If the Doctor’s name means anything, it is that in a story about a woman who is raped he will be the figure who helps her to heal. If there is to be a Doctor Who story about rape then that story has to be one that is about the victim. It has to be one about her agency and her identity. One in which she is not an object, and more to the point one that rejects the entire ideology that would treat her as one. A Doctor Who story about rape isn’t about vengeance, but reparation. And that, of course, is what River offers. Amy is not all right, but she will be. The horrible things that have happened to her cannot be undone. Not with a magic wand, and not with an army. But she can heal. She can have her daughter, and love her.
The wonderful, must-read Philip Sandifer writes about “A Good Man Goes to War,” and the whole Doctor Who reveal that River Song is actually Amy and Rory’s daughter.
It’s an interesting take, if one that I don’t really agree with or embrace; I think Steven Moffat really dropped the ball with the resolution of this storyline – for all that he clearly wants to explain away/fix the violation of Amy’s pregnancy happening without her knowledge and the subsequent kidnapping of her child (and he definitely does, hence the whole, awkward insert of “Mels,” the pre-regeneration River), the show not only utterly fails at doing so, it also fails at dealing with the inevitable emotional aftermath that said events should have had on the characters; sure, it happens off-camera, to some extent, but still. It’s a terrible fumble at best.
(It’s also a surprising fumble, in many ways; Moffat’s first season as showrunner was so well done in terms of emotion, but the second – and definitely his third – are far too focused on the intellectual sleight of hand instead of the emotional truth of the characters. He didn’t really returned to the heights of his first season in charge until “The Day of the Doctor,” for me, and even that was followed by “The Time of the Doctor.”)