Doctor Who

Is that Matt Damon or DiCaprio OH WAIT IT DOESN'T MATTER BECAUSE MATT SMITH IS AWESOME SHUT UP.
 
Ultimate Houde said:
Not as good as the previous two weeks, but the ending was topnotch.

ROBOCOP!
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I agree. Right now it's the weakest episode, but the ending was cool.

Also, "Robocop" was my though too!
 
And you think you are going to come back from the dead?

When haven't I!

Great story, love the ending to the Ponds. Great finale. Hopefully the new companion lives up to be as good as Rory and Amy were.

And Michael McShane has lost alot of weight. Good for him.
 
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Ultimate Houde said:
And you think you are going to come back from the dead?

When haven't I!

Great story, love the ending to the Ponds. Great finale. Hopefully the new companion lives up to be as good as Rory and Amy were.

And Michael McShane has lost alot of weight. Good for him.
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I don't think I like it much. It had some fantastic moments, When Haven't I, the babies, Don't let him see the damage, come with me, but overall it was dissapointing. And It may be that it couldn't have not been dissapointing. I might have wanted it to do too much. I've come to expect Doctor Who to tie things together in ways I didn't expect, so for this episode to just be a basically stand alone episode that ends with them leaving was... well a dissapointment. And the rational for him being unable to visit is bull****. More bull**** than normal too. I'm a fan of the what happened happened style of time travel but it needs to be used properly. Instead we got a defeatest doctor acting out a script because he has to. I mean if he can't go see Amy and Rory ever again then that means that something like 50 years, the 50 years that the majority of viewers know intimatly and would love to see him in, are cut off from the writers. I mean if he can travel to 1973 why can't he go see Amy and Rory then? And it creates a huge safe zone for his enemies.

I'm going to go watch 12 Monkeys.
 
The problem with THE ANGELS TAKE MANHATTAN is that while it has a number of nice moments, it simply doesn't convince for two reasons:

Firstly, as every reviewer has pointed out including you Friday, why can't the Doctor travel back to 1941 and pick them up? Why can't he tell Amy "I can't go to NYC but travel to Chicago and I'll pick you up there in a couple of weeks"? The mechanics of the time distortions simply aren't clear and it doesn't work so everyone saw that episode then afterwards begain rewriting the resolution scene as either explaining away why the Doctor can't go back or that he could've. When your audience feels compelled to rewrite your story, you've failed, no matter how entertaining it was.

Secondly, it simply doesn't convince emotionally. This would've been a great ending for Sally Sparrow if she'd been the companion. But not for Amy and Rory. They're nothing to do with the Weeping Angels. In THE GOD COMPLEX, the Weeping Angels were in David Walliams' nightmare, not Amy's. Rory, if I recall correctly, has never met them before. But the Silence... the Silence is all about Amy and Rory. It's been even more intertwined since River was revealed as Melody. Then there's the whole theme of "waiting". Rory waited for Amy. Amy waited for the Doctor (twice). They keep waiting. When I heard the Weeping Angels were involved I immediately thought the Angels would use they're "sending people back in time" trick to make the trio wait in some capacity to the point where they've lived their life and that's all that's left. Especially with all the hints of Amy and Rory growing older faster than the Doctor expected. In fact, I expected the Doctor to realise he's kind of been a Weeping Angel; he takes Amy and Rory off on adventures for months, returns them to the time they left. To their parents it'll look like Amy and Rory aged 50 years in 5 years and their lives were stolen. But, that's if you have to use the Weeping Angels. Frankly, I expected the Amy & Rory send off to involve Madam Kovarian and the Silence. Emotionally, it doesn't feel real. It just doesn't thematically fit with the story so far, it feels like the ending for a different companion, quickly truncated. And it has no set up.

There was another, unrelated problem: the Statue of Liberty is a Weeping Angel and doesn't do anything in the story. How is that not the focus of the story? It's such an awesome idea and they did nothing with it. It was wasted here. But there was good stuff, particularly the acting; Matt Smith's utter shock at the sudden loss of Amy was heartbreaking.

But I'm disappointed in this season. My favourite episode was THE POWER OF THREE and it was rather weak. A TOWN CALLED MERCY was CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL bad. DINOSAURS ON A SPACESHIP was a sort of Douglas Adams kind of fun, though not as good as THE LODGER. ASYLUM OF THE DALEKS I found boring because Daleks are crap (only time I've ever liked them was THE BIG BANG). THE POWER OF THREE was really wonderful until it ended. I actually can't remember how it ended. Really. I remember the build-up and I can't remember the end at all. They find a guy on a spaceship who is a Gallifreyan bogeyman and... something? I actually remember the ends to all the others. Very disappointing. Nothing on the level of THE ELEVENTH HOUR, or the Angels two-parter, or the Pandorica two-parter, the Silence two-parter, THE DOCTOR'S WIFE, A GOOD MAN GOES TO WAR, THE GOD COMPLEX or NIGHT TERRORS. Amy and Rory deserved better for their final send off.

I'm certain Moffat had trouble behind the scenes for these five episodes. He was gearing up for the 50th anniversary and Karen Gillan and/or Arthur Darvill wanted to leave, and he didn't want to set up the 50th anniversary story lines with Amy and Rory as they'd be leaving, so he put it off until the new companion and gave us five stand alone episodes with a slight continuity for Amy and Rory and nothing else tying them together. I dunno really, something wasn't working this time round. Hopefully he'll grab his stride, but I wonder... SHERLOCK is amazing, but he deleted his twitter account and I have a feeling that criticism is no longer anything he pays attention to, and he's starting to not question his work the way he was during the fifth season. We'll see if this is a hiccup in quality due to changes behind the scenes (let's not forget, two associate producers left, under pleasant circumstances though) as opposed to a downward trend.
 
There was a reviewer on Spinoff online who said that the Doctor could've gone to Connecticut, driven over to New York and picked up Amy & Rory.

Lots of people say similar things about that, but if the angel at the end still got to Rory, wouldn't they still have come after him even he left with the Doctor?
 
Why are we overanalyzing things?

I was stated if it was written, it became fixed in time. There deaths were written in time, so it was fixed.
 
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I'm not over analyzing anything, I only brought up what someone else asked, which is a fair question given what the Doctor said.
 
Ultimate Houde said:
Why are we overanalyzing things?

I was stated if it was written, it became fixed in time. There deaths were written in time, so it was fixed.
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It's not overanalysis. It's simply trying to understand the mechanics. The Doctor says he can't go back, but we don't understand why as he already did and River has to go back to give Amy the book. So if River can go back, why can't the Doctor go back after the paradox moment and pick them up? Or go to another city and meet them there? Why can't River go back, give them a time vortex manipulator each and vortex them back? There are contradictory rules at work in the story.

What's more, the entire point of last season was the Doctor getting out of a fixed point in time by tricking everyone into thinking he died when he never did. A similar trick of just paying someone to put the tombstone in Manhattan at the right time would be a similar feat. Also, you know, the tombstone changed to include Amy, which undercuts the idea it was fixed.

The mechanics of it are a mess. Which is a shame because it's never been that way before. There's been lots of timey-wimey wibbly-wobbly stuff going on, but it's been internally consistent with just the episode if not the whole show. But THE ANGELS TAKE MANHATTAN directly states the rules of time travel as one way, breaks that rule, then suddenly says the rule is unbreakable. It's unsatisfying.
 
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