Hello Sweetie: A Doctor/River Essay.
One thing, before I start...
The other day my eldest (Miss M, 11 y.o.) said to me:
“You know, I think River would be pretty quick to shut up anyone who says that girls aren’t as good as boys!”
I could only agree wholeheartedly. Because here’s the thing: River is awesome. River is smart and brilliant and capable and can hold her own against the Doctor, and doesn’t apologise. River does her own thing - she is Doctor Song, and later becomes Professor Song. River sends the Doctor messages through time and space, and she’s a time traveller in her own right. River can fly the TARDIS.
In short: She’s River Song, and she is a Big. Damn. Hero.
I have three daughters, and Doctor Who is their favourite show. And it has given them one of the most wonderful, truly strong, female characters I've ever come across. I cannot begin to explain how grateful I am.
***
But really, I’m here beause I have meta to share. I just... wanted to put that out there.
SPOILERS: All of S5 + Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.
Oh, and if you like, you’re very welcome to see this as a ‘ship manifesto. :)
“You and me, time and space. You watch us run!”
Doctor: Hi honey. I’m home.
River: And what sort of time do you call this?
Their married-couple interaction is a thing of pure beauty. Not only does it ground a hugely unconventional relationship in something we can relate to, it is also highly entertaining and *very* appetite-wetting. Are they married? Properly married married - or something else?
Although really, the marriage thing is a bit of a red herring. Because their relationship is something more, something beyond that.
“I’m not always going to be there to catch you!” the Doctor admonishes in ‘Time of Angels’, and River laughs him off: “And you are so wrong!”
Because that’s what they do, that’s how it works. They’re always there to catch each other. In actions, in words - back and forth, to-me to-you to-me to-you, always looking for a way to undercut the other and get the upper hand, and simultaneously supporting, trusting, believing in each other 100%.
Is it any wonder River was so disappointed in the Library?
RIVER: You know... it's funny, I keep wishing the Doctor was here.
ANITA: The Doctor is here, isn't he? He's coming back, right?
RIVER: You know when you see a photograph of someone you know, but it's from years before you knew them? It's like they're not quite... finished, they're not done yet. Well... yes, the Doctor's here. He came when I called, just like he always does. But not my Doctor. Now my Doctor... I've seen whole armies turn and run away. And he'd just swagger off back to his TARDIS and open the doors with a snap of his fingers. The Doctor... in the TARDIS... next stop: everywhere.
The Doctor appears suddenly.
DOCTOR: Spoilers! Nobody can open a TARDIS by snapping their fingers. It doesn't work like that.
RIVER: It does for the Doctor.
DOCTOR: I am the Doctor.
RIVER: Yeah. Some day.
It’s not really about the armies turning and running, or the swagger, or the finger snapping, I don’t think. It’s because the (Tenth) Doctor didn’t know the game they play. She kept tossing him the ball (as always) but he never caught it, just looked at her without comprehension, wondering what the hell she was doing. All the things that were always a given and taken as understood were suddenly questioned, needing to be qualified and quantified and explained - and something that needs explaining can’t ever work like it should.
("And he looks at me, he looks right through me and it shouldn't kill me, but it does.")
At some point I will sit down and watch the Library eps, this time seeing them with River’s eyes, and I fully expect to come away going ‘Dear God, you're hard work young!’
*sniff*
But. Let’s go back to The Big Bang, and the Doctor rescuing River from the exploding TARDIS. Because their wonderful interaction does away with any damselling - River doesn’t fall into her hero’s arms, oh no. She berates him for being late! ;)
Then of course they re-appear back on Earth and I’m going to quote promethia_tenk, because she summed it up perfectly:
You know what I thought there, seriously? "Mom and Dad are home and everything's going to be alright now."
