TV Review | Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan by Steven Moffat

Doctor Who’s painfully short autumn run concludes with The Angels Take Manhattan, an era-ending script untidily stapled into the centre of a season that serves as rather an apt reminder of the Doctor’s chaotic existence. Fortunately, showrunner Steven Moffat’s script is expertly neat.

Unlike 2007’s Daleks in Manhattan, this episode lives up to its heavily-hyped New York billing, offering viewers a real flavour of the city that only comes with actually shooting a few picturesque scenes there. At one point the Doctor even traverses a stunning Central Park bridge where, many years ago, I proposed to my wife. It’s certainly far more effective than a hopeful bit of chroma key. Of course, it’s arguable that Los Angeles or perhaps even Bangkok (whose abbreviated Thai name Krung Thep literally means “city of angels”) would have served as a more fitting city for the Weeping Angels to claim as their own, but then we’d never have got to see the suddenly snarling Statue of Liberty menace our heroes – a set piece so noteworthy that it would surely have been the main talking point of any other episode.

The Angels are used remarkably well here, Moffat eschewing the straightforwardly-murderous tactics of The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone and returning to the Angels’ innovative “killing you nicely” temporal tactics of Blink. Here Moffat expounds upon those tactics though, introducing us to the Angels’ Winter Quay “battery farm”, where their temporally-displaced victims are incarcerated so that they can be zapped back in time and fed off again and again. The Angels Take Manhattan also shows us a few new Angel variants, Moffat offsetting the overwhelming presence of the Statue of Liberty with a bundle of grotesque stone babies that I found far more unsettling than their full-sized (and, indeed, oversized) counterparts. Rory’s cellar scene with the cherubic monsters is, in some ways, the story’s most frightening.

 

The story’s real horror though is not the tangible dread conjured by the Angels, but the creeping fear borne of the Doctor’s inexorable loss. Perhaps inspired by his fury over leaked spoilers in the past, here Moffat makes this episode’s spoilers its heart; he proudly hangs his whole narrative on them. Many people watching this episode did so knowing full well that Amy and Rory would be leaving the Doctor at its end, and so Moffat decided to let the Doctor and River know too. River Song’s – or the pseudonymous Melody Malone’s – yet-to-be-written novelisation of the events unfolding sits in the Doctor’s pocket throughout, Rory and Amy’s fate committed to its pages like a literary Schrödinger’s cat. Every event that the Doctor reads about makes it a fixed point in time; every telling, Target-style chapter title furtively peeked at is soon cemented in reality, including “Amelia’s Last Farewell”. This book lends the episode a crippling sense of inevitably that put me in mind of Tom Baker’s 1980 swansong, Logopolis, though Christopher H Bidmead’s science-heavy four-parter couldn’t hope to compete with the emotional sophistication of Moffat’s fraught forty-five minutes as they tear towards their heartbreaking crescendo.

In one sense, few of the Doctor’s companions die; in another, they all do. The Angels Take Manhattan painfully toys with this perspective-puzzling notion, broaching the Doctor’s loss of his travelling companions in a way that forces the viewer to look at the Doctor’s loneliness anew. The episode’s final moments pay homage to companion departures as distinct and memorable as those depicted in Earthshock and Doomsday – the viewer can feel the end coming, there’s no escaping it, yet Moffat has a cruel trick up his sleeve that makes one companion’s departure frighteningly real in its abruptness, and the other’s far more heartbreaking than even the most tragically-minded of us could imagine. To the writer, and to all four actors involved in that crippling cemetery scene, bravo.

The Angels Take Manhattan thus says a sombre goodbye to the revived series’ longest-serving companions, and does so with real science fiction flair and even greater emotional elegance. I didn’t think that any episode would ever be able to move me in the way that Russell T Davies’ superlative Doomsday did, but now, having watched this masterpiece play out before me in blazing 1080p HD, suddenly I’m not so sure.

Doctor Who will return at Christmas on BBC One.

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