River Tam

River
Name	River Tam
Occupation	Student, fugitive, occasional accomplice to illegal acts
Gender	Female
Born	circa 2500
Homeworld	Osiris
Family	Gabriel Tam (father) Regan Tam (mother) Simon Tam (brother)
Portrayed by	Summer Glau Skylar Roberge ("Safe") Hunter Ansley Wryn (Serenity)

River Tam is a fictional character played by Summer Glau. She originally appeared in Joss Whedon's short-lived cult-hit television series Firefly but went on to appear in the R. Tam sessions, the comics 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 when it comes to almost everything, intelligent beyond her years (she even corrects her brother's spelling when she is three years old). Her gifts are not merely intellectual; she is also a talented and graceful dancer.

Summer Glau won the Saturn Award's Best Supporting Actress for her role as River in Serenity in May 2006.

History

Early life

When River was about 14, 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 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 clutches of the Alliance doctors and scientists, River was tortured and experimented upon secretly and extensively, and made the victim of cruel surgeries and psychological abuses.

In the R. Tam sessions, a webcast series of short films produced as tie-ins to the movie Serenity, some of what was done to River is shown, including the various levels of insanity. We get to see River when she first joins the Academy. The interviewer asks her what she "sees" and she tells him about how their first experiment died on the table, hinting even more at her psychic powers. She later kills the interviewer with a pen.

The Alliance attempted to isolate River from her family, but she managed to send a call for help by putting a coded message in a letter to her family. Simon decoded the message, and set out to rescue his 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.

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 via cryogenics. River would then be taken to Persephone, which is 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 manages to break into 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

Rescued by her brother and put temporarily in cryo suspended animation, the two became wanted fugitives, were disowned by their parents and hunted by both Alliance forces and bounty hunters, who have been enticed by a large bounty. Simon, a talented doctor, treats her regularly, trying to find medicines that help the now-mostly psychotic River. He discovered through an advanced form of medical imaging that part of her brain, the amygdala, which acts as a filter for emotions, had been stripped. 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 (albeit often in a twisted, nursery-rhyme sort of way extremely similar to Drusilla, another Whedon character), she can "feel" people's emotions and sense their thoughts. What River sees is open to interpretation, although it often is very clearly related in some way to a future event (or, in some cases, events she simply could not know, like when she insinuates that the Patron of a small village came to power by killing the previous Patron, or that she knows of crewmember Jayne's betrayal). 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.

She is deeply intuitive and relies very much on feelings of things rather than knowledge (for example, after Serenity transported a herd of cattle between worlds, River tells Mal that, while in transit, the cows "forgot how to be ^*... now they see sky, and they remember what they are.") and her way of communication is almost lyrical, always deeper than it appears and never simple (save for a few occasions, e.g. telling Simon "You're such a boob"). This superhuman insight may come from some psychic talents, or may be a manifestation of her sheer genius and ability to process all the information regarding a situation (including body language, vocal inflection, prior knowledge and anything else that may be relevant), much in the way that Sherlock Holmes would often make brilliant deductions about total strangers. Her abuse at the hands of the Alliance may also have helped to augment these talents.

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. River has demonstrated superior skills in fighting and weapon-handling in several circumstances. In "War Stories", she shoots and kills three soldiers with her eyes closed. In the film Serenity, she takes out an entire bar full of dangerous patrons and security personnel, and ultimately confronts and kills a mob of Reavers single-handedly.

By the end of the film, River appears to have stabilized (even going so far as to actually say "I'm alright"), suggesting that much of her disassociative 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, apparently without paying attention to the intensely complicated mathematics.) At the end of the film, she takes over the co-pilot's station and capably flies the ship (under the watchful eye of Mal).

Notes

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History

Early life

Rescue

Character description

Notes