They really, really have that vibe, and I love it to distraction. And thinking about it, it’s part of the reason I ship them. (To touch again upon what I wrote at the start.) Because River isn’t a Companion as such. She doesn’t need the Doctor in order to see the wonders of the universe, doesn’t depend on him the way Companions do. She dances ahead, teasing, tantalising, holding her own. A partner, not an assistant.
Actually - I’m reminded of something the_royal_anna once wrote about Wesley and Lilah from AtS:
This is where the Wes/Lilah dynamic was extraordinary. Wesley has this overwhelming need to protect, to be the man. Fred won't stand for it. Little Fred, who'll go giggly and girly over her lab assistant, doesn't want him to protect her. But Lilah, strong, powerful Lilah, who watched her own back and only hers, Lilah let him. It's exactly because she was strong, because she had faith in herself, that she could let him. And so when the Beast comes to ravage W&H she'll let him play knight to her damsel in distress, because she understands. Understands him, understands her, knows what he needs from her and what she needs from him.
There is an awful, awful lot of this in Doctor/River. (Except they’re SO much less screwed up, thank goodness.) Most of all though, River understands him. To just briefly jump ahead, then a moment that breaks my heart is when the Doctor wants to say goodbye to Amy. And Amy replies that surely he wants River, and River just shakes her head.
“He doesn’t really know me yet.”
To be able to take a step back, to put *his* needs above her own without malice - now that is love. Real, and mature, and clear-sighted.
“Oh Doctor, why do I ever let you out?” she sighs in ‘The Pandorica Opens’ when seeing Amy’s room, and that one little sentence tells us so much. She can see the wonder of him, but knows the danger of falling for it (“I hate white wizards in fairy tales, they always turn out to be him!”) - sees clearly the man beneath the mask.
I remember listening to the podcast for the Library episodes, and Moffat saying how when she whispers the Doctor’s name to him, he is, at that moment, reduced to just a man, without any of the fancy spectacles or titles he usually hides behind. But, I think (hope) this will go both ways, once we discover who River actually is, and what she is to the Doctor.
Because she certainly isn’t a saint, or an innocent. She lies, cheats and steals in order to get what she wants or needs, and seemingly doesn’t much care that a man has been crippled so she can travel in time. (Yes, the universe is in danger, and the end clearly justifies the means. Still I'm sure the Doctor would be pretty horrified if he found out.)
Now there are a lot of overt parallels between Jack and River (other than the 51st Century attitude to sexuality and the very interesting use of Jack’s tagline ‘[21st Century is] when everything changes’ etc). JB often refers to Jack as the ‘muscle’ on DW, the one carrying the big gun, fighting the battles the Doctor won’t, and River - with her gun always at the ready - clearly fulfils a similar role in many ways. (“Records indicate that you will show mercy!” “I’m River Song. Check your records again.”)
What’s interesting about this isn’t River’s attitude as such (we’ve always had characters like this, the Brig being the most immediate that springs to mind), but the fact that the Doctor gets involved with her, [possibly] to the point of marriage. I foresee a lot clashes, and (hopefully) a lot of the Doctor being called on his (sometime) hypocrisy. After all, he was deemed the most dangerous creature in all of the universe...
Stepping sideways for a minute, then one thing I loved about The Big Bang, and the fact that the Doctor was going to erase himself in order to save the universe, is how it ties back to the Library episodes:
DOCTOR: You can let me do this!
RIVER: If you die here, it'll mean I've never met you.
DOCTOR: Time can be rewritten.
RIVER: Not those times. Not one line! Don't you dare!
Because she’s been there. And she’d rather die than go through that again, this time without an Amy to bring him back...
As for the season as a whole, I love how the Doctor/River relationship has (very organically) gone from:
“I can run away if I want to! Time is not the boss of me!” to “Are you married, River?”
