In which the Doctor, Amy and Rory visit present day New York. They are relaxing in Central Park. Whilst Rory goes to fetch coffee, Amy reads aloud to the Doctor a detective novel - Melody Malone: Private Eye in Old New York Town. The Doctor feigns disinterest, but then borrows it from her. He first tears out the last page, as he has a dislike of endings.
They are surprised when the narrative of the book starts to mirror what they are currently experiencing. Rory is suddenly transported back in time, finding himself in the Park in the middle of the night when it had been broad daylight. He is confronted by River Song, and learns that it is 1938. Before she can explain what is happening, they are abducted by some armed men and bundled into a car.
In the present, the Doctor and Amy read of this, and so head for the TARDIS. It is unable to go directly to its destination due to massive temporal disturbances. It arrives in a graveyard overlooking the city. Amy fails to spot a gravestone with Rory's name on it.
In 1938, Rory and River have been brought to the home of a wealthy gangster named Julius Grayle. He has a morbid fear of statues. Earlier, he had employed a private detective named Sam Garner to go to an apartment block called Winter Quay. There, Garner found a flat in which his own elderly self was living. The building was infested with Weeping Angels. When he tried to escape he was forced up to the roof, where he was confronted by the Statue of Liberty, also an Angel.
Grayle has Rory locked in the basement, as it is River who he needs. He knows that she has knowledge of the Angels. Rory is attacked by cherub statues. Grayle shows River his prized possession - a captured Angel, which is chained up in his study. He has been torturing it, and now lives in fear of other Angels coming to rescue it and take revenge. The Angel seizes River by the wrist.
Rory, meanwhile, has found himself transported by the cherubs to Winter Quay. Not knowing why he is there, he enters the building.
The TARDIS materialises in 1938 with great difficulty after the Doctor discovers that the presence of so many Angels has created the temporal disturbance. The Doctor goes back in time to leave a message on what will be an antique Chinese vase which Grayle will later acquire - a message which will allow River to arrange a homing signal for the TARDIS to lock on to. It arrives in Grayle's home and the disturbance knocks him out. The Doctor warns Amy to stop reading the book, as it will commit them to what is says. If it is in the novel then it happened, and they will have no control over events.
The Doctor is forced to break River's wrist to free her from the grip of the captured Angel. Whilst Amy cannot read the novel, she can look at the chapter headings to get a clue as to Rory's whereabouts, and this points them to Winter Quay.
He, meanwhile, has found an apartment where an older version of himself is lying on his deathbed. The Doctor, Amy and River arrive. Meanwhile, back at his mansion, Grayle comes to and is horrified to see the main doors wide open, and he discovers that the Angels have entered...
The Doctor realises that the apartment block acts like a huge battery for the Angels. Anyone entering it is forced to live out their life there, with their potential energy feeding the creatures.
The Angels attack, forcing everyone up to the roof. Once again, the Statue of Liberty Angel approaches. Rory has worked out a way to break the temporal trap he has found himself in. If he dies, it will create a paradox which should destroy the Angels.
He elects to jump to his death, arguing with Amy that he is used to dying, and it won't matter as they will never have come here if he us right. To the Doctor's horror, she elects to jump with him.
They suddenly find themselves back at the graveyard. As Rory sees the stone with his name on it, a surviving Angel comes up behind him and sends him into the past. The Doctor cannot take the TARDIS back due to the temporal disturbances which now permanently cover New York. Amy decides to allow herself to be touched by the Angel as well, to join her husband. The gravestone which had held Rory's name now also has that of his wife. He predeceased her, but they both lived into their 80's.
The Doctor is left heartbroken as the TARDIS can never follow. Something River says about endings makes the Doctor remember the page he tore out of the novel. He races back to Central Park and retrieves it. It is an epilogue from Amy - a message to the Doctor referring back to the morning after that first night young Amelia Pond encountered him...
The Angels Take Manhattan was written by Steven Moffat, and was first broadcast on 29th September 2012. It marked the conclusion of the first half of Series 7, which would continue in the Spring of 2013 following the annual Christmas Special.
The story sees the departure of companions Amy and Rory. She had been the longest serving companion of the New Series at this point, beating Rose Tyler by half a season (though Rose would be brought back for guest visits after she left as a regular).
