The Angels Take Manhattan

Chapter The 228th, where you can tell it in his accent when he talks, he's a Gallifreyan in New York.

Plot:

The Doctor, Amy and Rory are enjoying a trip to present day Manhattan, when Rory disappears. Strangely, the events of his disappearance seem to follow the text of a book the Doctor is reading, which turned up from nowhere, a hard-boiled detective story featuring a character called Melody Malone (the character is a proxy for, and the novel has been written by, River Song). A weeping angel has zapped Rory back to 1938 where he meets with River. She has been able to travel there with her vortex manipulator, but the TARDIS won't easily be able to land because of time distortion. River and Rory are held up by gunmen, who put them in a limo and drive them to the house of a rich mobster, Grayle. He's a collector who has a captive weeping angel, and he wants information about it from River. His goons throw Rory into a dark basement which contains cherubic baby angels. The Doctor, with Amy who's trying not to fix events by reading too far ahead in the book, arranges some convoluted gubbins to allow the TARDIS to land, knocks out Grayle and rescues River. They find that the baby angels have zapped Rory in space, not in time, and follow him to a place called Winter Quay, an apartment block near Battery Park.

The building is being used as a temporal energy farm by the many angels living in New York; they tempt people to the location, then zap them back decades to live the whole of their lives trapped in an apartment room. The others catch up with Rory as he sees his older self in a bed in such a room: an angel therefore will get him imminently. Refusing to accept this fate, Rory goes to the roof of the building with Amy, intending to jump off and kill himself, preventing that future; Amy is going to jump with him. This will create a paradox, and hopefully they will come back to life. The angels close in on them, including a moving Statue of Liberty, which turns out to be a giant angel. They jump, and time is erased. Along with the Doctor and River, they find themselves in a graveyard near the TARDIS in present day New York. The TARDIS can now definitely not ever go back to the 1938 time zone as it is too screwy. Rory spots a gravestone with his name on it, and a lone angel behind him zaps him back to 1938. Amy chooses to let the angel get her too, and they live their lives together back in that time, her name appearing alongside his on the gravestone. River leaves the Doctor saying that she'll write up the book and give it to Amy in the past to get published, but will also ask Amy to write an afterword. Alone, the Doctor reads this; Amy tells him to go back and tell the waiting Amelia on the first night they met of all the adventures that she will have in the future. He does this.

Context:

Watched on my own one evening, late, from the disc in the series 7 Blu-ray box set; even though the story is presumably available on the BBC iplayer, my first instinct wasn't to go there, but was instead to go to the bother of reaching up to a high self, fetching down a reasonably well-designed box, extracting - fiddly, this - a disc, and putting this disc into the Blu-ray player. I'm old school, I suppose (more on that in the next section below). If I put on a Doctor Who story earlier in the day and invite the children to watch, they tend not to be interested; this time, when they should have been sleeping, it attracted them like moths. Both the youngest (girl of 9) and the eldest (boy of 15) snuck in and watched for a bit, before I insisted they get back to bed.

First Time Round:

It know it does very much sound like I'm talking about dusty, dated concepts such as corsets and penny-farthings, but my chief memory of seeing this story first time round in 2012 is that - for whatever reason - the recording of the BBC1 broadcast onto my PVR didn't work, and I had to wait for the traditionally scheduled BBC3 repeat of the story that week, to add it to my hard drive. I was miffed about this, as in those days BBC3 in my area wasn't available in HD on Freeview, so the picture quality was inferior to the rest of the episodes of this half-season that I'd digitally recorded the previous weeks. It was a bit fuzzy, and it had an intrusive station ident (or DOG, or Digitally Originated Graphic) spoiling one corner of the picture. Ugh. BBC iplayer was a thing even in those days, but maybe I could only watch that on my computer rather than the TV. Or maybe I was just set in my ways. I finally saw the story in HD when the aforementioned Complete Seventh Series Blu-ray box set came out in autumn 2013. I still record every Doctor Who story on first broadcast, then delete them once they've come out on Blu-ray and I've purchased them. Currently, my hard drive just contains the most recent Eve of the Daleks and Legend of the Sea Devils, even though I don't really need to keep them as they are constantly available to stream. I'm keeping alive the tradition of watching and recording Doctor Who onto video tape from the earlier days of my fandom in the 1980s.

