What happened is convoluted and almost ridiculous, by River's measure, but. Charles has asked and thus she tries to craft an answer.
What happened? The Doctor attempted to break the barrier and he did, though River isn't certain if it was managed very well or for very long. He broke the barrier and it echoed it's failing resonance into the minds of everyone. They saw things from home, they saw but they may not have been real and it lit up the broken and fractured parts of River's mind like an old switchboard suddenly flooded with power. The circuits failed and her structure failed and her safety measures failed and she spent time almost but not quite driving her body to shock as it separated into various pieces in her own mind. People were afraid, were angry, were devastated and in that cacophony there was no room for one girl to be one thing.
So she went to Ned and he helped her, gave her a story to force her words into something she has a little more control over, but ...she's not entirely fixed. Not that she can ever be, really, but she's uncertain how long it will take her to recover from this. If she's to properly recover at all.
"Don't know what will help." Her brain is still doing it, the abrupt start stop revise reevaluate spiral that has her either falling or floating she isn't sure. Only that it won't stop, and it isn't at all a comfortable state to be in, and now she has doubts. About the nature of this experiment and the limits it places on them, about what happens when so many people are frozen outside of time in its own bubble. Something went wrong when the barrier fell, something about time and movement and passage, and it's got River occasionally falling into a sort of feedback loop. "Don't know."
don't worry about it!
What happened? The Doctor attempted to break the barrier and he did, though River isn't certain if it was managed very well or for very long. He broke the barrier and it echoed it's failing resonance into the minds of everyone. They saw things from home, they saw but they may not have been real and it lit up the broken and fractured parts of River's mind like an old switchboard suddenly flooded with power. The circuits failed and her structure failed and her safety measures failed and she spent time almost but not quite driving her body to shock as it separated into various pieces in her own mind. People were afraid, were angry, were devastated and in that cacophony there was no room for one girl to be one thing.
So she went to Ned and he helped her, gave her a story to force her words into something she has a little more control over, but ...she's not entirely fixed. Not that she can ever be, really, but she's uncertain how long it will take her to recover from this. If she's to properly recover at all.
"Don't know what will help." Her brain is still doing it, the abrupt start stop revise reevaluate spiral that has her either falling or floating she isn't sure. Only that it won't stop, and it isn't at all a comfortable state to be in, and now she has doubts. About the nature of this experiment and the limits it places on them, about what happens when so many people are frozen outside of time in its own bubble. Something went wrong when the barrier fell, something about time and movement and passage, and it's got River occasionally falling into a sort of feedback loop. "Don't know."