At two key points in the narrative, River gives Amy advice born of life experience her mother doesn’t have, first explaining the Doctor’s aversion to endings, and then loudly and vehemently overruling the Doctor and telling Amy to let the Angel take her so she can be reunited with Rory. This marks the first and indeed only time that a River Song story openly acknowledges the Doctor’s marriage to River and focuses on the marriage of River’s parents. Within that, however, is a story with its own focus – one that is structured around two marriages. Either way, they function perfectly well as a cosmic horror kick, and Moffat and Hurran conspire to craft a quick and efficient bit of pulp fiction, taken from one genre over, that steadily transitions into weird fiction before, on a dime, executing an endearingly gonzo set piece in the form of the Statue of Liberty being a Weeping Angel. Depending on your perspective, they either lack an origin entirely, serving as a sort of predator that extends from the concept of the universe itself, or their origin sits squarely in that weird intersection of Borges and Lovecraft. The Angels are simply a lurking and pre-existing horror. Lovecraft’s death, as the entire opening sequence is essentially Doctor Who doing Lovecraft, finally paying off one of the great unrealized promises of the 1990s.
It’s telling that the story is set the year after H.P. Within the context of The Angels Take Manhattan, however, this is linked cleverly to another literary tradition, namely that of weird fiction, a genre that has always been defined by the qlippothic, albeit usually under a different name. But as with Asylum of the Daleks, this paratext is fundamental to understanding the structure of The Angels Take Manhattan, an episode that from the first frame only makes sense if the audience goes in knowing that it’s Amy Pond’s departure story. To some extent this has been the major problem with this entire run of episodes: it’s clearly just 2012’s filler before we get to 2013, where the main event is, both because of the fundamentally forward-looking nature of the hype machine that fuels Doctor Who and because 2013 – 50 = 1963. All of this is ultimately framed by the paratext: by the fact that even before Asylum of the Daleks aired, Coleman had been announced as the next companion and the departure of the Ponds had been set for this story. But if that story was aggressively forward-looking, here we get the flip side: a story that cannot possibly look forward. Asylum of the Daleks served as Moffat’s most aggressive feint, at least in terms of the audience, with everything it was sold as disappearing in a haze of Jenna Louise Coleman. The decision to frame the first portion of Season Seven with two returning monsters is interesting. On television today, however, the last of five episodes in Doctor Who’s 2012 mini-season.
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