Re. that first statement, and their behaviour in ‘Time of Angels’, then it becomes even funnier in retrospect (just to repeat the exchange I used at the start):
Grumpy!Doctor: “I’m not always going to be there to catch you!” (Translation: *grumblegrumblegrumble*Women*grumble*)
Smug!River: “And you are so wrong!” (Translation: From my point of view, you pretty much just proposed. So you might as well stop protesting, because Darling - you don’t stand a chance!)
But, going back to my point, I especially love how the fact that she might have killed him is one of the things that really sparked his interest. And this is not just because he’s a very messed up kinda person (although that’s part of it, I’m sure), but because it puts them on a much more even footing, and alleviates a fair bit of his guilt.
And there is the fact that, despite infuriating (and intriguing) him, she not only trusts him absolutely:
Octavian: Doctor Song, do you trust this man.
River: I absolutely trust him.
Octavian: He's not some kind of madman then?
River: *beat* I absolutely trust him.
- but also, as she points out before she dies, he knows (has always known) how she dies, knows that she dies for him, and that he *can* trust her too, trust her absolutely. Knows he can throw pretty much anything at her and that she’ll cope, that she won’t ever leave him. As a way into his heart, these qualities are hard to top.
Which is why one of my favourite moments in ‘Flesh and Stone’ is the moment when he loses it and yells her down. Because to have that - to have someone you don’t have to hold back with, someone you can take out your frustrations on, if necessary - is something the Doctor needs very much I think. (See? They’re *so* married, even if they aren’t.)
And then of course comes the ‘Hello Sweetie’ in 50ft high letters graffittied on the oldest cliff face in the universe... (“You wouldn’t answer your phone!”) His smile when seeing it is one of the most brilliant things ever, because he tries not to smile, but can’t help himself. The lady has truly impressed him.
All of it leading to that wonderful scene after the wedding.
“Did you dance?” he hears her say, and he stops, smiling.
And then follows the conversation that ends up with the Doctor getting himself entangled in his own words (if he was ever going to get married, it’d definitely be because of a situation like this...), and what I love so much is that he is very aware of how his words could have been misconstrued. That him thinking about marrying her could be a perfectly logical thing by now. And no, he isn’t quite there yet. But he’s interested, and has stopped running away. As a matter of fact, he’s thinking about running towards...
Finally, then I’ve been pondering River’s fate, and the Doctor’s actions. It is quite clearly a problematic ending - is his overriding need to save people at any cost a positive or a negative? Because her virtual heaven could just as easily be seen as an imposed impossibility for moving on, for finding final peace. The Lonely God once more incapable of letting go, and needing to give her a ‘happy ending’ whether she wanted it or not.
But. That was Ten, and his motivations. Eleven is a very different creature, and so is the way he operates. And now, I rather suspect that somewhere in that virtual paradise there is a message for River, saying ‘Gotcha’.
See, Doctor/River strikes me as in so many ways being what Doctor/Master could have been, if only the Master hadn’t gone evil (and insane). The continual need to get the better of the other, to outsmart and outmanoeuvre each other, is one of the things that lies at the heart of their relationship, and simple death won’t change that...
RIVER: Oh, for heaven's sake! He just can't do it, can he? That man, that impossible man! He just can't give in.
And then we get this, which is very interesting viewed in the light of S5:
River: Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair, and the Doctor comes to call... everybody lives.
Cut: River closes the TARDIS book. She gives a goodnight kiss to the Girl, who is now in the third bed in the children's room, beside Donna's kids Ella and Joshua.
River: Sweet dreams, everyone.
She switches off the lights and the screen goes black.
River Song, reading bedtime stories to children from her diary...
(“You and me, time and space. You watch us run!”)
Because this is the thing:
“That's okay, we're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? 'Cause it was, you know. It was the best. A daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away.”
Oh Mr Moffat, you truly magnificent story teller. I think you’ve outdone yourself with this one. (Are outdoing, will outdo... I love watching them run!)
*
Still, I am sure that one day River will decide that it is her time, and send one last, final message to her Doctor:
‘Goodbye Sweetie.’
