Melody "Mels" Pond, later River Song, was a human being with Time Lord DNA due to being conceived onboard The Doctor's TARDIS and exposed to the Time Vortex. She became a professor of archaeology and a convicted murderer.
The daughter of Amy Pond and Rory Williams, Melody shared a close, romantic marriage with the Doctor and was one of the few people to know his true name. She was a doctor of archaeology, and later a professor, in the 51st century. Like Melanie Bush and Charley Pollard, she was an example of the rare companion whose timeline was not synchronous with the Doctor's.
Biography
Birth
Melody Pond was born on the asteroid of Demon's Run to Amy Pond and Rory Williams, after her mother had been abducted. Shortly after birth, Melody was replaced with a Ganger and taken by Madame Kovarian to be raised as a weapon against the Doctor. She was chosen for this purpose because she had traces of Time Lord DNA as a result of being conceived onboard the TARDIS inside the Time Vortex. The extent of her Time Lord-like abilities included incredible physical strength, (DW: Day of the Moon) the ability to understand and create devices based on complex principles of time and space, (DW: The Wedding of River Song) the ability to regenerate and to pilot the TARDIS. (DW:The Time of Angels , Day of the Moon, A Good Man Goes to War, Let's Kill Hitler)
Early Life
As a child, Melody was indoctrinated by the Silence to kill the Doctor. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
While a little girl, Melody ended up in an orphanage in America in 1969 and later at a warehouse in Florida. She was put into an Apollo astronaut suit upgraded with alien life support systems. She used the suit to telephone President Nixon directly, begging for help. This led to her first physical meeting with the Doctor (in their meeting as a baby she had been a Ganger)—a brief one, as her mother shot at her, scaring her away. She returned to the orphanage and tried to ask Amy for help, but the Silence arrived. After an unknown incident, she escaped the spacesuit and fled. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon) Six months later, in New York City, dying, Melody regenerated. (DW: Day of the Moon
Mels
By the late 1990s she was an adolescent living in Leadworth under unknown circumstances. Under the name of "Mels Zucker", she became her parents' close friend, helping them to realise their love for each other. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
Mels was often in trouble, with outbursts of reckless criminal behaviour. She was obsessed with Amelia's "Raggedy Doctor", dreamt of marrying him and claimed in school that historical disasters were his fault because he did not intervene. Through all of this, she was fully aware that Amy and Rory were her parents and that she intended to kill the Doctor. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
Adventures with the Doctor
Regeneration into River
When the Doctor arrived in a Leadworth cornfield in 2011, Mels forced her way into the TARDIS at gunpoint to escape the police. She shot up the console, exposed the temporal grace feature as a "clever lie" and forced them to land in Hitler's office in 1938, inadvertantly saving Hitler from the Teselecta. He mistakenly shot her. To the surprise of the Doctor and her parents, she regenerated into her next incarnation, recognisable as River Song. Acting on her conditioning, she almost immediately tried to kill the Doctor — first with guns, then 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, to the "River Song" he kept mentioning, and his struggle to save her from the Teselecta. She demanded to know who River was and Amy ordered the Teselecta to show her. It morphed into the image of her new incarnation. She asked her parents if the Doctor was worth saving. When they said yes, she sacrificed her remaining regenerations to revive him.
A new purpose
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 "thank you" gift at her bedside - a TARDIS-shaped diary. After recuperating, River entered the Luna University a few years before her birth. When asked why she wished to study archaeology, she said she was "looking for a good man". (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
The day River received her doctorate, Madame Kovarian, agents of the Church and the Silents tracked her down. River was forced into a modified astronaut suit and taken to Lake Silencio, Utah on the 22nd April, 2011, where she was submerged in the lake to wait for the Doctor. (DW: Closing Time)
When the moment came to kill the Doctor, River drained her weapon pack, defying a fixed point in time. Time ripped apart, creating a reality where every moment happened at once. Though at first unwilling to rectify her error, after marrying the Doctor, she followed through with his apparent murder to restore the timeline, knowing he was really the Teselecta. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
Imprisonment
River was imprisoned in the Stormcage Containment Facility for the Doctor's murder. When he asked her about this earlier in his timestream, she said he was "A very good man. Best man I've ever known". (DW: The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone). Though River knew the truth, she served the sentence to make the Silence believe the Doctor was dead. She escaped frequently to spend time with her husband, then returned to her cell until the next time. (DW: The Wedding of River Song, DW: A Good Man Goes to War, et al.)
The Battle of Demon's Run
On one of her birthdays, the Doctor took River to the last Winter Frost Fair on the River Thames in 1814. Stevie Wonder unwittingly performed there before being returned to his proper time. Returning to Stormcage from this escapade, River met Rory in his Roman uniform. She refused his request to come aid them at Demon's Run, saying she couldn't be there "until the very end" and "this the day he finds out who I am."
