farm version of the Weeping Angels and the way the Ponds choose their ending rather than having it done to them. It isn’t flawless, because the Angels have lost some bite and the rule about the TARDIS not landing leans on convenient physics. But the Doctor begging Amy to stay is the most affecting thing in the hour, and I’m giving it 4.5/5.

Two and a half years, two hundred-odd years of waiting between them, one daughter, several deaths and at least one divorce. The Ponds have had the longest and strangest run of any companions the revived show has produced, and “The Angels Take Manhattan” sends them off with an ending that is cruel, elegant and, crucially, chosen. They aren’t killed. They decide. I’ll say up front that it isn’t a flawless episode, and the Angels themselves have lost some of their edge here, but it’s still a very fine goodbye.

A book you shouldn’t read

The conceit is the best thing in it. The Doctor is lounging in Central Park reading a battered pulp detective novel, Melody Malone, private eye in old New York, and it gradually becomes clear that the book is an account of the thing they’re living through right now, written by River from the other end. That makes it a fixed record. Anything he reads has already happened, and once he’s read a chapter he can’t change it, because knowing a future event is exactly what locks it down. So he spends the episode desperate not to turn pages and turning them anyway, because he needs to know, and that’s a properly clever engine for a story about time. It turns reading into an act of destruction.

The chapter headings become a countdown on their own, and when he finally sees one with Amy’s name on it the show doesn’t need to explain what it means. I love that it lets me get there a beat before he does, and then makes him sit with it. It’s also the first time in a while that the Doctor’s cleverness is the problem rather than the solution. After the slow, domestic year we got in The Power of Three, where Amy and Rory seemed to have found a way of having both lives, this is the episode that comes to collect on that.

Winter Quay

The Angels, meanwhile, have done something new and much worse than usual. Winter Quay is an apartment building they’ve converted into a farm. They take a person, send them back in time, and put them in a room in that building where they live out their entire natural life alone while the Angels feed on the temporal energy of the life they should have had. At the end of it their younger self is brought to the same building to watch them die, which closes the loop. It’s the nastiest idea the Angels have ever been given, and a real escalation from the relatively clean predation of Blink, where a life was stolen and lived somewhere else. Those Angels were burglars. These are livestock farmers.

The moment it lands is Rory wandering the building and finding a room with his own name on the door, and inside it an old man in a bed who looks at him, recognises him, and dies. Arthur Darvill plays the horror of that beautifully, and Amy arriving in time to hold the hand of a version of her husband who has spent sixty years in that room alone is the single worst thing this show has done to either of them. I’d also say, and this is where I part company with some of the more glowing write-ups, that the Angels in the rest of the episode feel oddly defanged. The cherubs are creepy for about a minute, and the Statue of Liberty being an Angel is, I’ll admit, ridiculous, several hundred tons of copper that apparently tiptoes through Manhattan without one person glancing up. I don’t care in the slightest, because it’s the right kind of stupid.

River gets less room than she deserves, but what she has is sharp. She breaks her own wrist escaping an Angel’s grip and then hides it, and when the Doctor discovers it and heals her with regeneration energy she’s genuinely, coldly furious with him, both for wasting it and for assuming she wanted rescuing. Her explanation is the most telling thing she’s said about the two of them: she hides the damage because she has learned that he can’t stand to see her hurt, and that a man who can’t stand it will eventually stop coming. Alex Kingston plays it as a practised habit rather than a grievance, which is much worse. One fan review from the week it aired, over at Doux Reviews, called this the best episode of the season so far, and scenes like this one are a big part of why I agree.

The roof

So they beat it the only way available, by making the loop impossible. If Rory dies now, before he can be taken, then the old man upstairs never happens, and the paradox tears the Angels’ farm apart. He climbs to the roof to jump, and Amy, having done the arithmetic, takes his hand and goes with him, because the alternative is being the woman who stood on a roof and let him. It’s a suicide pact played as a love scene, and Karen Gillan is extraordinary in it. There’s no speech. There’s an argument about whether it’ll work, and then her deciding that if it doesn’t, she isn’t interested in the version of her life that comes after. And it works. The paradox detonates, the Angels are wiped out, and everybody wakes up in a graveyard in the present, alive and having got away with it.

I think the staging deserves a mention too, because the roof scene is shot with a calm that the rest of the episode doesn’t have. The noir lighting that gave us the first half hour drops away, the music thins out, and for a minute it’s just two people and a very long drop. That restraint is what makes the next beat hurt, and it’s the thing I’d point to if someone asked why this one lands harder than most of the exits the show has given us.

The gravestone

Which is when the show does the thing that makes this ending stick. There’s one Angel left, in the graveyard, and it takes Rory with no warning and no fight and one blink, sending him back to 1938 for good. This time there’s no paradox available to undo it, because the book has already been written and the Doctor has already read the last page. Amy stands in front of it and asks River what the odds are that it’ll put her in the same year, in the same city, and River says she doesn’t know, and Amy decides that’s good enough. The Doctor begs her, genuinely begs, with no cleverness left, just a man asking her to stay, and she tells him she’ll be fine and to look away because she doesn’t want him to watch. Then she says his name, and lets it touch her. That plea is the most affecting thing in the hour, mostly because it’s the one moment where he has nothing to offer.

The gravestone is the punchline: Rory Arthur Williams, 1890 to 1994. And his loving wife Amelia Williams, 1894 to 1993. They got the whole life, eighty-odd years of it together, in the wrong century, which is more than most companions get and is precisely nothing like what the Doctor wanted for them. He can’t follow, because New York in that period is so damaged by the paradox that the TARDIS can’t land there, a rule the episode states firmly and which doesn’t entirely survive examination, since time machines are notoriously good at approaching a city from a different year and taking a train. It’s the one place the ending’s logic is doing what the ending needs rather than what the story allows. But the feeling underneath it, that he has finally lost something he can’t solve, is strong enough to carry it. Amy’s afterword, written into the last page of a book he swore he wouldn’t finish, is the right final note: a message telling him to go back and find the little girl waiting in the garden, and tell her a story about how she grows up and travels the universe and is happy.

Rating: 4.5/5. A gorgeous, grim, properly upsetting farewell, shot beautifully and played to the hilt by Gillan and Darvill. The “he can’t ever land there” rule is a piece of convenient physics the story leans on harder than it can bear, and River’s material is slightly crowded out, but everything else is as good as a companion exit gets. They jumped off a roof holding hands and it wasn’t enough, so she looked at the angel, said his name, and chose the wrong century over the right one without him.

Did you think Amy was right to step in front of that last Angel, or should she have stayed with the Doctor and let Rory’s fate play out without her? Tell me in the comments.