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Are we just not clever enough to appreciate River Song?
Sufyaan_Kazi
Posts: 3,862 Forum Member
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I was thinking about this after replying to a different thread. Since we saw Rivers' life in reverse (so to speak) is that one of the reasons why she came across as a bit annoying. I always hated the way and how she said "spoilers" and especially how she treated Matt like some small piece of dirt rather than the Doctor but thinking of what she was as a concept its kinda cool, the reversed woman/girl.
So, if we had watched all he appearances in the order her character experienced them could we have learnt to understand and accept the way she behaved? Maybe we just aren't viewing her character in a timey wimey sense and just viewing her life as a straight line. I don't know if I even agree with this idea, but wanted to flesh it out.
Am I right with this brief summation of her life as she experienced it:
So, if we had watched all he appearances in the order her character experienced them could we have learnt to understand and accept the way she behaved? Maybe we just aren't viewing her character in a timey wimey sense and just viewing her life as a straight line. I don't know if I even agree with this idea, but wanted to flesh it out.
Am I right with this brief summation of her life as she experienced it:
- Baby
- baby grows and is coached/indoctrinated into becoming THE super Doctor assassin
???At some point used doctors crib in the TARDIS ?? - Grows up to become girl in the astronaut suit ??)
- Baby regens into Mels ??
- Spends her childhood with her future parents and as her future Moms' best friend at school
- Mel's regens into River after being shot by Hitler
- Kills the Doctor
- Learns that she what she believes is wrong and actually falls in love with the Doctor.
- Loses al her remaining regenerations to save the Doctor, discovers her name is River Song
- Becomes a Professor, ten kidnapped again by Kovarian
- Almost splits apart entire civilisation as we know it, to prevent the Doctor dying (as she thinks will happen) before Doctor resets everything.
- Lives an exciting life between prison cell and escapades with the Doctor.
- At some point reveals to Amy & Rory she is their child.
- Develops a sort of over-confidence in time travel and has a "control" over the Doctor because she (well I don't know really - but she thinks she knows how to fly the TARDIS better so basically mocks his mistakes in what she thinks is a cute way)
- Can call on the Doctor any time she wants by leaving him messages throughout time
- Finally, ends up in a library to find a Doctor who doesn't actually know her, has her heart broken that the love of her life looks straight through her with no idea who she is
- sacrifices herself one more time to make sure the Doctor can become the man she fell in love with in her past
- lives on as a data ghost, and can have the occasional mental teleconference with vastra et. al
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Of course that doesn't mean her arc couldn't have been more interesting as I stated above. It should have been. Instead she always knew too much...often more than the audience which was frustrating...and seems to just have appeared every now and again to say 'spoilers' and please her fans. I never even really bought the connection between her and Eleven. It didn't feel like this epic doomed love story. Just a narrative contrivance that got ever more contrived.
Its a shame. There was so much scope there. Moffat wrote himself a wonderful set up. And in my opinion he blew it. Example? To have set up that moment where the Doctor shows up in a new suit and gives her his screwdriver and to never have that appear on screen and instead dash it off in a mini episode dvd extra? Absolute madness. If they had developed her character properly that could have been one of the all time classic scenes. It could have been Capaldi! A link to the past and a sense of closure. But no. She turns up being largely pointless in The Name of the Doctor, utters a truly benign revelation and then says 'spoilers' again. And is gone.
But she will be back.
Yes, i think the idea of the character was great but i feel let down in the execution. The idea that she finally kills Matt, that would have been cool. I really would have preferred to see more of Mels incarnation, perhaps at the expense of River. Completely bonkers, duplicitous, sexy, confident, unpredictable, basically very interesting and entertaining to watch, sigh.....
I still think it was wonderful how she was to kill the Doctor (even though there was no apparent reason it specifically had to be her) and the scene with them at Lake Silencio is fantastic... until the 'get out of jail free' card had to be played.
I loved the concept of the Doctor going quietly to his death for the sake of the universe. That he cheated it by allying himself with a group he previously seemed to possess only contempt for (the Tesselecta gang) was just so unfulfilling to me dramatically. I don't know if it was in character or not, but I felt like it retrospectively undid all of the previous drama and pathos. But needs must and the Doctor had to be alive for the next season.
