Quote Originally Posted by dehro View Post
mmmmh..so.. the last episode..

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from an emotional point of view, I Think it's nicely handled.. tells us a few things we all know but bear reminding such as the Doctor's need for companions..and the fact that he's actively engaged in deleting himself from stuff (apart from Unit's records, apparently..)
and it was sort of closing a circle between Amy, Rory and the Doctor without going epic, which was a nice touch.
Plotwise this episode is so, so full of stupid that I'm choosing to erase the stupid and just write timey-wimey-wibly-wobbly over it.
The Statue of Liberty thing is just too dumb for words..reminds me of Legolas skating down a set of stairs on a shield.
I can just picture Moffat giggling away at the sheer absurdness of it and at getting away with it because he can.
that has got to be the first Angel that has people inside it (I do think there are people in and around the Statue at all times..) also..it's not made of stone, unlike every other Angel, and it's on a fracking ISLAND!!! there are bound to be people stationed there... There are always planes that fly over it, ships that sail past it, people that look at it etc etc.. hell.. the only reason it wouldn't appear on a radar when it started moving is that radars didn't exist back then...just not doable..yet they did it anyway.
The whole.. "they're going to go back in time in a place where you can't land a Tardis and it's fixed".. is so patently stupid that you can only wave it away by telling yourself "they've got to make the Ponds un-reachable somehow"..except this is not how...
The Doctor could just go anywhere on earth during those 50-ish years they spent in New York and send them a bloody postcard!.. and they could always travel outside New York and meet him somewhere else...or he could borrow his wife's vortex thing..
...and can someone please explain to me why New York should have all these time paradoxes/vortexes/fractures when the Doctor hardly ever goes there and the Pond's actions have deleted the Angels' from the place.. yet London is perfectly safe to travel to and from despite being the single place in the universe where the Doctor hangs out most and where any race of time-traveling aliens have at some point or another caused havoc???
Also..are we sure there haven't been episodes set in New York after 1938 but before 2012? that seems unlikely to me..but I know next to nothing about old-who.

So.. as a stand-alone episode it works, if you keep in mind that it focusses on emotions, on a farewell, on acting skills and on giving some kind of a new start to the Doctor.
as part of a series, in a somewhat well defined universe with certain rules and a canon to which it should be subjected.. it's a trainwreck which flies in the face of half of what we know about how the who-niverse works...because it just chooses to ignore the dozens of options the Doctor has or would have to circumvent this particular fixed moment in time and stay in touch with the Ponds or even bring them back..options given to him both in canon and by simple common sense.

I may choose to re-watch it sometimes in the future because I like the Ponds..certainly not for it's plot, episode-worthiness or drammatic impact..definitely not to use it as reference for anything Doctor-related.. I just don't know that this episode can be used as canon source for anything other than "where did the Ponds end up?.. oh, yeah..there"
I mentioned this in detail in the last page, but:
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The whole deal with the Ponds is not that he can't visit them. He's the Doctor, he probably already has a dozen ways worked out to do that. The problem is that he can't afford to. Paradoxes are bad, and the Ponds just created a dozy of one with that stunt. If the Doctor does anything to screw with the fixed point, time bursts at the seams. It's holding right now and that's good. That means that anything and everything the Doctor may have already done in that time frame is okay, but any new additions and POP! Any extra-temporal meddling that could effect their life span, even a postcard without a meeting location, runs that risk. He can't screw with that fixed point at all, and that means ANYTHING before it.

As for why New York is a bad place, temporally, it's because of Winter Quay, not the Doctor. There is a constant stream of temporal distortions, because the Angels have evolved from hunters to farmers.

And how would you have removed them? The Doctor was always going to go back to them until they died, were placed out of his reach, or made to costly to reach, and they couldn't say no to him. Given that established dynamic, how do you cut them off?

I mean, they clearly didn't go back to Winter Quay. If they had, the paradox would have resolved and the Doctor would be free to spring 'em again. They lived long lives in New York, and lives happy enough that even at the end of it all they still wanted to be buried together. That's a good ending.