Doctor Who Review: "The Angels Take Manhattan" (Series 7 Episode 5)

p00s689k Doctor Who Review: The Angels Take Manhattan (Series 7 Episode 5)

As a standalone episode, The Angels Take Manhattan is certainly impressive. Moffat once again makes tremendous use of the Weeping Angels, exploiting their unique abilities to create a plausible trap for Amy and Rory. While I maintain that Amy and Rory’s departure feels sudden on the whole, I have no narrative issues with how the situation is handled here. The angels have been so well established at this point that I have no trouble questioning the boundaries of their powers; that they could form such a tight temporal circle around Amy and Rory, just through the ability to send them back in time, seems like a proper, insurmountable obstacle. The Doctor has to appear powerless for this scenario to work, and he does. From a narrative standpoint, Moffat achieves his goals.

The ‘Melody Malone’ plot device, meanwhile, was absolutely ingenious, the kind of crazy, cerebral puzzle only Moffat could create. The hour has a lot of fun cutting from the Doctor reading about the action, to the action actually occurring, and the book is integral in establishing the concept of circularity. It is inevitable, in time travel, that enough tinkering will set certain events in stone, and the book’s presence was a firm reminder – to us as much as the Doctor – of this sad truth.

In the end, my feelings on The Angels Take Manhattan are thoroughly mixed, and I suspect they always will be. The episode itself provides a strong conclusion to two beloved characters, and works spectacularly in a vacuum, but it does not feel right to me when I consider everything that came before. I believe Moffat ultimately kept Amy and Rory on the show too long, zooming past at least one good stopping point and writing himself into a corner from which he could not entirely escape. There are many good ideas on display here, as there always are, but the hour does not satisfy me as a loyal viewer of the show.

But none of this tarnishes Amy and Rory’s legacy for me, and it does not deaden my excitement for the next batch of episodes. Though it is tough to imagine any other companions travelling inside the Eleventh Doctor’s TARDIS, we know upcoming co-star Jenna Louise-Coleman plays wonderfully opposite Smith, and I am extremely excited to see her shake up the Doctor’s normal dynamics. This chapter of Doctor Who history did not close perfectly, or even particularly well, but a new era will soon begin, and I am eager to see where it leads.

Read previous DOCTOR WHO – Series 7 Reviews:

#1 – Asylum of the Daleks

#2 – Dinosaurs on a Spaceship

#3 – A Town Called Mercy

#4 – The Power Of Three

Follow author Jonathan Lack on Twitter @JonathanLack.

Rosemary

Colonel? I think you mean Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Jonathan-Lack/100000619690152 Jonathan Lack
  
  Darnit! I can’t believe I disrespected the good Brigadier like that. Total brain slip. Thanks for pointing it out. It is now fixed.
Ben

I disagree. You’re angry that they’re story ended abruptly. There was no build up. I think that was the point. The Doctor left them last season but couldn’t leave them forever. He kept coming back to them and that came back to bite him in the butt. The Ponds kept traveling with him under his trust only for him to fail again. The Ponds’ emotional arc was that they chose the Doctor life. And that lead to this. It was abrupt. And sudden. And that’s how it’s supposed to feel. They were ripped away from the Doctor. That’s what he and us as viewers were supposed to feel. And yes, we don’t know if they lived a happy life. But it’s open to us to figure out. We, like the Doctor, are to rely on Amy’s words. And hope that they lived happy. That’s the tragedy in it, that we don’t know for sure. Especially when River told her about not letting him know about the damage, she wouldn’t have written about it being bad even if it was. And that was the point, for us to feel just a bit unsure. Also there was the theme of the Doctor becoming darker due to being alone all the time as the Ponds were on and off, like River. And this I realized thru this episode is meant to lead into his need for a new companion so that he’s never alone. That was the other theme, he can’t be alone and should find someone else.