A couple of weeks after the broadcast of the story, a web 'minisode' that provided a coda to Amy and Rory's story aired called P.S. I raved about this 5-minute long storyboard and narration creation way back in an early blog post published in August 2015. It was written by the current showrunner Chris Chibnall, and his writing for the Ponds there, as well as that in the two episodes he wrote for the first half of series 7, and other online minisodes, was great - the best I think that they'd been depicted in the show up to that point. There's definitely been as good character work in the stories of his own era, but perhaps not quite as consistently done as in 2012.

Reaction:

I was reminded while watching The Angels Take Manhattan of an interview that 1960s companion actor Frazer Hines (who played Jamie) once gave. I can't remember exactly when and how I experienced it, but I think I can recall enough to reflect the spirit. He was talking of his disappointment at the long-running role he played in the soap Emmerdale Farm, Joe Sugden, being killed off, and said that he'd have always been prepared to come back and make cameo appearances when there were family weddings and such, which he thought important to keep up the verisimilitude of such a fictional landscape. I agree with him that that's important, and I believe he would have been good to his word (he returned to his role on Doctor Who a couple of times many years after originally appearing, for example). There isn't much plot in this Angels story. Bags of atmosphere, some clever ideas, some nice-one liners and moments of emotion, all are present; but, what actually happens? Rory gets zapped back into the past and Amy choses to follow him, and they live happily ever after. That's it. Everything else surrounding that is a complicated construction built specifically to avoid having the risk that Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill (as Amy and Rory) might not want to come back in future for the Doctor Who equivalent of a wedding episode. A ridiculous amount of heavy-lifting in the script arranges things so that they are stranded in a time zone that the Doctor can't again visit. The lifting is so heavy, in fact, that you can see the writer straining at various points. Was it worth all the effort?

To be fair, it's not something of which just this story is guilty, it's endemic from 2005 onwards; the final stories of companions tend to have to be final with a capital F, allowing for no chance of return; they also, though, don't include anyone being killed off completely. (Yes, writer Steven Moffat did kill a few people off during his tenure, but only for them to be brought back to life, sometimes multiple times, so that doesn't count; The Angels Take Manhattan even makes a joke about the many previous times Rory's been resurrected.) I'm guessing it's a search for drama and novelty that produced this trend, rather than narrative plausibility - it's not like Doctor Who is set in a farming village, the whole of time and space is big enough that you might not run into the same people often. It gets progressively harder to achieve the operatic level of finality that is felt to be required, though, and the amount of screen time devoted to that rather than any actual story is quite marked with respect to this story particularly. It also seems unnecessary, as a lot of the previous few stories (the first half of series 7) had been building up to the Ponds choosing to leave anyway. Time travelling is increasingly impacting their day-to-day lives, and they're getting older (though the scene where the Doctor and Rory diplomatically avoid the subject of Amy's wrinkles doesn't work because she has no bloody wrinkles, she's a twenty-bloody-five year old actress and former model ferchrissakes). It wouldn't have been beyond writer Steven Moffat to make an exciting and moving departure without forcing a wedge of time-distorted decades between the members of his first TARDIS team, but he obviously felt it was necessary.

It's mostly just window dressing without much story, then; but, it's pretty superior window dressing for all that. Creating a detective story in the Raymond Chandler style is in itself a first for the show, and a good fit for the River Song character; Alex Kingston is giving her usual 5-star performance, having fun playing the detective and the femme fatale rolled into one. Moffat's integration of this heightened narrative, by making it a story within a story, is very clever. There's lots of energy in the sequence of intercut scenes with events playing out in the 1930s time zone, and other characters reading of the events in the book in the 2010s; Moffat then takes it an extra step by making this a timey-wimey conceit: it the characters read too far ahead they'll be powerless to change things. Sequences with weeping angels stalking people as those people blink were probably already overused even in 2012, but Moffat still innovates by adding the baby angel cherubs. There's the wonderful moment where one blows out the match that Rory is using to keep it observed in the dark cellar; this and almost every scary scene is expertly shot by director Nick Hurran and crew. The one big thing that doesn't work in the script, and no amount of direction can make work, and which I suspect was one of those things that occasionally come up where the author's enthusiasm just runs away and they can't resist, is the angel Statue of Liberty. The concept of the angels is that they can only move when not being observed. How is it even remotely possible that something as large as the statue of liberty could be unobserved long enough to travel an inch, let alone get from Liberty Island to Battery Park and back without masses of people noticing? It's very silly.

