Doctor Who Series Blog – The Angels Take Manhattan

It’s all over. The Ponds are gone. Dead in New York. There’s little point in carrying on with this article.

Only joking! Yes the Ponds have made their emotional exit from Doctor Who, and what an exit it was. Embroiled in a plot masterminded by those freakishly scary Angels, the Doctor and River Song said goodbye to good friends, parents and in-laws.

Amy and Rory’s exit aside, The Angels Take Manhattan restored my faith in the series after the previous two episodes. A Town Called Mercy was far too slow for my liking; it didn’t have enough ‘yowzah’, and The Power of Three suffered from what you might call being a bit too… premature – the ending was over before we had time to blink. The last episode in series seven however was the essence of Doctor Who distilled into a 45-minute episode. We had everything from frantic running around, last minute plot twists and the sultry River Song laying innuendos everywhere like an overactive hen laying eggs. What more could you ask for?

The Angels are a truly terrific invention of the imagination; they appear so lifelike, and yet, at the same time, they fool you into believing they are as inanimate as they first appear. Steven Moffat took them one step further this time though when he introduced cherubs to their arsenal. Don’t be fooled by the cute little baby face chubby with one too many chocolate bars; there’s nothing sweet or innocent about them. This is especially evident if you have the misfortune to be trapped in a pitch-black cellar with them. Although, whilst the Angels may have drafted in cherubs like Fagin recruiting children in Oliver Twist, they also enlisted the help of Lady liberty herself. Nothing strikes terror in the heart like the face of the Statue of Liberty bearing down on you from the top of a building. How the production team managed to move her from spot on Liberty Island is beyond me…

Speaking of dastardly returns, how about the reappearance of River Song? It always confuses me that she is Amy and Rory’s daughter, yet far older than her parents. There’s also a very odd dynamic between the two couples – the Doctor and River, and Amy and Rory. The Doctor is the Ponds’ son in law, yet he’s ageless and their guide and mentor, rather than a typical son-in-law: a submissive boy who calls their daughter his. If the Ponds had stayed much longer, Jeremy Kyle would have had a field day. In fact, as we learnt last series River was kidnapped as a baby and turned into a weapon designed to kill the Doctor. I don’t think psychotherapy would be able to even scratch the surface on that one.

If that weren’t enough, the sexual tension between the Doctor and River would take more than a sonic screwdriver (no pun intended) to cut it. As the T.A.R.D.I.S rocketed into New York in 1938, River called out, “It means Mr Grayle, just you wait ‘till my husband gets home”. Will that woman ever say something without that saucy tone of hers? There was also a very interesting parallel between the two couples. Amy and River are your typical alpha females, whereas the Doctor and Rory seem to do as they are told. Who could argue with a Scottish woman and a woman who survived brainwashing and killed her future husband?

On to more pressing matters. Episode five saw the departure of two of the best assistants since Davies revitalised the show in 2005. We first knew Amy as the girl who waited and we’ve been in love with her ever since. Ostracised by those around her because of her belief in the “raggedy-man”, Amy found solace in the company of the Doctor, accompanying him on all sorts of life-threatening adventures. Rory, although a kind of tag-along figure, brought his own brand of humour to the show as the long-suffering partner, and later husband, of Amy.

In this episode, Rory is taken captive by the Angels so that they may feed off his time energy. He is brought face to face with himself, albeit a good sixty years older, and witnesses the death of this future self. Even at this point I had put Kleenex out of business. In an act of ultimate sacrifice, Rory takes his life to create the mother of all paradoxes, thus destroying the farm of the Angels. Not wanting to be apart from him, Amy joins him and the two jump off a skyscraper. Now, as if one death wasn’t enough, Moffat decided to punish us with a second: a stray Angel zaps Rory back in time so that minutes after he technically died, he dies a second time. Amy, once again unwilling to be separated from her husband, she surrenders to the rogue Angel, thus drawing the final curtain on the Ponds.

If you watched this episode and didn’t shed a tear, then I strongly suggest you check whether your heart is organic and not made of stone. Assistants have come and gone, but few will be as fondly remembered as the Ponds. Their exit will leave an extremely large gap in future episodes and it will be extremely difficult to fill the shoes of Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill. Each assistant brings something new to the table and undoubtedly Jenna-Louise Coleman will bring her own unique style to what is, quite frankly, a British institution.

Doctor Who returns at Christmas, but will things ever be the same?