A passing thought

[tigerfort]

If I were (a) Steven Moffat and (b) feeling exceptionally cruel I would have the Doctor give River a parting kiss after their next adventure together. And have her as flatfooted by it that time as he was at the end of "Day of the Moon". Which would be very sneaky (though also cruel, especially to River as a character), setting her up for the heart-break we saw this time round without them ever having had a romantic relationship - she wasn't mourning its end, she was regretting that it will never happen....

Of course, I'm not Moffat, and he isn't always that evil to his characters. But it isn't unheard of.

Comments

[footnotetoplato.livejournal.com]

... although cruel, that's also a lovely narrative. Thanks for sharing.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

Pretty much my reading of that scene - River hopes that she has a romantic future with the Doctor, but he has no memory of it. The Doctor's Wife in two weeks time will be someone else.

[tigerfort.livejournal.com]

I've been avoiding spoilers, but had been assuming that "The Doctor's Wife" was at best figurative, and potentially deliberately misleading. Given that Neil G is one of the few people I would trust to do it, I'm hoping for a speculative episode about the real nature of the Tardis :)

[thalassius.livejournal.com]

While my experience of this is and will remain limited to the two-parter and the explanation of who she was, if she does indeed have Merlin syndrome (she lives backwards through time), *she already knows what's happened*. For her, there's no hoping about it - it's happened, now it's over. It's all in her past and his future, just as at some point later on it'll all be in his past and her future. She doesn't have a romantic future with the Doctor from her perspective, but she does from his.

Of course, this does assume that she's living backwards through time like T S White's Merlin (or Rachel Weintraub in Hyperion).

[naath.livejournal.com]

She's not living backwards in that way.