River Song: in the Hero Seat

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River Song: in the Hero Seat

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River Song: in the Hero Seat (finally)

I have felt more and more defensive of my love of Professor River Song over the last couple of years. This wasn’t always the case – while she has always had something of a controversial/’problematic fave’ status in Doctor Who fandom, on the whole the pro-River voices were loud enough that I didn’t mind so much that there were so many fans who didn’t like what she represented – either the idea of the Doctor having a future romantic history at all, or there being a woman in his life who is better at stuff than he is.

River and her relationship with the TARDIS is an absolute gift, and I refuse to see it otherwise. Ditto: her dress sense, her attitude, almost all of her dialogue, the splendid actress who plays her, the rare occurrence of a confident female action hero who is over 40, and, well. I just really like River, okay?

While I’m at it, I loved all the ‘story arc/River Song’ episodes of Series 6, too. Talk about problematic faves! I don’t think it’s considered good etiquette in fandom to say anything positive about Series 6 at all (let alone Steven Moffat as a writer), but I found those episodes some of the most exciting, groundbreaking, character-rich and chaotically excellent stories of New Who, even if they didn’t always make 100% good sense.

The weakness of Season 6, to my mind, was that most of the non-arc/non-River Song episodes didn’t provide enough emotional depth to follow through on the episodes that Moffat wrote, but I’ve discussed this (and the disappointing resolution of the Amy baby storyline) elsewhere.

River, though. We learned so much about River in these episodes: the Impossible Astronaut, Day of the Moon, A Good Man Goes To War, Let’s Kill Hitler and The Wedding of River Song. The questions got bigger, the shoes got more fabulous, and then there was That Reveal, the one that our glamorous archaeologist secret agent, the Doctor’s future maybe-wife, was also Amy and Rory’s baby, conceived on board the TARDIS. In, apparently, bunk beds.

Somehow, it wasn’t the revelation that River lost her entire childhood or was separated from her parents or was part Time Lord (ish) or a bespoke assassin trained to be the perfect sociopathic muderer that was most controversial, at least among the viewers who had already taken River to their hearts.

No, the worst sin of the character was that she apparently chose the field of archaeology because she was “looking for a good man.”

Personally, it never occurred to me to take that line of dialogue seriously – not with River, who is constantly sarcastic and flippant to hide what she is really after. But many of River’s most ardent fans took that line as a knife in the back – and while their reading isn’t my reading, they are well within their rights to be offended.

River Song is defined by her relationship by the Doctor, it’s true. He is the protagonist of the show, it was bound to happen. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it. At the same time that fandom was coming to terms with the fact that the more we learned about River, the less mysterious and cool she became, there was also another conversation beginning to catch alight: the conversation about when and how the Doctor could be regenerated into a female character, and whether that would break the show’s pretty bendy format. It’s an important conversation, and the sidelining of characters like River and the female companions (who are to many of us, our prime audience identification figure) provides fuel for that important, fascinating conversation.

I grit my teeth whenever River is held up as the prime example of “why Steven Moffat can’t write women,” one of the most frustrating recurring fannish ideas about New Who. The River-Eleven relationship is definitely an example of one of Moffat’s recurring writing quirks, which is that he tends to write romantic pairings as if they just stepped out of a 1930’s screwball comedy (and maybe has not properly examined some of the problematic gender ideas that fall out when you start dreaming your script will be read by Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn). But the quirks (I won’t say faults) of Moffat’s writing apply as equally to his writing of men as they do to women, and it drives me up the wall when my beloved female characters from the show are regularly thrown under the bus as part of a hate campaign for the show runner.

Also, it’s astounding how often the ‘Moffat can’t write women’ meme is repeated not only among feminist fans who would like to see women treated with greater nuance or complexity on the show, but among those fans who feel the show would be better with fewer women in it altogether. Generalised criticisms like this are next to useless, and are often used to fuel the wrong argument – look how quickly the critique of the uncomfortable gender issues in Twilight caught on in popularity, shifting from ‘this sends the wrong message about romance to teenage girls’ to ‘women who like these books are stupid and the women who wrote the books is stupid, and really, women are stupid.’ (yes, I’m exaggerating, but try to find an argument about Twilight these days that doesn’t have at least a whiff of that)

It will be REALLY interesting to see if the Moffat hate (and specifically, the directed hatred of his female characters) continues to burn hotly among fans when his final season screens, now that they know he is leaving…

Anyway, River Song. I love her. I’d watch her shoot bad guys in amazing shoes while reciting the telephone book. But I will admit, after only getting to see glimpses of her narrative in the shadow of the Doctor for so long, I took particular pleasure from the appearances of River over the last year, both in the 2015 Christmas Special The Husbands of River Song and in her own 2016 audio series from Big Finish.

Having been arguing for years that it’s a bit much to criticise a character for having their narrative revolve entirely around the protagonist of the TV Show named after him… oh, it’s been lovely to see River reframed as her own hero. Because, of course, she’s REALLY GOOD AT PROTAGGING.

The Husbands of River Song felt like a giant apology letter to fans for that “looking for a good man” line and all the other little indignities that have sideswiped the character over the years. Here, with the Twelfth Doctor incognito and finally wearing a face she does not recognise, we not only get to see what River’s life is like when her sweetie is not around (four times as bonkers, as it happens), we also get to watch the Doctor himself witnessing it.

His offended face at her slew of husbands is pretty great. He thought he was special! But we also get to see his fondness for her, and his fascination at who she is and what she’s like when she doesn’t think he is watching her. We’ve had hints of this before – when she terrified the Dalek in The Big Bang, or when she warned Rory not to tell her old man of the violence she was capable of perpetrating (“He gets ever so cross”) but here the Doctor gets to eavesdrop on the true, hard-edged River. And he adores her even more.

All this, and in the closing moments of the episode, we finally get resolution to the relationship that was always told in the wrong order – finally they are both old enough and experienced enough with each other that the power dynamic is balanced instead of slightly creepy.

I seriously could watch a whole season of Alex Kingston and Peter Capaldi acting out River and Twelve’s final, super long marathon date together. I bet there’s a heist in there, somewhere. And space dragons.

That brings me to the wonderful recent audio series, The Diary of River Song, in which River Song is so completely the protagonist, that I finally admit – yes, this character is too good to be playing support, she should have had her own show YEARS AGO.

This is River at her glorious best – romping around the universe’s archaeological digs, glamorous parties, crashing spaceships and nearly dying several times over – as well as running into two separate versions of her beloved Doctor, only one of whom is real. If you’re one of those many fans who always felt a little cheated whenever a Doctor Who episode screened which didn’t have River in it, or if you felt she was badly served by the TV show, or if you loved every appearance and just want MORE…

Well, the Big Finish River is everything her fans deserve.