At the time, viewers believed that this might also bring River Song's involvement to an end, now that her parents were no longer travelling with the Doctor. It does mark the end of her more frequent appearances.
New York has featured in the series before - the first occasion being a brief stopover on top of the Empire State Building in The Chase. More recently, a whole story was set in Manhattan, but the series never actually filmed there. A small unit simply visited to take plate shots that could be superimposed over scenes filmed in Wales. Series 6 had seen the series' first US location filming, but now the series got to film in New York itself.
The visual theme of this story is certainly film noir. Most of the scenes takes place at night, or in darkened buildings. We have a private eye (Garner) whose first name is Sam (after that famous private eye Sam Spade?). We also have a gangster-type villain in Grayle, who surrounds himself with gun-totting henchmen. Apart from these obvious trappings, there is also a mounting feeling of dread. We know that Amy and Rory are leaving, but we don't know how. Will Rory finally die for good this time? The gravestone seen early on certainly suggests so.
The Gangster genre has only ever really been used once before in the show but then it was employed in a futuristic alien planet setting (The Leisure Hive).
Chris Chibnall really should take a leaf out of Moffat's book and make more of his regular characters, instead of overloading stories with too many guest artists. Stories like this show how it should be done.
This week's adaptation to the opening logo is having it look like the coppery green surface of the Statue of Liberty.
No prequel this time, but the story was given a mini-postscript, appropriately enough called P.S.
This was in the form of an animated sequence, in which Rory writes to his dad to tell him about the life he and Amy had in New York. It is revealed that they adopted a child - a son named Anthony. It is he who has delivered the letter to Brian Williams.
Overall, a very good episode for the Ponds to go out on - suitably doom-laden throughout. The Weeping Angels are used effectively for once - probably their best outing since Blink. The creepy cherubs are an excellent addition to their ranks.
Things you might like to know:
- The Statue of Liberty may well be a statue, but it is made of metal, bolted together, rather than solid stone. Questions must also be asked as to how it could get from Liberty Island to Battery Park without anyone really noticing it.
- The ending of this episode connects back to the ending of Matt Smith's first episode. Moffat had always intended to explain why Amelia hears the TARDIS after staying up all night waiting for it.
- P.S. was originally going to be a live action sequence intended as a DVD extra, but Mark Williams was unavailable - which is why it was produced as an animation. It is narrated by Arthur Darvill.
- There is a rather lame excuse why the Doctor cannot go back and pick up Amy and Rory from some time other than 1938. He claims that in going back to join Rory, she is creating a fixed point in time. This is thrown out there as a reason, but we don't learn what it is about her sacrifice makes it such a fixed point.
- Amy is seen reading a copy of The New York Record - a fictitious newspaper first invented for The Daleks In Manhattan.
- As well as the final appearance of the Ponds - save for a cameo from Gillan in Matt Smith's final story - we also have our last sightings of the Doctor's tweed jacket costume, the Smith opening credits, and the Smith TARDIS "bronze" interior.
- River is a professor now. She's no longer a prisoner as the man she is supposed to have killed no longer exists - the Doctor having gone round removing himself from every database after the conclusion to Series 6.
- The book which Amy and the Doctor read is actually a copy of detective novel The Thin Man, by Dashiell Hammett, with a fake cover.
- Moffat's first idea for this story was for it to have been the Daleks who caused the Doctor to be separated from Amy and Rory. However, as the Daleks had already featured in a New York-set story, he changed it to the Angels, which made more sense if you're talking about people being separated in time.
- Other ideas from earlier drafts included Grayle being transported back in time to Imperial China, or to the Rennaisance era. Instead of a message on a Chinese vase, the message would have been in a puzzle box, which would have River's vortex manipulator hidden inside. Winter Quay was going to have multiple Rorys and Garners - suggesting more clearly that they would be sent back in time over and over again.
- The cherubs only featured after some real statuary ones were spotted on the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, and Moffat thought they would make a good addition.
- There's a couple of nods to Moffat's other well known show here. The first chapter of the novel is "The Dying Detective" - a Sherlock Holmes story. The Chinese vase segment is said to take place in 221 BC, after Holmes' address of 221B Baker Street.
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