River has a very attractive hourglass figure in her current (and supposedly final) form, much to her delight upon regenerating. She has a mess of curly, strawberry blonde hair, and hazel-green eyes like her mother. She has been described as looking intimidating or fierce, though a smile will quickly soften her looks, should she deign to grace you with one.

River seems to have picked up a lot of her personality traits while growing up with Amy and Rory as ‘Mels’. She’s cheeky and feisty like her mother, and responsible and devoted to her loved ones like her father. She has a taste for excitement and adventure, and she’s broken several laws - the worst of which was murder, which earned her a cell in Stormcage Prison. River remains in Stormcage willingly, as a sort of penance for her crime, though she has the ability to come and go as she pleases (which annoys the guards). She also has an intimate knowledge of the TARDIS, as the TARDIS herself taught River how to pilot her.

Conceived on the TARDIS while it was in-flight, she was later born on the asteroid-base called Demons Run, while her mother was held prisoner there by Madame Kovarian. Kovarian, working with The Silence, kidnapped baby Melody and took her far away to an unknown time and place where she was raised and presumably brainwashed to kill The Doctor.

Kovarian's scientists found that Melody had traces of Time Lord DNA mixed in with her human DNA, and they experimented on Melody to bring these traits to the fore. It has not yet been revealed as to how many regenerations Melody has gone through previously, though there have been at least two occasions: Melody was a fair haired little girl who escaped from The Silence in New York City in December of 1969. Sometime thereafter, she regenerated into a light cocoa skinned girl who called herself Mels and positioned herself so that she would get to “grow up” with Amy and Rory (her parents) and become their best friend. In fact, she pointed out that each one was in love with the other, helping to ensure her birth would occur in 2011.

As Mels, she became enamored with The Doctor, based on the wonderful and exciting tales about him from Amy - and just like Amy, she fiercely believed that The Doctor was not at all imaginary, but very real. When Mels 'first' meets the Doctor, she notes that Amy never told her that The Doctor was ‘hot’.

Pursued by the police for stealing a fire engine red sports car, Mels forced The Doctor, Rory and Amy into the TARDIS at gunpoint and shot the control console (but, only because The Doctor told her that her gun wouldn’t work on the TARDIS, that they were in "a state of temporal grace" - but, remember Rule One: The Doctor lies...). This caused the TARDIS to fill with smoke and crash land into the office of Adolf Hitler in Berlin of 1938.

Meanwhile, in 1938, a shape-shifting humanoid robot containing miniaturized humanoids has assumed the form of a Wehrmacht officer and attacked Hitler. Running out of the TARDIS to escape the smoke, The Doctor and his companions inadvertently stop the robot from killing Hitler, but when Hitler fires a revolver at the robot to defend himself, he aims poorly and fatally shoots Mels instead. Mels reveals that she is in fact Rory and Amy's daughter Melody Pond, and she and The Doctor share some banter about getting married - and then, rather than dying, she regenerated into the form known as River Song.

Having been trained by her captors since infancy to kill The Doctor, she had managed to fatally poison him with lipstick containing an extract from the Judas tree, which would slowly kill him and also prevent his ability to regenerate. She then jumped out of a window and started running, with Amy and Rory in hot pursuit.

After her identity as River Song is revealed to her, River decides that she can’t let The Doctor die as she had originally intended, and so she used the last of her regeneration energy, as well as what is believed to be the rest of her remaining regenerations, to bring the nearly dead Doctor back to life. The Doctor, Amy and Rory then left her in a hospital with a new, empty TARDIS-styled diary.

Now, in what is believed to be her final incarnation and calling herself River Song, Amy and Rory’s daughter has come backwards in time several, several times, and met most (if not all) of The Doctor’s past selves - although her timeline is not at all synchronous with The Doctor or her parents.

In the year 5123, River enrolled in a course on archaeology at Luna University, located on Earth's Moon, in an attempt to track down and reunite with The Doctor. The day River earned her doctorate in archeology, Madam Kovarian, agents of the Church and the Silence tracked her down in her office at Luna University, while she was going through her research notes on The Doctor. River had no recollection of who they were, thanks to her brainwashing and conditioning several years earlier. They forced River into a modified astronaut suit and took her to Lake Silencio, Utah on the 22nd April, 2011, where she was submerged in the lake to lie in wait for the Doctor.

