Well Then, Soldier, How Goes the Day? River Song/ Doctor Who Speculation

If you ever wish to lose a day of your life chasing “theory” rabbits down the proverbial rabbit hole, Google the phase: “Amy Pond and River Song” or “Who Did River Song Kill?” Frankly, the internet is bursting with speculation and theories on what actually transpired and what was revealed during the recent Doctor Who episode, When A Good Man Goes To War. Not wanting to be left out of the party, I’ll add my theory and speculation as well.

If you’re not interested in Doctor Who spoilers or theory or anything related, come back in a day or two when I can guarantee the subject will not be Doctor Who. Otherwise, paraphrasing Bette Davis in “All About Eve,” fasten your seatbelt because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Warning: This article contains spoilers, speculation and a lot of WTF stuff, in addition to being long. Continue reading at your own risk.

This is my personal River Song Bible/Theory prefaced with the following thought: She is a character that is either loved or hated depending on your point of view of the Doctor himself. If you think the Doctor is the “badass of the universe,” then you probably like her. If that’s not your opinion of the Doctor, then you probably don’t care for River Song or are indifferent towards her. She was introduced to us in the season 4 episodes, Silence in Library and Forest of the Dead. These episodes were written by Steven Moffat who would ultimately take over the executive producer duties from Russell T. Davies. Moffat would go on to write every episode in which River Song has appeared. The combined nine episodes, upon review, tell us more about Professor Song in hindsight than first suspected. The episodes in broadcast order are:

• Silence in Library
• Forest of the Dead
• The Time of Angels
• Flesh and Stone
• The Pandorica Opens
• The Big Bang
• The Impossible Astronaut
• Day of the Moon
• A Good Man Goes To War

The broadcast order is the story told from the Doctor’s perspective, but River Song’s story is actually told in the following reverse order keeping in mind two rules:

Rule one: All Time Lords lie.  This includes River Song as well as the Doctor.

Rule two: “Time isn’t a straight line. It’s all bumpy-wumpy, timey-wimey,” per the Doctor in The Impossible Astronaut.

A Good Man Goes To War

1. Birth and kidnapping at Demon’s Run in the 52nd Century.
2. The Doctor discovers that Melody Pond (River Song) has “Time Lord” DNA attached to her human DNA making her a human Time Lord (Lady).
3. River confesses her true identity (Melody Pond) to her birth parents Amy Pond (She who helps bring the Silence) and Rory Williams (The Last Centurion). This is also why she refused to go to Demon’s Run to help the Doctor when asked by Rory Williams earlier. She didn’t want to interact with her past self as an infant.
4. River tells the Doctor that he must change because he is becoming the evil in the universe – that he is so feared that people are willing to kidnap a baby to make it into a weapon to bring him down (or create the Pandorica).
5. This is the climax/high point of her adult relationship with the Doctor so far.

The Impossible Astronaut

1. The Silence witnesses the death of the “Doctor” at River’s hand in 2011. (Yes they do and yes she does.)
2. In 1969, the adult River tells Rory Williams (her father) that she and the Doctor are time traveling in opposite direction and the day will come when he won’t know who she is and that thought will kill her.
3. The little girl is referred to by President Nixon as Jefferson Adams Hamilton who believes her to be a boy based on her answering his “where are you” question first instead of his “who are you” question. It is implied that this child is Melody Pond who was being raised by the Silence at the Graystark Hall Children’s Home in Florida.
4. River is furious and slaps the Doctor in relief that he is still alive and in frustration thinking that he would be so cruel as to deceive her by having her witness the murder she committed (see below).

Day of the Moon

1. She kisses the Doctor passionately for the last time (or so she believes).
2. Possibly the first time she regenerates (New York 1970). (Yes, that is her.)

The Pandorica Opens

1. In 5145, River escapes from Stonecage Containment Facility to show the Doctor Vincent Van Gogh’s painting of the exploding TARDIS that she stole from the Royal Collection.
2. The Doctor says, not knowing he is actually referring to the universe’s view of himself while looking at the Pandorica Box; “there was a goblin, or a trickster—or a warrior—a nameless terrible thing soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. And nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it. One day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world….Think of the fear that went into making (the Pandorica Box), what could inspire that level of fear?”
3. The Doctor’s enemies across the universe band together in the Alliance to trap him in the Pandorica because they reason (correctly)  the TARDIS  will be responsible for the destruction of the universe and (incorrectly) that the Doctor is the only one capable of flying the TARDIS. They do not know that it is River flying the TARDIS when the Silence causes it to explode. Thus, River Song (not Amy Pond) is the one responsible for the destruction of the universe and is the true “bringer of the silence.”

