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Melody "Mels" Pond, later River Song, was a "child of the TARDIS" and the Doctor's wife. She was human with Time Lord DNA, conceived by her parents, Amy Pond and Rory Williams, onboard the Eleventh Doctor's TARDIS as it travelled through the Time Vortex. (DW: A Good Man Goes to War) This gave her the potential for great strength and regeneration and the ability to pilot the TARDIS and understand complex principles of time and space. (DW: The Time of Angels, Day of the Moon, A Good Man Goes to War, The Wedding of River Song).
Melody was stolen from her parents as an infant by Madame Kovarian to become a weapon of the Silence in their war against the Doctor. After her second regeneration, she killed the Eleventh Doctor, but then broke her mental conditioning to give her remaining regenerations to revivify his corpse. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
The Doctor and her parents left her to make her own way in the universe. With no connection to her family or the Silence, River became an archaeologist, ostensibly to track the Doctor through time. She crossed the Doctor's path on several occasions, generally with the result that she was meeting him at progressively earlier points in his own time stream. Hoping to avoid temporal paradoxes, the Doctor gave her a diary to keep track of their meetings and to prevent her from revealing "spoilers" to him about his own future.
Again forced by the Silence, she made a second attempt on the Eleventh Doctor's life. Though actually unsuccessful, she was convicted of his murder and spent many years in Stormcage Containment Facility for it — apparently to convince the universe that the Doctor actually was dead. This confinement was made more bearable by escaping frequently to go out on dates with the Doctor. (DW: First Night, Last Night)
Ultimately, she died saving the lives of the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble in the Library. That incarnation of the Doctor saved her consciousness digitally to the Library's computer system, granting her a form of theoretical immortality. (DW: Forest of the Dead)
Biography
Birth
Melody Pond was born on the asteroid of Demon's Run in the 52nd century after her mother had been abducted from the 21st century. Within a month, she was replaced with a ganger and taken by Madame Kovarian to the 20th century to be raised to kill the Doctor. (DW: Day of the Moon, The Almost People, A Good Man Goes to War) She was chosen for this task because she had traces of Time Lord DNA from her conception on the TARDIS. This gave her the potential for great strength and regeneration, to pilot the TARDIS and understand complex principles of time and space. (DW: The Time of Angels, Day of the Moon, A Good Man Goes to War, The Wedding of River Song)
A little girl lost
Melody was trained by the Silence to kill the Doctor. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
As a little girl, she ended up in an orphanage in 1969 America and at a warehouse in Florida. She was put in an Apollo astronaut suit upgraded with alien technology. She used it to phone President Nixon directly, begging for help. (WC: Prequel (The Impossible Astronaut))
This led to her first physical meeting with the Doctor and her mother shooting at her. She returned to the orphanage, but Silents arrived. She forced her way out of the suit and fled. Six months later, in New York City, dying, she regenerated into a new incarnation. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon
Mels
By the late 1990s, she was an adolescent in Leadworth called Mels. She was a close childhood friend of her parents, who had no idea she was their daughter. She was often in trouble, with outbursts of reckless criminal behaviour. She obsessed over Amelia's "Raggedy Doctor", dreamt of marrying him and claimed in school that historical disasters were his fault because he did not intervene. All the while, she knew Amy and Rory were her parents and that she intended to kill the Doctor. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
Becoming River Song
When the TARDIS landed in a local cornfield in 2011, Mels forced her way aboard at gunpoint and crashed it in Adolf Hitler's office in 1938, inadvertently saving Hitler from the Teselecta. When Hitler shot her, she stunned the Doctor and her parents by regenerating into River Song. Acting on her conditioning, she killed the Doctor with poisoned lipstick. She cheerily called herself a psychopath and ran amok in Berlin, yet showed empathy for the Doctor's devotion to her parents, jealousy of the "River Song" he kept mentioning and compassion for his struggle to save her from the Teselecta. She demanded to know who River was. Amy ordered the Teselecta to show her. It morphed into the form of her new incarnation. She asked her parents if the Doctor was "worth it". When they said yes, she sacrificed her remaining regenerations to restore him.
