Eleven And The Moffat Era: A God Who Must Not Be Worshiped
The Doctor was certainly a god to the girl who waited. She spent her life sitting, looking up at the stars, waiting for the Doctor to come back for her. It almost destroyed her life completely. Eventually, her time with the Doctor cost her her daughter, her family (she lost her parents when she went back in time), the possibility of children, and her life.
The Doctor cost River everything. He cost her her family, her childhood, and her adulthood. Her entire life was built around her relationship with the Doctor, her holy journal, the sacrifices she made to him. She was raised to the religion of the Doctor, she didnt get a choice. Im pretty sure she was the only companion who ever called him a god. The idea that the Doctor should apologize for fighting evil seems repellent, even based on the idea that he got too big. But if you re-frame it in the context of a god being worshiped, the story looks very different. If you see fear of the Doctor as worship.
From that perspective, the problem with the Doctors life was that he was demanding worship from his foes. When he challenged them before the Pandorica, when he rubbed in his victory at Demons Run, when he told the Atraxi to run, he was acting as a god, using the threat of his power. The form of worship he received was supposed to be fear, but he didnt count on what that fear would produce. As River told him in A Good Man Goes to War, This was exactly you, all of this. You make them so afraid. Doctor, the man who healsbut if you carry on the way youve been going, what might that word become?
The worship the Doctors foes gave him made them stronger. It meant they took River and bent her to their will, made her a weapon that almost cost the Doctor everything. It made the Daleks stronger, costing one of Claras incarnations her life. The worship the Doctor received almost tore the fabric of reality asunder in The Wedding of River Song. Thats why the Doctor arranged his own death. He demanded one more sacrifice from River Song, and he tried to stop Amy and Rory from knowing he was alive. Notice that it didnt mean he stopped fighting evil: it just meant he stopped demanding worship. The Doctor sacrificed Amys faith in him, told her he wasnt a god. He made her stop waiting, stop worshipping, by telling her that he was nowhere near as powerful as she thought. Thus, Amy made him a man by seeing him as a man. The Doctor was made to understand that he had demanded worship. and it was terrible, by River. River was created to be a devil to his god, to bring him down. The plan backfired because the planners didnt count on Rivers feelings, or on the Doctors brilliance. But the essential tragedy of Rivers story was that she and the Doctor could never have an equal relationship, because she could never stop worshiping him.
River was in love with him before she met him. She fell in love with the idea of the Doctor, not with the Doctor himself. She was the epitome of the terrible things that would happen if the Doctor allowed himself to be a god. That was the essential problem with the Doctors and Rivers relationship, for better or for worse: to her, he would always be a god. And having someone around who believed he was a god was really, really bad for him. It put her in the unique position of being able to tell him when he was acting like a god, of being able to scold or hit him, because that basic fact that she worshiped him was a constant. River once said one psychopath per Tardis, and she was right. If she had stayed with the Doctor permanently, it would have been a disaster. And that fact, that she would always be waiting for him to see her, was truly awful.