River Song is a fictional character created by Steven Moffat and played by Alex Kingston in the British science-fiction series Doctor Who. River Song was introduced to the series as an experienced future companion of series protagonist the Doctor, an alien Time Lord who travels through time in his TARDIS. Because River Song is a time traveller herself, her adventures with the Doctor occur out of synchronisation; their first meeting (from the audience's perspective) is with the Tenth Doctor (played by David Tennant), the Doctor's first and apparently her last. Kingston plays her in 15 episodes, as River becomes a companion, romantic interest and eventual wife of the Doctor in his eleventh incarnation portrayed by Matt Smith. From a production perspective, the Twelfth Doctor (played by Peter Capaldi) is the last incarnation to meet her, spending a 24-year-long night with her, before her first meeting with the Tenth Doctor. From the timeline perspective, the final time River meets with the Doctor, she is a hologram/echo from the library archives; she and the Eleventh Doctor part ways in the episode, "The Name of the Doctor".
River Song was created by Doctor Who writer Steven Moffat for the show's fourth series in 2008, under the tenure of then executive producer Russell T Davies. When Moffat took over Davies' duties as executive producer, he began expanding on the character's background, depicting adventures earlier in River's timeline, upgrading Alex Kingston from a guest star to a recurring actor in the series. Other actresses have subsequently portrayed younger versions of the character.
When the character was first introduced, much about her origins remained a mystery. Following the character's initial appearance, Davies had described her as "one of the most important characters" in the narrative, and "vital" to the Doctor's life. In series six (2011), Moffat's episodes unveil more about the character. It is not until the character's ninth appearance that it is revealed that River was born Melody Pond, the daughter of the eleventh Doctor's companions Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) and Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill), alongside whom Kingston had already appeared six previous times in series five and six of the show. Having been conceived on board the TARDIS as it travelled through the time vortex, Melody was born with genetic traits and abilities similar to those of the Doctor's own race, the Time Lords.
Contents
Appearances
Television
River Song first appears in the Doctor Who 2008 series two-parter "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead" (which was written by future showrunner Steven Moffat) during the Russell T Davies era of Doctor Who. Here, she encounters the Tenth Doctor (David Tennant) in the 51st century and, though he has never met her, claims to be someone he will come to trust completely. River, who is a professor of archaeology and carries a TARDIS-colour/pattern diary of her adventures, is able to convince the Doctor of his future trust in her by whispering his real name into his ear, which he explains he would only divulge under extraordinarily rare circumstances. At the end of the second episode, she sacrifices herself to save the people who were trapped in the Library's database, knocking out the Doctor before he can do the same. In turn, he is able to upload a copy of her consciousness into a computer, allowing her to live on in a virtual world with the archaeological team she was with in the Library. He achieves this via the use of a sonic screwdriver given to her by his future self.
After Moffat took over from Davies as executive producer of the show, River Song reappeared in the 2010 series. In the two-parter "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone", which takes place prior to River becoming a professor, she encounters the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith), again having more history with him than he with her. She leaves coordinates for the Doctor so that he may rescue her in the 52nd century; joined by the Doctor's latest companion, Amy Pond (Karen Gillan), they investigate the crash of the spaceship Byzantium. She shows herself to be more adept at flying the TARDIS than he is and reveals to the Doctor that she is imprisoned in the "Stormcage Containment Facility" for killing "the best man I've ever known."
An earlier version of River appears to assist the Doctor in the fifth series finale "The Pandorica Opens"/"The Big Bang". After being contacted by Winston Churchill (Ian McNeice), River leads the Doctor to 102 C.E. While River is travelling in the TARDIS on her own, it explodes with her inside. The Doctor, using River's vortex manipulator, teleports her out. After the Doctor erases himself from history by flying the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS in order to close the cracks in the universe, River helps Amy to remember the Doctor and bring him back, by giving Amy her now-blank diary. At the close of the series five finale, River ambiguously suggests to the Doctor that they might be married and tells him that he will soon learn the truth about her, after which "everything changes".
