Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond gets the send-off she deserves in an episode featuring the return of the Weeping Angels.
Warning: Article contains spoilers.
We’ve known this season of Doctor Who was leading up to the Ponds’ deaths for a while now, but that doesn’t make their tragic sendoff in the mid-season finale, “The Angels Take Manhattan” any less devastating. Whovians, get your tissues ready.
The episode, written by showrunner Steven Moffat (Sherlock) opens on a noir New York City detective narrating as he goes to work for some bigwig who thinks the city’s statues can move. Yeah, right, our uber-American narrator thinks, just before he finds himself in a creepy hotel chock full of Weeping Angels — terrifying aliens who turn to stone when you look at them, but rapidly attack when you look away, even to blink.
As we know from the previous Angels episodes, they feed off of the time energy released by sending a person back in time to live out their lives and eventually die. Our detective stumbles into a room that houses an older version of himself — oh no! Then he goes up to the roof and is faced with a snarling Statue of Liberty next to the building, in the episode’s most ridiculous and unfortunate plot point.
And then, suddenly, the Doctor! And the Ponds! Ah, all is good.
The Doctor (Matt Smith, Bert & Dickie) reads a sexy detective book in Central Park next to a bespectacled Amy (Karen Gillan, In Love with Coward) and always-aloof Rory (Arthur Darvill, Robin Hood). Amy’s glasses come up in conversation, and we find out she’s wearing them to hide some new lines on her face. In one of the episodes many final instances of foreshadowing and thoughts about age, the essentially immortal Doctor seems to remember human mortality.
The Doctor tears out the book’s final page, proclaiming, “I always rip out the last page of a book. Then it doesn’t have to end. I hate endings.” So do we, as fans watching a finale.
But wait! The book seems to be describing current events surrounding the Doctor! And Rory, who’s gone off to get coffee, is nabbed by an Angel and taken into the past! Where we find out the book was written by River Song (Alex Kingston, Upstairs Downstairs)!
Rory has been transported to the New York City of April 3, 1938, River tells him, and the TARDIS can’t travel there because of all the time distortion surrounding the Angels. She got there using her trusty old vortex manipulator, which is promptly forgotten. They go to the bigwig’s house.
Meanwhile, in a present-day graveyard, Amy pushes the Doctor to read ahead in the book to find out what to do next. But the Doctor refuses, saying, “Once we know it’s coming, it’s fixed … it’s written in stone,” as the camera pans away to reveal Rory’s tombstone. Amy reads that the Doctor will have to break something and he is infuriated, knowing he has no control over that aspect of the future now.
The Doctor is able to get a lock on River’s location in time and space by traveling to 221 B.C. China, of course, and he and Amy shoot off to join their respective wife and husband. When they get there, Rory’s been thrown in the bigwig’s basement with a bunch of baby Angels and River’s been grabbed by a chained-up Angel elsewhere.
The Doctor deduces the “something” to be broken is River’s wrist and determines to find a workaround. If she doesn’t break her wrist, then their future isn’t bound by what’s written in River’s book.
Rory’s disappeared, Amy tells the Doctor, before suggesting he read chapter titles as a way of cheating the system. So he does, and he finds out where Rory’s gone. But he also sees a chapter titled, “Amelia’s Last Farewell.” Moffat!
The Doctor, incensed, makes off to find Rory. River soon joins him, wrist unbroken. So Amy will live after all! Except, wait, nope, turns out it is broken. Moffat!
The Doctor, Amy and River head over to the hotel from the episode’s open and find Rory. The reunited family heads upstairs and finds a room with an old Rory inside, who soon dies.
Turns out the hotel is a kind of battery farm for the Angels, full of people displaced in time. If our heroes could manage to help Rory escape, though, it would create a paradox that would poison all the Angels and possibly kill them. But they would be chasing him forever.
Rory makes it up to the roof, sees the seemingly unmoving (and shockingly pointless) Statue of Liberty Angel and decides to jump to his death to create the paradox. As he’s climbing onto the ledge, Amy arrives. She berates him: “You think you’ll just come back to life?” To which he responds, “When don’t I!”
After some soul-searching, they decide the only thing they can do is jump together. This is it. It’s really happening. The Doctor arrives and screams at them to stop, but they jump. In one of the most beautiful and emotional scenes of Smith’s tenure, Amy and Rory fall in slow motion as the Doctor screams and cries looking over the roof. Fade to white.
But hey! Amy and Rory wake up back in the current New York graveyard as the Doctor and River are cleaning the TARDIS nearby. Everyone walks to enter the TARDIS when Rory notices his name on the headstone from earlier. He stops to read it and POOF! He gets taken by a straggler Angel who’s snuck up behind him!
The TARDIS can’t travel back to the NYC of the past, because the time energy would feedback and blow up the whole city, or something.
So Amy chooses to sacrifice herself again, and willingly gets poofed by the Angel. The gravestone adds a name: “Amelia Williams.” Touching, and heartbreaking. It’s the first time she’s been called a Williams. The Doctor is as devastated as the fans.
River somehow sends the book back to Amy to get it published, giving her the chance to write an afterword, which, of course, is the very same last page the Doctor ripped out earlier. He runs to read it, crying as he does.
Amy writes to him telling him to go talk to a little girl named Amelia, who’s waiting patiently for the return of the madman in a box … and all of the tears fall out of your face.
It’s a thoughtful and well-deserved ending, even if the Doctor — and we fans — hate endings. Just rip my heart out of my chest, Moffat. The time had come for the Ponds, though, and this season had buttered us up emotionally. Jenna-Louise Coleman proved herself more than capable in the season opener, and I’m excited to see how she livens up the show when she rejoins the Doctor in the Christmas special.
Tidbits
— The Angels make noise when they move now? Alright, Moffat, how much are you going to retcon your own characters?
— Kingston was “packing cleavage that would fell an ox at 20 feet,” as the book reads. Yowzah!
— In a nice detail, River tells the Doctor she’s been pardoned from prison, where she had been for murdering the Doctor last season, because all references to the Doctor in the universe have been deleted. That sacrificing of some of his own mythology seems like a turn from the dangerous “Time Lord Victorious” mentality of plots past.
— In another nice detail, the Doctor heals River’s broken wrist with a bit of his regeneration energy, a costly maneuver that enrages her. Are the show runners setting up an eventual final ending to the series?
— Rory’s second, surprise death was one of the biggest “WTF” moments of the whole show. I’m still outraged.
king@umdbk.com
