Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan (2012)

My first piece of disappointment with this episode came even before the title sequence. I'm going to launch straight into spoilers but before the show aired I heard rumour that a certain New York landmark would be revealed as an angel. This sounded like a great idea, with the fact that it had never moved before being covered up by the fact that under normal circumstances there would always be at least one person watching it. Others suggested that perhaps some kind of city wide blackout would finally allow it the chance to move, which the episode would slowly lead up to (or alternatively it would never actually move, remaining a disturbing threat). But in the end there was no clever reasoning, no justification for the entire city missing the Statue of Liberty taking a stroll up the Hudson river, showing that not much thought had been put into it past the original idea. The final words of the opening's Private Detective really sum the whole thing up - "You gotta be kiddin' me!"

While this particular aspect went against everything we already knew about the Weeping Angels (and seemingly served no real purpose), the Angels still worked well for most of the episode. The last episode to feature them seemed to abandon their penchant for sending people back in time so it was nice to see this idea revisited, with the additional caveat that they didn't always have to send people back in time. Mostly they lived up to their usual creepy nature - I could watch almost any situation you could think of where keeping them in view is somehow difficult and find it terrifying. Rory's ordeal with a packet of matches was especially good, even if it should probably have lasted a much shorter time (possibly down to the baby angels seemingly mischievous nature).

How Rory ended up in this situation was a little confusing though, with River Song's sudden appearance in 1938 seeming rather inexplicable. She also initially felt more like her brainwashed incarnation, either being ignorant of Rory's fate or deliberately putting him in danger for no particular reason. You could say that she was just playing up to her pulp novel role but at this point she had no idea she was going to be the star of the story she would write later. It could also perhaps be put down to her inquisitive nature, which lead to her finding herself in the clutches of a chained and weakened Angel.

Bringing the group back together again required a rather ingenious trip to ancient China, which like some of the short trips in the last episode I liked its rather throwaway nature given how convoluted a plan it was. This seemed to be the last great plan the Doctor had this episode though, afterwards seeming almost paralysed by the knowledge of how future events must play out. His joy followed by disappointment at River's method of escape from the Angel was quite believable. I'm not sure I always like the strict view the show takes about pre-ordained events but it perhaps leads to a more consistent universe than one where changing the future constantly splits us into a whole new parallel universe.

However the events that follow see Amy and Rory determined to change his fate, as the Angels plan to trap victims in an endless time loop to feed off their potential life energy. Rory witnesses his future self dying, with his aged counterpart surviving just long enough to see Amy again after years alone (a nice reversal of 'The Girl Who Waited' I thought). In a way I was kind of surprised that this section was still effective given the amount of times that Rory has seemingly been killed off in the past. Needing to create a paradox to break the Angel's cycle, the only way out seems to be for Rory to take his own life, creating the impossible situation of him dying twice. With no guarantee that this plan will work or that they will survive it, Amy eventually decides to take the leap off the building with him, as the Doctor and River look on.

As it turns out they do survive the creation of this paradox but any happiness is short lived, as a surviving Angel zaps Rory back in time, literally setting his death in New York in stone. The smug smile on the Angel's face suggested to me that it knew it would gain a second victim, with Amy unable to leave Rory to die alone, choosing instead to be touched by the Angel and be re-united. I felt that this was always the way Amy and Rory needed to step out of the show, that as long as they were together they could live without the Doctor but sadly I think its implementation left an awful lot of plotholes in its wake. The dialogue surrounding this felt very rushed and confusing, personally I thought that the Doctor meant he could never visit New York again in any time - before taking a jog through Central Park to retrieve his last book page. And there's probably any number of alternate ways that Amy and Rory could have met up with the Doctor, even if he couldn't make it back to New York circa 1938. It has to be said that I didn't immediately think of them seeking him out again though, instead having the opinion that they might take this opportunity to go on and live a relatively normal life.

The question is whether it needed to give that false hope of them surviving the paradox, especially when it had already made the same point earlier about the impossibility of changing your fate once it is known. I think some simple changes could have resulted in an ending that essentially said the same thing but would feel less jarring. Perhaps just have the Doctor reappear in the graveyard after the paradox, with the gravestone now listing Amy and Rory's names together. It's strange that so many of this seasons episodes have been criticized for resolving too quickly, when this one perhaps didn't need this extra twist. I think it would have been better to spend more time on the Doctor's grief and also give a glimpse of Amy and Rory's life in the past, just to highlight that it was more of a bitter-sweet ending to their story. In fact, someone has written an excellent obituary imagining the rest of their story, which may not be canonical but certainly seemed fitting to me.

In the end it seems slightly strange that this episode was such a standalone one. Watching the previous episodes many people picked up on aspects that seemed important but did not have any relevance on the Pond's final exit. For me, the extreme fear the Doctor showed in previous episodes didn't fit right and I'm left wondering if perhaps this season's episodes were not in order from the Doctor's viewpoint. This could actually tie together with him perhaps cheating time and fitting in one more adventure with Amy and Rory - while also thinking about starting up a gang. That's not to say that I think we will see Amy and Rory again, their exit seemed very final and should probably remain that way. If anything it's perhaps been a shame that there wasn't more for them to do this season, feeling more and more like they were being dragged back in to the Doctor's world, when being set up with a nice house and a Jaguar E-Type already felt like a rather natural end to their story last season.