✩River Song and the Doctor

If you recall my last post, I mentioned a Tiktok that gave me inspiration as to what I think the story of my film will be. In the video, the speaker talks about the Dream SMP, but also mentions “River Song and the Doctor.” Now, I had no idea what this phrase meant, so I decided to do some research, which is what I will be sharing in today’s post.


At first, the phrase sounded like a song, so I looked it up on Spotify. After an unsuccessful search, I turned to Google, which gave me some helpful results. Turns out, the phrase comes from the popular franchise Doctor Who. I never watched the show but I know a little bit about it, so I decided to pursue research. What I found, among loads of confusing terms and lore I did not understand due to never watching the show, was that the sci-fi show about time travel really likes to push the limits of this superpower.


The show used time travel in such a unique manner, unlike other pieces of time travel media. Contrary to stories where a character simply goes back in time and then returns to the present (as seen in Back to the Future), Doctor Who utilizes time travel to its fullest capacity. In this article from Screenrant, the article finds a way to simply describe the two characters, River Song and the Doctors time shenanigans with one another and throughout the course of the story. The main takeaway from the article is that River Song has abilities of which time travel is one of them, so as a young child she is trained to kill an adult Doctor, and when this plan fails she finds her parents as children and grows up with them (unless I understood the article wrong, which is entirely possible). There are a few other explanations of how convoluted River Song’s relation to the story is, but all of them are weird like the example I provided. Needless to say, using time travel in this manner is super neat, but super confusing for viewers, no matter how much of the show they watch. Take a look at this chart a viewer of the Doctor Who franchise made to show both the Doctor’s linear timeline that the story follows and how it relates to River Songs' wild timeline.

(On top of not understanding half of the terms due to not watching the show, this diagram is almost painful to look at because it is so confusing. There are plenty of other charts similar to this that you can see here, yet none of them are easily understandable to someone like me.)




I do believe it would be really cool to do something like this since many fans could theorize and chat with one another about how the time travel in my film functions; however, my target audience is teens and young adults, and many people in this demographic (even outside the target audience), might not have the energy or willpower to watch a film with a timeline system as strange as the one demonstrated in Doctor Who. Though the system works very well for Doctor Who, this can be chalked up to the show’s long runtime which gathered a massive fanbase, along with its preestablished “wibbly wobbly time wimey stuff.” For a film without a plan for a sequel, a budget of $0, and no fanbase yet, I don’t believe that making my film have a timeline like River Song and The Doctor would be the best choice of action. For now, I will stick to my idea of characters who live on reversed timelines.

Until next time :)!!