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  • I just don't get why some of the stuff shown in this episode like the book and the graves are treated as completely immutable. Is there some reason why they couldn't just Trick Out Time and say, tell River to lie about these specific details in the book so that they will react how they're supposed to? Go back to the day before they saw the graves and temporarily change what the graves say?
    • The Doctor is shown to have considerable difficulty in landing the TARDIS in 1938 New York, and even has to arrange for "landing lights". This is explicitly stated to be due to the activities of the Angels. That likely has something to do with it.
      • Yeah why exactly does he have a problem doing that though this time? He didn't have any trouble landing in 1930's New York in "Daleks in Manhattan", and it's not as if the Angels had been there for less than 8 years doing their Timey Wimey Ball, I mean their whole Hotel set up means at least a human lifetime of activity in the city before.
      • Temporal pollution. The Angels are creating paradox upon paradox upon paradox upon paradox in that hotel, just to sate their appetites. In this situation, the Doctor can't land the TARDIS there because the TARDIS is kicking and screaming like a terrified child being dragged into the doctor's office. It desperately, desperately does not want to go into this temporal toxic-waste dump even though it has to.
      • It's explained in the episode that the paradox of Rory jumping and cancelling a tonne of time loops also poisoned every other time loop in the area, and the Angels may have made thousands. The TARDIS will probably outright refuse any attempt to navigate the massive crater in time that is 30s New York.

  • A cherubim Angel blows out Rory's candle in the trailer. Can Angels breathe when quantum-locked? Does that count as moving?
    • I think the wind just blew the candle out - the face of the cherub just made it look like it was blowing the candle out.
    • Being quantum-locked didn't stop that Angel in Blink from turning off that light bulb.

  • The Statue of Liberty isn't stone, it's made of copper and metal. How can they make it an Angel?
    • The Image of an angel becomes an angel, so they might be trying to make it look like one of them
      • Or they could have done it the other way around, making an existing angel look like the Statue.
    • Angels might be able to quantum lock into any form, as long as it can't be killed; you can't 'kill' metal any more than you can 'kill' stone.
    • Copper and metals come from refining mineral ores, which are stone.
      • No, copper ore (and all metal ores) are metal, they are simple deposits found in rock (or stone).
      • No... not at all. Hematite e.g. is an iron-oxygen compound, and is a mineral just like quartz (which is silicon-oxygen), which makes up a large part of what we commonly call "rock".
    • At the very end of Blink, aren't some of the statues shown made of metal?

  • How did Amy and River get that book published? It would have far too much required backstory to make any sense of the characters and plot mechanics (we only got it because we were already familiar with the characters and setting), and the afterword is more or less completely nonsensical.
    • Vanity Publishing.
    • As a side-note, how did Amy get that book published in 1938 if she's stuck in an apartment for the rest of her life? And if they sent it to another past Amy, wouldn't she have noticed it was weird an Amy, Rory and the Doctor showed up and that Melody sounds like her daughter?
      • Amy wasn't stuck in an apartment - her and Rory's suicide created a paradox which destroyed the whole operation. After the last Angel sent them back in time, they were free to live where they wanted in the past, just like the Angels' victims in Blink.
    • Perhaps it's one of a series; just because they don't mention other volumes doesn't mean there aren't any. Plus, back in the 1930s, there were loads of avenues for authors to get published (as well as publishers, there were a lot more short story magazines for a start) — it's where the whole 'pulp' thing comes from.
      • The Bells of St. John reveals Amy writes more books, which supports that argument.

  • How did the Angels plan on keeping people alive in the apartment complex if they keep them there for their entire lives? Did the angels provide thrice-daily meal service and delivery of enough mentally stimulating books/misc. to stave off suicide?