In an alternate timeline where River regained control of herself, she refused to kill The Doctor, and instead managed to drain the suit's weapon system, resulting in The Doctor avoiding his death. This caused a fixed point in time to rip open, making all of Time collapse together. In this new collapsing timeline, River was part of a group that struggled to fix Time and yet not let it result in The Doctor's death; this group was led by Amy, who also remembered the original timeline’s events. River managed to create a distress beacon, begging the Universe for help in saving The Doctor and received a unanimous "yes" from the entire Universe. River was eventually reunited with The Doctor, who tried to grab hold of her, as it would send them back to Lake Silencio. River refused, as it would mean the Doctor's death. After the Silence attacked, River revealed her beacon and the results to The Doctor. In response, The Doctor decided to marry her. He whispered into her ear "look into my eyes", which she did and realised he was in fact the Teselecta, and The real Doctor was inside of its left eye, waving at River from the mechanical man’s pupil. River and the Teselecta-Doctor kissed, which sent them all back to Lake Silencio where River "killed" the Teselecta disguised as The Doctor, setting things right again, and also avoiding the untimely death of The Doctor.

They needed the Silence to believe that The Doctor was truly dead, though, so River allowed herself to be arrested and locked up in the Stormcage prison to serve her sentence for killing The Doctor; meanwhile, The Doctor made frequent visits to River, sometimes taking her out, and other times just staying in, while the Universe at large believed him to be dead...

River had an opportunity to gain The Tenth Doctor’s trust, despite his skepticism, by revealing that she knew his true name. It is presumed that she actually learned this from The Eleventh Doctor before she saved his life as he lay dying in Berlin in 1938.

At one time, River was taken by The Doctor for her birthday to the last Winter Frost Fair on the River Thames in 1814. Stevie Wonder unknowingly performed before being taken back to his original time. Returning to Stormcage from this escapade, River encountered Rory in his Roman uniform, seeming shocked to see him. She refused his request to come aid them at Demons Run, saying she "can't be there until the very end" and "This is the day he finds out who I am."
River met The Doctor, Amy, and Rory at the end of the battle of Demon's Run in the 52nd century, where she revealed her identity - first to The Doctor, and then to her parents.

On receiving an invitation containing coordinates from the Eleventh Doctor, River escaped from Stormcage to meet Amy, Rory and him in Utah in the United States of America in 2011. The Doctor took them on a picnic, where he was killed. River, Amy, and Rory burned the Doctor's body, then went to a cafe and found another version of the Eleventh Doctor, who claimed to be about two hundred years younger than the one they had seen die.

River helped the Doctor defeat the Silence by using their brainwashing of humanity against them. At her request, the Doctor returned her to Stormcage, where she kissed him. From his shocked reaction, she realised that from his perspective, it was their first kiss, and from her perspective, probably their last.

River has a TARDIS-shaped diary that chronicles her adventures with The Doctor, which she frequently uses as a tool to discover where The Doctor is in his timeline, in relation to hers. Sometimes she’s a younger River, and sometimes she’s older and near her final adventure, which happened in The Library. River died there, in order to save The Doctor, Donna and the other 4,022 people trapped in The Library's computer. She pleaded with him to not try and change history, not to change one moment of what had and would come for them. River’s data ghost lives on there, in a virtual existence within The Library’s archives.

”Yes," River agreed. "You both are a bit mad, but that's neither here, nor there. I don't see another way out, so logically..." she trailed off, gesturing towards the new tunnel that they had uncovered.

She'd almost said something about how it was rather funny to hear the pot calling the kettle black, but... They really ought to save any bickering for when the coast was truly clear.

"Now, wouldn't it be best to make ourselves scarce, while that thing digs itself out? I know I don't want to stick around for that. And besides, isn't whatever's down there why we're here in the first place?" And with that, River stepped forward, pulled a small but powerful torch out of her winter coat and clicked it on to illuminate the new path.

"Follow me, boys -- ladies first, and all that..." she boldly declared, as she stepped into the mouth of the tunnel and started to carefully follow it down, further into the icy darkness.

River did so love a tomb.