Characters / Doctor Who – River Song

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Professor River Song, née Melody Pond (Tenth, Eleventh and Twelfth Doctors)

"Spoilers!"

^{Click here to see her first incarnation.}

^{Click here to see her second incarnation.}

Debut: "Silence in the Library" (2008)

Played by: Alex Kingston (2008, 2010–2013, 2015), Sydney Wade^note "The little girl" (2011), Harrison and Madison Mortimer^note Baby Melody (2011), Maya Glace-Green^note Young Mels (2011), Nina Toussaint-White ^note Mels (2011)

"Hello, sweetie."

The Doctor's Wife and Professor of Archaeology

A half-human/half-Time Lord, Melody Pond was the child of Amelia "Amy" Pond & Rory Williams, conceived on the TARDIS after their honeymoon. We wouldn't know this until much later; we first meet her (before we meet her parents!) under the alias "River Song", as a professor of archaeology who we'll come to find has an unusually close relationship with the Doctor for many reasons. The first of which is that she and the Doctor never meet in the right order; the Tenth Doctor first met her in the Library in the 51st century, where it would be the last time for her (sort of — it's complicated), and it only gets more confusing from there. They move roughly in opposite time directions, and depending on what end of the timeline they're on respectively, they each know secrets about each other that they're unable to talk about without creating paradoxes. As a result, she's a walking collection of "Spoilers!" and very much aware of it.

The other reason is that her mother was abducted by a splinter group of the Papal Mainframe, a religious order who nominally protected certain sections of the universe. This splinter group, led by Madame Kovarian, foretold of the Doctor's arrival on a world called "Trenzalore", where, due to a confluence of events, the Last Great Time War would begin anew leading to the Doctor's permanent death. Engaging in extremes to prevent this, Kovarian abducted Amy, held her captive on the asteroid "Demon's Run", and forcibly removed Melody from her mother upon birth, the idea being to train her as an assassin who would utilize her Time Lord abilities to insert herself into her parents' timeline as a friend called "Mels". Gaining intel, she would then move in and at the right time, kill the Doctor for good, succeeding in one timeline. What Kovarian didn't count on was Melody genuinely falling in love with him, even marrying him at a moment where his death was prevented, causing time to freeze but history to happen all at once.

After Kovarian's defeat, River and the Doctor would continue to go in opposite timelines; eventually, River would find herself spending twenty-four years with the man she loved, before finding herself on an expedition to a certain Library... and her destiny.

It should be noted that River was never officially deemed a companion, but is included here for completion purposes.