The Big Bang

1. Believing a Stone Dalek has killed the Doctor, River kills it while it begs for mercy after instructing the machine to look her up. (This telling the enemy to “look me up” attitude is typical of the Doctor (especially #10 and something #11 did in “The Eleventh Hour”) and a statement that he (or she in this case) is to be feared and not engaged.)

The Time of Angels

1. In the 51^st century*, River leaves a message for the Doctor on the home box of the Star Liner, The Byzantium, written in High Gallifreyian indicating that she can read and write in the dead language. The message is “Hello Sweetie.”
2. River demonstrates to the Doctor’s surprise that she can fly the TARDIS properly and knows not just where the controls are, but also what they really do. The paradox is that the Doctor teaches her to fly the TARDIS in her past after she has shown him how to properly control the ship in his future.
3. Amy asks River if she is the Doctor’s wife. River (knowing that she is talking to her birth mother) responds by asking if it could be anything that simple. Amy says “yup” and River responds by saying she won’t confirm that Amy is right, but Amy is very good.

* River Song was born and sent to prison in the 52nd century. However, the crash of The Byzantium occurs in the 51st century. On that mission she was accompanied by the Church while she was still a prisoner. This could only happen if the Church has a time travel machine of its own otherwise there is no way for her (and the Church space fleet) to travel backward to a past century. Without a time machine being a common commodity, Silence of the Library/ Forest of the Dead (where she dies) and The Time of Angels can’t happen.

Flesh and Stone

1. The Doctor discovers that River is in Stonecage Containment Facility because she murdered a good man (in her own words “a very good man. Best man I’ve ever known.”) Note: Stonecage is NOT on the planet Shada.
2. River tells the Doctor that she hopes she has done enough to earn a pardon (she has).

Silence in Library

1. In the 51^st century, River leads a private expedition to the Library Planet and meets the Doctor (#10) who is not her Doctor (#11). This Doctor does not know her and the only way she can gain his trust to whisper his real name to him. She remains devastated that he does not know her even though the Doctor is not nearly as antagonistic toward her as he was previously.
2. She carries a modified version of the Doctor’s sonic screwdriver that the Doctor (presumably #11) had given her prior to her expedition.