The previous 4 episodes didn’t build up to this. It built up that they would stay with the Doctor and see more worlds, and that was the point. That a result of that led them to this abrupt end. And this provided more finality than the God Complex, while also ending it with them being together.
- Taher Kathawala
  
  *their
Jacki Whitford

I also disagree. In reality, people we love are taken from us by random acts of violence every day. I thought this episode was brilliantly done. Amy first met River when they encountered the angels, and Amy left River the same way. Like Sally Barrow, Amy lived loved (Rory) happily till then end of her days. I feel absolute joy in that Amy and Rory were able to live out their lives together. I was also happy to see that River is pardoned and free to travel the universe. I truly wish River Song had her own spinoff adventure show. That would be exciting and hilarious. The point driven home with every companion is that the Doctor should never travel alone. And that sets us up for the next companion.
- Fredrick Beondo
  
  This may be a bit out of left field, but that whole ‘the Doctor should not travel alone’ first struck me with the ending arc of sorts of the Tennant era, after finally saving Donna Noble from having her mind implode and sending the Time War back to whence it came…’The Waters of Mars’, where he decides to save everyone because of his own self-obsessing ‘Timelord Triumphant’ and then the commander commits suicide rather than change history. You can see in Tennant that the Doctor realized he overstepped his bounds, and I attributed that to the idea that he hadn’t gone so long without a companion since he first arrived in the new series.
  
  It seems he needs a companion to give him an opposing viewpoint or at least someone to bounce his crazy ideas off of, and in their own way, I’d say Amy and Rory were combinedly the best companion the Doctor has ever had, because even they didn’t totally agree and their love was always just such a confusing issue for the Doctor, though in his own way he loved them so, else why would he fight the fact Amy was right that she HAD to let the Angel send her back to Rory, knowing full well there was no alternative?
  
  I won’t say it was the way I’d have liked to see them leave, even if in the end they did get what they always wanted, to be together until the end…now for Ms. Coleman, who I had hoped would come aboard as the poor space stewardess with the endless souffles who mistook herself for a Dalek because the Doctor would grab her before the crash, even if that meant resetting the end of Asylum and they all remember him again…
Dale

I too respectfully disagree that there was no arc. Amy and Rory are two individuals more committed to each other than to any other option. We’ve seen this emerge throughout the series. As Amy says before jumping off the building, this is marriage. She won’t live without Rory. They love each other deeply and get to prove it. I gain some solace that they are back in another time TOGETHER. It doesn’t matter to them what point in time it is. And, due to the way the Angels zap people without erasing their current history, they and the Doctor get to keep their past experiences as we know them.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Jonathan-Lack/100000619690152 Jonathan Lack
  
  As I say in the article, that’s been done before. Doing the exact same thing Moffat and other writers have done with characters countless times before is not insightful or revelatory enough to be the final note, for me at least. To each their own.
Taher Kathawala

I think Amy and Rory are strong characters… so important in the life of the eleventh doctor. The compassion he feels for Amy especially is unrivaled by any of his other incarnations with any of other companions. They may not be as iconic as other companions… but the relationship between Amy and the Doctor (and the rare conflicts with Rory) is forged from the relationship of a father and a daughter. Fiercely protective of each other, but also allowing a degree of freedom (while Rory feels the classic jealousy that a beta male may feel.)

Their send-off IS too abrupt. It’s been built up in episode after episode… but, I dare to say. a, “two-parter,” may have been useful in this situation. Part 1, introduce the dilemma and put the characters in some sticky situations… early in part 2, begin finding solutions and towards the end sending Amy and Rory off… with a bang.

The Weeping Angels were a great concept… but I must stress on the were. This episode was like a machine gun. Came in dilemma solution disappearance problem. As grammatically in-accurate that last sentence was, I think it captures how quickly the episode went by.

I think Moffatt should have used a different concept for their send-off and saved the Weeping Angels for another day.

On the plus side, the fact that it was a random act of violence on the part of the Weeping Angels shows that the Doctor was making the wrong judgement in coming back to take them on more adventures… deserting them (although leaving a person with an apartment and car is hardly deserting) may have been in their best interest. Moreover, it shows how people close to you may be ripped from you at any second and there’s nothing you can do about it. This brings the Doctor closer to the reality of human life and helps make him feel the sad difficulties that a regular human who doesn’t know the course of time feels.

All in all… good, but could have been better.