Fin
The other day my eldest (Miss M, 11 y.o.) said to me:
“You know, I think River would be pretty quick to shut up anyone who says that girls aren’t as good as boys!”
I could only agree wholeheartedly. Because here’s the thing: River is awesome. River is smart and brilliant and capable and can hold her own against the Doctor, and doesn’t apologise. River does her own thing - she is Doctor Song, and later becomes Professor Song. River sends the Doctor messages through time and space, and she’s a time traveller in her own right. River can fly the TARDIS.
In short: She’s River Song, and she is a Big. Damn. Hero.
I have three daughters, and Doctor Who is their favourite show. And it has given them one of the most wonderful, truly strong, female characters I've ever come across. I cannot begin to explain how grateful I am.
***
But really, I’m here beause I have meta to share. I just... wanted to put that out there.
SPOILERS: All of S5 + Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.
Oh, and if you like, you’re very welcome to see this as a ‘ship manifesto. :)
“You and me, time and space. You watch us run!”
Doctor: Hi honey. I’m home.
River: And what sort of time do you call this?
Their married-couple interaction is a thing of pure beauty. Not only does it ground a hugely unconventional relationship in something we can relate to, it is also highly entertaining and *very* appetite-wetting. Are they married? Properly married married - or something else?
Although really, the marriage thing is a bit of a red herring. Because their relationship is something more, something beyond that.
“I’m not always going to be there to catch you!” the Doctor admonishes in ‘Time of Angels’, and River laughs him off: “And you are so wrong!”
Because that’s what they do, that’s how it works. They’re always there to catch each other. In actions, in words - back and forth, to-me to-you to-me to-you, always looking for a way to undercut the other and get the upper hand, and simultaneously supporting, trusting, believing in each other 100%.
Is it any wonder River was so disappointed in the Library?
RIVER: You know... it's funny, I keep wishing the Doctor was here.
ANITA: The Doctor is here, isn't he? He's coming back, right?
RIVER: You know when you see a photograph of someone you know, but it's from years before you knew them? It's like they're not quite... finished, they're not done yet. Well... yes, the Doctor's here. He came when I called, just like he always does. But not my Doctor. Now my Doctor... I've seen whole armies turn and run away. And he'd just swagger off back to his TARDIS and open the doors with a snap of his fingers. The Doctor... in the TARDIS... next stop: everywhere.
The Doctor appears suddenly.
DOCTOR: Spoilers! Nobody can open a TARDIS by snapping their fingers. It doesn't work like that.
RIVER: It does for the Doctor.
DOCTOR: I am the Doctor.
RIVER: Yeah. Some day.
It’s not really about the armies turning and running, or the swagger, or the finger snapping, I don’t think. It’s because the (Tenth) Doctor didn’t know the game they play. She kept tossing him the ball (as always) but he never caught it, just looked at her without comprehension, wondering what the hell she was doing. All the things that were always a given and taken as understood were suddenly questioned, needing to be qualified and quantified and explained - and something that needs explaining can’t ever work like it should.
("And he looks at me, he looks right through me and it shouldn't kill me, but it does.")
At some point I will sit down and watch the Library eps, this time seeing them with River’s eyes, and I fully expect to come away going ‘Dear God, you're hard work young!’
*sniff*
But. Let’s go back to The Big Bang, and the Doctor rescuing River from the exploding TARDIS. Because their wonderful interaction does away with any damselling - River doesn’t fall into her hero’s arms, oh no. She berates him for being late! ;)
Then of course they re-appear back on Earth and I’m going to quote promethia_tenk, because she summed it up perfectly:
You know what I thought there, seriously? "Mom and Dad are home and everything's going to be alright now."
They really, really have that vibe, and I love it to distraction. And thinking about it, it’s part of the reason I ship them. (To touch again upon what I wrote at the start.) Because River isn’t a Companion as such. She doesn’t need the Doctor in order to see the wonders of the universe, doesn’t depend on him the way Companions do. She dances ahead, teasing, tantalising, holding her own. A partner, not an assistant.