Forest of the Dead

1. River sacrifices herself to keep the Doctor from sacrificing himself to save the 4022 souls trapped in the library’s data core. Before dying she tells him not to rewrite history in a selfish attempt to save her and she’ll see him again as they are time traveling in opposite directions.
2. The Doctor (#10) saves River’s consciousness in his screwdriver which he uploads to the repaired library data core where she now resides in a virtual world of her own. Interestingly enough, she has a recreation of her diary in her world and cares for three children, one of whom is the virtualized CAL (a human girl named Charlotte Abigail Lux). Rivers refers to the Doctor as “that impossible man.”

~~~

Regeneration: River Song’s ‘Time Lord” DNA allows her to regenerate which she did as a child. However, she cannot die and regenerate as the Doctor does because she only has one heart, but she can regenerate if she is dying – not dead. She knew neither she nor the Doctor would be able to regenerate if they died fixing the data core on the Library Planet, hence her decision to sacrifice herself while emphatically stating that the Doctor didn’t stand of chance of surviving the revitalization of the data core and neither did she.

River Song IS NOT ROMANA or any incarnation of Romanadvoratrelundar. She is NOT the older/younger Lorna Bucket of the Gamma Forest because Bucket interacts with the baby Melody.  She is not a future version of the Doctor. She is not Jenny (daughter of Doctor #10) or the daughter of a future Doctor. She is and has always been River Song/Melody Pond (out of Amy Pond by Rory Williams as my grandmother would say).

Did River kill the Doctor?: Yes. And no.  Unlike the Doctor, who gets others to kill for him, River does personally kill – sometimes out of vengeance (check with the Stone Dalek if you have a question about that). She does kill the Doctor, but it is the “ganger” Doctor who is purposely drawing attention to himself in order for the Silence to witness his death in 2011. The purpose of the charade is for the word to get out that the Doctor is dead and no longer a threat to his enemies and the Church (a faith-based military organization operating in the 51st century and 52nd century). The paradox is since he time travels he’ll remain a threat indefinitely since any future interaction with his enemies will be presumed to have occurred before his death.

River Song was intended to be a weapon to be used against the Doctor by her kidnappers, but by interacting with her as a child he changed the weapon into a devoted ally. She is so devoted that she is willing to go to prison to maintain the ruse of the Doctor’s death. When the ganger Doctor says he is sorry after being shot and while regenerating, he is apologizing to River standing with Amy & Rory who had just called out to him seconds earlier before because he did not know that a ganger Doctor could or would regenerate. This forces River to shoot him again (and shooting him once was painful enough for her). He is sorry for asking her to sacrifice her freedom so that he might have his. She will later sacrifice herself again for him on the Library Planet.

But you can’t be right about River killing the Doctor or the Doctor being a ganger. The Doctor who died was 200 years older than #11 and he knew Jim the Fish.  I remind you of Rule Number One. The Doctor or the rather the ganger Doctor lied about his age and knowing Jim the Fish. (There is a circular logic as to why the ganger Doctor knows of Jim the Fish. It’s because River tells the real Doctor of Jim the Fish when she is trying to determine who he is (after she slaps him)). At the picnic, the ganger Doctor tells Amy that she’s put on a couple of pounds. The ganger Doctor knows that he is talking to a flesh avatar (ganger Amy) and  he knows the real Amy is pregnant; hence the reference to her weight gain. At the picnic, only River and Rory are real. Amy and the Doctor are gangers.

Nope, you’re wrong because Rory is the “Good Man” she kills. She kills her Dad. That’s the “best man she’s ever known.” Someone else kills the Doctor – not River Song. Sorry, but she doesn’t kill Rory, but she may have recently watched him die; hence her initial shock at seeing him. Rory, the Lone Centurion, is the “Good Man” who goes to war, the good man who waited 1,894 years for Amy’s return, but he is not the good man River kills because River kills the ganger Doctor so the real Doctor can stop running. Rule two applies.

River Song in Love: River Song loves the Doctor. He loves her, but he is not in love with her. The Doctor is only in love with the TARDIS (Sexy). He trusts River in the future as much as he is willing to trust anyone.  She has pictures of all of the Doctor’s incarnation but does not know the order. This doesn’t mean she has met all of his incarnations; for example, it is extremely unlikely that she met Doctor (#4) and Sarah Jane. She could tell #10 was younger than her Doctor (11) by looking into his eyes. (Time Lords can sense the presence of other Time Lords, so she’d be able to recognize him as the Doctor regardless of what he looked like.)  Speaking of the Doctor, “Hello Sweetie,” is how she initiates every encounter/adventure with him and often refers to him as “My Love.”

Non-Time Travel Life:  At some point, River Song develops a stable enough non-Time Lord related life to obtain a degree in Anthropology earning a doctorate. She also loses the American accent she had as a child in “The Impossible Astronaut” and develops a British one (indicating lots of time in the U.K.) When she meets #10 she is a Professor indicating she has been appointed to a teaching /research position by a university.

Speculation: River Song says at the end of “Forest of the Dead:” – “Everybody knows that everybody dies, and nobody knows it like the Doctor. But I do think that all the skies of all the worlds might just turn dark if he ever, for one moment, accepts it.”

In The Almost People, the Doctor gives his ganger his sonic screwdriver. The screwdriver is not Flesh so it can’t be destabilized as the ganger was.  The Doctor will travel back to the 22^nd century Earth island and retrieves his screwdriver and revives the ganger Doctor who will be stabilized in the TARDIS. The retrieved screwdriver is the one he will later modify to capture River’s data ghost (and retrieve later). The ganger Doctor killed in The Impossible Astronaut doesn’t have a screwdriver (or a TARDIS for that matter) else River would have made an on-camera point of saying she retrieved it.

Younger River will kill the ganger Doctor under circumstances yet to be revealed; however, clearly under orders/ direction from Madame Kovarian and her superiors. But the orders are compromised by the Doctor’s interaction with young River.  Rule two applies.

The bottom line is: The only water in the forest is the river and the only non-Vashta Nerada life in the forest (on the Library Planet) is also the River. At the end of  When a Good Man Goes to War the Doctor now knows he has the means to free her from the Library thanks to ganger technology and the stabilizing influence of the TARDIS.  And more importantly, now a reason to do so.

That’s my theory (and my speculation relative to season 6 of Doctor Who) and I’ll stick with this until Moffat proves me wrong which could be as early as this winter. Until then, “River, get them all home!”

Added on 30 August: You can see what I actually got right here.