  • The idea of the Statue of Liberty being an angel in the first place is totally ridiculous. World famous statue in a city of 8 million-ish people, a city that "never sleeps", an alien that can't move if someone's watching. Seems to me that there should be at least one person at any given time that's looking at it, never mind when it's running around the city making giant booming footsteps. Who doesn't look around when you hear BOOM...BOOM...BOOM sound of a giant walking about?
    • Well, it was mentioned that no one seemed to notice the angels, so maybe they have a sort of Perception Filter that allows people to see them but never notice them. They seem to change with every episode, anyway, so why not? The BOOM...BOOM...BOOMs were sporadic; that was probably people glancing out their windows, "Oh look, the Statue of Liberty is in the middle of the street", and going back to whatever they were doing.
    • For that matter, does it even do anything? If you're going to turn a famous world landmark into a time demon, you might as well do something with it. Just stomping over to gawk at people on the roof seems somewhat unbecoming.
      • Its role is probably to poke those people that escape onto the roof, sending them back in time to be recaptured. Why not use a standard, more subtle Angel up there for that is less clear.
      • It's most likely that it goes over there to feed on the time energy. The question remains, of course, as to why make the Statue an Angel, bring up the Fridge Logic of how it's supposed to move, and then not do anything with it at all.
      • No matter how you look at it, it doesn't make any sense. So really, the only true explanation is Rule of Cool.
      • Which means, if we look at it in a Watsonian sense, that even the Weeping Angels of old can fall prey to Awesome, but Impractical.
      • Further proof of this: no-one—NO-ONE—was looking at the statue that was taller than the building when Rory and Amy were preparing to jump. They were understandably too busy with Drama. The paradox wasn't that Amy and Rory died, it was that the statue existed, unhindered, and didn't EAT everyone in less than a split second. It just existed to show up, canonizing the joke that existed on the internet long before this episode, solely to threaten Rory and never be mentioned again once Rory got his idea to jump, because the characters had the relevant plot to talk about.
      • I assumed someone was looking out of a window or something in that scene. There were probably some people who had an idea what went on, didn't dare go anywhere near, but did still try to save others by staring as long as they could when they saw the angels were after them. But since there was no way out of the building other than jumping (and no-one else would know to do that), these efforts could never achieve anything.
      • As of "The Name of the Doctor", it's possible that one of Clara's duplicates was nearby and peeked at it long enough for them to escape.
      • The So L angel was probably stationed there to grab captives from behind in the event they did try to jump off the roof. It's not as if someone would need to be an expert on time travel to be Driven to Suicide by the sight of themselves aged to near-death, is it? The angels surely recognized the risk of a paradox, and took precautions against it. It would've caught Rory and Amy as they fell, returned them to the rooftop, and time-shifted them both, except that with two people falling instead of one, there was no direction from which it could reach in to catch them without getting time-locked.
    • We actually have the answer: There is a poster of the statue of liberty in the elevator. As per Flesh And Stone/Time of the Angels images of angels become angels. Make the statue an angel and every picture of the statue becomes an angel. The Angel!Liberty came from the poster in the elevator. Well, maybe. That kinda pushes into Wild Mass Guessing of course.
      • But if that image created a real Angel, wouldn't it be the size of the image, rather than the size of the actual Statue of Liberty?
      • In "Time of Angels", the Angel that was materializing from the recording was normal-sized.
      • But wait. There are millions of pictures of the Statue of Liberty. If any image of it—assuming it actually is an angel—can become a full-sized replica, the planet should have been overrun with the damned things a century ago. (Y'know, on a side tangent, as cool as the video angel scene was in "Time of Angels," the whole "image of an angel becomes an angel" thing opens a whole cannery full of worms once Fridge Logic is applied.)
      • Rewatch Time of the Angels carefully. What the Doctor says about the video-Angel is "it's reaching out… observing us". An image of an angel doesn't become a different angel, but more like a "pathway" for the original Angel to materialize in a different location out of the image. As a result, the poster may have been how the Statue of Liberty Angel got to the building unseen, but it was the same consciousness, the same mind, controlling it that was normally housed in the real Statue of Liberty. It only reaches out where it chooses to do so.
      • Possibly the Statue had only recently been converted into/replaced by an angel, so only pictures created since that happened would pose such a risk. There'd be a number of them, but probably not enough to overrun the planet, especially at a time when photos still had to be painstakingly developed in a darkroom.
      • As I recall, the Statue is already shown to be an Angel in the 1930s, so that would null the theory of it being a recent convert.
    • The real problem with the Statue being an Angel isn't that it's made of metal or that there are already millions of photos of the thing. The real problem is that in 1938, when the episode's past events take place, it was in the process of being renovated by the National Park Service after decades of neglect, hence was partially encased in ropes and scaffolding. Which, if it broke loose to walk around the city, would be left scattered all over Liberty Island as a dead giveaway that something weird is happening.

  • Since when can the Doctor use regeneration energy when he hasn't recently regenerated? Is this something he's always been able to do? Because if so, it's pretty out of character for him that he wouldn't have used it to heal any of the hundreds of good people he's seen die in front of him.
    • It probably only works between Time Lords, whose bodies are made to be able to use the stuff, and as such only really have been applicable when he was with Romana, the only other Time Lord he liked that he's spent any meaningful length of time with other than River.
      • He gave up ten years of his life to recharge the TARDIS in Rise of the Cybermen, so there's precedent. It does seem likely that it only works with Time Lordy things, though.
      • Don't forget that in Let's Kill Hitler River was able to use up her remaining regenerations to save the Doctor from dying. So yes it has been established that regeneration energy can be used to help another Time Lord who is injured.
    • The question is, what exactly does it mean for the Doctor to use up "regeneration energy" like that? Ten gave up ten years of his life, but that didn't really seem to mean anything in the long run- his next regeneration was really rough, but that's assumed to be because he was holding it in so long. Is Eleven going to have problems with his next regeneration? Or was River worried about nothing?
      • I presume that the more energy you use up, the greater the risk that your next regeneration will go poorly and you won't actually survive the process. This would work well with the idea that River used up all her remaining regenerations in Let's Kill Hitler.
      • As of The Time of the Doctor, it's possible that the Doctor wasn't too concerned about his next regeneration, because he was on his last one; he didn't even have enough energy left for another regeneration.
    • Another point: if the Doctor could always use regeneration energy then why didn't he use it on the Master when the Master refused to regenerate?
      • River did want her wrist to get better, and she didn't see it coming, so she absorbed it. A broken wrist would have hindered her quite badly. The Master, on the other hand, would have rejected the energy because he wanted to die, to amongst other things, hurt the Doctor and leave him the Last Time Lord. Again.
      • A bit late to the party here, but additionally, the Master was dying, and the Doctor, being in his tenth incarnation at that time, probably didn't have enough regeneration energy left to heal him. It took River all of her remaining regenerations (a total of ten, assuming that she started with a full set) in order to revive the Doctor.
    • Plus... the Master is still a psychopathic mass-murdering bastard who has caused the Doctor nothing but grief and pain for a good long while by this point. The Doctor might be incredibly saddened by the Master's death and might not want to be the last Time Lord in the universe anymore, but that doesn't necessarily equal being so desperate to keep him alive to the point where he sacrifices his own life (or lives) to do so, especially since if he does so there's a fairly good chance the Master is just going to use the opportunity to cause more pain and misery to the universe. River is, by that point, his wife (sort of) and hasn't done anything nearly on the level that the Master has, so he's a lot more willing to sacrifice himself to heal her. Put simply, the Doctor believes that River is worth the sacrifice, and that the Master probably isn't.