The Doctor took River to the "best hospital in the universe" to recover. Knowing of her future as his on-and-off companion, he left a TARDIS-shaped diary as a gift, hoping to avoid "spoilers", foreknowledge that might wreck the universe. After recuperating, she entered the Luna University in 5123. When asked why she wished to study archaeology, she said she was "looking for a good man". (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
Adventures with the Doctor
22 April 2011
The day River received her doctorate, Kovarian appeared with agents of the Church and the Silence. They seized her, forced her into a modified astronaut suit, took her to Utah on 22 April 2011 and submerged her in Lake Silencio to await the Doctor. (DW: Closing Time)
When the time came to kill him, River drained her weapon pack to defy a fixed point in time. Time shredded into a reality where all history happened at once. She initially refused to rectify her error, but after wedding what appeared to be the Doctor, she went through with his apparent murder to restore the timeline, knowing he was really the Teselecta. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
Imprisonment
River was sentenced to twelve thousand consecutive life sentences in the Stormcage Containment Facility in the 52nd century for the Doctor's murder. (DW: The Time of Angels, The Pandorica Opens) She served the sentence to make the Silence believe him dead, but starting with her first night, escaped often to spend time with her husband, then returned to her cell. (DW: First Night)
Return to the Battle of Demon's Run
On one birthday, the Doctor took her to the last Winter Frost Fair on the River Thames in 1814. Stevie Wonder unwittingly performed before being restored to his proper time. Returning to Stormcage, River met Rory in his Roman garb. She refused to come aid them at Demon's Run, saying she couldn't be there "until the very end".
Minutes after Kovarian had fled with her first incarnation at the end of the Battle of Demon's Run, River appeared and revealed her identity, first to the Doctor and then to her parents. (DW: A Good Man Goes to War, CON: When Time Froze)
Silence in America
On receiving an invitation from the Doctor, River escaped from Stormcage to meet Amy, Rory and him in Utah in America on 22 April 2011. The Doctor, inside a Teselecta double of himself, took them on a picnic where the Teselecta was shot by River's younger self. Amy, Rory and River went to a cafe to find a version of the Eleventh Doctor two hundred years younger than the one inside the Teselecta. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut, The Wedding of River Song)
River helped the Doctor defeat the Silence by using their brainwashing of humanity against them, while making sure she did not meet her first incarnation. At her request, the Doctor returned her to Stormcage, where she kissed him. He was shocked and she realised that from his perspective, it was their first kiss; from hers, probably their last. (DW: Day of the Moon)
The opening of the Pandorica
The TARDIS rerouted a phone call for the Doctor from Winston Churchill to River. She escaped to warn the Doctor of a prophecy of the TARDIS exploding. She blackmailed a Time Agent's vortex manipulator off Dorium Maldovar and stole a painting from Liz Ten showing the TARDIS exploding and space-time coordinates. She graffitied a diamond cliff at the dawn of time with the co-ordinates, then travelled to England in 102 AD to meet the Eleventh Doctor and Amy.
The Pandorica lay under Stonehenge, transmitting a signal to summon an alliance of the Doctor's enemies. The Doctor got them to back off and sent River to fetch the TARDIS. Instead, it took her to Amy's house on 26 June 2010. When River told him the date, the Doctor realised the TARDIS was about to explode and told her to escape. (DW: The Pandorica Opens) Instead, she was trapped in a time loop of the first moments of the explosion. (DW: The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang) The Doctor rescued her in 1996, told her his plan to use the Pandorica's restoration field to reverse the Total Event Collapse of the universe and was shot by a stone Dalek. River told the Dalek to look in its data banks for her, taunted it into begging for mercy, then killed it.
After the Doctor had restored the universe by erasing himself, River left her now blank diary at her parents' wedding so Amy could remember him back into existence. After a brief conversation about her marital status and identity, River told the Doctor he was "going to find out very soon now and I'm sorry, because that's when everything changes", and left him wondering. (DW: The Big Bang)
The Crash of the Byzantium
River was put in Father Octavian's custody in the 51st century for a mission to earn her pardon. She infiltrated the Galaxy class Byzantium to find its Home Box, into which she carved "Hello Sweetie" in Old High Gallifreyan and her temporal coordinates. This attracted the Doctor's attention twelve thousand years later, leading Amy and him to her and Alfava Metraxis. (DW: The Time of Angels) They defeated an army of Weeping Angels who had awakened in the planet's Maze of the Dead. (DW: Flesh and Stone)
Following this adventure, she visited Amy and Rory after the Doctor's "death" and exposed the truth behind many lies to her parents. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
A Night in Darillium
The Doctor took River to Darillium to see the Singing Towers. Along the way, she met an earlier version of the Doctor and just missed two earlier versions of herself; apparently, the Doctor had been "promising for ages". (DW: Last Night) She later said he had wept as he said goodbye. He knew, although she did not, that her death was imminent. He gave her an upgraded version of his sonic screwdriver. (DW: Forest of the Dead)
The Library
In the 51st century, River, now a professor, was hired by Strackman Lux for an expedition to the Library to learn what had happened there a hundred years earlier. A cryptic message had been sent: "4022 saved. No survivors." Expecting trouble, she contacted the Doctor by psychic paper. The version of the Doctor who turned up had not yet met her. Bewildered, he agreed to help River's team.
