The Weeping Angels introduced me to Doctor Who. In the fall of 2012, a friend created a viewing guide to ease skeptical newcomers into the series. He suggested everyone start with “Blink,” one of the all-time greats that introduces the Weeping Angels. These creepy statues only move when nobody is looking at them, but if they touch you, they transport you back in time, all so they can feed on the temporal energy created by disrupting the timeline. You don’t need to understand decades of Doctor Who mythos to enjoy this well-constructed bottle episode. After “Blink,” it took me only a couple of months to binge through everything the revived series had to offer.
Perhaps because I watched the entire series so quickly, the Weeping Angels began to feel a bit overused, prompting me to roll my eyes every time they popped up on screen. That’s mainly because of the series 5 two-parter, “The Time of Angels” and “Flesh and Stone,” which involves an entire army of Weeping Angels on an alien planet in the distant future. “Blink” works because it’s a more intimate and claustrophobic story; “Flesh and Stone” doesn’t because it does too much.
But fourteen years ago today, Doctor Who delivered a superb 45 minutes of television that remains as heartbreaking now as it did back then. It does this by telling a tighter story involving Weeping Angels with personal stakes, a pulpy noir vibe, and Manhattan as its vibrant setting.
The Weeping Angels finally found something worse than death
“The Angels Take Manhattan” initially feels like a rather casual adventure, or more accurately, a pleasant little vacation. The 11th Doctor (Matt Smith), Amy Pond (Karen Gillan), and Rory Williams (Arthur Darvill) are enjoying a quiet afternoon in Central Park when Rory leaves to get coffee. Before he can return, a new kind of Weeping Angel called a Cherub sends him back to 1938, where he encounters River Song (Alex Kingston) — operating under the alias Melody Malone — and learns that Manhattan has become a hunting ground for the Angels. They’ve taken over an apartment building called Winter Quay, where they imprison their victims and repeatedly feed on the temporal energy created by sending them into the past.
Back in the present, the Doctor realizes that the detective novel he has been reading was written by River and recounts the adventure as it unfolds. The book becomes both a guide and a trap — it’s also an intriguing part of the episode’s gimmick as events play out across the two timelines. “Once we know what’s coming, it’s written in stone,” the Doctor warns Amy. As long as they don’t read ahead, the future is still in flux. Yet if they want any hope of saving Rory, they have to keep reading.
Naturally, the Doctor figures it all out, but then Rory discovers a room containing an elderly version of himself, who has spent decades trapped inside Winter Quay just waiting to die. This isn’t a possible future. It’s a fixed point in time. The only way to fix this, Rory reasons, is to leap to his death from the top of the building. Amy tries to talk Rory down from the roof while the Statue of Liberty looms nearby (yes, as an actual Weeping Angel) makes for one of the most emotional scenes in all of Doctor Who.
When Rory climbs onto the edge of the roof, he asks Amy to push him. Instead, she steps up so she can take his hand. “Together, or not at all,” she says. Then they jump.
It is horrifying and deeply romantic watching them embrace each other as they fall 32 stories, doubly so as the Doctor emotionally unravels on the roof. Rory once gave Amy two thousand years. Amy answers by choosing to give up the rest of hers rather than let him die alone. Any lingering doubt about which man she will choose at the end of the episode has already been answered.
Time and time again, we’ve seen Amy torn between Rory and the Doctor. On one hand, there’s the Raggedy Man who walked into her life when she was a little girl, like something out of a fairy tale. On the other is her husband, the man who literally waited for nearly 2,000 years just to save her. For years, Rory had tolerated being treated like the third wheel in his own marriage. Although Rory sometimes bristles at Amy’s obsession with the Doctor, he almost never becomes the petty, possessive boyfriend we expect. He simply chooses Amy, no matter the stakes or circumstances.
Here, for what feels like the first time ever, we see Amy unequivocally choose Rory.
That choice is particularly satisfying because the first half of series 7 feels largely uneven and occasionally frustrating, especially the premiere, “Asylum of the Daleks.” Just a few episodes prior to this, “The God Complex” compromised Amy’s seemingly unshakable faith in the Doctor and ultimately ended with her and Rory attempting to live a normal life as a married couple with a new house and a flashy car. It felt like a complete, albeit anticlimactic, conclusion to Amy’s arc. Yet “Asylum of the Daleks” picks up roughly two years later with Amy and Rory on the brink of divorce. At best, it feels manufactured. At worst, it feels downright infuriating.
“The Angels Take Manhattan” course-corrects in the most satisfying way possible, transforming Amy and Rory’s apparent deaths into a love story.
The Doctor cannot save everyone from goodbye
Amy and Rory’s paradox works. Winter Quay is erased, and they awaken alive in a graveyard with the Doctor and River. It’s a miracle. Just when you think they’re about to go to a pub to play video games, Rory once again sees something he shouldn’t have: his name on a gravestone. That’s when one last Weeping Angel taps him on the shoulder and sends him back to 1938.
New York’s timelines have been scrambled by too many distortions, and Rory’s death at an advanced age is now literally in stone. The TARDIS won’t ever be able to return, and it sounds like going to New York at any point in time might prove a challenge. Doctor Who’s time-travel rules have always been pretty flexible. But Matt Smith’s era as the 11th Doctor often emphasized that knowing the future makes it harder to change. The emotional logic here is much firmer than the actual mechanics. Couldn’t Rory simply leave New York and meet them in San Francisco in 1940? Would the timestream prevent it somehow? Doctor Who doesn’t bother to explore any other options, because Rory’s time in the TARDIS is up, as is Amy’s.
Amy is given one tear-filled choice: Blink and let the Angel send her into the past even though they’re not sure if it’ll be at the same time as Rory, or leave with the Doctor. The Doctor begs her not to go, his usual manic energy falling away to expose the vulnerable and desperately lonely man underneath. River encourages Amy. Of course, Amy chooses to be with Rory and tells River to look after the Doctor.
Smith’s performance makes this loss feel especially painful because his Doctor so often hides behind his silliness. He is wacky, impulsive, and exhilarating to watch, able to transform ancient weariness into the excitement of a child discovering the universe. In Amy’s final moments, all of that crumbles. He begs her, but she goes anyway. He screams and cries.
At least Amy finds a way to leave the Doctor one final message in the afterword of River’s novel. She assures him that she and Rory lived well and were happy, then asks him not to travel alone. That last part is so important. The Doctor needs companions not merely because he is lonely, but because they keep his twisted brilliance, mania, and pain from curdling into something sinister. We’ve already seen what happened when the Tenth Doctor traveled alone for too long.
The Weeping Angels are the perfect monsters to end Amy and Rory’s story because they do not simply kill people. They separate them from everyone they love and force the survivors to keep living with the loss. The Doctor is a time-traveler. He should be able to see his friends whenever and wherever he wants. Yet Doctor Who engineers the precise circumstances that make it impossible.
All these years later, “The Angels Take Manhattan” remains messy as a time-travel story and nearly perfect as a goodbye.