  • Why, exactly, can't the Doctor go back in time to see Amy and Rory again? Even if he can't take the TARDIS back to New York in that particular time period, what exactly is stopping them from traveling to, you know, ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD, where he could go? It just seems like a nonexistent problem created just for Rule of Drama.
    • They vanished right in front of their own gravestone. By observing the gravestone when he looks at where they vanished, the Doctor turns their death of old age in the past into a fixed point. Which was likely the reason the Angel wanted to poke them there in the first place.
      • That just explains why he can't bring them back to the present (not for good, anyway), but he explicitly states that he'll never be able to see them again at all. What's stopping him from just popping back to the past for a visit, as long as it's nowhere near New York?
    • Because now he knows that they've lived out their lives without seeing him again, so it's fixed and he can't change it. Like how reading something makes it fixed, it's the same concept.
      • "He knows that they've lived out their lives without seeing him again"-How exactly does he know this? It was never stated anywhere that they never saw him again, just that they lived the rest of their lives in the past.
      • I think that's where 'Amelia's Last Farewell' comes into play. He takes that to mean it's the last time he'll ever see her, and based on everything that's happened, he's aware that trying to fix a future he's already read about will cause a paradox. And according to him, another paradox would destroy NY.
    • It seems to me the Doctor could just commission that exact gravestone to be made and bring it with him in the TARDIS, and put it up in the proper spot, thus tricking out time in a manner similar to how he did in the previous season's finale.
    • A statement by Steven Moffat says that normally the Doctor could arrange for a fake grave stone to be made or otherwise trick out time, but since they've already mucked up time a bunch it would be too much. http://www.themarysue.com/steven-moffat-ponds/
    • Moreover, he's right there when Amy talks herself into following Rory into the past, and hears her make the choice to leave her Tardis-travelling friend behind in exchange for the slim hope of reuniting with her husband. He's plainly more than a bit hurt by this, but he's not going to subvert Amy's right to make that decision: she's willing to cut ties with the Doctor now, and he's learned to respect companions' decisions to leave, however much he's become attached to this pair in particular.
    • The same reason he rarely goes back to see any of his previous companions once they've made the decision to leave him — it hurts him too much.

  • Is the Doctor ever going to tell Brian why his son and daughter-in-law never came back from traveling with him? It's entirely possible that he would be too guilt-ridden and avoid Brian altogether...but you have to admit, that'd be a pretty rotten thing to do.
    • My theory is that Brian'll be back for the Christmas special, he strikes me as a good character for that and it would give closure to the whole deal with him.
    • I don't think there's anything stopping Amy and Rory from leaving messages for Brian. They could write 50 years worth of letters to him by the time the Doctor got the courage to approach him.

  • The newspaper that Amy is reading at the beginning says that the Detroit Lions have won the Super Bowl. Never mind the fact that there's no way that any American watching the program would take that claim seriously, but the Super Bowl usually takes place in late January or early February, meaning the weather in Central Park should be far chillier and winter-like than it is.
    • Warm snap, maybe? Either that, or it's a really old newspaper she just found lying around somewhere.

  • The Statue of Liberty is BIG and right on the bay of New York. Now, admittedly it's not really big, but considering how busy New York is and how busy New York Harbor is, wouldn't you think there would always be somebody looking at it, making it basically impossible to become Angel-fied? Not to mention that presumably the park service or NYPD would always have somebody on Liberty Island...
    • We don't know. We just don't know.
    • Maybe the statue isn't an angel, but it's filled with angels manipulating it. They move it around like a giant puppet/costume and since no one can see them inside, they don't get quantum locked.
      • Interesting theory (although how would they change its facial expression? Unless in the Whoniverse Lady Liberty has gigantic teeth.)
    • Maybe it's not really the Statue of Liberty, but simply a giant angel (same as the cherubs are undersized angels) which took on that shape so that people who see and quantum-lock it will assume it's a replica or a movie prop?

