10 Doctor Who Villains Who Ultimately Turned Good

3. River Song

Doctor Who River Song Gun
BBC

While River Song is one of the most beloved heroes of the NuWho era, if you look at her timeline from her perspective, she actually started out as a villain.

Raised by Madame Kovarian for the sole purpose of killing the Doctor, River comes surprisingly close to accomplishing this mission in Series 6's Let's Kill Hitler, where she poisons him with some lipstick: one quick kiss is all it takes.

But obviously, the show was never going to kill off its main character, and in the end, the Doctor managed to survive this poisoning, and it was River who helped him do it.

After discovering that she was destined to become close to the Doctor, River abandoned her murderous quest and used up all her remaining regeneration energy to heal her future husband. Who says romance is dead?

From this point on, she became the heroic River Song we all know and love, and had many wonderful adventures with the Doctor before meeting her end in the library.

In this post: 
Doctor Who
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.