Tried to come up with something snarky for Valentine's Day but I'm really more apathetic about the whole thing so instead figured I'd write about one of my favorite "couples" who cropped up in pop culture in the past year: The Doctor and River Song from Doctor Who. Disclaimer first: This story is one that's still being told, and it could go in a way discounting everything we know at this point, especially with Moffat in charge. Also, if you're still catching on the new Who, there will be some spoilers in here.
Time travel as a narrative tool can be a very refreshing, high-concept wrench to throw into a love story's gears, albeit typically a tragic one. From Time After Time and The Lake House to the perennial The Jetsons Meet The Flintsones to even other examples in Doctor Who such as the also-Stephen-Moffat-scripted The Girl In The Fireplace. The story of the Doctor and Professor River Song is something different though.
The Doctor (currently Matt Smith, as well as a host of other actors) is a time-traveller, who since his show started in the 60s has been zipping to all ends and all whens of the universe. He is traditionally flighty, frenetic and rarely in one place to keep more than a small, ever-changing stable of companions on his adventures, and certainly never able to maintain a traditional relationship, if he is ever in in the mindset to want to. Introduced during David Tennant's run as The Doctor in the episodes The Silent Library and The Forest Of The Dead, Professor River Song (played by Alex Kingston) was brash, forward and intelligent enough to keep up with the Doctor; another time-traveler, an archeologist (a time-travelling archeologist alone is a concept worth exploring), and adventurer traipsing some common ground between Indiana Jones and the Doctor himself. She makes it known that she is intimately familiar with and seemed to be romantically linked to the Doctor, and has for some time; they've been through all manner of adventures, she has her own sonic screwdriver and knows things she could otherwise not know short of hearing them from the Doctor himself. Contrawise, this was the Doctor's first time meeting her as we know it, and thanks to her and presumably his own aversion to "spoilers" she never reveals any details about the twisted möbius strip that is her-past-his-future, although it's killing her to be with the man she clearly loves and know he has no knowledge of the life she's been through with him. This is all relatively unique in Doctor Who as, for a show which bounces around from past to present to future and every variable therein the time-stream, as the Doctor himself is fond to say, is "fixed" and we rarely run into timelines such as River's who flow conversely to the one we're following, raising questions about the fixed nature of time overall versus one's own personal timelines.
Initially and understandably wary of accepting this at face value, River earns the Doctor's trust by revealing she knows his real name which in near-fifty years of serials has yet to be declared, and it's left hinted that the Doctor would only let it be known when his own life was coming to an end. In the end of Forest, River sacrifices herself to bring back the population of a dead planet rather than the let Doctor die, to protect her past so that it would still exist in her future.
Undeniably a powerful moment, but at this point, I wasn't feeling the character as much as I would later on; maybe in part because I just generally didn't like the Russell T.Davies/Tennant run as much as other people did but I think heavily because this was a character who was just dumped in the middle of a story and we are expected to care about her while her character development runs backwards. I don't think there is any other more optimal way to do it, and it turns out it does work in the long run but at the time it just fell kind of flat for me, and back then we wouldn't see the character return for almost two years.
In that two-year interim, a lot would happen with Davies' Doctor that has no bearing on this story, and as part of Tennant stepping from the title role to make way for Smith's tenure, RTD would step down as showrunner and pass the reigns to River's fictive father Stephen Moffat. Suddenly, I found myself enjoying the show as a whole for the first time since Eccleston left. To clarify, just so stem off any backlash I might get from this, I think Davies did a fine job with what he was did, I just felt the direction he took the show in the twilight of his run was abhorrant, and to a similar point Tennant was marvelous in the role and did excellent with what he was presented with, which I simply didn't care for all that much. Moffat, on the other hand, reinvigorated the series with a combination of the modern pathos I feel Davies had steered too hard into, and the kind of lighthearted zaniness of the original series that had been somewhat lacking since the show's resurrection. The show, in short, was fun again. And it's in this atmosphere we get our return of River Song.
In an episode that also sees the return of fan-favorite (also Moffat-created) villains the Weeping Angels, we have a new Doctor and a new companion but the same self-sure River we met last time, short of the knowledge of her previous-upcoming venture to the library planet, which alternatively lays very heavy on the Doctor's mind. The episode opens with River Song in the middle of a heist that brings her back into contact with the Doctor despite a gulf of 12,000 years between them. When they meet up, the reunion instantly devolves into an argument about driving resembling a bickering married couple. There's a spaceship crash, a loosened creature, and a well-armed squad of clergymen. In course River reveals she's not yet a professor, so one can assume the gentlewoman-thief act is how she got by earlier on in some kind of semi-reversed Catwoman/Batman dynamic. Since this doesn't end with the Doctor giving the sonic screwdriver to River or passing on his real name, while this is the second time the Doctor's met her we can assume this isn't the second-to-last time for River. She does seem to know the Pandorica isn't far off, though. Here, we're seeing the Doctor far more trusting and concerned with River after their encounter in the library, and alternatively River isn't quite as trusting of the Doctor herself, as its hinted there are things about who she is that he doesn't know yet. At this point, it's possible we're seeing part of the courting phase of their relationships on both parts, both know each other but neither one terribly deep into the relationship, albeit one further than the other. Despite being in the middle of a siege between military might and quantum monsters, we see the relationship between these two burgeoning and the seeds being set for the relationship. With the already-odd father/daughter relationship between the Doctor and Amy Pond, we're looking at one of the most chronologically-dysfunctional family units ever. Especially when, at the end, River drops the hinted bombshell of her being the one who finally killed the Doctor.
The next time we see River, ramping up to the season finale, is her breaking out of jail and gathering necessary information and components to deliver the Doctor a warning in the form of a Van Gogh painting (and in the guise of Cleopatra). An adventure that requires raiding every available outfit in BBC's costume storage ensues, and River with a moderately small part in the greater plan this time around. It's clearly earlier in her personal timestream, as she's yet to believe the Doctor can't do the impossible yet. We do, however, get to see her scare a Dalek, which I don't believe anyone besides the Doctor has done up to this point. Come the end of the adventure, the universe and the episode she's still playing with him and teasing information for his past, promising we'll learn who she is "very soon" and that's when "everything changes".
As I said early on, we don't know what the truth is here. Despite all indications, she could be an assassin, the Master's wife or relation seeking revenge, a form of the Doctor herself. Alternatively, she could really be his wife, potentially even Susan's mPublish Postother. In the realm of Doctor Who, really any eventually could crop up. In the meantime, however, we have what we have and taken at face value we have a fun, eventually-initially tragic relationship with a character we rarely see in this situation and one we know almost nothing about, without any way of knowing where's it's going or where it's been.
Although in the end, she may not be a great match for him, considering her opinion on fezzes.
"That's a fairy tale."
"Doctor, aren't we all?"
Second disclaimer: I haven't seen The Time Traveler's Wife yet but I've gathered in writing this it may be somewhat similar conceptually. I'll get around seeing about this eventually.
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