  • What's to prevent Amy's afterword and their graves from simply being planted fakes? Hell, the Doctor's death was given a precise time and date and he's still alive? And if the Doctor can't go back to New York in 1938, what's to prevent him from leaving them say, a cross-Atlantic telegram informing them to take a ship to 1938 England where he'd pick them up?
    • Again, 'Amelia's Last Farewell' is part of it. He can't see her again, ever, because he already knows that he's not going to. New York is already weak from all the paradoxes and alternate timelines—not sure how THAT works, but whatever—so I'm guessing he can't affect the Pond's timelines at all, at any point in time, as long as they're in New York. As for why the Ponds don't leave, the Doctor does say that if they left they'd be running for the rest of their lives. So I'm guessing the angels want them to stay in New York, possibly as revenge against both them and the Doctor for foiling their diabolical plans.
      • Amelia's Last Farewell doesn't have to point to her scene in the graveyard. That part of the story could have even just been an epilogue to the book that tells of adventures afterwards when the Doctor did manage to see her again. The title itself doesn't mean anything as it is easy to work around. As viewers we know that the Last Farewell takes place then due to Karen Gillan wanting her exit to be permanent but in universe there is nothing to suggest that it needs to be at the graveyard. Also the Doctor says that to Rory as the Angels were chasing specifically him to farm his time energy in the paradoxed timeline. The new timeline is just a case of that one Angel getting lucky. Seeing as how Amy and Rory live happy lives we can specifically see that the Angels didn't chase them.
    • Remember the afterword, too. Amy was apparently a lot older when she wrote it, and it confirmed that they never saw each other again (alright, so he could go back to a time after she wrote it... but somehow I think meeting her again as a very old woman not far from death would probably upset both of them more).
      • Another factor is the fact that their ages at death are now fixed points. With how dangerous it is to be around the Doctor, he probably doesn't want to risk them dying earlier than that and causing a possibly destructive second paradox.
      • In reality only the gravestones are fixed points. All it'd take is for the Doctor to forge whatever it says on the gravestone and they'd be fine. Amy and Rory could have died each at age 40 in a new timeline and as long as the Doctor makes sure that it reads age 80 and 88 respectively when young Amy and Rory sees the graves then the fixed point would in fact stand.
      • No. Setting aside the fact that a "fixed gravestone" makes no sense, the reality is that witnessing your future fixes it in place. By looking at the gravestone, Rory's death in Manhattan (which would lead to that gravestone being placed there to be seen by Rory) became fixed and unavoidable since the gravestone marked the placement of a dead future Rory.
      • But they didn't see their future selves. They saw a grave marker. Again, all that's fixed is the gravestone. The grave could be empty for all they know. Really, the only reason that the Doctor couldn't go back and rescue Amy and Rory is because the Doctor Who writers don't know how to invoke Tricked Out Time effectively.
      • More like the Doctor knows just how badly wrong Tricked Out Time can go if you screw around with it too much. Adelaide (re)taught him that lesson in "Waters of Mars". Plus the Doctor was beginning to get conscious that the time of parting with his latest companions was drawing near and he was trying to wean himself off them (Amy accused him of that and he gave the weakest no-means-yes answer possible). He was getting tired of always looking over his shoulder for the event that would take them from him, and there it was. It was time to move on, he knew it, Amy knew it, River knew it. As far as endings go it was pretty good compared to some of his other partings. Certainly not a planet to the face or a complete nervous breakdown coupled with a "The Reason You Suck" Speech directed at him.

  • The very end confused me. Did the Doctor really go back in time and tell Amelia those stories? Wouldn't that mess up the timeline pretty significantly? I know the shot of her looking up as a kid was always in The Eleventh Hour, but I don't understand what we're actually supposed to imagine happened. Was her timeline altered? Did the Doctor tell her the stories without her remembering somehow? Did she actually know everything that was going to happen all along and just never mentioned it?
    • I think we are meant to take it as he told Amelia vague things like "she will find a guy who truly loves her" rather than specifics like "Rory will wait 2000 years for you outside a box keeping you alive". So from that night on she knew she would see the Doctor again and have great adventures but had to pretend to be mad at him. Although if the "hit him with a cricket bat" part still happened in The Eleventh Hour, then that really does seem even harsher than it was if she actually was angry thinking she'd never see him again.
      • She probably was actually mad at him. Perhaps he didn't give her any specifics of when exactly he would come back, and she hadn't expected to wait 14 years. However, while the thought of him going back to comfort her is a nice one, it doesn't make any sense canonically. It even ruins the most compelling aspect of Amy's character development: the feeling of abandonment she had to go through.
    • There's also the question of why the young Amy was fixated on the raggedy Doctor she first saw, when (if he did indeed visit her again when she was young) he would have come in his usual garb.
    • Amy was told through her whole life that the Doctor was an imaginary friend. Even if he did come back to visit her (and beside this episode we know he did because of the Big Bang 2) that just would have reinforcing her abandonment issues because, seriously Doctor, who going to tell her you'll be back and then not come back for 14 years? She should hit him with a cricket bat!

  • It's mentioned the Doctor has been going around erasing himself from various databases across time and space - this is from River, and it appears it's not long before she meets the Doctor for the last time in 'Silence in the Library'. The thing is, if he has been doing this, surely he'd also remove himself from the biggest library in the universe? So how can the Vashta Narada look him up? Doesn't he create a paradox? If he hasn't deleted himself from the Library, then surely people will still know who he is?
    • By River's time the Library has been abandoned for 150 years or so, so nobody could get in there and look anything up. Plus the Doctor knows that the Vashta Nerada are gonna look him up because he's already been through that, so he most likely left that database alone on purpose.
    • Another sort of headscratcher is how can the Doctor work for U.N.I.T. again if there's no record of him anymore?
      • Probably something similar to the above; he's kept some faint traces of himself around in case he needs them. In any case, the main contact he had with U.N.I.T in the episode we saw him working most closely with them following his determination to keep to the shadows was the daughter of one of his oldest and bestest friends in the universe; if anyone's likely to have heard enough about him to get a sense of how he operates, it's her.
      • He only erased records of himself. He didn't erase the memories of people who'd worked with him, or the people they'd told about it.
      • Or, given how "The Day of the Doctor" wrapped up, the Curator could have restored the records, or intercepted Eleven when he came to erase U.N.I.T.'s files and told him not to.
      • This raises another question: nobody's going to put that information back into the database? It's the Doctor; I find it hard to imagine people who know about him wouldn't have backups of information like that well hidden. Even if he destroyed all of the information in the database, people would still remember enough to point out 'this man exists and is important; keep an eye on him'.
      • If the Doctor's capable of erasing all information about himself on any given database, then he's probably capable of writing a virus or bot or something that is able to detect if someone tries to re-upload it on any given database and then delete it again.
      • As one comic points out, Earth is the one planet where it is simply not possible to erase all data.