---

Tropes associated with the television continuity

A-F

• The Ace: River is a brilliant and well respected archeologist and fighter. There’s a reason people recruit her from prison as often as they do.
• Action Girl: She made a Dalek beg for mercy.
• Adventurer Archaeologist: Professor of archaeology.
• Adventurer Outfit: She loves fancy dresses, but for proper adventuring she changes into practical camo.
• Anachronic Order: She's a time traveller, and she and the Doctor always have to take a few minutes and check where they are in their relative timelines. Because of this, several episodes (like "The Impossible Astronaut", "A Good Man Goes to War" and "Night and the Doctor") feature a few Rivers at once.
• Anguished Declaration of Love:
  • In "The Wedding of River Song", where she declares no one in the universe loves the Doctor more than she does.
  • A different kind of anguish in "The Husbands of River Song", when the Doctor learns to his chagrin that River doesn't know he loves her back.
  River: When you love the Doctor, it's like loving the stars themselves. You don't expect a sunset to admire you back!
• Anti-Hero: She wasn't always a nice person before she joined team TARDIS, and she can't always afford to be a nice person afterwards, due to spoilers.
• Axe-Crazy: Extremely so in "Let's Kill Hitler", as her young, wanting-to-kill-the-Doctor incarnation Mels.
• Badass Boast: In "The Timeline of River Song" which was in Doctor Who Confidential after the 2011 finale, during the footage of River effortlessly gunning down multiple Silents with a laser pistol from the start of the series.
  River: Did I mention I was kick ass with a gun? No one kidnaps me and gets away with it!
• Badass Bookworm: Scariest Archaeologist Ever. She is rather kickass for an academic.
• Battle Couple: The Doctor and River Song are a married battle couple. He is feared across time and space, and she is part-Time Lord and raised as a weapon to fight the Doctor. They've fought off alien invaders back-to-back, while flirting.
• Badass Family: Her mothers and father are Amy Pond (the Girl Who Waited), Rory Williams (the Last Centurion), and the TARDIS herself. Also she's married to the last Time Lord in existence.
• Big Damn Kiss: Five total, all with Eleven: their first to each other, a big one to fix the consequences of her first kiss with him, one to fix a massive Time Crash, and her last one (well, her Virtual Ghost's last one) with him. She does not get one on screen with the Twelfth Doctor, in part due to the No Hugging, No Kissing rule established with his incarnation.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Song" means "River" in Vietnamese. ^note Sort of. The correct word is "sông", which is not a surname. There are surnames that mean "river" - "Hà" and "Giang", for example. However, "song song", spelled exactly like that, means parallel.
• Boxed Crook: As revealed in "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone", she spends many years of her life in the (allegedly) high-security Stormcage. Her crime is "killing the best man she ever knew". The man turns out to be the Doctor, whose death she helped fake.
• Brains and Bondage: Why would an archaeology professor have handcuffs? Spoilers.
• Brainwashed and Crazy: Spends the first years of her life being indoctrinated to kill the Doctor. She falls in love with him instead, and ends up saving him from her own assassination attempt.
• Bratty Teenage Daughter: Young River Song is an odd variation on this in that her mother doesn't know she's her daughter.
• The Bus Came Back: She made a return appearance in the Series 9 Christmas Special, alongside the Twelfth Doctor; this was the second to last meeting between them in her personal timeline.
• Cardboard Prison: The definition of her imprisonment in Stormcage. In "The Time of Angels" River is an inmate who is guarded by Father Octavian, but in "Flesh and Stone" (immediately after), later in "The Pandorica Opens" and in subsequent episodes, River is shown to be imprisoned practically voluntarily, as she is resourceful enough to escape Stormcage easily if she well wanted to. After a date with the Doctor, she breaks back into prison.
  "Sir? It's Doctor Song. She's doing it again, she's packing."
• Character Catchphrase:
  • "Hello, sweetie!" whenever she meets the Doctor.
