Doctor Who: Series 7, Episode 5 – “The Angels Take Manhattan” (2012)

*End-of-episode spoilers.*

Series 7 isn’t one of my favorites, and for me, “The Angels Take Manhattan” is a low point.  It mucks around with established rules in order to ramp up the manufactured drama, and logic takes a flying leap out the window.  While it has some good points, this episode isn’t nearly as good as it should have been.

The Weeping Angels have besieged New York City—throughout time, it seems, but there’s a general convergence in the 1930s.  The Eleventh Doctor, Amy, and Rory are out for a pleasant day in Central Park when Rory is taken by an Angel and shot back in time.  The Doctor and Amy follow him back to a noirish ‘30s, where they run into a fellow Angels investigator:  River.  Together, the gang struggles to defeat the Angels and save Rory.

For starters, the whole “time can’t be rewritten once you’ve read it” thing really annoys me.  The conceit is that the entire adventure has already been written down in a book River wrote in the future and, rather than merely being a useful tool to get a leg up and find Rory, the book is deadly dangerous because anything read from it becomes an unalterable fixed point.  In other words, everything is currently up in the air, but if Amy reads that Rory is killed, then he’ll be killed and nothing can be done to stop it.  That’s hugely stupid to me.  1) According to canon, both the Doctor and River lie constantly, so why take her word as gospel?   2) Maybe it’s a timey-wimey thing, and even if River knows Rory really made it out okay, she has to put it in the book because she knows from the adventure that they read it in the book and worried that they were going to lose Rory.  3) Everything they actually do read in the book is vague enough that it could turn out more than one way—for instance, Amy reads, “But why do you have to break mine?” “Because Amy read it in a book,” but she doesn’t read the Doctor actually breaking River’s wrist, so who’s to say the book doesn’t go on to have River talk the Doctor out of it?  4) Why is a written description more binding than hard visual evidence, a la the Lake Silencio quandary in series 6?  If that can be faked, why not a book?

So, it makes no sense, but it’s not there to make sense.  It’s there to facilitate the tragic ending in which, after defeating the Angels, Rory is taken anyway and Amy chooses to let the Angel take her too so he can be with him.  It’s all in service of the tears and teeth-gnashing and overblown music going, “Cry, dammit!” as the Doctor begs Amy not to go.  (By the way, the whole “I’ll never be able to see you again!” thing is total bogus as well.  Even if the paradoxes and time meddling mean the Doctor can never go back to 1938 New York, why can’t he pick them up in 1939 New York, or 1938 New Jersey, or whatever time/place would be acceptably removed from the temporal epicenter?  Instead of pleading with Amy to stay, he should have been instructing her on when and where she and Rory could meet him.)  It’s a companion exit that makes me feel practically nothing, because the emotional manipulation is so blatant and thickly laid on.  Amy and Rory deserved better.

So what does work?  I like it when Rory first encounters River on his arrival to the ‘30s.  I like Amy’s determination to save Rory no matter what the laws of time say.  I like Rory’s plan to stop the Angels, and when Amy worries that he won’t come back to life if he creates a paradox by dying when he’s not supposed to, I love that he simply exclaims, “When don’t I?” I like that the Angels are acting like Angels again and the dumb “image of an Angel” stuff has been forgotten.  Finally, I like the Doctor, Amy, and Rory lounging around Central Park—too cute.  For a big “event” episode, though, there should be much more for me to hang my hat on.