River still had her battered diary of her life with the Doctor. She tried to use it to find the Doctor's place in his timeline, but realised he was a far younger version who neither knew nor trusted her. (DW: Silence in the Library)
As the threat of the Vashta Nerada worsened, River knew she must prove she was someone he would come to trust completely. With profuse apologies, she whispered his true name into his ear. The Doctor was stunned and River had won his trust.
Time was running out. The Doctor was about to kill himself to rescue Donna and more than four thousand others trapped in the Library datacore. River knocked him out, handcuffed him and took his place. She pleaded with him to not change their history, not a moment of what had/would come for them. She said he had always known this was coming. The Doctor began to babble questions. River smiled, said, "Spoilers", and killed herself. (DW: Forest of the Dead)
Epilogue
The Doctor reasoned his future self had given River his sonic screwdriver for a purpose. Inside it was a "neural relay" data chip holding her Data Ghost. The Doctor saved River by uploading her into the virtual world in the Library's data core, CAL. CAL had also saved the data ghosts of her archaeological team, giving her company in the virtual world. River would take care of her two virtual children and Charlotte (the girl wired into the mainframe) in the virtual world, reading out her diary of her many adventures with the Doctor and how sometimes "everybody lives" when the Doctor comes to call. Her story ended with her wishing her audience sweet dreams. (DW: Forest of the Dead)
The Tenth Doctor remembered her death when Davros asked him how many people had died in his name. (DW: Journey's End)
Alternate timeline
In an alternate timeline, River gained control of her suit's weapon system and did not kill the Doctor at Lake Silencio. A fixed point in time - his death - was ripped open; all time collapsed into a single moment, 22 April 2011 at 5:02:57 pm. In this crumbling timeline, she belonged to a group seeking to fix time and yet not end his life. They were led by Amy Pond, who also remembered the original world from her exposure to the cracks in time. River built a timey-wimey distress beacon to ask the universe's help for the Doctor, to which much of the universe answered with a resounding, "Yes!" She was wed to the Doctor and he revealed he was inside the Teselecta. They kissed and River killed "the Doctor" to restore the timeline. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
Undated/Unchronicled events
- The Doctor and River had a picnic at Asgard. (DW: Silence in the Library)
- The Doctor and River shared an adventure in the Bone Meadows. (DW: The Time of Angels)
- The Doctor and River visited Easter Island. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut)
- The Doctor and River met "Jim the Fish". This meeting established that the Doctor who had arrived at a Utah diner after his "death" was an earlier version; he had never heard of Jim the Fish. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut)
- River was shot at and chased by Sontarans after asking if they were on a "hen night". (DW: Last Night)
- River attended a party with the Eleventh Doctor and helped him search pet shops for a Queen of England, who had become a goldfish. (DW: Bad Night)
- River and the Eleventh Doctor had an adventure involving a euphonium, a biplane and someone named Marilyn, possibly Marilyn Monroe. (DW: Good Night)
- River spied on the first nine incarnations of the Doctor. A page in her 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 [vortex] manipulator and I got out of there in a shot. That is a conversation I am not ready for yet!" (VG: The Eternity Clock)
Personality
In her first incarnation as the 'little girl', Melody was shy, innocent and terrified of the "monsters" who had trapped her in the spacesuit. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut) Her second incarnation, 'Mels', was saucy, often in trouble and chased by police just before her regeneration. She resented the Doctor and blamed him for historical disasters, but wanted to marry him.