  • This episode seems to contradict itself. The future is set in stone once you see it, right? Well, they saw the gravestone minus Amy. So Rory died alone. Definitely, no way to change it. Except then they suddenly do. What? Doesn't that create a paradox?
    • It was written in stone (I believe that was the wording) that Rory died of old age. It wasn't written in stone that he died alone, his name was just by itself. Nothing was known about the exact circumstances of his death. Amy's fate wasn't written in stone, it was open. So I don't think there's a paradox; the only thing they knew to be true was that Rory wasn't coming back, and the age he died. Any other details about his death could be changed.
      • It never said it had to be written in stone. The plot point was that once someone's future was known then it was fixed and it couldn't be changed. When Rory saw the empty grave then by this episode's rules it would have been fixed that he was buried alone. The fact that Amy was added to the grave does in fact completely contradict the main rule of the episode. In fact the saddest thing is that this was the most concrete thing in the episode. Every other time the 'fixed point' came up there were easy work-arounds or it was an extremely vague fixed point. So they actually contradicted it in the worst way possible.
      • I meant, 'written in stone' was the metaphor the Doctor used. Really think about that metaphor; if something is written in stone, you can't change it, but you can add to it. The first time Rory died, it was written in stone, as it were, that he died, after not having seen Amy for a long time. That couldn't be changed. The last time he died, it was simply written in stone that he died at a certain age, and was buried in a certain place. Nothing else. When Amy went back in time, a bit was added to that fate; that she would die and be buried with him a few years later (so, if you want to be technical, he was buried alone, since Amy died later). Nothing that they knew for sure about his fate was changed, it was merely added to.
    • No, it's not set in stone once you see it necessarily; they were able to prevent the first version of Rory's fate, where he died in the hotel, by causing a paradox. They couldn't prevent it again without making the paradox so much worse that it would rip a hole in reality. They couldn't avoid writing the book for the same reason. But that didn't stop Amy from being sent back with him.
  • The group is in Rory's hotel room, discussing how if Rory gets out of the hospital without being caught by the Angels it'll kill all the Angels. They can't figure out any way to get him out of the hotel safely.
River is right there. Wearing her Vortex Manipulator, which she made a point of telling Rory worked fine in New York. Why not put the manipulator on him, send him somewhere else and then go pick him up in the TARDIS once the paradox has destroyed the hotel?
  • The book is, technically, fiction. Writing something does not make it true. For instance, if she had written "And then the Doctor grew wings and automagically murderized all the angels with a flick of his screwdriver" doesn't mean it would happen. So all it would take to avoid this whole thing would have been them interpreting certain parts as 'fiction' and thus determining that they don't have to actually happen.
    • But it gets worse: River KNOWS the Doctor will look at the table of contents, because the book is written after the events. Moreover, because she knows the whole 'set in stone' thing and knows that the Doctor will look at the Table of Contents. So she doesn't need to include the fatal chapter name. If her book would prevent Amy from travelling back, there's nothing to stop her from simply vanity publishing it and having the copy delivered to the Doctor ahead of time.
      • Actually, getting to the end of it, the entire plot hinges on River being a moron, because it's based on the book. If instead she had sent the Doctor a manual with a list of "If... Then..." type statements regarding the incident, everything would have been solved. Because "If you don't watch out after the paradox, Rory will be Angel'ed again" is true even if you watch out.
      • The Stable Time Loop is the problem here. The plot is based on the book, because the book is based on what happened, which included it being based on the book. Since the book existed, River couldn't avoid writing it or using those chapter titles without causing a paradox.

  • So as per Flesh And Stone/Time of the Angels, an image of an Angel becomes an angel. The Statue of Liberty is an Angel. Photography existed in 1938, as did newspapers. Why didn't the Angels use an inevitable front page picture of the Statue to hit all of New York simultaneously? Heck, any of the Angel'ified statues would have worked. Surely hitting everybody in New York would be far more energy than hitting one person per room at the hotel.
    • They don't want everyone to become an Angel, they just want food. There'd be too many Angels, not enough food.
      • Angels don't turn people into angels, they just send them back in time and eat their energy.
    • The point of the hotel was the energy was a continuous loop - you head up to the room, the Angels get you, send you back 40 odd years and feed off that energy, and when the energy has run out and you die, your younger self appears again and gets sent back again. It's a Stable Time Loop.
      • Doesn't work. If they can feed on one person for an eternity they'd only have to trap one person, especially since from the angel's perspective they'd have that infinite amount instantly. The reason it was helpful was because they could lock somebody up and... I don't know actually. Trying to fathom the purpose of the farm ends in madness. If they eat energy from people living their lives, the farm is counterproductive since the people aren't doing much. If simply being near somebody lets them nab the energy, then why bother with the hotel at all? Simply sitting in a park and nabbing bits from everybody nearby would produce significantly more than a hotel with a handful of people.
      • They feed off the potential energy. Basically, they feed off of what life the person WOULD have lived had the angels not gotten to them.