  • "Spoilers" when keeping anyone's relative future a secret. Also her last words before her Heroic Sacrifice.
  • Telling the Doctor "I hate you" whenever he does something clever. Usually followed by the Doctor saying, "No you don't."
  • As Mels she had, "Penny in the air," soon followed by, "The penny drops." Just like the Doctor, it's a catch phrase she never uses after she regenerates.
• Character Development: River is kidnapped by a cult as a child, because of the unique gifts she has as a time lord / human hybrid, and they brainwash her to become their own special weapon against the Doctor. But after her first major encounter with the Doctor, where she discovers everything they taught her was a lie, River decides to start thinking for herself and forge her own path as an independent woman. She also falls deeply in love with the Doctor. Later in life, River is still a reckless daredevil who loves to cause trouble and have adventures, but she becomes wiser and more mature, as a result of her experiences with the Doctor and the lengths she has to go to protect the space-time continuum from potential disaster.
• Clingy Jealous Girl: In a rather funny variation on the trope, she frequently suspects that the Doctor may be hiding other women somewhere while she's around... but it's always a past or future version of herself.
• Consummate Liar: So as to not spoil anyone's relative future.
  River: I lied. I'm always lying.
• Daddy's Girl: It's subtle, but she's very close to her father even before he knows he is her father. She has heartfelt discussions with him about her relationship with the Doctor and where it's heading, happily chats with him about her dates, and confides in him her worries. On a slightly creepy note, she's attracted to Roman Centurions — though the context of that scene suggests that she might have been lying to preserve Rory's ignorance of their relationship.
• Dark Action Girl: Before her Heel–Face Turn, she was a psychopathic assassin.
• Distaff Counterpart: To the Doctor himself, being (half) Time Lord. In particular, she seems to have borrowed some hairstyling tips from Six and carries the Third's posh sensibilities as well as knack for no-holds-barred action. Coincidentally, the Third is Alex Kingston's favorite Doctor.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: After lifetimes of trying to catch up to the Doctor, she spends 24 years with him on Darillium... after which, she meets him and he doesn't recognize her.
• Expy: According to Steven Moffat, she's one of Indiana Jones.
• Extra Parent Conception: Due to being conceived in the TARDIS, and having the Time Vortex poured into her in the womb, the TARDIS considers herself River's mother in addition to Amy and Rory. River finds out the first time she meets the TARDIS, and is completely shocked when the TARDIS tells her.
• Extreme Omnisexual:
  • Says she once dated a Nestene Duplicate.
  • Moffat jokes that she was involved with her entire archaeological staff.
  • In "The Husbands of River Song", she is revealed to have had multiple husbands — and at least two wives.
• '80s Hair: A whole lot of it. She's delighted when she regenerates into Alex Kingston and sees it. Strax, who doesn't really understand mammals, calls her the one with the "gigantic head".
• Family Relationship Switcheroo: Inverted. Typically the situation is that a child is raised by someone they're told are not their mother or father but secretly are. River spent her childhood with her parents as their same-aged delinquent best friend without them knowing it was her, though she knew. And due to Trolling Creator, just as we're starting to figure all of that out, there are anvil-sized hints that Amy's baby may also be the Doctor's, which turns out to be a giant Red Herring.
• Faux Affably Evil: In "Let's Kill Hitler", prior to her Heel–Face Turn. Her younger self acts much like she always does, except with more murder attempts.
• Femme Fatale: Becomes this in her middle phase, black dress and all. Thinks she's this when she's young. Grows out of it when she's older, which is when we first meet her.
• Foregone Conclusion: She dies in her first appearance, "Silence in the Library"/"Forest of the Dead". Her subsequent appearances are earlier in her timeline. ^note With one post-death appearance by her saved consciousness: The Name of the Doctor"