River met the Doctor, Amy, and Rory at the end of the battle of Demon's Run in the 52nd century. She 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 containing coordinates from the Eleventh Doctor, River escaped from Stormcage to meet Amy, Rory and him in Utah in the United States of America in 2011. The Doctor took them on a picnic, where he was seemingly killed. They burned the Doctor's body, then went to a cafe to find another version of the Eleventh Doctor, who claimed to be two hundred years younger than the one who had died. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut) Although she concealed it, River knew full well that the assassin was an earlier version of herself and that the dead Doctor was in fact the Teselecta. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
River helped the Doctor defeat the Silence by using their brainwashing of humanity against them. 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, and 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 from Stormcage to warn the Doctor of a prophecy of the TARDIS exploding. After blackmailing a Time Agent's vortex manipulator off Dorium Maldovar, she travelled to the Roman era of Earth, where she met the Doctor and Amy.
They found the Pandorica under Stonehenge, transmitting a signal summoning an alliance of the Doctor's foes. The Doctor got them to back off and sent River to fetch the TARDIS. Instead, it took her to Amy's house on the 26th of June, 2010. When River told him the date, the Doctor realised the TARDIS was about to explode and told her to escape. Instead, she was trapped in a time loop of the first moments of the explosion. (DW: The Pandorica Opens) The Doctor used her vortex manipulator to rescue her and bring her to 1996, where she learned of his plan to use the Pandorica's restoration field to reverse the erasure of the universe. The Doctor was badly wounded by the Stone Dalek hunting them. Angered at the apparent loss of the man she loved, River told the Dalek to look in its data banks for her, taunted it into begging for mercy, then killed it.
After the Doctor restored the universe, erasing himself in the process, River left her now blank, TARDIS-shaped diary with Amy on her wedding day in 2010 so she could remember the Doctor back into existence from the Void. After a brief conversation with him about her marital status and identity, she said 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
Some time after River had returned from 2010 to prison, she was put in Father Octavian's custody in the 51st century. If she carried out her mission successfully, she might earn her pardon.
Sent as a guest on the ship Byzantium, she infiltrated the lower levels to find its Home Box, into which she carved "Hello Sweetie" in Old High Gallifreyan, along with temporal coordinates, to attract the Doctor's attention twelve thousand years later. Leading the Doctor to Alfava Metraxis, she helped him defeat an army of Weeping Angels which had been awakened in the planet's Maze of the Dead. (DW: The Time of Angels, Flesh and Stone)
After this adventure, she visited Amy and Rory after the Doctor had "died" and exposed the truth behind that and several other lies to her parents. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
Darillium
Some time after earning her pardon, River received a surprise visit by the Doctor, who had a new haircut. He took her to Darillium to see the Singing Towers. According to River, the Doctor wept as he said goodbye to her. The Doctor knew, although River did not, that her death was imminent, and gave her an upgraded version of his sonic screwdriver as a farewell present. (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 discover what had happened there a hundred years earlier, when a cryptic final message had been sent: "4022 saved. No survivors." Expecting trouble, she sent the Doctor a message by psychic paper. The version of the Doctor who turned up had not yet met her. Though bewildered, he agreed to help River and her team.
River still had her battered, TARDIS-shaped diary of her travels with the Doctor. She tried to use it to discover where the Doctor was in his timeline, but realised that he was a much younger version of the Doctor who neither knew nor trusted her.
As the situation with the Vashta Nerada worsened, River knew she must prove to him 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.
River died physically when she sacrificed herself in the Doctor's place to save Donna and the other four thousand twenty-two people trapped in the Library's computer. She pleaded with him to not change their history, not one moment of what had/would come for them. (DW: Forest of the Dead)
After saving the trapped people, the Doctor reasoned his future self would give her his sonic screwdriver for a purpose. Inside it he found a data chip, a "Neural Relay", which held River's 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 River's dead 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: Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead)
The Tenth Doctor would later remember her death when Davros reminded him of the people who had died in his name. (DW: Journey's End)
Alternate Timeline
In an alternate timeline, River regained control of herself long enough to drain the suit's weapon system and not kill the Doctor. As a result a fixed point in time - the Doctor's death - was ripped open, and all of time collapsed into a single moment, 22 April, 2011 at 5:02pm. In this new, disintegrating timeline, River was a member of a group that sought to fix time and yet not end the Doctor's life. This group was led by Amy Pond, who also remembered the original events due to her childhood exposure to the Cracks in Time. River built a distress beacon, begging the universe for help in saving the Doctor, to which much of the universe responded with resounding agreement. She was wed to the Doctor and he revealed that he was really the Teselecta. River and the Teselecta 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 together. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut)
- The Doctor and River met a being named "Jim the Fish"; this meeting proved to be important in determining that the Doctor who had arrived at a Utah diner after his "death" was an earlier version (since this Doctor had never heard of Jim the Fish). (DW: The Impossible Astronaut)
Personality
