I've started off a few of my more recent reviews with something along the lines of "Steven Moffat has a problem," and I'm going to start this one off by wondering whether Moffat knows why the Angels were such a creepy, scary threat to begin with. So I wanted to preface this by saying that Moffat's easy prey right now since he's the showrunner, but that's not why I keep criticizing him. See, after "Blink" aired, I wrote a list of Doctor Who episodes I owned and a brief synopsis of each one, and at the end of the "Blink" synopsis I said something along the lines of "Moffat should be the next showrunner." Seriously, the first three years the show was back, Moffat consistently wrote the best episodes each season. He rightfully snatched a Hugo for "The Empty Child," beating out Battlestar Galactica's "Pegasus," and then his "Girl in the Fireplace" stole a Hugo from BSG's "Downloaded."
So I'm not trying to say that Moffat is the biggest hack on Doctor Who since Terry Nation. That's not what I'm getting at here. Nation was a guy who wrote (and snagged the copyright for) the Daleks, and yet the best-remembered Dalek serials (The Evil of the Daleks, Day of the Daleks, Genesis of the Daleks) weren't written by him (Genesis is credited to him, but the whole concept was outgoing Script Editor Terrance Dicks's idea, and it was heavily re-written by incoming Script Editor Robert Holmes). In contrast, Moffat actually came up with several good monsters, it's just that he went and milked his most famous one far too hard.
Case in point: the climax of "The Angels Take Manhattan" involves the Doctor, River and Amy arguing in a graveyard while a statue points at Amy. The Weeping Angels work in dark rooms with flickering lights, which, admittedly the first half of the episode has in spades. The don't work outside in broad daylight. The tag at the end of "Blink" - showing a bunch of statues outside in broad daylight - worked as kind of a stinger because it didn't require us to think about it too much, and it was an effective capstone on the previous 44 minutes of pure terror.
Also... the decision to treat the Statue of Liberty like the T-rex when up until this point the Angels have been Velociraptors... it doesn't work. The Angels aren't scary when the camera holds on them for a very long time, which is basically what happens with Lady Liberty in the background of all the rooftop scenes. It's hard to fault the director for not "getting" the Angels because there are parts of this episode that do work as well as the scariest parts of "Blink." In particular, the little kid statues that keep terrorizing Rory went a long way towards making the Angels scary again. (Although, how did those statues get Rory out of the basement and over to their farm? They didn't zap him through time...)
By far the most frustrating thing about this episode is the fact that 1938 is somehow a TARDIS-proof year. Daffy Duck was named, the March of Dimes was established, Hitler assumed control of the German military, and the Munich Agreement was signed. Okay, those are fairly important things. But hang on; back in "The Empty Child," the TARDIS managed to land in 1941. Ah well, different production teams, different rules, ri... oh, wait, "The Empty Child" was written by Moffat. Why couldn't the Doctor have popped back to 1941 and picked up Amy and Rory after three years? Because the plot demanded it?
By far the most ludicrous thing about "The Angels Take Manhattan" (and it's a close tie between this, the Godzilla Lady Liberty, and the Graveyard Scene) sees the Doctor running in slow-motion to recover the last page on the novel he was reading as if it's the key to resolving the episode's crisis and not just a little epilogue on the Ponds.
Still, aside from Martha Jones, Amy probably gets the most dignified companion exit of New Who, and I guess that's saying something.
6 out of 10.
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