G-L

• Good is Not Nice: Though she seems to have mellowed out in the future, she starts off quite merciless despite being heroic.
• Good Thing You Can Heal: During the first 15 hours following a regeneration, a dozen bullets are no problem.
  "Tip for you all: never shoot a girl while she's regenerating."
• The Gunslinger: In her own words "kickass with a gun".
• Half-Human Hybrid: She's got primitive Time Lord DNA from being conceived on the TARDIS. It's explicitly said that she's the TARDIS's daughter as much as she is Amy's and Rory's.
• Happily Married: To the Doctor, hence all the flirting and kissing she does around him. It's not flirting, it's PDA with her husband. Although for many of her meetings after the marriage, he hasn't married her yet, and he doesn't realize he's going to — although he starts to suspect it as soon as the topic comes up. Ironically, in their final (as far as we know) meeting in "The Husbands of River Song", the most she does is kiss the Doctor on the cheek.
• Have We Met Yet?:
  • The Doctor and River meet in the wrong order: for example, the Doctor's first encounter with her is her last encounter with him. In her first encounter with him, she realizes he's already had many encounters with her future self, motivating her to save his life.
  • In "A Good Man Goes to War", Rory asks River this when he comes to recruit her to find Amy.
  • The 12th Doctor encounters River, who obviously doesn't recognize him in his new regeneration and he just strings her along for most of the episode. ("The Husbands of River Song")
• Heel–Face Turn: Kills the Doctor, then brings him back to life, using up all her remaining regenerations in the process. "As first dates go, I'd say that was mixed signals."
• Heroic Sacrifice: Twice, and both times were to save the Doctor's life. The first time (from her perspective), she tries to kill him, then uses all of her regeneration power all at once in order to save him. The second time (from her perspective), she prevents him from making a Heroic Sacrifice to save Donna and thousands of others, and gives her own life to save him instead. She had to, because she wouldn't even exist if he'd died that day.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: She can fly the TARDIS better than the Doctor, amongst other things. Extremely justified: The TARDIS is her second mom and taught her how.
• I Know Your True Name: The first character in the show's 50+ years confirmed to know the Doctor's real name, and is still only one out of two. It eventually allows her to open the Doctor's grave.
  Tenth Doctor: River, you know my name. You whispered my name in my ear. There's only one reason I would ever tell anyone my name — there's only one time I could.
• The "I Love You" Stigma: Despite the fact she married the guy, River never heard those three exact words said to her by the Doctor. (This is due to a longstanding tradition that the Doctor doesn't say "I love you" directly to anyone, not River, not Rose, not Clara, nor anyone else.)
• Improbable Aiming Skills:
  • Shooting Eleven's Stetson right off his head.
  • She offhandedly shoots a Silent that was behind her; due to Silent physiology, she shouldn't have even known it was there.
• In Love with the Mark: River was supposed to be the Silence's weapon to use against the Doctor. She learned another side of the story while growing up with Amy and Rory, and fantasizes about marrying him instead. She still tries to kill him, but saves his life when she realises the implications. When it came time to kill him at Lake Silencio, she refused, and all of time fell apart due to it being a fixed point in time.
• Instant Expert: Her TARDIS piloting is justified, since the TARDIS herself teaches her via telepathy, and is her second mom. Seeing as the TARDIS is unused to time progressing linearly and was fully aware of who River was all along, she probably started training her in utero.
• Internal Homage: A nod to the extremely long-running Expanded Universe companion Bernice Summerfield, another professor of archaeology who keeps a diary about the Doctor. Steven Moffat wrote for the Bernice Summerfield franchise before becoming the showrunner for the TV series. (He also jokingly suggested that River and Bernice had totally gotten married at some point, which immediately got a big thumbs-up from Benny's creator Paul Cornell. It's worth noting that "The Husbands of River Song" establishes that she has married women at least twice... And now that Big Finish can write both characters, it's only a matter of time...)
• Irony: Had she not done her Heroic Sacrifice in the Library, she never would have met the Doctor and never would have been born.
  Ten: Time can be rewritten!
  River: Not those times. Not one line, don't you dare!
• Kangaroo Court: Subtly implied to be a victim of this, as she was locked up in Stormcage Prison in the 52nd Century for murdering a man in the 21st Century on Earth.
• Kid from the Future: She's Amy and Rory's daughter who, due to time travel, ended up growing up with them.
• Kiss of Death: She prefers hallucinogenic lipstick over the traditional poisonous lipstick. The one time this is played straight is in "Let's Kill Hitler", since she was programmed from birth to assassinate the Doctor.
• Lady of Adventure: When she's not accompanying the Doctor, she's traveling on her own adventures and getting into trouble. "The Husbands of River Song" shows the Doctor what River gets up to when he's not around, this time attempting to scam a valuable diamond out of a bloodthirsty raider.
• Laser-Guided Tyke-Bomb: She was originally raised as a weapon to kill the Doctor.
• Last Kiss: With the Doctor in "The Name of the Doctor".
• Like an Old Married Couple:
  • Her bickering with the Doctor is so characteristic of old married couples that Amy quickly assumes they really are married. At that point, she is married to him from the perspective of her timeline, but he isn't married to her yet from his. It's timey wimey.
  • Even in the Library where Ten meets her for the first time, they argue so much that Strackman Lux yells at them for acting like a married couple when there were more pressing matters at hand.
• Like Mother, Like Daughter: She has a penchant for denying mercy to her enemies even when they beg for it, and she's willing to tear time itself apart for her husband's sake. Just like her mum, it turns out. Also, both she and her other mom, the TARDIS, consider themselves married to the Doctor.
• Loony Fan: Was deliberately brought up all her life to become obsessed with the Doctor, and inevitably fell in love with him in the process. Sacrificed centuries of her life to save him. Then studied archaeology just so she could find him again. When being forced to kill him, she firmly believes that she would suffer more than the rest of the universe combined. She's willing to do it, but not without letting him know how much he is loved first. When he hears her say that, the Doctor marries her.
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Brags happily about her past lovers, relentlessly flirts with the Doctor, and rivals Jack Harkness when it comes to rampant innuendo. Moffat has joked that she was involved with her entire archaeology team.
  The Doctor: We've got ten minutes, get dressed.
  River: Oh, that's so close to the perfect sentence.
• Loving a Shadow: River actually has this going in both directions with the Doctor. From the very first moment of her life, the Doctor was a dashing fairy-tale hero who knew everything about her. As she remarks to Rory, that's the kind of thing that makes an impression on a girl, but combined with the fact that they encounter each other all in the wrong order, it means she never really knew him as anything beyond the larger-than-life hero he presents himself as. And for her part, she fully believes that he has no genuine love for her either. Whenever she gets a moment with another companion, she gives them very cynical advice regarding any relationship with the Doctor, things like "Never let him see the damage" and "Never ever let him see you age," implying that, at least in her mind, the Doctor's affection is fickle and highly conditional.
• Love Confession: To the Doctor in "The Wedding of River Song" and just before the wedding itself. And again in "The Husbands of River Song", though she's not aware at the time that she's actually speaking to the Doctor.
• Loves Secrecy: She often says "spoilers!" with unconcealed pleasure.
• Luke, You Are My Father: River is Melody Pond, the daughter of Amy Pond, Rory Williams and the TARDIS. River tells them this after her newborn self is kidnapped.

