Untitled

fatimagic:

River was essentially raised by Kovarian and the Silence. She had her parents, sure, but up until her third incarnation, she had never really known love in the way that The Doctor loves her. So for him to be begging the Teselecta not to hurt her right after she’d just given him a death sentence…

And really, the whole episodes builds to that point.

“A significant factor in Hitler’s rise to power is that The Doctor didn’t stop him.”

She didn’t just randomly shift from wantng him dead to “being in love” with him. There were so many layers. She realized she’d been taking Kovarian’s word her entie life. But then to see a different side of The Doctor, one Kovarian assured her didn’t exist (and repeatedly at that, which finally culminated inot him still trying to save her parents with his dying breaths), she realized that she might have made a mistake in killing him. (And River, unlike most people, actually had the ability toi fix the life-or-death mistake she made.) That’s why the pisode ends once again with her in school, this time singing a different tune: “I’m looking for a good man.” Not The Doctor himself, but physical and historical evidence of him having been a good person - the exact opposite of what Kovarian had drilled into her head her whole life - that justifies her decision to save him. She’s hoping she made the right one, but now, she’s looking for tangible proof (the “significant factors”) that she did. And we see some of the fruits of her labor at at the end of “Closing Time.”