River is played by Aceles. Her journal is riverbytwos. Her played by is Summer Glau.

 

General Info

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Name: River Tam

 

Age: 17

 

Eye Color: Brown

 

Hair Color: Brown

 

Physical Description: River has long, wavy brown hair and dark eyes. She is thin and very athletic. When she is going through an episode, her movements tend to be jerky and defensive, her hands close to her face, and her eyes wander around the room, squinting at things no one else can see. When she is dancing, though, or more lucid, she is incredibly graceful.

 

Scars: There are some on her scalp from the multiple brain surgeries she endured.

 

Languages: River speaks fluent English, Spanish, Latin, French, German, Russian, Mandarin Chinese, and can very quickly learn pretty much any other language you care to throw at her. With a few days and a careful study, she is able to develop a tight enough hold on any language to talk to a native speaker.

She also likes pig latin.

 

Powers: Telepathy, empathy, psychometry. River can hear the thoughts of people around her and often picks up a great deal about their pasts without intending to. She can feel the emotions or pain of others as though they were her own. She can also learn things about an object's history just by touching it. She tends to sense the true nature of people, and can pretty much always tell when someone is lying.

 

Abilities: May I mention the asskickery? River is, in all technicality (though she seems like nothing of the sort) a trained assassin. She's been programmed with behavioral conditioning triggers that make her go into ballistic 'destroy' mode and attack everyone she can see until she is knocked out or someone says the phrase "Eto kuram na smekh". This translates literally in Russian to "this is for hens to laugh at", which means "this is very ridiculous". She uses a form of kung-fu/kick boxing that is very graceful, resembling ballet. As her brother once said, "she always did love to dance." She can easily overpower a man twice her size and weight. Her skill with firearms is also unequaled. During the episode 'War Stories', she took one look at a group of three men in different parts of a room, and then shot all three within the space of five seconds, killing each with one shot. She had her eyes closed the entire time. Though she has never displayed these skills without some sort of trigger (a dangerous, life-threatening situation, or some kind of subliminal messaging) it is assumed that she can also use them if she chooses. She does, however, sometimes simply collapse under the stress of a dangerous situation, bombarded by the angry thoughts and feelings of the people involved.

 

Personality

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River is completely unpredictable. She can go from quiet and solemn to full blown panic attacks and temper tantrums in the blink of an eye, but she spends most of her time in a dream-like, semi-aware state. She has lucid periods where her genius breaks through, spouting random facts about things like draining all the blood from the human body. Needless to say, this tends to creep people out.

 

Not only does she pick up on academic concepts at lightning speeds, she is highly athletic, and can execute a dance perfectly just by watching someone demonstrate it for a few seconds. She speaks predominantly in lyrical, cryptic nursery rhyme style speech, or talks about things that seem to have nothing to do with the conversation going on but that almost always have a deeper meaning. She is hyper aware of the world around her, to the extent that it is very difficult to understand what she is feeling or trying to say--her mind is completely chaotic. Since her amygdala has been stripped, she 'feels everything--she can't not.' She is therefor highly empathetic and friendly in her more lucid moments, but holds a deep capacity for darker thinking. She can also be a bit of a brat on occasion, her old show-off self shining through.

 

History

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(copied in part from wikipedia)

 

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 TV 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 as well as 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 graduate school, which was she considered - and referred to - as "gen ed" in the R. Tam sessions.

 

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, 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 dying on the table, something she apparently could not have learnt 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, but the R. Tam Sessions imply that she may have already had some form of latent psychic abilities prior to being recruited.

 

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 16-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.

 

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 men's 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, labeling them as fugitives (as mentioned in "Safe" and "Ariel").

 

After putting River into cryogenic sleep and putting her in a crate, Simon attempts to get offworld quietly and inconspicuously by taking Serenity, which he believes junky enough to be low profile. River is quickly discovered. While the two are eventually accepted by the crew as members in their own right, the first part of the series is spent with their futures undecided. It takes them actually being kidnapped ('Safe') for Malcolm to acknowledge them as crew members. Despite this, River's trustworthiness was often questioned throughout the series.

 

River is being brought in post the final episode of the series, 'Objects in Space', but prior to the events of Serenity. So Miranda, for all intents and purposes, is still a secret.

 

IN SHORT. River Tam:

• Is morbid and creepifying.
• Was crazy today.
• Is a genius.
• Was experimented on.
• Is always crazy every day.
• Misses her brother.
• Needs a hug.
• Can kill you with her brain. (Joking. We hope.)