The Angels Take Manhattan is another milestone episode for the Eleventh Doctor as he is forced to cope with the loss of companions for the first time. Although this is not my favourite departure episode companion, and Amy and Rory are not my favourite companions, it succeeds at the emotional content, at least better than the plot logic.
Events start off happily with the Doctor, Amy and Rory enjoying a picnic in New York in the year 2012. Amy is now wearing reading glasses, cementing the fact that she and Rory have grown old travelling with the Doctor. The team are perfectly comfortable with each other, with Amy and Rory enjoying a kiss while the Doctor acts as the gooseberry. It's certainly a reversal of their roles in series five.
But good things don't last forever. Rory goes off to get some coffees and is displaced back in time to 1938. At the same time, the Doctor reads about this in a pulp detective novel called "Melody Malone". Reading further on he discovers that River Song is the Melody Malone of the title. This book serves a similar role to the DVD Easter Egg in Blink, as a guide to events in the future of the protagonists. It is the first of many instances where Steven Moffat reuses ideas from his previous stories.
The Doctor and Amy reunite with River Song, but Rory has been transported off to a building in Winter Quays. The building is full of angels, and when the Doctor, Amy and River arrive and meet up with Rory, they discover the horrific truth.
The Weeping Angels have turned the apartments in Winter Quay into a human battery farm. People are displaced in time and drawn to the apartments. Here they are trapped and constantly displaced, as they live out their lives in the same room until he day they die, enabling the Angels to feed off the time energy. Rory is one of these victims and watches his older self die in bed. Steven Moffat has found another brilliant variation on the concept of the Weeping Angels displacing people back in time. Presumably the Angels must have to provide food to keep these people alive, and I like to imagine the Angels sneaking into restaurants at night to steal provisions for their prisoners. Amazing how no-one would spot this though.
Faced with the prospect of living the rest of his life alone, Rory decides to go on the run with Amy, in the hope that avoiding his fate would create a time paradox which could kill the Angels. Despite
their best attempts, Amy and Rory are unable to escape the Angels and are forced up onto the roof of the building. Rory decides he would rather die than live the rest of his life without Amy and gets ready to jump off the roof, but Amy does not want to live her life without Rory so she decides to jump with him. Rory and Amy jump off the roof and fall to their deaths. . This creates the necessary paradox which poisons the Angels
and resets time.
The Doctor, Amy, Rory and River are find themselves in a graveyard, back in 2012. The Doctor is convinced everything's fine, but thanks to the advanced hype of Amy and Rory's departure, the audience knows better. It's no surprise when a surviving Angel appears and zaps Rory back to 1938 again. The damage to the timeline caused by the first paradox means that the Doctor cannot return to New York in 1938. Amy decides to let the Angel send her back in time, rather than let Rory die on his own. I didn't find this particularly sad, since it repeated similar emotional beats to Amy's earlier decision not to die with Rory.
This is the first time that the Eleventh Doctor has had to cope with the grief of losing a companion, and Matt Smith plays the emotions in these scenes very well. The most child-like of Doctors is understandably upset at the idea of his companions getting old and changing. He even gives River some of his regeneration energy to heal her arm after she breaks it to escape the grip of a Weeping angel. Like Peter Pan, this Doctor wants to resist growing up. It remains to be seen whether travelling alone will make this Doctor as morose as his predecessor in time for the Christmas special.
While it was nice to see River Song again, once the Doctor arrives in 1938 she has nothing to contribute to the plot. She is here simply to be a witness to the death of her parents.
The trouble with time travel stories is that you have to pay attention, and this
means you notice more plot holes than in linear episodes. It seemed odd that the Angels zapped Rory back in time, but didn't immediately send him to Winter's Quay. This lead Rory and River into a pointless sub-plot with a man called Julius Grayle keeping a Weeping Angel imprisoned in his house. It goes nowhere, and the Angels kill Grayle before he can contribute anything worthwhile. It feels like Steven Moffat was trying to find a way to pad out the middle of episode before getting to the exciting conclusion.
The idea of the Weeping Angels bringing Statues to life is a great idea. But one that is not thoroughly explored in the episode. The Statue of Liberty only comes to life at the very end, and it never does anything cool like rampage in Manhattan. Not surprising, since it will just revert to stone if anyone looks at it.
Despite the numerous plot holes, I still enjoyed this episode. Matt Smith, Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill all put in good performances in their final story.The idea of the Weeping Angels bringing Statues to life is a great idea. But one that is not thoroughly explored in the episode. The Statue of Liberty only comes to life at the very end, and it never does anything cool like rampage in Manhattan. Not surprising, since it will just revert to stone if anyone looks at it.
As for the trailer for the Christmas episode....No idea what to think of this. All we got were brief shots of the Doctor, Richard E Grant, and the new companion. No episode title. No sign of any monster that would get kids excited. Nothing to really make me look forward to it.
Overall, this has been a pretty fun season. I didn't enjoy this episode as much as I enjoyed previous ones, but it was far from bad.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment