The Angels Take Manhattan: Ranking - 151

  The Angels Take Manhattan

(Series 7, Dr 11 with Amy, Rory and River Song, 29/9/2012, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Nick Hurran)

Rank: 151

In An Emoji:🗽

'Give me your huddled masses, your tired, your poor, 

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door a

And send you back in time to, say, 1964? 

Send these your homeless, lost, to me, 

So that I can stick them in a battery farm and eat them for my tea' 

It was always going to end up here wasn’t it? No not the Tardis crew running for their life from the 100 foot sentient version of the Statue of Liberty that no one else notices (that’s just daft), I mean of course the tragic story of Amy and Rory. It’s another ‘Amy’s Choice’ in which Amy is given the choice between effectively dying alongside the man she loves and trusting she’ll wake up beside him, not once but twice, or leaving him waiting for her as an old man living through time – and if anyone knows how impossibly hard waiting is then it’s Amy. After so many episodes of Rory sacrificing himself for her or waiting a thousand years to be reunited with her, here it’s Amy’s turn and unlike the dithering of before and wanting two different lives this time she’s sure, so sure that it breaks the Doctor’s hearts. Poetically Amy and Rory always had to live out the rest of their lives together, no matter how many times previous episodes tried to fool us by splitting them up or separate them (even this one tries it twice): they belong together in a way no pairing in this show has since Ian and Barbara back in the 1960s. It wasn’t as if Moffat could do what showrunners and script editors usually do with companions they don’t want to kill and marry them off – because they were already married. We also knew there was no way the Doctor was going to stop coming to see them for one last journey either, however much he promises himself across series seven to stay away and stop putting them in danger. Parallel worlds had been to death by his predecessor. Everyone knew they were going though and in this very story – I mean, Clara wasn’t just waiting in the wings, she’d sort-of been in the series twice already by this time – so it wasn’t exactly a surprise and there’s a funeralaic air to this episode from the opening moments that’s quite different to other stories, even though the story starts as just another walk in the park (literally given we’re in Central Park). The surprise comes from seeing just how exactly they leave and it’s as perfect a finale as two of the most beloved characters in modern Who could have had. Sometimes, with the false starts and twists and turns that make us think they’ve gotten away with it and they’re not going to do kill them off, that really works and the ending when it comes is so sudden, so horrible, just when you think everything has worked out the way it should it shocks you even more. 

 Unusually for Moffat it’s not a story that was set up months or even years in advance, but a standalone story that is refreshingly free of references to past stories. He’d known how Amy was going to leave more or less from the moment he’d written her and, as agreed when she first started, had a whole year of warning from Karen Gillan when she was thinking of leaving so as to be able to write her a proper farewell. Surprisingly though Moffat was still working on an almost entirely different script till near the end, trying out a plot idea with the Daleks that wasn’t quite working, something involving another parallel dimension as an alternative to execution. Moffat only got the idea about adding the Weeping Angels suddenly, late at night in a hotel bedroom during one of the production team’s publicity trips to New York where the series had really taken off during Matt Smith’s time in the Tardis, seeing the Statue of Liberty from his bedroom window and being reminded of the Weeping Angels. It seems odd that he hadn’t considered them before: Moffat created lots of new monsters and myths to add to the Dr Who dressing up box but the Angels were by far his most popular and recognisable and Amy’s first story (as recorded) had been based around them. They offer the perfect get-out clause that he needed: a means to have Amy and Rory cut off from the Tardis and leading very different lives, together, that wasn’t quite so sad as killing them both (with a sort of half-explanation for why the Tardis can’t simply go back and pick them up again ‘without exploding half of New York’). 