A couple of other points bothered me on this watch that I didn't notice on previous watches. The Doctor hints that New York is a great place for the angels as it's "the city that never sleeps", but that's the exact opposite of an environment they could flourish in. They'd surely be better off in some sleepy village where they can creep around undetected (ooh, now there's an idea!). The concept of the battery farm in Battery park (silly, but Moffat presumably couldn't resist again) took me a while to get my head round. When the angels zap people back in time it releases a burst of temporal energy that it's been established they feed on, but presumably they'd be able to absorb more if they kept in close proximity to their victim over a longer period? So, they zap people only in a limited area they can control - and presumably only back within a limited sweep of years -  and then keep their victim in one place, so any angels in the vicinity can get the benefit. I think that's what's being suggested. What a palaver! May as well just say they stay in the area because they're fans of Broadway shows, and ignore all of that nonsense. The other head-scratcher for me is what exactly happens at the end: in Amy / Amelia's original timeline did the future Doctor come back to her on the first night and tell her all about her adventures to come (and she's forgotten about this, or assumed it was a dream), or does he by going back there at the end of the Angels in Manhattan story change her past? Either way, it undermines some of the drama of their very first story The Eleventh Hour for me, without adding much in the way of emotion. The emotion had peaked anyway at the wonderful "Together or not at all" moment where Amy and Rory take a leap into the unknown. The rest - the excellent and the silly - doesn't matter much compared to that.

Connectivity: 

Both The Angels Take Manhattan and Legend of the Sea Devils see the Doctor accompanied by two companions, one male one female; in both stories, the adventure takes place outside the British Isles, with trips to the same places in two different time periods.

Deeper Thoughts:

Nobody Knows Anything. My day job for pretty much my entire working life to date has seen me in various roles on various teams, all of whose aim was to deliver something digital, a web application or phone app, that users might like, or at the very least might use. My favourite quote about the complexities of that day job, though, links to another career I had for a few years, as a screenwriter. It is William Goldman's "Nobody Knows Anything" first put out into the world in his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade. He follows up the initial three word soundbite with a short explanation: "Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess—and, if you're lucky, an educated one". Without this additional explanation, people can misunderstand it as something anti-intellectual or even anarchic. But Goldman was a Hollywood man, though he might not have liked that description particularly, and he respected the craft of all the cast and crew of Tinseltown. Even with all that knowledge and graft, he thought that you could get no better than an educated guess of the reaction when you present something to an audience. I think his words can be applied to any complex endeavour, and not just films. You can do all the market research you can afford, and arguably you should, but nothing beats putting something out there and seeing what people think of it. In my day job, of course, you can still change it once people start using it, and you've seen how they're using it, and what aspects of it they think are useful or not. Unless you're someone who tinkers like George Lucas with his various versions of the Star Wars films over the years, you can't do this for a movie or a TV show.

It's an exposing business to be in; the figures will tell you if something's a hit or a miss, but by then there's not much more you can do about it. Based on ratings, the most recent Doctor Who story Legend of the Sea Devils has been a miss, not a hit. It has achieved the lowest overnight (2.2 million) and consolidated weekly (3.4 million) viewers since the series returned in 2005. Fans and commentators have had their say about why this might be. Not enough marketing, wrong time of year, inferior scripting, being up against a live ITV show (Britain's Got Talent), not enough special elements to draw in a crowd. People have also said that these figures don't have any meaning in the modern context of streaming and constant availability, though some others have said that those making Doctor Who should be aiming for a large audience that want to watch it live (though that could be because, like me and my unnecessary recordings as described in the First Time Round section above, they are living in the past). Many people have speculated on what the incoming showrunner (Russell T Davies, returning to the role) might do to make things better. Of course, according to Goldman, none of these people really know what to change to make the next story a hit, because nobody knows anything. Me neither, but I have something of a theory; to illustrate this theory, I need to bring in something I have learnt about over the years as part of the day job, but which also has some relevance to films and TV: the Cynefin framework. Cynefin (named after the Welsh word for habitat) was invented in 1999 by the very clever Dave Snowden, and is a model to help understand problems and their possible solutions.

