galacticprobe said:
Thanks for the link!
And actually, in "Silence In The Library" River did know The Doctor; he just didn't know her, yet. She walked right up to him and said her classic "Hello, Sweetie." When he seemed not to know her, she played along by introducing herself to him (and to us watchers as well). Shortly afterwards - and this is probably not an exact quote - she said to him something like "You're pretending not to know me for some reason." Then she ran through some of their adventures in her journal with him, trying to figure out why The Doctor didn't know her. And once she realized that The Doctor actually didn't know her - because he hadn't met her yet - she was rather sad.
Dino.
I want to point out to the mods here I'm getting at something about the content of the River journal that will be clearer about the CONTENT of said journal about the idea of making a River journal replica as the series goes along. So bear with me before you start getting egregious about 'off-topic' and start modding out or moving posts around. I'm getting to a point about the Thing. I'm doing a Thing. Respect the Thing!
Okay, this part goes to CONTENT of ones prop. The next part will deal with what this means in CONSTRUCTING your do-it-yourself prop replica.
I'd argue she didn't recognize the 10th Doctor but knew it had to be him because no one else would be able to get into the Library and she was expecting him to meet her there, so she had to know the 10th Doctor could only be him. Whether she has "all his faces" is a throwaway line, indicating she may have been limited from knowing just how many regenerations he's had.
The 11th Doctor therefore would know that he has to keep his appearance as the 10th Doctor from her or else she'd know instantly in the Library that the 10th Doctor was the Doctor before he knew her. She clearly mistakenly assumes at the outset that he's a future Doctor to her "proper Doctor". The Doctor starts keeping things from River just as she keeps future events from him.
So again, this informs what sort of content would be in her journal. If you want to make up content for a replica, the very last entry has to be about the events of "Silence in the Library" and "Forests of the Dead". The last entry has to be plausible for the brief time between when she knocks the 10th Doctor unconscious and when he comes around to find her having handcuffed him.
So what would she write in those few minutes? Well a lot of what she reiterates to him, that he's always known she would die at the Library. That the Doctor mislead her because he knew how it all played out before she ever met him and that she was content in dying because she'd had a wonderful life with him. That's QUITE the revelation, but it's been dawning on her for hours from the moment she realized what was really going on. I would think the last page would probably contain a quick sketch of the unconscious 10th Doctor and a reiteration of what she is going to tell him when he wakes up and after she's died - DON'T CHANGE A THING.
That the Doctor honors this after a fashion, keeping her ghosting communicator thingy to preserve and build into a modded Sonic later to his former, 10th Doctor self can save her to the virtual reality thing is part of their time line River can't have anticipated of course, but the Doctor has to realize for the remainder of his 10th incarnation and on into the 'future' he must keep things from her. She clearly doesn't know the Crash of the Byzantium hasn't happened to him yet which is problematic because as Prof. Song, she should know he has the wrong face to have met Dr. Song, so the Time of the Angels is near the end of her life. Perhaps she does some work to finalize a PhD between the two events, but clearly she's not Professor Song for very long before her death. She's misjudged that the events of "Angels" is near the end of the 11th Doctors incarnation, not the beginning. So she must not know the 11th Doctor for very long.
It clears the way in a fashion that the Matt and Alex can play these characters and it even end before Matt's tenure is over, but then flare up again with a future Doctor actor and Alex or another actress playing the part as a much younger River.
So here's how these kinds of things inform
CONSTRUCTING your prop replica if you want it to actually have whatever "content" you include.
So for the prop, this would mean while one might want to make a hard-bound book type prop, but one might want to build it in a fashion were new signatures can be added to the book itself so if one wants to make the entries each signature can form a particular adventure with the ability to add and subtract or move around signatures at will.
I should explain when I say "signature" every hard bound book is made of pages of paper that stacked, then are folded over and sewn in the middle.
If you'll look at any hardbound book you have it's not one massive stack of paper folded to form the pages. It's actually a series of stacks which are individually the 'signatures'. If you pull out any hard cover book you own and look at the top or bottom where the pages meet the hard cover, you notice these signatures look like a lot of little magazines pinched together between the hard covers. These are usually sewn with thread rather than stapled as magazines are down the middle, then the thread you can see where there would be staples on a magazine are themselves sewn or joined together and glued to a stiffer paper that wraps all the signatures together at the 'hinge' point of the stiff paper wrapper and this wrapper of sorts connects the front and back insides to the hard bound covering.
A hard bound book uses glue to make the attachment of signatures to the end pages and cover into a permanent and strong unified structure. But for your prop, you want impermanence because you'd want to be able to add place-holder signatures perhaps covering the Doctors past you might want to edit as the story we see in the series unfolds to insert new content.
I've not tried to construct such a prop replica yet, but I have thought about it. One way would be for anyone wanting to do so to learn how to make signatures. This is very easy; just stack say 6-10 pieces of nice paper pre-folded evenly so you can sew them down the middle. Usually three points with ordinary thread near the top and bottom plus in the middle should do it. Once sewn, you'll probably want to invest in a guillotine paper trimmer so you can make the folded signature trimmed off and the proper finished size.
After making as many of these blank signatures as you want or think you'll need, you can pre-distress them by soaking them in say weak tea to stain them, blot them dry carefully air dry them and iron them a bit to make them lie flat-ish later. So you have a blank-books worth of them at this point.
What I would do is make a semi-permanent way to join them at this point. One could weave ribbon small enough through the stitching on each signature to join them together but still be able at a later date to snip the ribbon when one wants to shuffle or add and subtract signatures.
The hard part is making a semi-permanent attachment of the signatures to the hinge part of the wrapper that forms the inside front and back that attach them to the cover. I'm thinking here it might be the thing to make the wrapper sacrificially attached to the hard cover with photo-mounting adhesive sheets. This stuff will form a strong bond but if it's reheated later it will come part in a bit of a sticky mess, so one will probably have to discard the wrapper bit each time it's unattached and make a new one when 're-binding' the signatures when shuffled.
I'm probably making this sound like a more massive undertaking and trouble than it really is. Basically each signature has it's three little sewn points where the thread shows on it's edge facing the spine. If one spaces these so you can get a length of ribbon through each one then the signatures can be pulled and woven through slots cut with an Exacto knife cut into the 'wrapper' and then pulled tight and tied to make them sit in the wrapper at the hinge fold part, but this process can be repeated as necessary, say once a season or so to update it with new content.
Anyway, that's my idea that I toss out to any River Song journal replica makers. I'd love to see any other solutions to this method or ideas anyone else has.
SPOILERS