 While other showrunners and script writers tease us that they’re going to kill off people we love that’s too final for Moffat, a writer who has an odd relationship with death. Other writers kill their characters off as a matter of course (especially the incidental characters we never get to know) – it’s a normal part of life and therefore a normal part of drama, however horrific that might be. But Moffat cares too much for the people he writes for and his catchphrase, as early as his first Dr Who story on television, is ‘Everybody lives!’ He can’t bear the thought of killing characters he created who seem so very real to him. There’s always a second, third or fourth chance – and that’s just for the villains, never mind the main characters. Notably this is the first of two times something nasty suddenly happens to a main character on an ordinary day when they were just crossing the road (the other is Danny Pink): did this happen to Moffat for real? Is he still grieving and processing loss, so can’t bring himself to do this to characters of his own creation? Even his aliens aren’t the murdering, massacring types. It’s a far more common trope in the Moffat era (even in scripts he didn’t write, but did plan and supervise) to have aliens that come to help but get it ‘wrong’, the nanogenes of ‘The Empty Child’, the Teselecta robots of the ‘Day Of The Moon’ arc, the ship’s sickbay of ‘Curse Of The Empty Spot’, the crack in the wall of series five which seems to kill people only for them to be brought back to life again. The ones that are cruel are more interested in enslaving people instead, like The Silence or Even the Weeping Angels, scary as they are, don’t kill you – they just feed off you, sending you back through time. Sometimes Moffat can go so far out of his way to save characters that it just gets daft, but here creating The Weeping Angels gives him a get out of jail free card, so it’s a real surprise he didn’t think of it sooner and that it took seeing the Statue of Liberty to see it (although the idea that no one else seemed to notice it get up and move and scow, or the idea that there’s never been a moment since it was erected in 1886 when there wasn’t someone looking at it to hold it in a ‘quantum lock’, even in the dead of night. I’d love to see a ‘missing story’ about what happened in France that made them want to ship a killer statue out to their American cousins too – although it does explain why France suddenly decided to give America a present on their bicentenary, which always did seem weird to me). 

 Even the passing of time seems to make Moffat go a bit queasy. We pick Amy and Rory up when they’re meant to be much older, the Doctor confused as to why Amy might need reading glasses and looking shocked when he notices the lines under her eyes (it’s not specified on screen but Amy and Rory are 34 now in the script, dating this some thirteen years after ‘The Eleventh Hour’, just as that story was dated thirteen years after the Tardis first crash-landed into her garden and the Doctor first met ‘Amy junior’, meaning the Doctor’s been in her life for half of it by now). It doesn’t come off very well on screen (those few lines are hard to see and both Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill look a lot younger than their years anyway – even made up with prosthetics to seem like an old man Rory seems younger than he should), but Amy’s choice whether to follow Rory in jumping and creating a ‘time paradox’ so they don’t grow old apart is only half the story – the other half is about how everyone around the Doctor grows older while timelord genetics mean he stays forever young (particularly this one ‘with the face of a twelve-year-old’ as River Song says at one point) and how he can’t bear endings to anything, wanting the people he loves to live forever, even tearing the last pages out of books routinely so they can live forever in his mind (Moffat’s idea for the Doctor is very much based on ‘Peter Pan’, with this story closely modelled on the ending when Wendy decides she needs to grow up and leaves him, although in this instance it’s not by choice). The idea of Rory being alone for all those years is meant to be far scarier to us as an audience that just being zapped dead. The short goodbye or the long goodbye then – Moffat has a hard time with both. Notably we never actually find out what happens to Amy and Rory, even though Amy gets an entire ‘coda’ written at the end of her book and could have written anything: all she says is that she and Rory have a ‘nice life’ and then offers the Doctor some life advice. It’s frustrating (we want to know what they did, beyond getting books published – something that would have been near impossible in 1930s America before self-publishing incidentally – how Amy copes in a sexist era when she’d be very much ‘Mrs Rory Williams’ rather than he being ‘Mr Amy Pond’, how they’d have kept their mouths shut over the ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’ time traveller effect of knowing what will happen before it happens and ‘accidentally’ creating music that hasn’t been written yet. The DVD ‘extra’ adds in an adopted son who comes to visit his Grandad but even that doesn’t tell us as much as we want to know. Oh and Rory bought another trowel, apparently), but entirely in keeping: this is a fairytale ending free of the harsh realities of life where we don’t have to think about them getting old all over again. 

