He pays the price here. When Amy leaves it seems to hurt him more than anything has before. The few tears he shed over Rose looks like sang-froid in comparison and that's before he goes off on his massive sulk to Victorian London. What's the matter with him? He doesn't seem to think about Rory for a second. It doesn't even occur to him until later that River has just watched her own parents disappear. He seems obsessed with Amy in that moment. "I'll never be able to see you again!" he wails. Is it just that Amy is leaving? Or is it that she has chosen to leave that bothers him - that she has finally and irrevocably chosen a life with Rory over one aboard the TARDIS with the Doctor?
Well, it is own fault quite frankly. This is the man who deliberately locked his own granddaughter out of the TARDIS, who abandoned Sarah Jane in Aberdeen without a by-your-leave, who let Romana walk off with his dog and simply shrugged. You'd think he'd know: better to be the dumper than the dumpee. You'd think he would have hardened his hearts.
All that's at the end of course, and there's a lot to enjoy before we get there. Firstly, proper New York! Those scenes in Central Park - and the frenzy of interest they generated in onlookers - show again how confident this show is and how massive it has become. But they also make the whole episode reek of authenticity. Apart from that bit in the park and a few skyline shots, everything else we see is Cardiff, Swansea or CGI and it never looks anything less than utterly convincing. Even the graveyard, at the end, which is obviously fake (Manhattan isn't surrounded by hills with graveyards on them), looks magnificent. It's Merthyr or somewhere, shot against green screen with skyscrapers pasted into the gap, but I still can't see the join and, more impressively, the realisation that there isn't such a wonderful graveyard, grey and windswept, overlooking New York, is tremendously disappointing.
But, oh look, I've jumped to the end again, and this episode is all about the dangers of getting ahead of yourself. Once again Moffat comes up with an excellent variation on the perils of time travel: pushing into the Doctor's hands a novelisation of the adventure he is currently having, complete with teasing chapter titles. It's a tremendously clever idea, and one that offers so much to this story - we get the thrill of witnessing Rory fall out of the world into the supposed fictional narrative, and of realising that an inert book contains ongoing events; but it also offers the Doctor an advantage, offering clues like the ancient Chinese vase, and provides the episode itself shape and structure: foreknowledge becomes a trap, ratcheting different times together, binding our heroes to their respective dooms.
The Doctor's horrified, almost physically repulsed by this - presumably supremely offended by the indignity of being controlled, of having his options curtailed - and like many a husband cross with his mother-in-law, he takes it out on his wife. He's really quite unpleasant to River in Grayle's house (even allowing for the stress of the situation) and she goes to extraordinary lengths to dispel his black mood. When the Doctor discovers she has broken her own wrist, and hidden her pain, he tries to make it up to her with a bit of macho grandstanding, giving her a quick blast of his Time Lord magic to fix her injury. Quite rightly, she calls him out on this, but the disturbing thing about this scene is what tipped the Doctor over the edge in the first place: it was seeing the chapter title Amelia's Last Farewell that caused him to rage at River. It's an unsettling idea, reinforced by his reaction in the graveyard, but it seems that he might care more about Amy than he does about his wife. Sort it out, Doctor.
This story sees the best use of the Weeping Angels. They finally realise their full potential, revealed as arch manipulators who have contrived to turn Winter Quay into an invisible and (almost) inescapable trap. The use of the Statue of Liberty is irresistible, surely, even if it is ever so slightly silly ("That's cool," said William. "But what about the empty plinth?"), and the very idea of the Angels, silently stationed around New York, or bound in Grayle's alcove, is terrifying. With the ambient fear-factor already much higher than usual, an individual moment must be absolutely horrific to stand out - but I've never seen the boys more frightened watching the show than when Rory is in the cellar with the baby angels. Chris in particular was transfixed, slowly edging a cushion across his face, like an eclipse.
Amy and Rory's scene on the roof of Winter Quay is quite amazing. For those few minutes, with the Doctor and the ever-charismatic River pushed to the margins, Doctor Who belongs to them completely. It's their final big moment together (the graveyard coda is Amy's alone) and they do not waste it. The tension, already high, is made utterly unbearable by every wobble and shiver of their bodies on that ledge, and by the inevitable decision we know is coming.
NEXT TIME...
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