A River Runs Through It

As promised to the attendees of Chicago TARDIS 2011, here is the expanded version of the (Steven Moffat-approved) River Song timeline that I compiled for DWM 439 and have since updated to incorporate 2012 episode The Angels Take Manhattan…

Have we gotten to the point yet where we can figure out River Song’s beginning, middle and end? Or is everything between the events of Let’s Kill Hitler and Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead still one big bowl of lumpy mush? Here is a definitive timeline for the time-travelling archaeologist…

1) A Good Man Goes to War
On the asteroid Demons Run in the 52nd century, Melody Pond is born to Amy Pond and Rory Williams. She is named after Mels, her parents’ best friend from childhood. However, Amy has been kidnapped by the mysterious Madame Kovarian, who takes baby Melody from her mother to raise as a weapon to kill the Doctor.

2) The Impossible Astronaut
Now a little girl, and encased in an Apollo 11 spacesuit that has been upgraded – by a religious order called the Silence – with alien life-support systems, Melody ends up in the Silents’ warehouse base in Florida, 1969, from where she makes phone calls to President Nixon in the Oval Office, begging for his help. It’s in this warehouse that Melody first encounters the Doctor (at their Demons Run meeting, baby Melody was a Ganger duplicate), albeit briefly, as Amy unwittingly tries to shoot her daughter in the face. But misses.

3) Day of the Moon
Later in 1969, Melody encounters her mother again, in an abandoned children’s home (where, bafflingly, framed photographs of Amy with baby Melody are left). When Silents arrive, Melody escapes the spacesuit and flees. Six months later, in a 1970 New York City backstreet, a dying Melody regenerates into a toddler. This is River’s ‘Mels’ incarnation.

4) Let’s Kill Hitler
Now a young child again (at least in appearance), Mels is living in the English village of Leadworth, in the mid 1990s, where she befriends her parents as children, even playing matchmaker between them. Meanwhile, Mels dreams of marrying – and killing, presumably – Amy’s childhood hero, the ‘raggedy Doctor’. In 2011, a grown-up Mels tracks down the Doctor to a Leadworth cornfield, and forces her way into his TARDIS, escaping to 1938 Berlin, where she is accidentally shot by Adolf Hitler, and regenerates into the woman we more readily recognise as River Song. Acting on her conditioning as a infant, she tries to assassinate the Doctor… but ultimately sacrifices her powers of regeneration to keep him alive. The Doctor takes Melody/River to “the greatest hospital in the universe”, in the 52nd century, and gives her a TARDIS-shaped diary. In 5123, she applies to study archaeology at Luna University.

5) Closing Time
On the day River receives her doctorate, Madame Kovarian and her Silent henchmen turn up at Luna University, seize River, drug her, and force her back into the modified Apollo 11 spacesuit. They take her to Utah in April 2011, and submerge her in Lake Silencio to await the Doctor…

6a) The Wedding of River Song
Emerging from Lake Silencio in her Apollo 11 spacesuit, River shoots the Doctor dead. Except, it isn’t really him; it’s a Teselecta duplicate, inside of which is the real, miniaturised Doctor, who escapes, barely singed. River is imprisoned (for the Doctor’s murder) in Stormcage Containment Facility in the 52nd century, serving her sentence to make the Silence think that the Doctor is dead.

6b)  The Wedding of River Song
ALTERNATIVE TIMELINE:
Emerging from Lake Silencio to kill ‘the Doctor’ (not realising that he’s a Teselecta duplicate), River regains control of herself, and drains the Apollo 11 spacesuit’s weapons system, sparing the Doctor’s life. However, by defying this ‘fixed point’ in time, River causes time to shred into a reality where everything happens in a single moment – 22 April 2011 at 5:02pm. In this new, crumbling timeline, River belongs to a band of freedom fighters – led by Amy Pond, who also remembers both timelines – that seeks to fix time, yet save the Doctor. River builds a distress beacon to beg the universe to help the Doctor (but really just to show him how much he is loved). She weds ‘the Doctor’, who reveals to her that he is a Teselecta with the real Doctor inside. River and the Teselecta kiss, reverting the universe to its original timeline (cf. 6a).

