The conversation begins framed over Amy’s shoulder as the audience stands in her position intruding on a small, intimate moment between two people who often seem larger than life.
The Doctor asked River to find a way out of the angel’s grasp without breaking her wrist, but even after she broke it, he doesn’t understand why she lied to him about it - she’s gone against his wishes in much bigger ways and called him out when he’s gone too far in his actions, but this is different.
River has so many valid reasons to lie to everyone, even to him. Everything from her name to the reason she went to prison is a voluntary lie she tells to the world, but the nature of her relationship with her family requires her to lie to those who matter most whether she wants to or not.
We view bits of River’s life as it intersects with bits of Amy and the Doctor’s lives, but when we take a moment to step back and put ourselves in River’s position, we realize that the last time we saw her with him was on the beach as he lived up to every bit of the description of him she gives here, nervously asking her who she is like a schoolboy with a crush.
River knows painfully well that the next time she sees him he might not even know who she is. It won’t just be his face that looks too young for her; he really will be. Their physical appearances don’t reflect their ages and so their ages aren’t told in the lines on their faces, but rather in milestones and diary entries. In this episode, he pauses when she says she’s a professor and she laments about being in love with an ageless god with the face of a twelve year old. Professor River Song’s visit to the library is his end to their relationship and his youth is her’s. They’re both fighting against time and she’s lying to hide the pain it’s causing her and at the same time protect him because “he hates endings.”
She didn’t hide that she broke her wrist because of the physical damage. That has nothing to do with him; that was a decision she made on her own. She hid that she broke her wrist to keep him believing that there was a way around what was written in that book.
River is wrong to think she needs to hide her feelings from her husband and he clearly doesn’t want her to, but it’s hard not to see how she ended up that way after all these years living a life that required her to be strong to survive the worst life could throw at her and lie to those she loves.
There is not enough opportunity for them to grow together. Instead, they fall deeper in love at different times with a “normal” relationship staying beyond their grasp for so much of their lives. But this was one of the times where the universe allowed them to be together as equals in their relationship and so she painfully opens up to him instead of pushing him aside with a quip and a flirtatious look that buries feelings she knows that he won’t understand. Today, she trusts him to understand.
After she speaks, he watches as she struggles with the vulnerability of what she said, unable to return his gaze. Without saying anything, he takes her hand and pours the last of his regeneration energy into her wrist and kisses it in a gesture that speaks more than words could, but instead of propelling what was a constructive relationship moment forward, it exposes more of River’s fears and vulnerabilities and so, like a true Pond, she runs away from the person she loves to process feelings she’s not prepared to deal with.
At the end of the episode, in what is in many ways a continuation of their interrupted conversation on the staircase, the shock wears off for the Doctor and he realizes that he’s wallowing over the loss of his friends while she’s taking charge after having just lost her parents. He tries to tell her that her feelings matter and get her to talk to him, but instead of talking about herself, she pushes the conversation back to him and writing her book which visibly upsets him. River opened up to him earlier, but after losing her parents, there is too much damage beneath the surface to let her guard back down.
This time, the camera goes over the Doctor’s shoulder and we witness River from his perspective as all he can do is watch while she silently, but visibly pushes aside her feelings. He looks at her, sympathetic yet hurt that she would behave this way after what she said to him earlier, but this time he knows exactly what she’s doing. He doesn’t have to ask why.
