7X05 The Angels Take Manhattan (Grading/Discussion) (SPOILERS!)

[Sindatur]

Judge Death wrote:

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But you could say the same of myriad situations throughout Who.

Why didn't he save Adric? Not like the mass of one boy was going to be the deciding factor between the dinosaurs being wiped out at surviving? Hell he could rescue Adric then drop him off again as an old man to be blown up.

Why didn't he rescue Peri?

Surely you're not saying Peri was forced into becoming a Warrior Queen? They had real chemistry, I can believe she genuinely fell in love with him and wanted to give him a tribe of babies

[Saul]

Mr Light wrote:

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The Statue of Liberty thing was a cool teaser image but it makes no sense within the reality of the episode...

Possibly some kind of perception filter? It's there but not there.

[Deckerd]

The gumshoe at the start, when he went onto the roof and you saw those huge teeth behind him, that was a pretty good effect.

[Mr Awe]

Alidar Jarok wrote:

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Unless you're wrong, in which case you've just altered a fixed point in time.

It's just like replacing the Doctor with a lookalike robot. In this case, you're planting a headstone to keep up appearances.

Mr Awe

[The Keeper]

Excellent!

My faith in the franchise has been restored.

[gblews]

Loved the episode. As others have pointed out, it was nice to see the Angles become scary again and especially to see them doing their "potential" consumption again.

But OMG I'm going to miss Rory and Amy. The chemistry between those two AND the Doctor is pretty much off the charts. The little throw away lines, the in jokes, I just don't see how the show can be improved by their absence. Those characters were getting better and better together with each passing season.

Oh well, I'm only a NuWho watcher -- I've only seen the occasional Who classic -- so I'm sure others have felt this way about a companion before, only to eventually find another one to love.

Anyway, great episode. And please don't anyone remind me that Matt Smith's time will soon come to an end -- I can only take so much depression at a time.

[doubleohfive]

A writer friend of mine shared the link to this LJ entry/review this morning and it cohesively details every problem I had with this episode and more over, the characterization of the 11th Doctor:

Some pertinent quotes if you don't have time to read it (it's long):

River uses her gadgety-wagety stuff to track down Rory, having gotten away from the Angel by breaking her own wrist, thus not altering the future (although the only part of the book Amy read was that she SAID she'd have to break her wrist, she never read that she actually did, so the line she read in the book had already been fulfilled). River says she kept her broken wrist a secret from the Doctor because even though he's a millenium-old Time Lord who has stated repeatedly that he's so old he can't feel emotion the same way young people can anymore and that's why he takes them with him, he has the emotional security of a five year-old and can't handle anything remotely upsetting without going into a temper tantrum, so it's really best to hide things from him because he's not adult enough to deal with them.

This is probably the biggest thing that turns me off about Moffat's depiction of the Doctor. In that even through all the experiences he had, all the maturity he had in his previous regenerations, the Eleventh Doctor, despite what he claims, behaves very much like a bratty kid kicking and screaming for attention, caring nothing for anyone's feelings but his own. This isn't the behavior of someone so old he's forgotten how to properly interact with other people, this is the behavior of someone who never bothered to learn it in the first place.

I've never really bought in to the whole "Ten is better than Eleven!" argument until now. I defended series 5 to a lot of people at the time, and even though I personally thought Series 6 was incredibly uneven, it still had its moments when it wasn't telegraphing it's plot twists that we all saw coming a mile away:

As a sideline rant, anyone who griped about Ten/Rose drama should have hated this scene, but from preliminary reactions I've seen, they love it. The Doctor was absolutely shameful here, turning into a simpering, self-absorbed man-child refusing to respect his companion's wishes. Contrast this to how Ten behaved when he lost his companions. When he lost Rose in "Doomsday", a woman he was actually in love with, he went catatonic a while, then found a way to contact her to give her one last farewell, and was very mature and realistic about it. When Martha left him to be with her family and basically told him to go fuck himself, he was okay with that. He didn't put up a fight, he didn't argue, he didn't whine, he simply respected her decision and kept to himself how much it hurt him. When he lost Donna, he very pointedly tried to deflect any discussion about how he felt about it because he knew that making sure Donna was safe was much more important than softening his emotional blow.

And that is, in my opinion, why Ten is always going to be superior to Eleven, because the very fundamental core of Ten's character, to his very end, was that the needs of normal, everyday people outweighed his own and he would suffer any loss, take on any burden to ensure they were safe. To Eleven, everyday people are an audience. They exist to tell him he's amazing and clever and to be impressed with him, and if they don't, he has no need for them. Ten worked towards solutions ideal for everyone else, Eleven worked towards solutions ideal for himself.

