Although River Song doesn't reach the depths of the genuine Mary Sue characters like Captain Jack or the dreadful addons from the books like the never-interesting Iris "utter shit" Wildthyme, the character of River Song has hit a couple of walls for me. Three, if you include the fact that Alex Kingston is very much not everybody's cup of tea, and an actor of ER intensity. Which is to say, none.
However, the pair of walls of which I speak are as follows.
Wall 1: her timeline continuity is bollocks.
Unintelligent fans can repeat timey wimey and other babyish shit until they're even older men, but at its most basic the "incredibly clever" (done to death in various sci fi previous to Moffatt's attempt nonetheless) meeting someone "out of order" has been poorly executed. This is because when you do a "meeting someone out of order" thingy before you do it you need to know at least roughly where you're going. Then either keep the timeline straight in your head or write it out so the continuity can be shared with other people. That way, when the process you want to implement is just simple reversal and not randomly out of order meetings like in for example my own TYR: STONE COLD CERTAINTY, you just map the events backwards, and tick them off as you write them up and show them.
Unfortunately, this is not at all what was done with River Song. Groaning under the weight of even the flimsiest continuity, the character crashed and burned in her second appearance, since that would have to be her second to last appearance in the original plan and it was tied into a year very close to that of the Silence in the Library two parter. And yet here were extraneous plot points spilling out like weevils out of a bogan's cereal box.
And then came the idea to do a comicbook or at least a DC / Marvel comicbook type thing and retcon the family tree somewhat.
Not only was it silly, it was pointlessly self referential. This is what killed Star Trek- the endless call outs not so much to continuity as to the IDEA of continuity- leading to really big mistakes usually on the level of Chekov not having met Khan. It's all able to be explained away. Of course it is. But in doing so, you are taking your millions of readers or viewers and doing your best to turn them into thousands of readers or viewers.
It also completely ruins the Amy Pond baby. A smarter choice if they wanted to try a ham fisted ourobouros would have been to make Amelia Amy's daughter - she gave birth to herself. Inexplicable, very Celtic, and about infinity times better than the actual idea screened. Plus we would get more Amelia, which can only be a good thing since the juvenile actor involved is a total scene stealer.
Wall 2: it's called "Doctor Who", not "River Song".
This goes back to the many awful awful characters bodged into the doctor who books over the long years behind us and comes down to an unprofessional tendency of many fans turned to writers to be over reliant, even when turned professional, on not just overused tropes but entire chunks of plot from various pop culture sources. Since one of the main sources tends to be the execrable derivative "writing" of Star Wars, and similar rehashed rehashed rehashes, when a character is made front and centre they tend not to be original in dialogue, characterisation or incident. Take a bow, River Song.