Other media
Coinciding with the 2010 series, Alex Kingston portrays River Song narrating the "Monster Files" on the BBC website, an in-universe documentary account of Doctor Who monsters. This series had previously (in 2008–09) been narrated by John Barrowman in character as Captain Jack Harkness.
Included with the series six DVD release, the exclusive-to-DVD bonus five-part serial Night and the Doctor (2011) references River throughout, with River appearing in the mini-episodes "First Night" and "Last Night". The serial helps explain the depth of the relationship shared by River and the Doctor – despite only appearing in 15 (14 plus one flashback, as of 2016) episodes of the television series – when Amy Pond discovers that the Doctor goes on dates with River when Amy and Rory sleep at night in the TARDIS. During the serial, the Doctor attempts to take River on a date shortly after she is imprisoned in Stormcage, but their time in the TARDIS is interrupted by two future incarnations of River, and all are in turn suspicious of the signs of "another woman" being aboard the TARDIS. The Doctor is able to be rid of the two future Rivers, but not before learning from his future self that one of them is shortly to die in the Library adventure where he first met her. (It is later revealed in "The Husbands of River Song" that the Eleventh Doctor ultimately cancelled this date, and it is the Twelfth Doctor who ends up taking River to the Singing Towers.)
River appears in a further direct-to-DVD mini-episode included with the series 7 box set, "Rain Gods".
River, alongside Smith's Eleventh Doctor, is one of two main playable characters in the PlayStation 3 Doctor Who console game The Eternity Clock. Kingston provided voice acting and motion capture physical acting for the character. In regard to River's role in the narrative of the game, the game's producer Simon Harris explains that she "realises that what’s in her diary is not what she wrote and that actually the Eternity Clock is playing with her history, as well as the Earth’s history."
Author Gary Russell had planned to use River in the Twelfth Doctor novel The Big Bang Generation, but when he was unable to get permission to use her due to Steven Moffat planning on the 2015 Christmas special "The Husbands of River Song" being the Twelfth Doctor and River's first meeting, Moffat suggested that Russell write the story to incorporate the Seventh Doctor's former companion Bernice Summerfield instead.
Characterisation
Casting
For the role of River Song, whom executive producer Russell T Davies described as "sort of the Doctor's wife", the production sought to cast Kate Winslet. One of Winslet's first acting roles was in the BBC1 teen drama Dark Season, written by Davies. The role of River Song eventually went to Alex Kingston, known for starring in the popular US drama ER. On Kingston's casting, Davies said, "I bloody love her!" Kingston had been a fan of Doctor Who as a child. Kingston, when first cast, did not expect her role to be recurring. She later learned that Moffat had always intended for Song to come back for return appearances. Kingston enjoyed getting to play an unusual action hero female role, and praised the show for its variety of settings and opportunities "to relive one's childhood fantasies" playing with laser guns and wearing varied costumes from one appearance to the next. With regard to having to speak complicated technical dialogue, she said, "I'd work with a medical consultant on ER, who'd explain what we were saying, so I'd say it with a purpose and a truth. On Doctor Who, I've no idea what some of my lines mean!"
Discussing her role alongside Tennant and Catherine Tate (Donna Noble) in her 2008 introductory episode, Kingston said, "We just clicked. I've done guest roles on other shows, but rarely have I felt such a warm bond." About working with Kingston, Catherine Tate said, "I'm a huge ER fan. When you hold people in awe, it's almost a disappointment when they come in and they're utterly normal. But Alex isn't disappointing at all. She's such a lovely person." David Tennant was quoted as saying, "Alex is terrific. When she's telling you stories about hanging out with George Clooney, you know she's pretty cool."
