River Tam

Template:Firefly character River Tam is a fictional character played by Summer Glau. She originally appeared in Joss Whedon's short-lived cult-hit television series Firefly, and went on to appear in the R. Tam sessions, the comic Serenity: Those Left Behind, and the feature film Serenity.

River is the teenage sister of Dr. Simon Tam, both of whom take refuge aboard Malcolm Reynolds' Firefly-class transport ship known as Serenity. She is considered a child prodigy, intelligent beyond her years and athletically gifted.

Summer Glau won the Saturn Award's Best Supporting Actress for her role as River in Serenity in May 2006. Glau was also runner up for Best Actress/Movie in the SyFy Genre Awards for 2006.

History

Early life

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River being interviewed in the R. Tam sessions

During River's early childhood, she grew up alongside her brother, Simon, part of the wealthy Tam family on the "core" (Alliance-dominated) planet of Osiris. It is remarked throughout the series that she was extremely gifted intellectually from a very young age (she is noted as having “corrected [Simon's] spelling since she was three”), and also very graceful. She has been portrayed and described consistently as having always had both a strong thirst for knowledge and a love for and intuitive grasp of dance. By the time she was 14 years old, she had grown “bored” with her studies and was already in some form of college.

As revealed in portions throughout the series (beginning with the second half of the episode “Serenity” and ending — thus far — with the feature film), it was at this point that she was sent to a government learning facility known only as “The Academy”. While her parents and Simon believed the Academy was a private school meant to nurture the gifts of the most academically talented children in the Alliance (the uniting governmental force over all inhabited galactic planets), it was in fact a cover for a government experiment in creating the perfect assassin. While in the hands of the Alliance doctors and scientists, River was secretly and extensively experimented on, including (as revealed in the episode “Ariel”) surgery that removed most of her amygdala.

In the R. Tam sessions, a webcast series of short films produced as tie-ins to the movie Serenity, the progression of her youthful descent into insanity is shown, as are hints of her psychic abilities. She references the “Pax”, which would later be a plot point in the film, and mentions the Academy's first subject “d[ying] on the table”, something she apparently could not have learned through conventional means. The R. Tam sessions' portrayal of her initial interview with a member of the Academy indicates she had previously had strong “intuitive” abilities in addition to her high intellect and ready grasp of complex subjects. How and when this translated into her apparently full-fledged mind-reading abilities is unknown, though the short films suggest that it occurred only after the experimentation at the Academy.

According to Simon's monologue in the episode “Serenity”, the Alliance attempted to isolate River from her family, though she managed to send a call for help by putting a coded message in a letter to her brother. Simon decoded the message and set out to rescue his then 17-year-old sister, despite his parents' insistence that he was simply being paranoid. Simon exhausted his own personal fortune and sacrificed a promising career in medicine, but eventually located River with the help of anti-governmental groups. In the television series it was initially suggested that it was members of this group that had rescued River from the Academy and delivered her to Simon, who had in turn financed their operation; in the feature film, however, it is revealed that Simon himself had a key role in her escape, aside from monetarily supporting the extraction.

An addition to her story is made in the novelization of Serenity. Even after months of surgery and psychological abuse, she has been able to remain remarkably sane — sane enough to hide coded messages in her letters to Simon that escape the attention of Academy censors. However, when she is forced by her handler to demonstrate her abilities directly to key members of Alliance leadership, she almost immediately descends into extreme psychosis, her messages losing all coherence.

Rescue

After learning about River's abuse at the Academy, Simon is unable to help her for two years. However, Simon is eventually contacted by a group of men from an underground movement. They explain to him that the Alliance has been "playing with her brain". If funded, the men agreed to sneak River out in cryo. River would then be taken to Persephone, a planet slightly outside the Core, where Simon could take her wherever he wished.

Simon spends a large amount of money funding the men. As part of the plan, he infiltrates the Academy disguised as a uniformed official of the Alliance government and asks questions of Dr. Mathias about River's treatment. Simon activates a hidden stun grenade and releases River. They then run to the window of an elevator shaft, break through, and the mens' ship overhead releases a raft that they use to ride up to safety. This was all caught on the security cameras of the Academy (as seen in Serenity). From there, they head for Persephone.

When the Alliance learns of River's rescue, they promptly freeze all of Simon's monetary accounts, leaving him with nothing but his medkit, and put out a warrant for the arrest of both Simon and River, labelling them as fugitives (as mentioned in "Safe" and "Ariel").

Character description

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River awakens aboard Serenity.

In addition to being disowned by their parents, Simon and River are pursued by both Alliance forces and bounty hunters. Simon, a talented doctor, treats her regularly, attempting to find medicines that help the now mostly-psychotic River. Through an advanced form of medical imaging, he discovers that part of her brain, the amygdala (which acts as a filter for emotions) has been stripped. Rather than producing Kluver-Bucy syndrome, this prevents River from being able to control her emotions, even if she wants to. As Simon describes it, "She feels everything; she can't not." ("Ariel").

River displays near-telepathic perception; she "sees" and foretells the future (though she often conveys her visions in a twisted, nursery-rhyme manner), she can "feel" people's emotions and sense their thoughts. At the end of "Trash", she threatens Jayne by very casually remarking "I can kill you with my brain", but it is unknown whether this was an empty threat or not. The full extent of her psychic/intellectual powers are currently unknown, as are the intentions of the shadowy organization who experimented on her, or even the true relationship that organization has to the Alliance.

She is deeply intuitive and relies on feelings rather than knowledge, and her way of communication is almost lyrical, always deeper than it appears, consisting mostly of cryptic metaphors and never simple (save for a few occasions, e.g. telling Simon "You're such a boob"). By the end of the film, River appears to have stabilized (even going so far as to actually say "I'm all right"), suggesting that much of her dissociative behavior was related to the secret she revealed about the nature of the Reavers. Her extreme genius seems to be intact, however. (In a scene edited from the final cut of the film Serenity, River calculates the most efficient escape vector and launch window for the ship to leave the planet Miranda entirely in her head.) At the end of the film, she takes over the co-pilot's station and capably flies the ship.

As evidenced in Serenity, River's skill at hand-to-hand combat is virtually unstoppable. On two separate occasions she ventures into large melees (20-30 opponents against her at the same time), and on both occasions she emerges not only victorious but (apparently) completely uninjured. Her skill with firearms is also shown to be near super-human: during a battle in the Firefly episode "War Stories" she memorizes the battlefield in one quick glance, then proceeds to take out three advancing soldiers with one shot each without looking at her targets.

Trivia

• The fighting style used by River in Serenity was a Kung-fu/Kickboxing hybrid, modified to be more "balletic".
• The key phrase, that Dr. Simon Tam uttered to put River to sleep, "это курам на смех" ("eto kuram na smekh") in Russian means literally "this is for hens to laugh at", meaning "this is very ridiculous".

See also

• R. Tam sessions