Actually - I’m reminded of something the_royal_anna once wrote about Wesley and Lilah from AtS:
This is where the Wes/Lilah dynamic was extraordinary. Wesley has this overwhelming need to protect, to be the man. Fred won't stand for it. Little Fred, who'll go giggly and girly over her lab assistant, doesn't want him to protect her. But Lilah, strong, powerful Lilah, who watched her own back and only hers, Lilah let him. It's exactly because she was strong, because she had faith in herself, that she could let him. And so when the Beast comes to ravage W&H she'll let him play knight to her damsel in distress, because she understands. Understands him, understands her, knows what he needs from her and what she needs from him.
There is an awful, awful lot of this in Doctor/River. (Except they’re SO much less screwed up, thank goodness.) Most of all though, River understands him. To just briefly jump ahead, then a moment that breaks my heart is when the Doctor wants to say goodbye to Amy. And Amy replies that surely he wants River, and River just shakes her head.
“He doesn’t really know me yet.”
To be able to take a step back, to put *his* needs above her own without malice - now that is love. Real, and mature, and clear-sighted.
“Oh Doctor, why do I ever let you out?” she sighs in ‘The Pandorica Opens’ when seeing Amy’s room, and that one little sentence tells us so much. She can see the wonder of him, but knows the danger of falling for it (“I hate white wizards in fairy tales, they always turn out to be him!”) - sees clearly the man beneath the mask.
I remember listening to the podcast for the Library episodes, and Moffat saying how when she whispers the Doctor’s name to him, he is, at that moment, reduced to just a man, without any of the fancy spectacles or titles he usually hides behind. But, I think (hope) this will go both ways, once we discover who River actually is, and what she is to the Doctor.
Because she certainly isn’t a saint, or an innocent. She lies, cheats and steals in order to get what she wants or needs, and seemingly doesn’t much care that a man has been crippled so she can travel in time. (Yes, the universe is in danger, and the end clearly justifies the means. Still I'm sure the Doctor would be pretty horrified if he found out.)
Now there are a lot of overt parallels between Jack and River (other than the 51st Century attitude to sexuality and the very interesting use of Jack’s tagline ‘[21st Century is] when everything changes’ etc). JB often refers to Jack as the ‘muscle’ on DW, the one carrying the big gun, fighting the battles the Doctor won’t, and River - with her gun always at the ready - clearly fulfils a similar role in many ways. (“Records indicate that you will show mercy!” “I’m River Song. Check your records again.”)
What’s interesting about this isn’t River’s attitude as such (we’ve always had characters like this, the Brig being the most immediate that springs to mind), but the fact that the Doctor gets involved with her, [possibly] to the point of marriage. I foresee a lot clashes, and (hopefully) a lot of the Doctor being called on his (sometime) hypocrisy. After all, he was deemed the most dangerous creature in all of the universe...
Stepping sideways for a minute, then one thing I loved about The Big Bang, and the fact that the Doctor was going to erase himself in order to save the universe, is how it ties back to the Library episodes:
DOCTOR: You can let me do this!
RIVER: If you die here, it'll mean I've never met you.
DOCTOR: Time can be rewritten.
RIVER: Not those times. Not one line! Don't you dare!
Because she’s been there. And she’d rather die than go through that again, this time without an Amy to bring him back...
As for the season as a whole, I love how the Doctor/River relationship has (very organically) gone from:
“I can run away if I want to! Time is not the boss of me!” to “Are you married, River?”
Re. that first statement, and their behaviour in ‘Time of Angels’, then it becomes even funnier in retrospect (just to repeat the exchange I used at the start):
Grumpy!Doctor: “I’m not always going to be there to catch you!” (Translation: *grumblegrumblegrumble*Women*grumble*)
Smug!River: “And you are so wrong!” (Translation: From my point of view, you pretty much just proposed. So you might as well stop protesting, because Darling - you don’t stand a chance!)