Conception and development
The character was originally created purely for the plot of "Silence in the Library". Moffat knew that the team of archaeologists would have to trust the Doctor, but the Doctor's psychic paper could not explain and convince the team why he had appeared in a sealed-off library. Therefore, Moffat intended for the Doctor to know one of the archaeologists, but decided that idea was "dull" and instead decided to have one of them know him. Davies and Moffat were going through a phase in which they tried to find Doctor Who titles with rude acronyms "to wind up people on internet message boards", with one of Moffat's being "A River Song Ending"; when Davies asked "What's a river song?", Moffat decided to make this the name of a character who dies. They eventually changed the title to "Forest of the Dead", being unwilling to actually broadcast an episode with the acronym "ARSE". When Kingston returned to the show, Moffat explained to her some details about her character's back-story, knowledge which Smith, Gillan and Darvill did not receive until later. Kingston relates that she knows her character cannot be killed off because we saw her death in her introductory episode; each subsequent appearance is set at a different point in her character's personal history. Moffat had planned out that River was Amy and Rory's daughter for "a long time" and used "Pond" as Amy's last name to create a link between the two. For the filming of the sixth series, Kingston was aware of River Song's relationship to Amy and Rory, while the other cast only found out upon reading of the mid-season cliffhanger script for "A Good Man Goes to War".
Moffat was influenced by Audrey Niffenegger's science fiction romance novel The Time Traveler's Wife, which depicts a woman who romances and marries a man who unintentionally moves through time. Niffenegger's lovers experience an asynchronous and tragic love story. He comments, "I've quite purposefully used it", though he cites his 2006 episode "The Girl in the Fireplace" as the episode which most prominently explores the book's themes in addition to its conceit. Kingston herself compares the character to Niffenegger's titular Time Traveler's Wife, and like Moffat enjoys "backtracking" more and more with the character as the series progresses. The tragedy for Song highlighted by "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon" is that she is progressing to a point where the Doctor will not know or trust her any more. Kingston comments,
[What] Steven explained to me is that every time River sort of finds the Doctor, for whatever reason, she's never 100 percent sure which Doctor it is she's going to be meeting. And what they have already experienced together or not. So even when I come back, every time I meet Matt, I never quite know where we are in our relationship or what we have revealed or what we know about each other. Because time travel isn't linear.
Reception
An article published in Metro, entitled "Doctor Who fans love River Song...", noted how praise from fans on Twitter after the airing of "Day of the Moon" focused heavily on Song. In 2011, Laura Pledger of Radio Times listed Kingston as the fourth best Doctor Who guest star, writing, "For my money we’ve seen rather too much of River in the last two series, but there’s no denying Kingston has created a memorable character in Melody Pond." Keith Phipps for The A.V. Club compared the Doctor and River's romantic storyline to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, "if a bit more elegantly, for my money—it echoes the plight of anyone who's watched a loved one fade into the shadowlands of dementia. This is not a story that ends well for River and she knows it, whatever flirtatious high spirits being around The Doctor stirs in her." Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker felt the character to be the Doctor's "soul mate" and described Alex Kingston as "badass".
Neela Debnath of The Independent praised Nina Toussaint-White in her role as Mels, saying she was "every bit as sassy and vivacious as her later incarnation... it was a shame that she regenerated so early on because she brought a different energy to the character". However, Neil McCormick in The Daily Telegraph thought that her sudden introduction as Rory and Amy's childhood friend showed that Moffat was making it up as he went along. Charlie Jane Anders of io9 felt that River Song was at her "high point" in some of the early Matt Smith episodes, where she was "generally badass and mysterious". However, with "The Wedding of River Song", Anders felt she had lost her mystery and independence, and her love for the Doctor was unrealistic.
Whilst critical of the typical characterisation of British female science fiction characters, The Guardian's Krystina Nellis singles out River Song alongside Torchwood's Gwen Cooper (Eve Myles) as positive depictions of strong female characters, stating: "It'd be difficult to find two superwomen in less need of a man to save them." For her role as River Song in the 2011 series of Doctor Who, Alex Kingston won the Best Actress prize at the 2012 SFX magazine Awards. In a 2012 poll conducted by SFX magazine to find the 100 sexiest female characters in science fiction and fantasy, River was voted number 22. She was also included in AfterEllen's Top 50 Favorite Female TV Characters, at number 44. Character Options have also released official toys based on River Song as part of their Doctor Who range. Upon being notified of the existence of a River Song action figure, Kingston stated she did not "quite believe it" as "you don't get that on ER."