M-R

• The Masochism Tango: Her very first (from her perspective) words ever to the Doctor are to insult his bow tie. The second time she properly meets the Doctor, she tries to kill him with poison lipstick, then makes a Heroic Sacrifice to revive him. The third time she properly meets the Doctor, she refuses to kill him, then finally says she will, even though she will hurt more that the rest of the universe put together, as long as she can tell him how much he is loved; he angrily makes her marry him (long story) and they snark at each other as time itself explodes around them. From that point on, they date quite happily, but she gets on significantly less well with younger versions of him that she occasionally meets — because she can't spoil anything for fear of paradox. By the time she meets a version of him so young that all they can have is Belligerent Sexual Tension, their entire relationship revolves around snarking, bitching and flirting while he keeps on being frustrated at how secretive she is. The second to last time involved her meeting a version she didn't know existed (as it was the first face of a new regeneration cycle), while the last time she properly meets him, she punches him in the face, handcuffs him to a wall and makes a Heroic Sacrifice to save his life.
• Merlin Sickness: She and the Doctor meet out of order. A lot of it is Timey Wimey, but the big things are all back to front, with his first being her last.
• Mistaken for Murderer: She was locked up in Stormcage Prison for seeming to murder the Doctor.
• Mrs. Robinson:
  • The Doctor calls her this. She's not amused.
    The Doctor: ... the Legs, the Nose, and Mrs. Robinson.
    River: I hate you.
    The Doctor: No, you don't!
  • In her past (and his future), she gleefully calls him "Benjamin" in return.
  • "The Angels Take Manhattan" reveals that she's pretty bothered by the fact that he looks "twelve". (Though the context of the scene suggests this was meant more about how he acts than how he looks.)
• Mysterious Past: So much time travel nonsense is in her past that it takes well over a season to be uncovered.
• No Hugging, No Kissing: Totally averted with regards to the Eleventh Doctor. However, reflecting his less-affectionate demeanour, the rule is in place with the Twelfth Doctor except for a kiss on the cheek.
• Nom de Mom: Melody Williams is a geography teacher, Melody Pond is a superhero.
• The Nth Doctor: She's been played by Alex Kingston, Harrison and Madison Mortimer, Sydney Wade, Maya Glace-Green and Nina Toussaint-White. Technically, some of those actresses are differently-aged versions of the same incarnations: River gets three on-screen^note She goes from a little girl in 1960s America to a toddler in 1990s Leadworth, so there's room for other incarnations in between incarnations in total.
• Off Hand Backhand: She gives a powerful example of this trope, as she shoots a Silent behind her, when there's no way she could have known it even existed.
• Painted-On Pants: Lampshaded in "Let's Kill Hitler", when her younger self regenerates into the form that we first met her in. After going off to check out her new body's butt in a mirror, she proudly announces "I'm going to wear a lot of jodhpurs!"
• Plot-Relevant Age-Up: From the audience's perspective, as we get to see very little of her childhood despite having her infancy depicted on screen. Unusually, we get to see the aged-up version before the baby version.
• Power Dynamics Kink: She has a relationship of this kind with the Eleventh Doctor. She openly revels in her superiority to him in many aspects, including being better at piloting the TARDIS or knowing things from the future that he doesn't (when he asks her about those, she playfully answers: "Spoilers") - and he enjoys all of this. In two of the episodes, she handcuffs him to prevent him from ruining her plans, and when he asks about her reasons for doing so, she again replies "Spoilers". Also there was that time she tried to kill him...
• The Power of Love: She collapsed all of time itself to prevent herself from killing the Doctor.
• Psychopathic Womanchild: In "Let's Kill Hitler" she's essentially a hyperactive teenage girl in a 40-year-old body. One who sees nothing wrong with firing a lot of guns to get her way. As she grows older she has it under control, but still glumly refers to herself as a "psychopath" when she's already a Professor.
• Psycho Sidekick: She's often far more eager to use violence and weapons than the Doctor.
• Put on a Bus: River does not make an appearance in Series 8.
• Racial Transformation: Her second body, known as "Mels", is black, while her first and third bodies are white.
• Really 700 Years Old: In "The Husbands of River Song", she reveals that she is at least 200 years old, thanks to her "augmented lifespan". This is presumably due to her mixed human-Time Lord biology.
• Recurring Character: She was such a prominent and memorable character (count her tropes!) that it's easy to forget that she was never a regular companion on the show: just 2 episodes in Series 4, 4 episodes in Series 5, 6 episodes in Series 6, 2 episodes in Series 7, and the 2015 Christmas Special. Several of these episodes are 2-part stories, which both increased her prominence and means she's in fewer stories than an episode count would indicate.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Her prison breaks are built out of this
  • Also this line:
    River: So I was going to this gay gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled, when I thought to myself, "Gosh the Third Reich's a bit rubbish, I think I'll kill the Fuhrer." Who's with me?
• Remember the New Guy?:
  • Inverted in "Silence in the Library": she walks up to the Doctor and begins chatting with him as if they're old friends. The Doctor, however, has never met her before — turns out that, thanks to the Timey-Wimey Ball, he's meeting her out of sequence.
  • In "Let's Kill Hitler", Amy and Rory's never-before-mentioned best friend shows up for the first part. The Doctor is as confused as the audience, asking why he's never heard of her and where she was at their wedding. Then "Mels" is killed and turns out to be a prior regeneration of River Song/Melody Pond.
• The Reveal:
  • River Song is in fact Melody Pond, the daughter of Amy Pond, Rory Williams and the TARDIS. She's also been one of Amy and Rory's closest friends since they were kids, and becomes the Doctor's wife.
  • River is on the other side of this in "The Husbands of River Song" when she meets the Twelfth Doctor but doesn't realize who he is because he's not supposed to have any more regenerations.
    River: If I happen to find myself in danger, let me tell you, the Doctor is not stupid enough, or sentimental enough, and he's certainly not in love enough to find himself standing in it with me!
    The Doctor: (standing next to her) Hello, Sweetie.
• Right Behind Me: River falls victim to this trope several times, although often she's telling someone how awesome the Doctor is only to realise he's standing right behind her.
• Romantic Ribbing: River and The Doctor (11th) often teased one another, though River often had the upper hand.
  Amy: How come you can fly the TARDIS?
  River: Oh, I had lessons from the very best.
  The Doctor: (flattered) Well, yeah.
  River: It's a shame you were busy that day.
• Running Gag:
  • She has a habit of shooting whatever hat the Eleventh Doctor finds himself wearing.
  • And free-falling and being caught by the TARDIS.