But, going back to my point, I especially love how the fact that she might have killed him is one of the things that really sparked his interest. And this is not just because he’s a very messed up kinda person (although that’s part of it, I’m sure), but because it puts them on a much more even footing, and alleviates a fair bit of his guilt.
And there is the fact that, despite infuriating (and intriguing) him, she not only trusts him absolutely:
Octavian: Doctor Song, do you trust this man.
River: I absolutely trust him.
Octavian: He's not some kind of madman then?
River: *beat* I absolutely trust him.
- but also, as she points out before she dies, he knows (has always known) how she dies, knows that she dies for him, and that he *can* trust her too, trust her absolutely. Knows he can throw pretty much anything at her and that she’ll cope, that she won’t ever leave him. As a way into his heart, these qualities are hard to top.
Which is why one of my favourite moments in ‘Flesh and Stone’ is the moment when he loses it and yells her down. Because to have that - to have someone you don’t have to hold back with, someone you can take out your frustrations on, if necessary - is something the Doctor needs very much I think. (See? They’re *so* married, even if they aren’t.)
And then of course comes the ‘Hello Sweetie’ in 50ft high letters graffittied on the oldest cliff face in the universe... (“You wouldn’t answer your phone!”) His smile when seeing it is one of the most brilliant things ever, because he tries not to smile, but can’t help himself. The lady has truly impressed him.
All of it leading to that wonderful scene after the wedding.
“Did you dance?” he hears her say, and he stops, smiling.
And then follows the conversation that ends up with the Doctor getting himself entangled in his own words (if he was ever going to get married, it’d definitely be because of a situation like this...), and what I love so much is that he is very aware of how his words could have been misconstrued. That him thinking about marrying her could be a perfectly logical thing by now. And no, he isn’t quite there yet. But he’s interested, and has stopped running away. As a matter of fact, he’s thinking about running towards...
Finally, then I’ve been pondering River’s fate, and the Doctor’s actions. It is quite clearly a problematic ending - is his overriding need to save people at any cost a positive or a negative? Because her virtual heaven could just as easily be seen as an imposed impossibility for moving on, for finding final peace. The Lonely God once more incapable of letting go, and needing to give her a ‘happy ending’ whether she wanted it or not.
But. That was Ten, and his motivations. Eleven is a very different creature, and so is the way he operates. And now, I rather suspect that somewhere in that virtual paradise there is a message for River, saying ‘Gotcha’.
See, Doctor/River strikes me as in so many ways being what Doctor/Master could have been, if only the Master hadn’t gone evil (and insane). The continual need to get the better of the other, to outsmart and outmanoeuvre each other, is one of the things that lies at the heart of their relationship, and simple death won’t change that...
RIVER: Oh, for heaven's sake! He just can't do it, can he? That man, that impossible man! He just can't give in.
And then we get this, which is very interesting viewed in the light of S5:
River: Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair, and the Doctor comes to call... everybody lives.
Cut: River closes the TARDIS book. She gives a goodnight kiss to the Girl, who is now in the third bed in the children's room, beside Donna's kids Ella and Joshua.
River: Sweet dreams, everyone.
She switches off the lights and the screen goes black.
River Song, reading bedtime stories to children from her diary...
(“You and me, time and space. You watch us run!”)
Because this is the thing:
“That's okay, we're all stories in the end. Just make it a good one, eh? 'Cause it was, you know. It was the best. A daft old man who stole a magic box and ran away.”
Oh Mr Moffat, you truly magnificent story teller. I think you’ve outdone yourself with this one. (Are outdoing, will outdo... I love watching them run!)
*
Still, I am sure that one day River will decide that it is her time, and send one last, final message to her Doctor:
‘Goodbye Sweetie.’
Fin