Okaaaaaaaaaaaaay

So.

Here is my complicated stance on River Song.  

On the one hand: her whole plot of going rogue against what she was designed to be and living her life backward relative to the proper timeline and fighting for what she believes in and being badass and snarky with the hair and the heels and the guns and the rest?  INTO IT.  INTO IT UP TO MY EYEBALLS ANON.  HERE.  FOR.  IT.  HONESTLY KIND OF BITTER I DIDN’T COME UP WITH THE WHOLE ‘LIVING TIME BACKWARD’ THING MYSELF.

On the other hand: A, I don’t like the way the narrative handles her, B, I don’t like the change toward companions needing to be Special, and C, I’ve never been able to get into her and the Doctor as a thing.  This got long.

In order:

• A: The narrative handles her as a second Doctor with a gun.  Right down to being a little bit Time Lord because TARDIS Weirdness.  Well, we didn’t need a second Doctor, we had a Doctor, and I felt like the whole thing was sort of a consolation prize instead of having, at any point in time, a female Doctor.  Furthermore, the Doctor is interesting by contrast, and that’s likewise why his companions are interesting.  It’s the same reason you have Watson, the emotional intelligence, and Holmes, the esoteric intelligence, rather than two Holmeses.  By doubling the Doctors, you lose some of that spark between different character archetypes.  It’s a narrative flaw that I struggle to overlook.

• (Incidentally, I think River Song would have been a much more interesting character during the Ninth Doctor’s arc.  Because, see, the Tenth and Eleventh Doctors don’t use guns in a very cursory sort of way.  They’re killers and they know they’re killers and they’ve really descended into the dark, in a way.  Particularly Eleven.  Nine…well.  “So which are you, Doctor?  Killer or coward?”  “Coward, every day.”  I think seeing THAT man interact with River Song, who comes crashing in with her gun and her heels and her sarcasm, would have been much more dynamic than Ten, who burns an entire race after losing Rose, or Eleven, who…well.  Eleven.)

• B: I just don’t love the shift toward companions having to be Special, okay?  I liked Rose, a shop girl whose only real claim to anything was that she was brave, and Martha, who was a casualty of the Doctor’s mourning and who knew how to ask the right questions, and Donna, although WOWIE sometime someone should give me an excuse to scream about the end of HER plotline.  Rory and Amy and River and Clara are all Inherently Special, and the Doctor picks them because they’re Inherently Special, and I’m not really into it.  I’m not one to lecture about how characters all have to be the everyman, I don’t mind if your characters are Inherently Special, but this was a bit of a narrative about-face from the Doctor being delighted with humans because humans to the Doctor only being interested if there’s some weird shit going on with your timeline.  And I’d gotten really attached to the companions not having to be Special, that was the point that I took away from the first couple of seasons, and River is kind of the exemplar of that particular thing going away.

• C: This part isn’t anything particularly concrete but I was never into the Doctor/River romance and I’m probably never going to be.  Which is, I think, kind of a shame, because if it was handled better and the two above problems weren’t so overwhelming, I think it could be my jam.  This is partly because, I will freely admit, I really liked Doctor/Rose, because of the two above problems.  Rose is emotionally intelligent and the Doctor needs her in that capacity, Rose and the Doctor clash on questions of efficiency over morality, they’re dynamic.  Rose is normal–even boring–by Earth standards, and the Doctor sees everything about her that makes her brilliant, everything that makes her heroic.  The Doctor sees himself as a monster, and Rose is his touchstone, a person who can call him back to the man he wants to be with the question “And what about you, Doctor?  What the hell are you turning into?”  And that’s much more my thing in a relationship–people who need each other, who see something in each other that other people don’t–than Doctor/River.  Because the issue with River being Doctor Mark II (With Detachable Gun!) is that she and the Doctor don’t have that dynamic aspect, and the issue with both of them being equally Fantastically Special is that they turn into something of a relational feedback loop.  Which I don’t find engaging.

• Also I’m real bitter that having River around didn’t turn into a prime opportunity to call the Doctor out on his shit.  Because as the series has progressed there’s a lot of shit to call him out on.

• Lastly, I will add that these three things were instrumental in my breakdown.  I’ve seen enough of Eleven to know what I’m about, but I bowed out a while ago.