Doctor Who: A Few Notes on Season Arcs and River Song

During Eleven’s time on Who, the season arcs tend to get bigger every year.  Not that the Eleven era is unique in this; Twelve just had a pretty insane season-ender, and Ten’s years have their share of ramping up (companion-a-palooza, anyone?)  Still, Eleven’s big finales often feel the biggest to me, and as I’ve watched them, I’ve noticed a certain thread weaving through them in a very particular way, and that thread is River Song (spoilers for the finales of series 5, 6, and 7.)

To start things off, what are our end-of-season perils?  In series 5, the universe literally blows up – I wouldn’t have thought that could be topped in terms of high stakes, but it turns out Moffat was just getting warmed up.  Series 6 sees a massive paradox that causes time to collapse in on itself, with all of history happening at once until time as we know it simply disintegrates.  Compared to these two, the main catastrophe at the end of series 7 – all of the Doctor’s victories being rewritten into defeats, with the accompanying loss of life – is only moderately apocalyptic, with the Impossible Girl business as the episode’s more distinguishing factor.

So, that’s what we have to work with.  In each case, the big event is prefaced by portents, fixed points, or prophecies, and in two of them, the Doctor is targeted specifically because his enemies are aware of these impending disasters and try to avert them by capturing or killing him.  The Silence are really into this, making two attempts on the Doctor’s life to stop him from answering the “first question” at Trenzalore (technically speaking, I’d guess the prophecy probably refers to the incidents of “The Time of the Doctor,” but the circumstances fit “The Name of the Doctor” just as well for.)  However, both of these attempts cause disasters of their own that are arguably much worse than the one they’re trying to prevent.  Blowing up the TARDIS in an attempt to kill the Doctor makes the universe explode from the resulting cracks in time and space, and in sending an assassin after him, the paradox that breaks times is created.  No wonder the Silence give up trying after “The Wedding of River Song” – they’re menaces to the universe.

The thing is, in both these instances and the one in “The Name of the Doctor,” the Doctor isn’t actually the lynchpin of the situation; River is.  The Silence blow up the TARDIS in flight, assuming only the Doctor can pilot it (the Doctor’s conglomeration o’ nemeses assume the same and imprison him in the Pandorica to prevent said explosion,) but River is the one behind the console that day.  The Doctor finds his own, sneaky way to get around the fixed-point situation at Lake Silencio, but River, the Silence’s unwilling assassin, throws a wrench in the plan by refusing to go through with killing the Doctor – only on this show would that be a bad thing – creating two separate versions of the event and fracturing time in the process.  And the Great Intelligence gains entrance to the Doctor’s tomb, thus giving him the chance he needs to enter the Doctor’s timestream and rewrite his history, when River, not the Doctor, speaks the password:  his real name.  In that last one, River herself isn’t even there – it’s a projection of a copy of River on a data drive.  And yet, she’s still the reason everything goes to pot.

Why is this?  Why is River at the heart of all three separate occasions?  There’s something about it that makes me uncomfortable.  I don’t know – just this notion, like the show is subtly implying the Doctor wouldn’t have these problems if River would just get of the way and let him work.  And for a woman who’s held up as the nearest thing the Doctor might have to an equal, someone who frequently calls the shots, in fact, in their relationship, that doesn’t sit right with me.