I personally didn't care much for Amy as a companion due to her motivations and personality being so inconsistent. She didn't provide any kind of foil for the Doctor, and instead acted more as an enabler. I have hopes that the next companion will be better, but from Moffat's work on the series so far, I've come to notice that he doesn't seem to understand what the companion is for. The companion is supposed to be the character through which the audience interacts with the Doctor, and who grounds the Doctor's actions by giving him perspective on how his behavior affects normal people. Starting with "The Girl in the Fireplace", though, Moffat regularly treats companions as people who get in the way of the Doctor being awesome, and simply gives them "busy work" to fill up their screentime while the Doctor does everything himself. In "The Girl in the Fireplace", Rose and Mickey just hung out and explored the ship, an action that was irrelevant to the overall plot. In "Blink", Martha just smiled and nodded. In "Silence in the Library", Donna was whisked off to a virtual universe where she'd be out of the way and didn't accomplish anything that was of any necessity to solving the problem. And now in later seasons, we had the egregious example of "Asylum of the Daleks" where marital problems were invented for Amy and Rory to keep them occupied while the Doctor did his work, and they solved their problem by the end of the episode, which had zero consequence on anything else.

So while I congratulate Moffat on this episode for having Amy and Rory take initiative to both come up with and execute the solution to the overall conflict all by themselves, I don't yet have confidence that this is pointing towards a future trend of better companion relevancy. I'm also thankful that characters are starting to treat the Doctor as the attention-whoring man-child that he is, but as this episode has shown, they're also determined to continue to enable that very same behavior. I'm hoping this incident will help the Doctor become more mature and respectful of other people's feelings, but I'm fearing it'll just turn him pouty and sulky, that how dare his friends move away for business instead of hanging out at his house for the rest of their lives so they can congratulate him daily for getting new high scores in Guitar Hero.

[Allyn Gibson]

Going off-topic here...

Oddly, that review explains one of the fundamental problems with the Star Trek: The Next Generation crossover comic.

From Moffat's work on the series so far, I've come to notice that he doesn't seem to understand what the companion is for. The companion is supposed to be the character through which the audience interacts with the Doctor, and who grounds the Doctor's actions by giving him perspective on how his behavior affects normal people.

That describes succinctly the problem with Rory and Amy in Assimilation2 -- they have no narrative role in a Star Trek story. They don't need to function as the audience's window into this strange world, because the audience knows exactly what the Star Trek universe is and how it works. They can't carry any of the action, because there's a whole slew of Star Trek characters to do that. Basically, they have no function in the story except to stand around and occasionally talk to Deanna Troi. In retrospect, maybe this story should have been set during one of the Doctor's companion-less periods, much like the recent novel Dark Horizons (which is absolutely lovely, by the way).

Back to our "The Angels Take Manhattan" discussion...

[Pindar]

I just rewatched the stolen earth and journeys end, Donna had a much better farewell, IMO.

Donna was the last companion to leave before Amy and for my money her goodbye was a lot more emotional.

I found it a bit sad to rewatch though as everyone was still alive.

[Photoman15]

That long review is very telling. It tells me the author does not understand Doctor Who.

[doubleohfive]

Photoman15 wrote:

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That long review is very telling. It tells me the author does not understand Doctor Who.

And you do? Thank goodness we have you here to educate us. Please elaborate.

[Admiral2]

Ghost Bones wrote:

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Americans should just start calling them "chips" then, like us British who did back it.

But the BBC should be making programmes aimed at the audience who pays for it, not for potential audiences elsewhere who don't fund it. If they could have saved money by not going on this vanity trip to New York and achieved the same result then that's what should have been done.

So...the next time we make a show like Battlestar Galactica we won't populate half the cast with British actors and you won't complain when you get it on BBC and we say take it or leave it? Awesome!

[intrinsical]

Funny, and here I was thinking Ten was the whiny, bratty man-child.

"The laws of time are mine. And they will obey me!!!"
"I'm the winner. Timelord Victorious."
"I don't want to die!!!"

[Professor Zoom]

Ghost Bones wrote:

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But the BBC should be making programmes aimed at the audience who pays for it,

Who says they aren't? It still seems like they are. Just others outside of the UK also enjoy it.

not for potential audiences elsewhere who don't fund it.

Again, potential audiences elsewhere generate revenue for the BBC, which means they can fund more projects without having to raise the fee.

Sounds like they are saving you money.

If they could have saved money by not going on this vanity trip to New York and achieved the same result then that's what should have been done.

1. What if, as someone proposed, BBC-America helped pay for the episode, which means it didn't cost them anything.

2. What if by spending a little more, in terms of investment, GAINS more than the cost... wouldn't that be using money WELL.

And besides, whether or not they shot in New York doesn't actually reflect on the quality of the story--which, honestly was meh for me. Even if they shot in Cardiff it wouldn't have been better.

I get complaining about actual problems, but shooting in New York? I don't understand the problem.

[doubleohfive]

intrinsical wrote:

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Funny, and here I was thinking Ten was the whiny, bratty man-child.

"The laws of time are mine. And they will obey me!!!"
"I'm the winner. Timelord Victorious."
"I don't want to die!!!"

Bullshit.

What happened after each of those instances? Ten realized his mistakes. He paid for it when Brook suicides herself. Ten gives his life so Wilf won't have to, even though Wilf wants to die so Ten won't have to.

You're not wrong that Ten had some of these same issues. The part where you're wrong is that unlike Eleven, Ten actually learns from these missteps.