In her last incarnation, River was very strong-willed; though brainwashed and raised to kill him, she decided the Doctor was "worth it" and saved his life, giving up all her regenerations to do so. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler) She resisted the upgraded astronaut suit and refused to kill him, heedless of the consequences. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
River was frisky and cheeky like her mother, Amy. Like her father, Rory, she was stubborn, responsible and fiercely compassionate. She enjoyed showing off for the Doctor. She teased him, saying, "Spoilers!", of her foreknowledge and his. She kept her diary from him (DW: Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead) and hid that his death at Lake Silencio was a hoax. (DW: The Wedding of River Song) She loved the Doctor wildly (DW: Forest of the Dead, et al) and cared very much for her family. (Let's Kill Hitler, The Wedding of River Song)
River seemed at ease with being kept in prison much of her life for a crime she didn't commit, probably because she escaped easily. She once said she was breaking in instead of out, implying she was perfectly content. (DW: A Good Man Goes to War) She did, however, work toward earning a pardon. (DW: Flesh and Stone) She was joyously bloodthirsty; she killed the stone Dalek after it shot the Doctor and begged for mercy (DW: The Big Bang) and slew dozens of Silents to cover the escape of her family. (DW: Day of the Moon) She was confident in her abilities, intelligence and sexuality. She was flirtatious and bawdy, but was serious when the situation called for it. (DW: The Big Bang)
River was ready to die for the Doctor the instant she decided he should live. She freely gave up her remaining regenerations to save him after she had poisoned him. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler) She took the Doctor's place to free the people saved in the computer that controlled the Library; she knocked him out and handcuffed him before hooking herself up to the computer. Before she died, she comforted him, saying although it was her last time with him, it was his first with her and he would see her again. (DW: Forest of the Dead) She also offered herself to close the time field on the Byzantium to stop the Doctor from doing it, until he told her it wouldn't be enough. (DW: Flesh and Stone)
Other information
- River's "present day" spanned the 52nd and 51st centuries - in that order. She entered Luna University in 5123 and was in Stormcage by 5145. One of her last Stormcage appearances was in the 51st century, which was also when she died. How the outside world saw this and just when she was released is unknown.
- River took short trips with the Doctor, living a "normal" life between, rather than one extended trip and never seeing him after parting, as was usual with his companions.
- River was a skilled TARDIS pilot, having learnt from the TARDIS itself, which recognised her as its "child" because she had been conceived in the ship. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler) Her techniques were very different from the Doctor's. She claimed she "learned from the best" and joked the Doctor wasn't available that day. (DW: The Time of Angels)
- River knew Time Lord anatomy. She knew destruction of both of the Doctor's hearts would make regeneration fail. (DW: Forest of the Dead)
- River could write Old High Gallifreyan (DW: The Time of Angels)
- River had pictures of all the Doctor's incarnations, but did not know their order. (DW: The Time of Angels)
- River told Rory that the Doctor and she were meeting in reverse order; every time she met him, he knew her less. She feared the day when she met a Doctor who did not know her. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut)
- The names "Melody" and "River Song" are ontological paradoxes. Amy named her daughter after her friend, who was her daughter Melody. Melody began using the name "River Song" after learning about her own future as River Song. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
Behind the scenes
- All of River Song's full-episode appearances are in stories written by Steven Moffat. She appeared in a flashback of her death (DW: Journey's End) and the end of DW: Closing Time to set up the events of The Wedding of River Song.
- In an interview for a short video about the Eleventh Doctor's companions, Alex Kingston said River Song has encountered many incarnations of the Doctor and he "sends her into his past, where he knows he needs her expertise". Arthur Darvill said Kingston had been told more than anyone else about who River really is.
- The conversation at the end of The Doctor's Wife implies River was conceived on a bunk bed. When asked about this, Steven Moffat and Neil Gaiman independently and simultaneously acknowledged this, joking about the possibility of the ladder. They later agreed they had accidentally made this canon by agreeing on it.
- According to The Brilliant Book 2012, when River lived as Mels she used the surname Zucker. However, as brilliant as the Brilliant Book is, it is not considered a valid source for this wiki.
- An exchange in Silence in the Library can be read as implying that River was bisexual. When asked by Strackman Lux why he was the only one on his team with a helmet on, River said that she didn't fancy him; some viewers interpret this as indicating that she did fancy all the other members of the party. In 2012, Steven Moffat described River as "happily bi" on his Twitter page.
- To date, River has been played by six different actors (a set of twins played Baby Melody), the most to portray a single companion on-screen.
- River Song is the second Time Lord to change skin colour via regeneration on-screen, after K'anpo Rimpoche, whose second actor, Kevin Lindsay, was made up to look Asian. The actresses who played her in her Melody Pond and River Song incarnations were white. Both of Mels' actresses were black. In SJA: Death of the Doctor, the Eleventh Doctor noted that his racial characteristics were not limited to white; he "can be anything." Rassilon has been portrayed by white actors Richard Mathews and Timothy Dalton on-screen, while black actor Don Warrington was Rassilon's voice actor and cover-art model in Big Finish Doctor Who audio stories. One of the incarnations that Romana tried out in between her Mary Tamm and Lalla Ward incarnations had blue skin. (DW: Destiny of the Daleks)
- In Let's Kill Hitler River says she will gradually bring down the age of her body a little "just to freak people out", referring to the fact that a younger Alex Kingston has played later versions of River.