7) A Good Man Goes to War (again)
River breaks out of Stormcage regularly, to join the Doctor on adventures. (These include their venture to Easter Island, and an encounter with Jim the Fish.) When Rory visits her at Stormcage in the 52nd century, she has just returned from the last Winter Frost Fair in London in 1814, where the Doctor took her for her birthday. Shortly afterwards, she travels to meet the Doctor, Amy and Rory at the end of the battle of Demon’s Run, where she reveals that she is Amy and Rory’s daughter.

8) The Impossible Astronaut/The Day of the Moon (again)
River escapes Stormcage again, this time to meet her parents and the Eleventh Doctor in Utah, April 2011, for a picnic at Lake Silencio, upon invitation from the Doctor, who is then killed (but not really) by the astronaut (a younger River). The body of ‘the Doctor’ is cremated (River has to pretend that she doesn’t know that it is, in fact, a Teselecta duplicate), but then the actual, younger version of the Eleventh Doctor turns up. River travels with him to America in 1969, to help him defeat the Silence, nearly encountering her past, child self in the process. Afterwards, the Doctor returns River to Stormcage, where they share their – from his perspective – first kiss.

9) The Pandorica Opens
With a little help from the TARDIS, British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill phones River in 5145, to warn her of a prophecy that the TARDIS will explode. She escapes Stormcage again, blackmails a vortex manipulator off blue-skinned black marketeer Dorium Maldovar, and travels to Earth’s Roman era, where she catches up with the Doctor and Amy. They ride to Stonehenge, where they discover the Pandorica (a prison box intended for the Doctor) and a signal summoning an alliance of monsters. The Doctor sends River to fetch his TARDIS. But the TARDIS returns River to her mother’s house in Leadworth, in June 2010, and then traps River in a time loop inside the TARDIS in the first moments of its explosion…

10) The Big Bang
The Doctor uses River’s vortex manipulator to rescue her from the time loop. He brings her to Britain’s National Museum in 1996, where she meets up with her parents and the Doctor, forces a stone Dalek to beg for mercy (then kills it), and watches the Doctor pilot the Pandorica into the exploding TARDIS, resetting the universe and erasing himself from history. On her parents’ wedding day, in 2010, River delivers a gift for her mother: her (now blank) TARDIS-shaped diary, which prompts Amy to remember the Doctor back into existence.

11) The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone
Back in Stormcage, this time in the 51st century (and why not?), River is recruited by the Church (the faith-based military organisation that helped kidnap Melody Pond as a baby) for a covert mission, to earn her pardon: infiltrate the Byzantium starliner, which is carrying a Weeping Angel in its vault. Before the Byzantium crashes onto Alfava Metraxis, the Doctor rescues River – and he, she and Amy assist the Clerics in capturing the Angel from the crashed starliner, and defeating an army of Angels in Alfava Metraxis’ Maze of the Dead.

12) The Wedding of River Song (again)
River visits Amy and Rory in 2011 (in their timeline, after the events of The Wedding of River Song), and reveals that the Doctor (who they now think was killed at Lake Silencio) is, in fact, alive and well.

13) The Angels Take Manhattan
River, now released from Stormcage and a graduated professor of archaeology, arrives in 1938 New York City via her vortex manipulator, where she investigates – with the Doctor, Amy and Rory – the Weeping Angels’ invasion of Manhattan. She watches as her parents sacrifice themselves to destroy the Angels… except one Angel somehow manages to survive. In 2012, the surviving Angel transports the resurrected Amy and Rory back in time permanently, to be forever estranged from the Doctor. River declines the devastated Doctor’s offer of travelling with him in the TARDIS full time. Under the name ‘Melody Malone’, she writes a detective novel, and arranges for Amy to leave the Doctor a note in the form of its afterword. Some time after this, River receives a surprise visit from the Doctor, who takes her to Darillium to see the Singing Towers. According to River, he wept as he said goodbye to her. He gives her an upgraded version of his sonic screwdriver.

14) Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead
River is hired to lead an exhibition to the planet-sized Library, which has lain empty for a century, since the carnivorous Vashta Nerada invaded. She summons the Doctor via the psychic paper, but his earlier, tenth incarnation turns up instead. River ‘dies’ in The Library, sacrificing herself in place of the Doctor to save Donna Noble and the 4,022 people trapped in the Library computer… but the Doctor sort of saves River by uploading her into a virtual reality contained within The Library’s data core, where she can live out her days with her archaeology mates and two virtual children.

The end.