S-Y

• Sassy Black Woman: As Mels, she mouthed off to both her friends and teachers. It got her into trouble.
• Screw Destiny: Refuses to kill the Doctor in the series 6 finale, and consequently makes time itself implode in an attempt to avoid that fixed point in time.
• Self-Proclaimed Liar: "I lie all the time. Have to. Spoilers."
• Sent Into Hiding: She was a secret from her parents, and the Doctor was instrumental in rescuing her from her kidnappers. Her real name is Melody Pond, the daughter of Rory and Amy Pond, his first companions after meeting her for the first time.
• Serial Spouse: She married the Doctor, but also other people like Hydroflax^note technically, she married the diamond in his head, Ramone, Stephen Fry and Cleopatra.
• Shipper on Deck: Ships Amy and Rory, her parents, and merrily played a part in them hooking up when they were all teenagers.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Literally said she was looking for "a good man" as her reason for studying archeology.
• Sociopathic Hero: It's played very darkly in the series six finale. She calls herself a "psychopath" quite happily when she's young, and significantly less happily when she's older.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • She's named after herself... twice. Amy named her "Melody" after her childhood friend, Mels... who turns out to be her daughter Melody. The second time, she adopts her Gamma Forest name translation, "River Song", but only because the Doctor, Amy, and Rory keep calling her that, because that's the name they always knew her by.
  • Mels is the one to get Amy to realize Rory has feelings for her, which eventually leads to her own conception.
  • Gets the idea of defacing landmarks to summon the Doctor from Amy and Rory, who in turn got it from her.
  • She and the Doctor give each other the "Spoilers!" catchphrase during their respective first proper meetings.
  • Really, her whole life is one tangled mess of causality loops. The Doctor often does things with her because he knows he will do them with her, based on his (early, from his perspective) meetings with her later selves. Most notably, he knows that their date at the Singing Towers of Darillium will be the last, and makes sure to give her the sonic screwdriver that will preserve her essence, simply because she herself told him about the former when he first met her future self long ago in the Library, and he himself used her essence saved in the screwdriver to save her.
• Stepford Smiler: Comes across as carefree and flirty partially to hide a depressed and lonely side. She tells Amy she tries hard not to let the Doctor see her damage.
• Suddenly Ethnicity: Played With in eleven directions. She is half human and half Time Lord. Except that she has no Time Lord parents — her parents are two humans and the TARDIS. Also, she spent most of her childhood in her second regeneration, which happened to be black.
• Superdickery: The Doctor eventually realizes she's the victim of his, since he found it fun to string her along but she took it as a sign her love was unrequited.
• Super-Strength: A very minor example, but in "Day of the Moon" River mentions that the little girl — her younger self, it turns out — would have to be incredibly strong to tear herself free from the space suit.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: To Captain Jack Harkness.
  • Both are reoccurring on-off companions who the Doctor has difficulty trusting.
  • Both are time travelers much like the Doctor and have used vortex manipulators.
  • Both are paradoxical in nature, much like the Doctor. Captain Jack is immortal and is a living fixed point-in-time, while River is a half-Time Lord whose entire life is a Stable Time Loop.
  • The names they are usually known by are both aliases.
  • Both are Anti Heroes in their early appearances, before reforming after spending time with the Doctor.
  • Both are Extreme Omnisexual and have dated members of various species and genders.
• Tangled Family Tree: From late series 4 onwards. Amy and Rory are together and have a daughter, Melody, who was named after their childhood best friend, Melody. Amy, however, fancies the Doctor and forces him into a kiss early on. Melody turns out to be River Song, who eventually marries the Doctor, and is also Amy's and Rory's best friend Melody, accidentally named after herself. On top of that, Melody's second mother is the TARDIS, who considers herself married to the Doctor and has a rather romantic (as well as biologically symbiotic) relationship with him. Things get more complicated when Amy accidentally marries Henry VIII in a throwaway gag — because the Doctor, rather briefly, married Queen Elizabeth I, who happens to be Henry VIII's daughter, making her simultaneously his biological mother-in-law and his step-mother-in-law. And in the middle of all that, the Doctor starts fancying Rory a bit and snogs him for no reason.