  • Speaking of the hotel... How are there nameplates on the doors? I can't imagine an angel sitting down at a typewriter and banging out these nameplates.
    • An Angel typist? That would be the coolest thing ever! But anyway, the nameplates are pretty much in the same camp as the meals, entertainment, turndown service, laundry, those funny mints on the pillows...
    • The angels don't seem to use any technology, even typewriters, but they do all kinds of crazy things when no one's looking, like ripping out a man's consciousness to use as a voice. Maybe they can just make stuff like that appear out of thin air when they're sufficiently fed? Angels seem to gain new powers at the plot demands.

  • I'm still confused what the angels gain by having the hotel. It's been established that the only thing they really feed off of is the time energy they get from the throwback thing. Why bother housing any of the victims? If they get energy from just being near people (enough that imprisoning them is better than throwing them back in time) then they could accomplish the same thing in literally any popular hotel in a major city because those tend to be full of people all the time. Just look like cool statues and eat energy there. Surely the payoff would be much greater and the chance of failure would be much smaller.
    • They don't get energy from people living their lives; zapping people back creates time energy to feed on. The hotel lets them keep victims whom they can send back again once they're hungry. They don't use a legitimate hotel because once a bunch of people disappeared after a bunch of statues began moving and attacking people, the place would be declared haunted and people would flee, and the place would quickly be just as abandoned as Winter Quay.
      • And that explains how that happened.
      • Yes, but they clearly don't zap victims more than one additional time. Let's see: Rory gets zapped back from 2012 New York to 1930's-era New York. That's eighty years. Then he gets zapped again at some point, as he meets his elderly self just before he dies in bed. They couldn't have zapped him more than once, or he would have died in a period long before 1930's New York. So they got two meals out of him, and then spent most of a century keeping him alive and, presumably, teleporting him back to his room whenever he tried to escape. How can two meals possibly be worth the effort and energy required to maintain his prison cell for so long? Plus, New York City is a relatively young city, only five hundred or so years old. The hotel couldn't have existed prior. If you were going to set up a "farm" based on zapping people further and further into the past, wouldn't you put it in, like, Athens or something?
    • Didn't the Doctor once call them 'the most considerate psychopaths in the universe' or something along those lines once? Not only do they kill their victims in a manner which means they're technically not murdered, they also provide some kind of housing for them in the time period they get sent to as a courtesy.
      • They're also psychopaths. Yes, they are provided living quarters with a (assumed) mild level of luxury. But they can never leave. It was also hinted in the episode that they can't even see each other. Maybe they're showing their "guests" what it's like to be an Angel?

  • When the Doctor attempts to reach New York 1938, why doesn't he materialize in orbit and just fly to the city?
    • Presumably that wouldn't have worked, either.
    • It doesn't really make sense, especially when you realize that he could just land the TARDIS in Boston and take a bus to New York if he had to. The best explanation I've got is that Amy and Rory are inextricably linked with a bunch of timey-wimey paradox stuff now, and so if the Doctor ever meets them again or if they try to change their "live in NY till you die of old age" fate, then that will be bad for the universe somehow.

  • "The Angels take Manhattan! Because they can. Because they’ve never had a food source like this one: the city that never sleeps." Yes, but...wouldn't The City that Never Sleeps be incredibly inconvenient for the Angels? Wouldn't they want something more like The City that Constantly Has Its Eyes Shut?
    • Maybe the constant activity provides a nice background meal?
    • That struck me as odd, too. Maybe the writers were interpreting "Never Sleeps" in some weird way? Like, never sleeps = always tired = not paying attention?
    • Possible Fridge Brilliance related here — New York is indeed one of the busiest cities in the world with constant activity. But that means lots of people working late in almost-empty buildings where no one else is around, lots of people stumbling home drunk from partying all night with their guard down, lots of people waiting all alone in dark, empty subway stations for a train that never seems to arrive or waiting on the sidewalk for a cab or a bus at a place that would be teaming during the day but is completely abandoned at night, lots of people accidentally turning the wrong corner into a dark alley or a creepy neighbourhood that isn't the best place to be at night, lots of people who form just one more member of a faceless mass of teeming humanity with no one around them ever quite paying attention to what happens to them ... how many people just completely disappear in New York City and are never seen again? I'm willing to bet it's quite a lot.

  • Angels are fast, faster than you can believe. They're super-strong. They kill you as soon as they touch you. How the Hell did Grayle manage to capture one? And hold it in place (behind a curtain, where nobody can see it) with human chains?
    • The chains are a result of Strong as They Need to Be (or possibly early Unobtanium. As for how to catch it? Team of three strong men carrying, two looking at it at all times and one looking where they're going.
    • We know angels can be starved into near-immobility and weakness, so they might have captured it when it was on its last legs, nutritionally speaking. Either that, or it was just curious what Grayle intended to do with it and figured his schemes might afford it some nice opportunities to feed on and/or screw with people.

  • What happened to the detective from the introduction sequence after the paradox? Would he come back to life as his younger self in his own time since the whole hotel plan never happened? Would he be conscious of having died before or would he not remember anything related to the hotel?
    • There's no indication in the show either way, but if the hotel/farm never happened then most likely none of the victims were ever trapped there. I assume they didn't retain the memories, but it's just not addressed.

