11.34: The Angels Take Manhattan

In which Amy, at long last, makes her choice.

Broadcast: September 2012

Watched: January 2022

“Time can be rewritten.” “Not once you’ve read it.” Or more prosaically, “I hate endings.”

Completely, existentially terrifying, full of absolute headf*cks. The Doctor reading a story that turns out to be about them. Rory finding his older self in his own room in Winter Quay (great name for a sinister apartment block, that). The angel gripping River’s arm and her having to break her wrist to escape because Amy read ahead. The angel babies! The gravestone! “I’m sorry, Rory. But you just died.” It is hilarious that, in his last episode, Rory dies twice and gets zapped back in time twice. Entirely deliberate, too, I think: “You think you’ll just come back to life?” “When don’t I?”

It’s a brilliant watch. Yet it’s also weirdly forgotten and uninfluential, considering it writes out such major long-running characters. People seem to obsess over the bits that don’t quite make sense: the idea of the Statue of Liberty as a giant angel, even when there must be no point when no one is looking at it (they’ve clearly chosen the visual over the plot logic); the claim that the ending marks a permanent separation because of time distortions something something (“I’ll never be able to see you again!”), even though surely the Doctor could just travel to Montauk in 1939 and get on a train or something. 

Oh, and it’s got a double magic suicide in it, of course. Worse: Rory asks Amy to push.

Also, it doesn’t fit the story that this season seems to have been telling, of Amy and Rory just outgrowing the Doctor and deciding to live a normal life. That’s been set up for half a dozen episodes now, all the way back to The God Complex really... but we get a completely different ending. Maybe Gillan and Darvill asked for something more final? Or maybe Moffat just wanted the more dramatic ending? 

It does feel right that Amy ultimately chooses Rory over the Doctor – that’s sort of the story that they’ve been heading for since Amy’s Choice at the absolute earliest, and Moffat is ultimately a sentimentalist, who believes in the idea of overwhelming, life-changing love. It’s just a shame there’s a load of nonsense about the rules of time to get to this ending. Also, it feels kind of wrong that there’s a scene where the Doctor is talking about how impossible escape is, while it’s River that cheers them on. 

The very ending, though, Amy reading her letter to the Doctor over that final shot of Amelia in the garden hearing the TARDIS arrive and smiling, is absolutely perfect.

One of those that’s so close to being brilliant that the bits it gets wrong are really annoying.

Other thoughts:

• This is the third episode running to start with a voiceover, what’s with that? (Love the noir thing, though.) Less vexingly, it’s the second of the season to be set in the US. The Smith seasons are probably the highpoint for American fandom so far aren’t they?

• The title is clearly a deliberate correction for the fact it should have been The Daleks Take Manhattan, too. 

• “I don’t like them. They make your eyes look all line-y.” Bastard.

• “How does that work?” “I don’t know, we’re in New York.”

• River’s book calls Rory the skinny guy, which... feels weird. He’s in decent shape but he’s hardly Tennant. 

• I love that there’s a bit where you think an angel has been watching the Doctor in a sinister fashion, but no it’s after Grayle (who will always be the guy from Who’s Line Is It Anyway, in my mind). Sinister collectors are a bit of a genre meme aren’t they? This, Dalek, I think more than one in Trek?

• I like the way the story telling sort of uses the physicality of the high rise, and thus of New York: people go up in the lift and then can’t get down again, because it’s easy to guard the only ways down and keep them dark. It drives escapees up, and thus further into trouble. It is very nice of the angels to provide rooms in their battery farm with name tags. They’re considerate predators.

• The fake out ending where you think they’ve escaped is a bloody cruel joke, but it has one very odd line in it, from River: “They’re going to get terribly bored hanging round here all day”. Does she know what’s about to happen?

• Shortly before the ending, we get a scene of River flying the TARDIS while the Doctor mourns. Then he remembers they were her parents. That feels like a very telling comment on both the various relationships in play AND gender.

•  Amy calls River Melody :(