• This Is My Name on Foreign: Played for a reveal in "A Good Man Goes to War", when it turns out that River Song's name comes from a close approximation in the language of the Gamma Forest People: "Melody" becomes "Song", and they don't quite have a word that means "Pond" because "The only water in the forest is the river..."
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Suffers from a ton of Grandfather Paradoxes. Born in the 52nd century at Demon's Run, gets named Melody Pond after Amy and Rory's best friend "Mels", grows to a young girl in 1960s Florida, then regenerates there, somehow ending up a toddler in 1990s England who then grows up as Amy and Rory's best friend "Mels". Then meets the Doctor in 2012, proceeds to nearly kill him in 1945, and takes the name "River Song" after learning about her future self. Then, after faking the Doctor's death in 2011, ends up dying saving an incarnation of the Doctor who still hasn't met her in the 52nd century to make sure she exists in the first place.
• Token Evil Teammate: She calls herself a psychopath (even though she's really not — psychopaths lack empathy, which River has loads of). She is still by far one of the most violent allies of the Doctor.
  Dalek: You will be exterminated.
  River: Not yet. Your systems are still restoring, which means your shield density is compromised. One alpha-meson burst through your eye-stalk would kill you stone dead.
  Dalek: Records indicate you will show mercy. You are an associate of the Doctor's.
  River: I'm River Song. Check your records again.
  [beat]
  Dalek: Mercy?
  River: Say it again?
  Dalek: Mercy!!
  River: One. More. Time.
  Dalek: Mercyyyyy!!!
  [a few minutes later]
  Amy: What happened to the Dalek?
  River: It died.
• Touched by Vorlons: As a result of being conceived in and by the TARDIS, she is part-Time Lord. The Doctor tries to argue that evolution does not work that way. The TARDIS pointedly disagrees.
• Trickster Girlfriend: For the Doctor; loves to tease him and keep secrets from him.
• Twin Threesome Fantasy: In "A Good Man Goes to War", River implies that she once spent a very enjoyable birthday with two Doctors at once.
  • Also invoked in "Night and the Doctor", when she encounters two versions of Eleven.
    River: Two of you! The mind races, does it not?
• Tyke Bomb: Raised by the Silence to kill the Doctor for the first few years of her life.
• The Vamp: She was raised to be this trope — she killed the Doctor with a kiss. Thankfully, she gets better.
• Unrequited Love: Played with. Despite being his wife, River knows (or believes) that the Doctor will never love her. She doesn't care.
  River: When you love the Doctor, it's like loving the stars themselves. You don't expect a sunset to admire you back.
• Virtual Ghost: Her final fate is to be uploaded to the Library's main computer in order to save her life.
• Walking Spoiler: In-universe and out, to an insane degree. It's even her catchphrase.
• What the Hell, Hero?: After the Doctor saved her Virtual Ghost in the Library, he never visited her again, since it would hurt him too much to face her. She seeks him out and calls him out on it, very, very hard.
• Whole-Plot Reference: To one of Steven Moffat's favorite novels, The Time Traveler's Wife. The similarities would take quite a while to count. She even meets the Doctor in a library, exactly like the novel's titular characters. (The Twelfth Doctor owns the book, keeps his copy in the console room, and stores a spare TARDIS key between the pages.)
• Wife Husbandry: "The Impossible Astronaut" revealed that the first time River met the Doctor he knew everything about her, and was charming and wonderful. It turns out he met her as an infant but had no part in raising her.
• You Can't Fight Fate:
  • River's assassination of the Doctor-inside-the-Teselecta is a fixed point in time. When she attempts to avert it, the universe is plunged into a massive Anachronism Stew that threatens to tear time itself apart, leading the Doctor himself to unleash a What the Hell, Hero? on her.
  • Invoked by the Doctor in "The Husbands of River Song" in response to River begging him to do something to avert the fact that their night at the Singing Towers of Darillium will be their last ever date.

