Character Info
River Tam, played by Summer Glau, first appears in Firefly and also appears in the R. Tam sessions, the comic Serenity: Those Left Behind, and the feature film Serenity. River is the teenage sister of Dr. Simon Tam, both of whom take refuge aboard Serenity. She was considered a child prodigy from a very young age, intelligent beyond her years and athletically gifted. Simon stated that compared to her, he is an "idiot child," despite having graduated highly in med school and finished his internship a full four months faster than normal. Summer Glau won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as River in Serenity in May 2006. Glau was also runner up for Best Actress/Movie in the SyFy Genre Awards for 2006. River grew up with her brother Simon, with whom she was very close, as part of the wealthy Tam family on the "core" (Alliance-dominated) planet of Osiris. Having a high intellect and a ready grasp of complex subjects, she was sent to a government learning facility known only as “The Academy” at the age of fourteen. 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 surgery that removed most of her amygdala (which in the show is said to act as a filter for emotions),[36] preventing River from being able to control her emotion. She descends into insanity and nurtures psychic and “intuitive” abilities, but although the R. Tam sessions imply that she may have already had some form of latent psychic abilities prior to being recruited, how and when this translated into her apparently full-fledged mind-reading abilities is unknown. The Alliance isolates 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 sets out to rescue his sister, despite his parents' insistence that he was simply being paranoid. He succeeds two years later. 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 evidenced in Serenity, River's skill at hand-to-hand combat is virtually unstoppable. On two separate occasions she ventures into large melees (20–30 opponents against her at the same time), and on both occasions she emerges not only victorious but (apparently) completely uninjured. The fighting style used by River in Serenity was a Kung-fu/Kickboxing hybrid, modified to be more "balletic." Her skill with firearms is also shown to be near super-human: during a battle in the Firefly episode "War Stories" she memorizes the battlefield in one quick glance, then proceeds to take out three advancing soldiers with one shot each, with her eyes closed.