“Always and Completely Forgiven”: A Celebration of the River Song Arc
For Day 4 of Moffat Appreciation Week, I tried to pick one favorite episode. I really, really did. I googled “list of dw episodes written by moffat” and scrolled through the Wikipedia article obsessively, trying to figure out which one I liked best. “A Christmas Carol,” widely considered the perfect Christmas special? “Asylum of the Daleks,” an episode with one of the best twists in modern television? “The Snowmen,” which set up one of the most intriguing mysteries in Doctor Who? Perhaps “The Doctor Falls,” which is truly one of the greats.
The problem is, the episodes Moffat wrote are so interconnected that it’s nearly impossible to pick just one. And every time I thought I’d settled on one, I went, “But wait! Remember that great moment in…” and I was off again. And then I noticed: Moffat wrote every episode in the Great River Song Story.
Story time: awhile back, I wanted to introduce my mom to Doctor Who. But we had limited time, and I wanted her to a) know all the important information and b) see the best of Moffat. I had a bright idea: I’d just show her the River Song arc! So over the course of about half a year, we watched every episode that had River in it, in order.
And guys. I loved it. I think I enjoyed it more than my mom did! It was so much fun getting to see it all in the way it was meant to be viewed, with no “filler” episodes in the way to blur the details. In the story of River Song, Moffat created a mystery and romance all in one, a complex, sprawling thriller that defines the first half of his tenure the way Clara Oswald defined the second half.
The River Song arc is really, really brilliant. It begins with the perfect mystery setup that follows logically from what we already know of Doctor Who: if the Doctor can visit people who don’t know him yet (i.e. 2005 Rose, pre-moon Martha, little Clara), surely other time travelers can do the same to him. It’s a premise that’s both wickedly clever and completely obvious: very Moffat.
What’s absolutely perfect about the arc is that it works linearly backwards until it reaches its climax, at which point it goes back (er, forward) and fills in the details. We meet River at her end, at which point she’s at her fullest potential. She has everything figured out. She knows more than the Doctor does. She’s intriguing, complex, impossible not to love. And then she dies, and it’s very sad. And it’s over.
Well, no, obviously. We meet her again. And she’s very similar to Library-River; she still knows more than the Doctor, still has all that flair and confidence, but she’s not quite there yet. She’s haunted by a past we know little about, but it definitely involves the Doctor. When she leaves this time, we know she’s coming back. And suddenly, a character who was an intriguing one-off is an integral part of the Whoniverse.
River comes back again, as a supporting character, in “The Pandorica Opens”/”The Big Bang”. This two-parter is more important to her character than I think some people realize, because it’s the first time she doesn’t know everything. Her genuine surprise at Amy’s comment about the Byzantium is revolutionary to us, the audience: suddenly, River Song is not an oracle. We’re moving backward in her timeline, and it’s a bit frightening. We see her desperately afraid. We see her fail. She’s still an enigma, but she’s no longer quite so far away (and also, she cares ferociously about the Doctor).
Then we get to “The Impossible Astronaut”/”Day of the Moon” and this two-parter is also very interesting because it’s the last time she’s the one with all the knowledge in the relationship. She and the Doctor start out pretty equal in their timelines, but when the astronaut rises out of the lake, it’s clear she knows more about what’s going on than Amy and Rory (though she doesn’t know everything). Then, of course, the 2000-years-younger Doctor steps out of the diner and she becomes the oracle again, but for a few minutes we see a glimpse of her past and the Doctor’s future.
The other genius part of TIA/DotM is the way it sets up Amy’s pregnancy and the subsequent reveal. Amy is pregnant, and then she’s not, and suddenly there’s a little girl on the scene, someone we know is important. This is one of those developments that can’t be connected in the moment but makes perfect sense in hindsight. We also see River in Stormcage, and the heartbreak on her face when the Doctor comments that he’s never kissed her before; it drives home the hurt that River must feel when the Doctor doesn’t know her, and makes her more vulnerable to the audience.
And then! We get to “A Good Man Goes to War,” and we travel all the way back to her birth. It’s structured almost like a flashback in the story of River’s life: we leave River in Stormcage, in the midst of some great unknown tragedy, and then jump back to the start. And we find a baby who lost her mother, and the great lengths that mother went to to find her child - and then we jump back to the River we know, the River we trust, who explains to us what happened. She tells us she was that child. She’s Amy and Rory’s daughter.
We know who River is now, but we don’t know how she got there. So “Let’s Kill Hitler” fills that gap, explaining how River met the Doctor, how they fell in love. Why she knows how to pilot the Tardis. How she can time travel (dropped off in the fifty-first century). How she got the notebook.
Finally, there’s the climax of the mystery in “The Wedding of River Song”: is she the Doctor’s wife? Did she kill the Doctor? The episode answers these two central questions in a very straightforward fashion: yes, and yes. And with that, the main story ends. (And by the way, this episode always seems to enrage people because it presents River as this young, needy, desperate person whose life revolves around the Doctor. People read it as Moffat saying, “this is who she was all along! Surprise!” But that’s not how the story is structured. It works backwards. This is River’s origin story, not her ending. The awesome person she was in the Library? That’s who she grew into. She grew beyond the Doctor. You can see it if you watch in reverse.)
But here’s the lovely part about the River Song arc, one of the reasons I love it so much: it doesn’t really end there. River appears again in “The Angels Take Manhattan.” She comes back from the Library to talk to the Doctor one last time in “The Name of the Doctor.” And finally, in “The Husbands of River Song,” we see her just before her end: a rare glimpse into the life of the wonderful adventurer she became after all the struggles we went through with her.
The story of River Song was one of Moffat’s crowning achievements within Doctor Who: it’s almost a show within a show, the backwards story of the wonderful, mad time traveler who stole a vortex manipulator and ran away. So it’s fitting that River is mentioned and remembered in series 10 a great deal. She doesn’t overshadow anything, but her story touched so much of the Doctor’s. It’s only natural that as the end for Moffat’s Doctor drew near, she would draw closer.
After all, for River Song, what is an end but a beginning?
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