 There are other neat bits in this story too. The idea of the Weeping Angels creating a ‘battery farm’ of Humans to draw time energy off is gloriously creepy and wholly in keeping with what we’ve seen them do before. The location filming is stunning and while it seems odd the Doctor has basically taken his friends out for a day trip in their own time when they could have just hopped on an aeroplane, rather than travelling across time and space, it’s fitting in the Dr Who chronology that the Ponds should end up here, in the country that took them to their hearts so much (it’s hilarious that Moffat should be writing their ending, just when they are at a convention where Dr Who had been such a big hit and had never been more popular in America, but then that’s the parallel worlds of writers for you, always a year or so ahead of filming). It’s nice to have shots of New York in the present rather than a cat hospital in the far future or invaded by Daleks in the past, too and for once the main cast are actually there, not just a skeleton camera crew. It’s also a nod tip of the hat to a series that Karen Gillan did for BBC3 in between her first two series of Dr Who where she played model Jean Shrimpton in the drama ‘We’ll Take Manhattan’ (itself a riff on 1983 film ‘The Muppets Take Manhattan’, which Moffat clearly knew given the similarities between the ‘is it a real wedding or part of a show?’ between Kermit and Miss Piggy with the Doctor and River’s ‘is it a real wedding or something that happened in a parallel universe that no longer exists?’) The idea of River giving the Doctor the location and time fix for the Angels. 

Some parts, though, are just stupid and seem worse the more you think about it. The idea of the Doctor reading a book written by River via future-Amy-in-the-past is a neat one but it’s not really a cohesive part of the plot; usually Moffat story-arcs arcs are planned at and unwound at great length but in this story the Doctor just picks it up and finds Rory mentioned inside. Even making sure that Amy/River write all this in the future don’t even begin to explain why he came to be reading it that particular day – or why they couldn’t have written an explanatory note on the first page saying ‘if you happen to be the Doctor reading this get everyone back in the Tardis and go home right now under pain of death’. One of the other big messages of Moffat’s era is ‘spoilers’, of time travellers knowing things out of sequence, and a book should in theory be the perfect postmodern example of that: if its’ telling your story you can’t peek at the ending or you’ll be trapped forever, without the chance of free will. ‘The Mind Robber’ did something similar back in 1968, where fiction became fact after being read. But that was in a surreal fantasy and where everything was fictional because real time and space didn’t exist. This is New York in our era – not a parallel world, this one. The same rules don’t apply. Yowzahs, it makes my head hurt just thinking about it (and since when was ‘yowzahs’ a Doctor catchphrase? He uses it three times this story, out of the blue and never uses it again on screen). For a time you wonder if you’re going to get a really different kind of story, like ‘The Mind Robber’ where anything fictional gets turned into fact, but no: Amy and Rory were set to die on this day and so they do, even though it starts off as just as ordinary day. Instead these things happen because they’re, if you forgive the Weeping Angel pun, set in stone like that. It’s all a bit fatalistic for a series of open possibilities like Dr Who for me and at odds with how the rest of the series works; I mean, the Doctor could just stop reading the book and send it into a black hole so nobody could ever read it. This also makes a mess of just what exactly River knows: she understands enough to encourage Amy to travel back after Rory at the end and that she’s written an epilogue for the Doctor, but at other times she’s either a really good actor or utterly clueless as to what’s going on (the entire story could have been avoided if River had just marched Rory straight out of the building instead of hanging around admiring the Ming vases). She’s not exactly immune to breaking set time events and set fates given that she once shot at Hitler (!), and while they try to write into the script how a ‘time paradox’ means the Tardis can never land in the same place again, can’t the Doctor leave a message for Amy and Rory to get out of the state and go somewhere else at a certain time? He’s done worse things to the ripples of time after all. Also, how come River doesn’t just use her real name if she wants the Doctor to sort-of know what’s going on? 