Snowden - who is as much a tinkerer as George Lucas, and has continued to enhance and amend Cynefin over the years - would no doubt hate me over-simplifying it thus, but at heart it comprises four main domains (there is a fifth, but I won't go into it here) in which any situation might fall: Clear, Complicated, Complex and Chaotic. In clear situations, the course of action to take is obvious to any reasonable person, with little room for different approaches. In complicated situations, you need specialist knowledge or up-front analysis to a lesser or greater degree; with that, you should be able to get the same basic result each time you apply the approach that is indicated. Complex situations are different to complicated ones, because no matter how expert you are, or how much advance work you put in, you might not get the same result between one try and another; cause and effect appear to be more loosely coupled because there are so many variables at play. Finally, chaotic situations are where cause and effect seem completely uncoupled, and the course of action to take is going to have to involve more gamble and risk. To help grasp this, consider different ways of making a film or video recording. Making a short home movie using a smartphone is in the Clear domain; any reasonable person can point and click and create something watchable. This has not always been the case; making a home movie 40 years ago was most definitely a complicated affair, involving equipment not everyone could afford, and relying on a company to print the film from the captured negative. It required practice and expertise and planning; the refinement of technology platforms over the years has helped move the basic act from complicated to clear. Seeing movement between the domains is one interesting aspect of using this model.

An example of a similar situation in the Complicated domain is one that is familiar to Doctor Who fans, the making of a multi-camera video in a studio. This was how the show's early episodes were made. Expertise was definitely required, and much forward planning by the director creating the camera script, so the cameramen on the floor knew where to go to get their next shot, and the vision mixers in the studio gallery would know when to switch between cameras, and so on. It was a craft that could be taught, though; generally, if a director had done his or her preparation, any piece could be created consistently, reflecting the writer's screenplay, as many had before. In the height of the popularity of this method of making television, every day in multiple studios of BBC's television centre, multiple programmes were being made this way. The programmes were recorded before broadcast, but the approach grew out of live performances captured in the same way in previous decades; it being live meant a few more variables, but still we're in the Complicated domain unless there's a radical change in one of those variables. A good example of such a shoot falling into the Chaotic domain is the infamous story of Underground, a 1958 TV play going out live on ITV in the UK, where one of the actors died (off camera) midway through the performance. In the sprit of "the show must go on", the cast ad-libbed around the lack of an important character, the director tore up his camera script and shot the remainder of the play "like a football match", following the action, and frantically, rewrote lines on the fly supplying them to the cast when they were off screen. They got through it, by roughly following Snowden's recommended approach in that domain: act to stabilise the situation as much as you can, sense what is happening, and respond to what you sense.

So, in the world of making films and TV, what's an example of something from the Complex domain? That would be creating the screenplay in the first place. Putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard, to create something that one hopes will engage an audience. Remember, that in the Complex domain, putting in the same basic efforts does not necessarily mean the same result, and for a show like Doctor Who it needs to be done over and over again, week on week; the writers have to come up with interesting and new scenarios each time, and no guarantee that any of them won't bomb. So, what advice does the Cynefin framework give for a problem in the Complex domain? In a word, experimentation. Ideally, you try lots of different approaches (Snowden refers to them as probes, and would suggest you do them concurrently), see what works and what doesn't, amplify the former, dampen the latter. A writer can do this within the process of creating the text, trying things out and reworking them, but as per Goldman's guidance, you can't truly know until something is made and broadcast. Interestingly, Doctor Who has more scope to do this than a lot of other shows - it can sample different settings and genres every story. So, for those that didn't like recent Chris Chibnall episodes of Doctor Who, I say: one answer might have been to have more of them. Because of Covid, and because a handover is required to a new team taking over making the show, 2021 and 2022 will only see nine episodes of Doctor Who broadcast. The scope for trying different things has been restricted. Whether - had it been possible - the creation of a wider range of stories in that time might have meant more audience engagement and enjoyment, we can never know for sure (because - all together now - nobody knows anything), but it couldn't have hurt. Here's to more episodes per year in future!

In Summary:

Window dressing, but for a superior window, like one on 5th Avenue or somewhere like that.