I kind of get the reservations about River because:
- Things did get very complicated didn’t they: conceived in the TARDIS and having reincarnations; kidnapped and raised to kill the Doctor and then giving up her reincarnations; jailed for killing the Doctor and then marrying the Tesselactor robot which represents the Doctor, who agrees to marry her so that she doesn’t destroy the universe for him, but are they really married. And so on. You really had to pay attention that season, only good for the faithful, and not even good for many of them.
- You don’t marry your best friend’s much younger daughter, ewww, even if she is as worldly as you.
- As prudey as it sounds, I can never get used to the Doctor having love affairs: I watch romance for romance and Sci-Fi for Sci-Fi. So romancing or flirting with anyone, including River, is just weird to me. But that dislike isn’t just reserved for River. Let’s also chuck in Rose, Martha, Jack, Amy, Clara, plus a heap of more minor characters. At least with River she was the Doctor’s equal, the others are just kids in comparison, with the exception of Jack.
- She loves him more than he loves her. So there we go, creeping back to the traditional Doctor/companion relationship, their presence defined by a man, which isn’t River.
BUT I don't care about any of it because I LOVE RIVER. I have loved her since the Library, I love the gravitas of their backward timelines from beginning to end (and end to beginning), I love that she's a badass, and I love that someone actually has it over him. The concept is brilliant, and maybe the execution was a little clumsy at times, maybe, but I don’t care, I love her.
She is generally strong, clever, independent, classy and funny. She’s vampy, campy, and sometimes a little trampy. She had a maturity that the usual girl-wonder companions don’t have. She created a wondrous life for herself, not because the doctor abandoned her, but because that’s how she wanted it: she calls him, he comes running, and the amazingness in her life doesn’t revolve around him like, well, almost every other companion since 1962. What am I saying? He’s her companion, she’s not his. They’re like George and Amal Clooney: it’s tempting to say he married himself a trophy wife, but really, she got herself a trophy husband.
I thought the visual age difference between her and Matt would be weird, but they both made it work, and I actually think it helped Matt to expand the depth of his performance as a very old man with a very young face. I don’t think she was miscast, I think she needed to be exactly who she was to pull off the biggest companion challenge of them all, as a true equal (ok, the Romanas did this too, but they were still in the screaming companion era so they didn’t do it as well as River). There was none of the companion power imbalance that usually makes me feel, just occasionally, creeped out. I thought the parent/child relationship between River and Amy/Rory would be weird too, but it was just fun: everything looked wrong which made it so right for a time travel show. Maybe someone could have played the role better, but River had to be so many things, it's a hard role to pull off, and I think she did amazing.
Gotta say though, River divides fans everywhere. So glad we are the same here.