 Elsewhere the cherub angels aren’t as clever or as scary as their gargoyle counterparts either and the Angels don’t seem as much of a threat all round as in their previous encounters – it’s after seeing their previous two stories this one scares you, not necessarily because of what happens in this one. Rory being trapped in the basement being surrounded by statues, not knowing what the hell is going on (because he wasn’t with Amy when she met them – although you think it would have come up in conversation somewhere in thirteen years of chats about the Doctor), while the audience at home know he’s leaving the show too, ought to be one of the scariest scenes going, but instead it’s just ho-hum. The ever-wonderful Mike McShane, star of ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ (and valuable as an actor who’d kept his American accent but who was living in Britain full-time so didn’t have to travel), also disappears halfway through the story despite being ‘responsible’ for most of what happens, which is a real McShame. That’s a bigger problem with this story too: it spends so long setting itself up for a different kind of story, full of the mystery of who this collector is and what he’s been up to, and then just drops him from the plot to concentrate on Amy and Rory. It seems odd, in retrospect that this story wasn’t extended into a two-parter with even more twists and turns and more of an opportunity to get the book at the heart of the action rather than just dropping it in the way it does. This would also have enabled us to have the moving scenes (actually written by an on-form Chris Chibnall) of Rory’s dad discovering what’s happened to his son and daughter-in-law, unforgivably shunted into being just a DVD extra because there wasn’t space for it (they should have found space: seriously a lot of the opening twenty minutes could have been trimmed to include this, no bother). Plus I know I keep mentioning it but seriously, the idea of a Weeping Angel Statue of Liberty is the sort of thing you come up with while drunk or exhausted and somebody else in the production team goes ‘hahaha I love that joke, but obviously you’re not going to do that seriously are you? That would be utterly stupid!’ It doesn’t even look good, as if the CGI computer experts figured it was such a bad idea it was only going to get cut I the edit anyway. The biggest problem, though, is that as moving as this story is, we’re not on the floor sobbing out hearts out the way we were for Rose and Donna – and honestly I’m not sure why, because the scenes of Amy joining Rory as he balances awkwardly on a building ready to jump to their deaths and the one of Amy steeling herself to go back in time leaving a broken Doctor crumpling to the floor are devastating as individual scenes when they come up at random on my youtube feed. In context, though, they’re the payoff for a story that isn’t emotional so much as logical, so busy moving pieces around a board and being clever that it appeals more to our heads than our hearts. 

 Even so, for all the nitpicking, those are just details: the general sweep of the story, its sombre tone, the way the end breaks your heart just as everything seems to be alright at last (I never ever look at names on gravestones anymore, just in case), all of it is so well handled written and performed perfectly by everybody that it’s as excellent way to see two of Dr Who’s most beloved companions out as you could wish for. Even having half-guessed a lot of what was going to happen (with a plot that’s ultimately simpler than Moffat’s usual finales, for all the twists and turns) it’s all done so well that you get caught up in the action and only think about the plotholes later. This isn’t some half-hearted farewell, like Dodo leaving off-screen or a companion suddenly getting fed up like Tegan or Martha, it’s a true ending in all the best meanings of the word that feels all the bigger for how small the ripples that cause it are, the perfect way of giving Amy and Rory a whole new life while ending theirs with us. I’m even quite envious actually – they get to live through the 1960s in their old age! In New York! I mean, they could fork out for an apartment at the Dakota next door to John Lennon and Paul Simon (maybe even prevent John getting murdered – how about it Big Finish?!) As much as I’d miss moaning about forgotten stories on twitter and my Dr Who DVD collection (not to mention the Whoniverse on BBC i-player) that still sounds like a huge improvement on life to me. Where’s a gargoyle at this time of night when you need one?!… 

 POSITIVES + The moment when Amy and Rory ‘solve’ everything the first time round, by leaping to their deaths from the Empire State Building, is so poignant and powerfully played. The pair of them genuinely expect to die in that moment, try to talk each other out of it then do it anyway, together, to save everyone else, despite trying to call the other’s bluff and save the other. That’s Amy and Rory in a nutshell, trying to save each other while trying to do the right thing, always. The Doctor doesn’t save the day in this one – they do. That’s one hell of a way to leave any series and even though they survive the jump, that doesn’t change the fact that we know they’re both leaving this series and totally assume that’s how they’re going to die, splattered on the pavement. The slow motion shot of them falling to their doom is gloriously done too. Heavy stuff for a Saturday teatime.

 NEGATIVES - By contrast the Doctor-River relationship in this story is just awkward and so out of kilter with what we see before and since even though they are, in their own way, trying to protect each other too – admittedly there’s big stakes involved in this story, which is why their bickering is at a peak, but isn’t there always? The scene where River breaks her arm and tries to hide it from the Doctor just because she wants him to believe in ‘miracles’ is just horrid. Their relationship is a loving and honest one, for all their living it in reverse to each other; it’s so unlike the 11th Doctor to expect miracles of River Song to spare him pain and even more uncharacteristic of River to go along with it simply because ‘he doesn’t like endings’. This is the 11th Doctor, he’s seen more suffering than anyone – a broken arm is nothing. Plus, sorry but you can’t use powers of regeneration to mend someone’s broken wrist otherwise companions would be getting healed all the time (just think of Bill in ‘The Doctor Falls’ for one). I don’t quite know what that scene was for dramatically either – we’ve already seen how hard the Doctor has hard to harden his heart so it doesn’t break. There’s absolutely no reason for him to get cross at River in that moment and demand she finds a way to change the future. Plus does it change the future? It’s not in the book either way. River seems to recover mighty quickly too it has to be said – if she’d been in plaster for ‘her’ next story (but previous for the Doctor and us - ‘The Wedding Of River Song’ as it happens) then it might have been clever . Instead it’s just odd, a last minute attempt to ratchet up emotional tension in a story that was already swimming in it (and as an aside – yes another one – why does she go to such lengths of telling the Doctor he’ll be there whenever and wherever he needs her, because Amy told her to look after him – and then the pair don’t meet until he’s changed faces. The plot emphasises this bit so much it feels like it’s going to be a story arc but the only time River turns up during the whole of Clara’s time on the series is as a hologram sent from her future on the planet ‘Library’). 