  • When the angel sent Rory and Amy back, are there still Angels in that time period? If so doesn't that mean they keep doing that to people and have basically won? If they aren't then what stops Amy and Rory from leaving New York? Even if they have to be buried there, it doesn't mean they have to stay there all the time.
    • I thought Rory and Amy throwing themselves off the building caused the Angels to end up dead (except for the one in the graveyard).
    • There are no more angels in NYC after that one final straggler. As for why Amy and Rory couldn't leave the city after they were sent back, my best guess was that this would cause a dangerous paradox somehow. The whole city is riddled with paradoxes at this point, and Amy and Rory are at the center of them.
    • I don't remember anyone saying they couldn't leave NYC.

  • Shouldn't Amy and Rory have had separate gravestones?
    • It's not uncommon for married couples — especially those who have been together a long time as Rory and Amy are implied to have been — to be arranged to be buried together, either in the same plot or near enough to each other to only require one gravestone.

  • So... why DID they keep popping up in that graveyard whenever they were returned to the present day?
    • Because it was a significant point in time and space related to the goings-on.

  • Why did River have to break her wrist. She could've just used the vortex manipulator to escape.
    • In order to use her manipulator, she would've had to have taken her eyes off of the angel in order to input the coordinates, which would have given the angel an opportunity to strike.
    • "Because Amy read it in a book."

  • How would breaking River's wrist allow her to get free? If she broke her thumb, she might be able to slide out, but how would breaking her wrist help at all?
    • Perhaps they meant she'd inevitably break her wrist in the process of squeezing her way out of a stone hand. Breaking her wrist was an unavoidable side effect, not an enabling factor.

  • Okay, I know starting a new bullet point down here when the things I'm going to say have been variously mentioned above already is frowned upon, but as a newly-minted Whovian, I missed most of the prior debate and am very selfish. So here's the major headscratchers from this episode, as I see them.
    • The farm doesn't make any sense. The angels feed by zapping people into the past and soaking up the potential energy their removal from the time stream generates. They also can apparently physically teleport people without sending them back in time, too. And they take over a hotel in New York and use it as a location that they can keep zapping people back to feed younger versions of themselves. That part, I get. However, New York has only been around since about 1624, and chances are high that part of it's going to be underwater within the next century. It's one of the worst places you could possibly build such a farm. Plus, they can't be zapping prey much further back than the 1930's era we see in the episode, because otherwise there would have been no Old Rory to die in front of Young Rory's eyes. So they're getting, what, maybe three or four meals per victim out of it? And then they're keeping those victims imprisoned in the hotel, fed and cared for, even after they've fed. And when the victims try to escape, they (or the Statue of Liberty) zap them back to their room. But if the angels need to eat, then they clearly require energy to live, and they must be expending energy to return their prisoners to their cells. So unless Rory only ever tried to escape once before giving up—which I think we can all agree is unlikely—then the angels must have needed to keep expending energy to imprison him again. Not to mention the other resource drains that would come with maintaining the hotel for centuries. Yes, sure, Ten called them "thoughtful psychopaths," but if they're unable to handle basic resource management, they're not thoughtful, they're stupid.
    • The Statue of Liberty. First off, it's not made of stone. Okay, maybe angels can also be made of metal. But it's safe to assume that arguably the world's most famous landmark and tourist destination, not to mention a potential target for terrorism, is, between civilians and security, undoubtedly watched 24/7. Well, maybe it's just an image of Lady Liberty that became a proper angel and started stomping around. Okay, but one, there are millions of pictures of the Statue of Liberty, and even if they can only be activated by temporal radiation, the Doctor's taken enough trips to London alone that every Brit who has ever taken a holiday to the Big Apple should have found their home crushed beneath copper feet. Two, there's still the problem of it being a giant statue stomping around the biggest city in the United States. People are going to notice that. Well, okay, maybe it has a perception filter on it. And that... actually sort of makes sense. It also explains why Amy and Rory seem to completely forget about it while they're on the roof. Would have been nice for the show to acknowledge it, though. However, there's still one problem: an exponentially larger angel must require exponentially more energy to sustain it. Maybe that's why they built a farm, even if the farm makes no sense, as discussed above. However, it brings up the question of why a giant weeping angel would even exist, since it's both a massive resource drain and unable to hunt on its own without outside technology to cloak it. Rule of Cool, I know, but then, it didn't even do anything cool, it just stood near the hotel and made faces.
    • Why, oh why, does the Doctor, the man who just a year ago managed to escape his preordained death despite knowing it was coming, to the second, just immediately give up on saving Amy and Rory? His two best friends in the universe? His frickin' in-laws? So he can't go back to New York? Go to Chicago! Still too close? Go to Beijing and stow away on a boat! Is 1938 completely off limits? Fine, go back in 1939! Sure, sucks that Amy and Rory are stuck there for a year, but that's better than never seeing their friends and family again, right? Oh, but he saw their names and death dates on their tombstones, and read in a book that he never went to save them, so it's a fact of time now. Because apparently this matters to the Doctor now. It's vitally important that he absolutely not find some way to save them. He plays by the rules, now, and is a stand-up guy and paragon of Time Lord ideals. You know who isn't, though? River freaking Song, who has her own transportation device that's been explicitly shown to be able to carry passengers, not to mention she can fly the TARDIS herself. Why wouldn't she at least try to rescue them? And even if, even if, the tombstones are absolute, irrefutable proof that Amy and Rory have to die on the dates listed, what exactly is stopping them from coming back to present-day England, living out their lives, and then hitching a lift from River or the Doctor back to their appointed dates of death?
The whole episode just left a bad taste in my mouth, and it gets worse the more I think about it. I realize that Karen Gillan was leaving, but having Amy and Rory bow out gracefully at the end of "The Power of Three" would have been a much more fitting farewell to the characters, and wouldn't have resulted in the concussion I've inflicted on myself from all the head slapping.
  • Well, this is why we have the MST3K Mantra. You're right; a lot of stuff in this episode didn't make sense. (Though really we don't know what does and doesn't drain energy from the angels, so I think you're speculating there.) At the same time, there were some great thematic moments if you look past the flaws. Ultimately, it came to an emotional moment when Amy had to permanently choose between the Doctor and Rory, and she chose Rory. I think she needed a moment like that for her finale.
    • Basically, this. Moffat writes stories, not reality in the same way Sorkin writes dialogue, not reality. That is to say, they're highly flawed, lacking of verisimilitude, and full of Fridge Logic but they're also interesting, compelling, entertaining, thematic, and deep. The insistence on continuity is a style that is currently in vogue, but it's not the only way. For that matter, Moffat is significantly more concerned with continuity and logic than the classic series but he still has a similar healthy disregard. This is entirely Doylist and not the most satisfying answer and if you don't like it you don't like it, but I still think it's brilliant.
  • Plus Karen wanted to die by Weeping Angel.