I have to say it really does make more sense when you watch her life in order!
No doubt it does, but I'd rather it make slightly less sense and let the viewers use their own imagination. But, as I said, I suppose that is too much to ask of a piece of mainstream fiction.
Sure, he created a wonderful character with enough of a spark to last from Series 4 to Series 7 (and potentially beyond) making her the longest recurring character barring the Doctor within NuWho.
But River was a mystery before she was a character...and though it worked in the framework of a single two-parter of Series 4, further appearances diminish that sense of mystery and leave us with a hollowed out character by the end. Her appearances became more complicated as it went on as a result of that.
Moffat made a similar error that had different repercussions with Clara - she was a mystery before she was a character as well, to the point that she didn't get to show any character until her mystery started getting resolved. It put a huge strain on the role of Clara in Series 7 and wasn't fair to Jenna Coleman who acted superbly.
When the Doctor-River stuff is kept simple it really works. When she's reduced to a caricature made to spout catchphrases, especially once her mystery is gone, it really struggles to work and understandably divides audiences. Moffat's visions of Doctor Who which have very much revolved around elements including River Song are not overly confusing, but they are overly complicated and it is to the detriment of his own creations.
There were all sorts of theory's, speculation and sometimes quite outlandish ideas as to who she was. Many on this very forum. Again though Moffat took the easy way out, and for many, me included. It was a total let down.
For me at least, it was one of the biggest mistakes Moffat made and totally ruined her character.
Amen, Amen and Amen.
The whole Rory and Amy Williams' daughter bit was quite the cop out.
Until then, she was interesting.
I can and did appreciate her (until then). After that, she was just a gimmick, a cheap trick. (That, and of course, how she became a "Time Lord" in the first place - by two humans simply having sex in the Tardis.)
Was the whole River Song arc too clever, no..it was terrible writing. Poor, hotspotch character writing that substituted depth with chatchphrases and wishy washy concepts, character interaction with sassy one liners. The kind of writing that an element of sci-fi fans lap up becasue they think it makes them smarter for 'getting it'. For this viewer it was painful that the show stooped so low.
The whole River Song/Amy Pond arc was probably one of the dumbest things I've seen in Doctor Who's entire history.
But he doesn't trust that she's following him, turns around to check and condemns her to the Underworld forever. So basically love doesn't equal trust
If you start with the beginning of her "River Song" incarnation, then it goes something like this...
1 - Let's Kill Hitler
2 - (university scene from Closing Time) + The Wedding Of River Song
3 - (First Night/Bad Night/Good Night) + A Good Man Goes To War
4/5 - The Impossible Astronaut/Day Of The Moon
6/7 - The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang
8/9 - The Time Of Angels/Flesh And Stone + (garden scene from TWORS)
10 - The Angels Take Manhattan + (P.S.)
11/12 - (Last Night) + Silence In The Library/ Forest Of The Dead
13 - The Name Of The Doctor
EDIT: 14 - The Time Of The Doctor (included for appearance of Silents and "Papal Mainframe")
Before that, she was a cheap gimmick. Now she had some background, and a stake in the ongoing events.
Instead, they pretty much tied up the entire story in LKH, having her become the River we know by the end of the episode and even stripping out her only-just-discovered regeneration powers.. I was a tad disappointed that after such a long build-up for her character, the whole mystery was wrapped up so quickly.
We need a like button on this forum
like button, again!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqpZx1USOTI
For Tom Tit especially
River- "Oh, you are good when you want to be"
The Tardis lights flicker.
I think our ideas of a cheap gimmick are somewhat different.
To me, she was interesting; she traveled in a different order than The Doctor, and I wanted to see how things would turn out.
Then, they jumped the shark eight ways to Sunday. Seriously, you can create Time Lords just by having two humans mate in the Tardis? Rent out rooms in the thing and bring back a whole race of them - Super, Super Gimmicky. She is the daughter of Amy Pond - Gimmick. She and The Doctor marry (semi-gimmicky - it is more a gimmick because Amy is now the Mother-In-Law of the man for whom she has been pining all of her life).
The traveling the other way thing was not as gimmicky to me as the constant jumping the shark that we had halfway through her story.