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Melody "Mels" Pond, later River Song, was a human with Time Lord DNA, having been conceived onboard The Doctor's TARDIS in the Time Vortex and manipulated by The Silence. She was also an archaeologist and the Doctor's convicted murderer.
The daughter of Amy Pond and Rory Williams, River married the Eleventh Doctor and was one of the few to know his true name. She was also one of the few companions whose timeline was not synchronous with the Doctor's.
Biography
Birth
Melody Pond was born on the asteroid of Demon's Run in the 52nd century to Amy Pond and Rory Williams after her mother had been abducted. Within a month, she was replaced with a Ganger and taken by Madame Kovarian to be raised to kill the Doctor. She was chosen for this task because she had traces of Time Lord DNA from her conception on the TARDIS and the abilities to understand complex principles of Time and Space, (DW: The Wedding of River Song) regenerate and pilot the TARDIS. (DW: The Time of Angels, Day of the Moon, A Good Man Goes to War, Let's Kill Hitler)
Early life
Melody was trained by the Silence to kill the Doctor. (DW: Let's Kill Hitler) While 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. Her mother shot at her. Melody returned to the orphanage and tried to ask Amy for help, but Silents arrived. She forced her way out of the suit and fled. Six months later, in New York City, dying, she regenerated. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon)
Mels
By the late 1990s, she was an adolescent in Leadworth known as Mels Zucker. (REF: Doctor Who: The Encyclopedia). She was a close friend of her parents, who did not know she was their future 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.
Adventures with the Doctor
Regeneration into River
When the TARDIS landed in a Leadworth cornfield in 2011, Mels forced her way onboard at gunpoint and crashed the TARDIS in Adolf Hitler's office in 1938, inadvertently saving Hitler from the Teselecta. He shot her. Stunning the Doctor and her parents, she regenerated into River Song. Acting on her conditioning, she tried to kill the Doctor with guns and poisoned liptstick. She cheerily called herself a psychopath and ran amok in Berlin, yet showed empathy for the Doctor's devotion to her parents, jealousy for 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 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 gift at her bedside: a TARDIS-shaped diary. After recuperating, she entered the Luna University shortly 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, Kovarian appeared with agents of the Church and Silents. 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 every moment happened at once. She 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 imprisoned in the Stormcage Containment Facility in the 52nd century for the Doctor's murder. (DW: The Time of Angels) 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. (Night and the Doctor: First Night)
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". She had already met the Doctor, Amy and Rory at the end of the battle of Demon's Run in the 52nd century. She had 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 in 2011. The Doctor took them on a picnic where he was shot. They burned his body, then went to a cafe to find a version of the Eleventh Doctor two hundred years younger than the one who had died. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut) Although she concealed it, River knew the assassin was an earlier version of herself and the dead Doctor was 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 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, then travelled to the Roman era of Earth 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. Instead, she was trapped in a time loop of the first moments of the explosion. (DW: The Pandorica Opens) The Doctor rescued her in 1996, told her his plan to use the Pandorica's restoration field to reverse the erasure 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 with Amy at her wedding so she could remember him back into existence. After a brief conversation about her marital status and identity, River 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 returning from 2010 to prison, 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 Alfava Metraxis. They defeated an army of Weeping Angels which had 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 many lies to her parents. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
Darillium
Some time later, River received a surprise visit by the Doctor. He took her to Darillium to see the Singing Towers meeting an earlier version of the Doctor on the way. 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 as a present. (DW: Forest of the Dead, Last Night)
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 where the Doctor was in his timeline, but realised he was a far younger version who neither knew nor trusted her.
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.
River died in the Doctor's place, sacrificing herself to release 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)
The Doctor reasoned his future self would give River his sonic screwdriver for a purpose. Inside it he found a data chip, a "Neural Relay" 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: Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead)
The Tenth Doctor would 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 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 5:02:57pm. 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 distress beacon to beg the universe's help for the Doctor, to which much of the universe answered with resounding agreement. 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 together. (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 by Sontarans after asking if they were on a "hen night". (Last Night)
- River and the Doctor met Cleopatra, whom the duo considered a pushover after River pointed a gun at the Egyptian Queen. (DW: The Wedding of River Song)
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) Another example of her incredible willpower was when she resisted the upgraded astronaut suit and drained the power of its weapons, refusing to kill the Doctor regardless of the results. (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 enjoyed keeping her personal diary from him (DW: Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead) and hiding that his death at Lake Silencio was a hoax. (DW: The Wedding of River Song) She loved the Doctor deeply and cared very much for her family. River did not seem to resent being kept in prison for much of her life for a crime she did not commit, probably because she could escape easily. She once said she was breaking into prison instead of out, implying she was perfectly content with the situation. (DW: A Good Man Goes to War) She was joyously bloodthirsty: killing the Stone Dalek after it had shot the Doctor, though it begged 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 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 willing 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 when he tried 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 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). She also knew that if the Doctor died before a regeneration cycle was complete, he was dead for good. (DW: The Impossible Astronaut)
- 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 she and the Doctor 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. The only exception is her appearances in a flashback of her death. (DW: Journey's End)
- 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.
- 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 canonised this by agreeing on it.
- 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, while 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. 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.