  • After the Doctor asks River to travel with him. She answers with "one psychopath per TARDIS". Now we know River (unhappily) considers herself a psychopath, but does that statement means she considers the Doctor insane too?
    • Yes. I remind you that this is a man with an actual theme called The Madman With A Box.
    • And she's right to turn down the invitation. The Doctor has companions for many reasons, foremost among which is so that there'll always be someone to stop him from going too far. River, though, is considerably more bloodthirsty than the Doctor tends to be; granted he more than makes up her head start once he gets going, but she's quite formidable in her own right, and much quicker to start shooting (literally and metaphorically). River is well aware of this, and she knows that if they travel together, sooner or later, a day will come when he needs someone to hold him back, and instead finds her urging him on, and on that day he'll make the Master, "the Time Lord Victorious", even the Last Great Time War itself, look like nothing. And then, after he's used the power at his command to wreak literally unimaginable violence on the very fabric of space-time, he'll come back to himself, and the realization of what he's done will destroy him. She has no desire to see such a fate befall either the universe or the man she loves.

  • Books written from the future become temporally binding. What's to stop Twelve from coming back and giving Eleven his fanfiction, where the Daleks decide to adopt peace and love and the Doctor lives on Tahiti with Susan?
    • I've heard it's a magical place.
      • You. You I like.
    • 'Temporally binding' doesn't mean 'that which is completely made-up and fictional suddenly becomes real'. If you were to take a copy of Harry Potter back in time and give it to Charles Dickens, then Hogwarts and Dumbledore won't suddenly spring into existence, because they're still completely fictional. Presumably 'temporally binding' applies to books which more-or-less factually record what will happen — encyclopaedias, biographies, roman à clefs, etc.
    • The reason the book became temporally-binding was because of all the other paradoxes and space-time anomalies present at the time, including the weeping angels. This seems to come up a lot in Doctor Who; when enough paradoxes are present, a fixed point seems to be artificially created. So normally, while the book could be disregarded, the Doctor with his Time Lord abilities probably sensed the fixed point, and realized that the book was bad news.

  • The Doctor wanted River to escape without breaking her wrist because that would prove he can change time. But how would it prove anything? The book only told him words to say. It doesn't say that River's wrist actually broke. He had to say that, but then anything could happen.
    • And he only read a title of a chapter: "Amelia's Last Farewell". For all he knew it could have been about a different Amelia, or she could have made her last farewell to a completely different person than River and the Doctor.

  • Steven Moffat has just said that the War Doctor and the second Ten count and the Doctor has used all his regenerations. So how did the Doctor have regenerative energy to heal River's wrist? I know a lot of people think that he has energy left over from when River gave her regenerations to heal him, but I'm pretty sure that all went towards saving his life and he couldn't store that energy.
    • A regeneration requires X amount of regeneration energy. The Doctor must have had 12X>Y>13X amount of energy; in other words, enough for 12 full regenerations, plus a little extra, which he could use for tricks like giving the TARDIS life in Pete's world, or healing River's wrist.
    • This is retroactively explained in "The Timeless Children": The Doctor actually has seemingly limitless amount of regeneration energy, but the Time Lords' mindwipe had made him forgot about that, so he thinks he's limited to 12 regenerations.

  • Can someone explain to me what the Doctor and River's argument regarding her broken wrist was all about? It seemed really silly and trivial to me and not worth arguing for. Did Steven Moffat just want to add a bit of drama between the Doctor and River?
    • Basically, the Doctor wanted River to escape without breaking her wrist to prove that they could change established events and that it's not a hopeless affair because he's afraid of the chapter title "Amelia's Last Farewell". Not wanting to disappoint him, River lied about breaking her wrist and he got upset because she lied and because it implies it's not going to be possible to change that title.


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