associating sunflowers with summer and sunshine and childhood.
“Sad,” said Mels.
Amy thought about it harder than anyone. “Proud,” she finally said.
“Why?” asked the teacher.
“I don’t know,” said Amy.
“Well,” the teacher said, smiling indulgently, “that’s not much good to anyone, then, is it?”
“Her name is on it,” Rory spoke up.
“Well spotted, Rory,” said the teacher. “But the Amy whose name is on here is a different Amy, who died a long time ago. She must have been a friend of Vincent’s.”
*
When Amy Pond was fourteen years old, she attended a talk at the local art museum. The subject was Van Gogh, his paintings and life.
Amy had not thought to dress up. Everyone else was in sensible clothes, suits, dresses. She was wearing a miniskirt. All eyes turned to her as she walked down through the rows of seats. Some of the glances were merely curious. Some were not.
The last available seat in the room was next to a middle-aged man who looked Amy up and down with obvious interest. Amy glared at him, did not adjust her skirt, and listened to the talk quietly and determinedly.
At the end, the discussion between the panelists turned to the mysterious inscription on Vase With 12 Sunflowers, and the woman’s name written there with love.
“It’s very likely that this Amy was a prostitute,” said one of the men.
*
When Amy Pond was nineteen years old, she and Mels went to Paris for a short holiday. After two days’ worth of Disneyland, Amy insisted on visiting the Louvre.
“You’re so boring,” Mels chided. “Just like an old lady.” But she came too.
When they got to the main gallery, it was packed with tourists and schoolchildren. All Amy could see was people’s backs, rather than the paintings she had come to get closer to. Mels elbowed a few people aside so that she could get a better view, but Amy realised she couldn’t be bothered. She felt incredibly disappointed, like she had suddenly been denied access to something belonging to her.
A young tour guide was giving a talk to a group of tourists, and she had reached Vase With 12 Sunflowers.
“People often ask who Amy was and the truth is we don’t really know,” the guide said. “But I like to think of her as a sort of…unattainable object for Van Gogh.”
“This is boring,” Amy said to Mels. “Let’s go.”
“Amy was his muse, his ideal of womanhood, perhaps…”
*
When Amy Pond was twenty-one years old, she went poking about in the TARDIS library.
“Amy,” said the Doctor, “I can’t help noticing you’re digging out all my books on Vincent Van Gogh. And some of those are from the thirtieth century, so do be careful with them.”
“I just want to look.”
“You want to look to see if you could have saved him,” the Doctor said gently, but (Amy thought) a little patronizingly.
“No,” said Amy.
“It’s understandable. You’ve suffered a lot of loss recently,” the Doctor said, before seemingly catching himself and saying, “Let’s go have some fun, eh, Amy?”
But Amy suddenly smacked the book she was reading with her fist, and stared at him with tears in her eyes. The Doctor hurried over to her, and as Amy tightened her fingers on his wrist they both stared at the text on the bottom of the page.
It is unlikely that “Amy” ever existed at all…she was most likely an imaginary figure concocted by Van Gogh to deal with his splintering reality...
*
When Amy Pond was twenty-three years old, she and her husband and her daughter and her Doctor visited the Great Galactic Art Gallery, which held fine paintings and artworks from every corner of the universe.
“Doctor,” she called to him with a slight gasp in her voice. He was giggling at a sculpture with River. “Doctor. Vincent is here.”
The Doctor came over and observed Vase With 12 Sunflowers, even brushing it with his fingertips a little. “See,” he said. “I told him.”
But even as he turned away Amy found that she couldn’t. She pressed the little red button by the side of the painting, and a speaker into which visitors could ask questions popped up. “What would you like to know?” asked a robotic voice.
“Who is Amy?” asked Amy.
“Historians do not know,” said the voice, “but they believe she must have been a woman loved by van Gogh.”
*
When Amy Pond was thirty-seven years old, she bought a framed copy of Vase With 12 Sunflowers and hung it up in the New York apartment. When the sun set, the light hit it just right.
“That’s pretty,” Rory said to her. “You always loved van Gogh, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Amy said, her voice tinged with nostalgia. “Even met him once.”
Rory was eating a sandwich as he glanced at the painting, and Amy watched was amusement as his chewing suddenly slowed.
“Oh my god,” he said, after swallowing his food. “I remember we talked about it in school once. Vincent’s friend Amy. That’s you, isn’t it? You’re Amy!”
“Yes,” Amy said proudly. “I am.”
The Timeline of River Song in Doctor Who.
There’s a bigger version of this over on visual.ly.
(Covering all the televised episodes, ‘minisodes’, and references to unseen adventures.)
I’ve been updating this timeline for several years, and it felt like the right time to give it another overhaul…
On villains
Let’s talk about Bucky Barnes, River Song, their decidedly similar narratives when it comes to bodily autonomy, agency and abuse, and the way fandom reacts to all that!
Both Bucky and River are forced to become ‘a weapon’ in the most horrific ways possible – Bucky is tortured and brainwashed; River was experimented on whilst in the womb and spent her childhood alone and terrified (”The spaceman’s here! It’s going to get
me! It’s going to eat me!”).
Due to the brainwashing/horrible medical abuse both suffered, both became the cold-blooded assassins that they never would have become without interference – Bucky working for HYDRA, River tasked by Madame Kovarian with killing the Doctor. Similar dehumanising language is used on both characters by their abusers –
“I made you what you are” / “[We’re] your owners.” / “We’ve been far
too thorough with your dear little head.” (Kovarian to River)“You
are to be the new face of HYDRA.” “Wipe him and start over.” (Zola and Pierce to Bucky)
When finding themselves tasked with murdering someone they realized loved them (Steve for Bucky, the Doctor for River) it shifted the mindsets of these characters enough to make them flee – Bucky disappeared into the ether; River applied for the Luna University. Slowly they started to regain agency.
Neither character can really be classified as villainous, because of all the things they did they did none of them of their free will. And yet ’Bucky’s not a villain!’ has become a meme, added to gifsets and interviews, reiterated constantly, and River…doesn’t have that. Whenever there’s a ‘Look at Moffat’s villains, all dressed the same!/all older women!/all women!’ post, despite her stint of villainy lasting less than one episode she’s right in there, alongside Kovarian, with zero context given. I’ll grant that the writing may not help at all in that regard (I agree with whoever said ‘can we take the word psychopath away from Steven Moffat’) but basically –
River and Bucky are both characters who were abused and brainwashed and had their agency ripped right from them to make them ‘villains’, but Bucky gets a meme and a hundred gifsets of his broken face and a hundred corrections on any MCU post where he’s lumped in with the likes of Loki or (worse) Pierce, and River gets…well, River usually gets a screenshot taken of the time she was wearing an outfit similar to Kovarian’s for plot reasons, has that placed alongside a screenshot of Kovarian – the woman who abused and experimented on both her and her mother – and a witty caption along the lines of ‘but all of moffat’s villains are different guyz!’ placed over her. And try as I might –
I can’t imagine anyone doing the same thing with Bucky and his abuser.