Tropes associated with Big Finish

Big Finish

Voiced by: Alex Kingston

Away from her husband and parents, River tends to go on adventures of her own, encountering friends and foes old and new. Sometimes she also decides to pay the Doctor a visit, only to find that they're younger than she remembers.

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• Arch-Enemy: While it may be a stretch to refer to them as such, River ended up encountering several incarnations of the Master, setting them up as perhaps her most frequent foe. On a more personal level, she ends up dealing with Madame Kovarian again.
• Batman Gambit: In “Companion Piece”, River is captured by the Nine and forced to give him information on the Doctor’s companions so that the Nine can bring them together in a ‘collection’. She eventually manipulates the Nine’s ego by sending him after Katarina (a particularly ‘rare specimen’ from his perspective) at a point when River’s own past self is collecting Katarina’s body, knowing that her past self will keep the Nine occupied long enough for the companions River’s already assembled together to break out and rescue themselves.
• Berserk Button:
  • Though River describes herself as a psychopath, she takes it upon herself to help innocent people when they get caught up in nasty occurences they don't deserve (chalk that up to the Doctor). This puts her at odds with the Rulers immediately. She then shows just how much of a psychopath she can be.
  • Reading her diary is another, as is impersonating the Doctor with it. Even when keeping the man who did the reading and impersonating alive would be optimal, she shoots him dead after freeing herself out of spite.
  • Involving the Doctor, particularly against her, is yet another. She is particularly unhappy when she finds out the incarnation of the Doctor who receives the Rulers' party invitation is the Eighth Doctor. She views Eight as naïve, and finding out this version from him is from the early days of the Time War makes her all the more incensed.
• The Bus Came Back: After her final appearances in "The Name of the Doctor" and The Husbands of River Song".
• Call-Forward: River has her sonic trowel in "The Diary of River Song", before it was established on-screen in "The Husbands of River Song".
• Calling the Old Man Out: When River is reunited with Madam Kovarian, she wastes no time in criticising everything Kovarian did while ‘raising’ her, to say nothing of Kovarian’s fixation with killing the Doctor having reached a point where Kovarian tries to kill the Fifth Doctor.
• Clones Are People, Too: River is given at least the opportunity of such a situation in “The Lady in the Lake” when she finds a group of ‘proto-Time Lords’ created from her DNA who possess at least some of her potential abilities, including a limited ability to regenerate. While at least one of these clones independently became a psychopath, River considered the proto-Time Lords as a whole to be her family, and is able to help the rest turn against Madam Kovarian.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Though River plays hard and fast with time travel, she doesn't approve of the Rulers of the Universe's plans to live up to their name at all and sabotages their schemes twice over. The second time includes quite a lot more explosions than the first time, and quite a few more people dying. She does sound an alert so that the people partying can get to life-rafts, and she doesn't stop anyone from escaping, but if they're too busy partying or trying to manipulate planets to evacuate she sees that as their problem. Of course, she doesn't take kindly to those who escape by trampling others to do so...
  • She also has respect towards the Doctor's timeline in that there are certain Doctors she cannot "play with", one in particular being the Eighth. That doesn't stop her from helping him in any way she can while he's stuck in a death trap she inadvertently brings upon him.
• Have We Met Yet?:
  • Par for the course for River. However, unusually for her, she takes great pains to ensure that she and the Eighth Doctor do not meet, knowing this incarnation hasn't and thus cannot meet her. ^note  According to the Bonus Features on the final disc, potentially the River from this era of her complicated life could go back and tangentially encounter any of the Doctor's classic era incarnations... and implies that not only might this happen, but that River will have to get increasingly creative in avoiding continuity issues.
  • She later encountered the Sixth and Seventh Doctors, who then forget her after an adventure in a collapsing time anomaly wipes River's and Seven's memories and elects to use her amnesia lipstick on the Sixth after he accidentally commits an immoral act and gets concerned he might get too affected by it.
  • By the time of "Lies in Ruins", River observes that she’s stopped worrying about explicitly wiping the Doctor’s memory when she meets his past selves, as things just seem to work out on their own with the Doctors remembering their meetings with her or not as ‘appropriate’.
• Loophole Abuse: Think that setting your base in a field that prevents time travel will save you? Not when the depot that supplies you isn't covered by a similar field. River exploits it for all it is worth, and then some.
• Slap-Slap-Kiss: As always, she's both infuriated and aroused by the Doctor - see, for example, her tea with his Seventh incarnation, where he effortlessly figures out that she tried to slip him memory agents. She seems torn between a mix of annoyance that it isn't working, and a desire to vault over the table and snog him senseless.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: River is very adept with her vortex manipulator. After the twelfth time she re-arrived at the party, each time dressed up as a service robot and planting anti-matter bombs about, and departed on one of the escaping life-rafts, she simply stopped counting. She simply sums it up the times she went back with "enough".
• Tranquil Fury: River can pleasantly discuss how she managed to completely destroy a massive space station with temporal manipulation equipment, complete with a disguise she took over a dozen times at the same time and yet make it exactly clear just how enraged she was to do it.
• Troll: She realizes that Missy is the Master as soon as they meet in "The Bekdel Test", but pretends at first to think she's the Rani, Romana and then the Meddling Monk just to get on Missy's nerves.
• Unexpected Character: She's the first companion from the new series to return to Big Finish and interact with a younger Doctor.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In "My Dinner with Andrew", River attempts to save the Fifth Doctor from an assassin by luring him to the same location as Andrew Edmondson, a man who is the Fifth Doctor's identical double. However, when River is called out on the idea of letting an innocent man die to save someone else, she tries to save Andrew, although an older Andrew eventually goes to his death willingly after living a full life.
• Woman Scorned: The Rulers of the Universe made a very keen mistake when they tried to recruit River Song, unintentionally and continuously hitting every one of her buttons. Handing her over to a man who impersonates a future incarnation of the Doctor, clones her and kills off said clones after they realize who he is, with her being aware of everything said clones went through, is what really sends her over the edge though. Bertie Potts is horrified when he sees the destruction River brings upon them, alone and in less than an hour, and even more so when he learns how. In short? Do not piss off River Song.

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"Goodbye, sweetie."