In her first incarnation, as the 'little girl', Melody Pond was shy, innocent and terrified of the "monsters" that had trapped her in the spacesuit. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut) Her second incarnation as 'Mels' was independent and feisty, often in trouble, and chased by the police shortly before her regeneration. She resented the Doctor and blamed him for many historical disasters, but wanted to marry him nonetheless. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler) In her final incarnation, River was very strong-willed, and though brainwashed in her childhood and raised to kill him, still decided that the Doctor was a good man and saved his life, sacrificing all her regenerations in the process. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler) She had the strength to drain the upgraded astronaut suit's energy reserves, preventing herself from killing the Doctor despite the impact on the timeline. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
In her final and best known incarnation, River was feisty and cheeky like her mother, Amy. From her father, Rory, she got a sense of responsibility and deep compassion for loved ones. She was vivacious and enjoyed showing off, especially for the Doctor. She would say "Spoilers!" to refer to her knowledge of the Doctor's future, or his knowledge of hers. River was good at keeping secrets, especially anything which could change the future. This included keeping her personal diary from the Doctor (DW: Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead), and concealing her knowledge that the death of the Doctor at Lake Silencio was an elaborate setup until the time was right (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
River loved the Doctor deeply and cared very much for her family. She and the Doctor were eventually married, and she had the strength to resist her brainwashing and stop herself from killing him (DW: The Wedding of River Song). She seemed to feel no resentment at being forced to remain in prison for much of her life for a crime she did not commit, presumably because she could escape easily, sometimes by herself and sometimes with the Doctor. Once she joked that she was breaking into prison instead of out, implying she was perfectly at home in that environment. (DW: A Good Man Goes to War) However, although she was very caring to her loved ones, she could be joyously merciless - for example killing the Stone Dalek after it had shot the Doctor, even though it pleaded for mercy when it realised who she was, or shooting dozens of Silents to cover the escape of the Doctor and her parents (DW: Day of the Moon). She was very confident in her abilities, intelligence and sexuality. She was often flirtatious and bawdy, but was serious when the situation called for it. (DW: The Big Bang)
River was willing to sacrifice herself from the moment she was convinced the Doctor deserved to live. She freely gave up her remaining regenerations to save him after poisoning him herself. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler) She took the Doctor's place when he tried to release the people who were saved in the computer that controlled the Library. To prevent the Doctor killing himself, River knocked him out and handcuffed him before hooking herself up to the computer. Just before her death she comforted the Doctor,saying that although it was her last meeting with him, it was his first with her and he would see her again. (DW: Forest of the Dead) She was also willing to sacrifice 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)
Known family
- The Doctor - husband
- Jenny - step-daughter
- Susan Campbell - step-granddaughter
- Rory Williams – father
- Amy Pond – mother
- Augustus Pond – maternal grandfather
- Tabetha Pond – maternal grandmother
- Sharon – maternal great-aunt
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 from Stormcage, is unknown.
- River Song seemed to take shorter trips with the Doctor, living a "normal" life between trips, rather than having one extended trip with the Doctor and never seeing him after parting ways, as usually happened with his travelling companion.
- River Song was a skilled TARDIS pilot, with techniques very different from the Doctor's. She claimed that she "learned from the best", and joked that the Doctor wasn't available that day. (DW: The Time of Angels) She had learnt from the TARDIS itself, which recognised her as its "child" because she had been conceived in the ship. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler)
- River knew about Time Lord anatomy. She knew that destruction of both of the Doctor's hearts would make regeneration impossible. (DW: Forest of the Dead). She also understood that if the Doctor died before his regeneration cycle was complete, he was dead for good. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut)
- River Song could write Old High Gallifreyan.
- River had pictures of all the Doctor's incarnations (DW: The Time of Angels), though she did not know their order.
- River told Rory that she and the Doctor were meeting in reverse order and that 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)
- Both the name "Melody" and "River Song" are ontological paradoxes. Amy named her daughter after her friend, who unbeknownst to Amy was her daughter Melody. Melody later began using the name "River Song" after learning about her own future as River Song.
Behind the scenes
- All of River Song's full-episode appearances have taken place in stories written by Steven Moffat. Her only other appearances were in a flashback in DW: Journey's End (her death) and at the end of DW: Closing Time (which acted as a cliffhanger to her appearance in DW: The Wedding of River Song).
- Excluding DW: Closing Time and DW: The Wedding of River Song, River Song only appears in two-part episodes.
- In an interview for a short video about the Eleventh Doctor's companions, Alex Kingston stated that River Song has encountered many incarnations of the Doctor and that the Doctor "sends her into his past, where he knows he needs her expertise". Arthur Darvill stated that Kingston had been told more than anyone else about who River really is.
- Humourously, the conversation at the end of The Doctor's Wife implies that River was conceived on a bunk bed. When asked about this, both Steven Moffat and Neil Gaiman independently and simultaneously acknowledged this, joking about the possibility of the ladder. They later agreed they had accidentally canonised this by agreeing on it.
- To date, River has been played by six different actors, the most to portray a single companion on-screen.
- River Song is the only Time Lord to change skin colour via regeneration on-screen, (other than K'anpo Rimpoche, whose second actor, Kevin Lindsay, was made up to look Asian) as the actresses who played her in both her Melody Pond and River Song incarnations were white, while both of Mels' actresses were black. Earlier in SJA: Death of the Doctor, the 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. A black Time Lord was also seen in DW: The Sound of Drums.
- In Let's Kill Hitler, River says that 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 will play later versions of River.
- Before the fact that the little girl and River are one and the same was revealed in-universe, Steven Moffat confirmed it in an interview.[1]