 BEST QUOTE: Rory ‘I always wanted to visit the Statue of Liberty - I guess she just got impatient!’

Prequels/Sequels: The novel ‘Angels Kiss: A Melody Malone Mystery’ (2012) is a short 40-page spin-off book by Justin Richards published as both a standalone piece and as part of the anthology ‘Summer Falls’, written from the point of view of River Song (under her pseudonym) as she investigates weeping angel attacks in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. It’s a bit of an odd read and the detective clichés quickly become grating (as does the innuendos) but there are some nicely spooky passages and you learn a lot of extra back story about how the Weeping Angels took over New York. Ale Kingston wrote her own sort-of sequel ‘Ruby’s Curse’ (2021) set in the same time period and again starring River under her pseudonym. No Weeping Angels this time, but lots of Easter Egg references for fans to spot and the actress gets how River ‘speaks’ bang on, perhaps unsurprisingly after playing her for so long. To date the book the Doctor actually reads in ‘Manhattan with Amy’s afterword has yet to exist in ‘our’ universe, despite being one of the most obvious spin-offs of the lot!

Additionally ‘PS’ is the scene that was written to be the coda of ‘Manhattan’ which they ran out of time to both shoot and include in an episode that was over-running anyway. Rather than film it with the actors it’s an animation. Uniquely, with Arthur Williams acting as Rory on the voiceover. Amy of course had no family to leave behind once she followed Rory to 1920s New York but Rory really misses his dad. He finds out what happened in much the same way as ‘Blink’, when his grandson Anthony knocks at the door with a letter from Rory which reveals that he’s the son they adopted back in the 1930s whose now quite elderly himself.  It’s very poignantly and sad, though undoubtedly missing a lot by not being filmed: understandably Mark Williams wasn’t going to come back for a short scene like this but it’s a real shame that we can’t see the reaction to this, except in some line drawings. It does make for a proper ending to the Ponds story though and gives Rory closure the same way Amy had by writing to the Doctor. Included on the series 7 DVD and blu-ray sets.
Finally there’s ‘Rory’s Story’, an eight minute short written by Neil Gaiman and performed  by a 1930s-looking Arthur Darvill in lockdown and uploaded to the Dr Who youtube channel that carries on the story further. He’s leaving a video message for baby Anthony the day before the Ponds’ adoption on ‘the only working smart-phone in the world’. Like all these lockdown extras it’s really a tale of fortitude and resilience in the fate of feeling hopeless. Rory’s summary of the events of his life is really quite funny (‘I was a plastic centurion waiting for your mum about 2000 years then the universe ended then  died again, then we were married, then I was shot and drowned, then I was rescued by a mermaid and your mum gave me CPR’). Rory is then interrupted by Karen Gillan adding a voice overdub and yelling at him to ‘stop faffing about and come and paint the baby’s room…NOW!’ It’s all very in character and makes the Ponds feel as if they really do have new adventures we don’t get to see.

One of those adventures happens to be with the 11^th Doctor again, the comic strip ‘Endgame’ (part of the series ‘Prisoners Of Time’ which featured all then-twelve Doctors somewhere) thanks to a ‘chronal trail’ that leads the Tardis to places she wouldn’t normally be able to go. Sadly Amy and Rory’s reunion (and meeting of Clara) is cut short by the main plot, when an evil future version of Adam Mitchell (from ‘Dalek’) teams up with The Master and Autons to fight the Doctor.

previous ‘The Power Of Three’ next ‘The Snowmen’