I wanted the Ponds to go on and on, but this is what happens when you hire talented actors to play companions–they have careers to pursue. This didn’t happen in the old days, dadgummit, when companions would leave and the actors who played them were never to be seen again, like Tegan and Adric.
The part I didn’t get is the collector guy that was keeping the Angel statues.
How could he have one in his office without getting attacked? Heck he had them all over his house.
The one in his office was chained up. I think that (and the cherubs,) were the only ones he had. The others only came after hearing the chained up one “screaming.”
And maybe the cherubs, in addition to looking like babies, are Weeping Angel babies and aren’t as fast/mobile, so keeping them in a basement is good enough?
Quick, name those actors without googling them! I can*, but then I was a nerd in high school, who had Doctor Who to spend ny Saturday nights with, instead of, y’know, girls.
And how were the Angels taking over New York’s statues? The Angels aren’t statues, despite their appearance; they are living beings who look like statues. But Lady Liberty is a statue, something made by people. (Oooh, unless she’s been an Angel all along; she’s never moved because someone’s always looking at her. She did come from the French, after all…)
I’ve always wondered why no one thinks to simply take a sledgehammer to an Angel. Or if you really want to get elaborate, take the Frodo option: Load all the Angels you can find in a truck, put a couple guys back there to watch’em, then haul’em to the nearest active volcano and chuck’em in. Maybe you can’t kill a stone, but Mama Pele sure can.
*Janet Fielding and Matthew Waterhouse.
“Once we read it, it was written in stone.”
Oh Moffat. Yeah, sometimes I hate the internet too.
Seriously, can anyone imagine even five years ago a show announcing, months in advance, the departure of beloved characters? Now they can’t fight the internet, so they join them. I mean it was well done and I enjoyed it, but it would have been exponentially more affecting if I hadn’t known it was coming.
The last time someone tried to alter a fixed point in time, it resulted in pterodactyls in Hyde Park and Roman centurions marching the streets of London in the service of Kaiser Winston I of the House of Lancaster.
The time before that, it lead to the entire population of Earth being unable to die, resulting in the collapse of the global economy and the near takeover of the world by the Mafia.
And the time before that, it resulted in the Langoliers trying to eat baby Rose.
It’s a bad idea, i’m saying.
I get the idea of a fixed point in time. But this is the Whoverse. It’s 50 years old. It’s not hugely internally consistent. Why can’t the Doctor have a brilliant idea, and figure out how to go there safely, with some timey-wimey stuff ?
But a good ending,nevertheless. I’ll miss Amy, and Rory. They’re both excellent actors, and I hope that being in Doctor Who doesn’t stop them going on to the careers they would have had.
Besides the obvious answer of “It would be a massive deus ex machina and ruin the emotional impact of the story”, the episode itself had previously established that New York is so full of temporal distortions and fixed points that time travel is extremely dangerous there. The Doctor couldn’t even land the TARDIS in 1938 on the first go-around because of the disturbance, and the trick he used to pull it off nearly destroyed the entire world. Since time distortion is cumulative, it would follow that for him to try it again would be even more dangerous than it was the first time, which was bad enough that it scuffed up the TARDIS’ paint job.
Besides, the wife won’t let him.
The only thing that has been entirely consistent is that there are some things the Doctor can’t do, and saving his companions when they die is one of them. If you take that away, then all the stories lose their impact.
He was a semi-regular on the UK version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? way back when. He’s lost some weight and the goatee and his hair’s gone white.
He also was the guy who lulled the protagonist into apathy in Office Space, but his most famous stuff was definitely Whose Line.
I liked the episode, but I definitely don’t get why the Doctor can never visit them again.
Well, I liked the finale, I think the way the Ponds left the Doctor’s companionship was bittersweet and, you know, worked for me. One thing though that took me out of the episode yet again was how the rules for the Weeping Angels keep changing. I was tickled when I realized that they’d gone back to the original idea of the angels sending you back in time instead of just boom killing you outright. But they were able to move waaaay too freely. I mean, in Blink it was established that they could not move if ANYONE was looking at them, not just the people they were chasing. The whole reason they’re Weeping Angels is that they cover their own eyes so that they can’t see EACH OTHER when frozen and keep them from moving. In fact,
(spoiler for Blink within, if you haven’t seen it, which I doubt anyone here hasn’t, but hey)
that’s how they were defeated in Blink; when they were attacking the TARDIS and it disappeared, the four angels were left looking at each other in a circle, never to move again. But here, there were crowds of them, not covering their faces when frozen, traipsing down hallways and moving in parks full of people in broad daylight. And you cannot convince me that the Statue of Liberty ever has SOMEBODY not looking at it, day or night, for long enough to walk across the city and stand next to a building. Twice.
And yet somehow it makes more sense than the idea that it failed to attack Amy and Rory while neither of them was looking at it because they were busy arguing about jumping. 
I imagine there’ll be a Doc Brown “Well I figured…what the hell” moment coming sometime with a reunion show of sorts. 
I had to google him as well and for me, his most recognizable role was as Kramer’s nemesis FDR (Franklin Delano Romanowski) on Seinfeld.
I would be willing to bet that River can use the wrist thing to jump back and visit Mom and Dad, and maybe the Doctor could take the Tardis back to a few months before they arrived and wait until they showed up, but if either River or he moves them away from that timepoint, something bad happens.
But I do like that Amy let the Angel pop her back to be with Rory. Since he waited 2000 years for her, popping back to 1938 was fine with me. I even liked that she was willing to jump off the building with him.
He was also Friar Tuck in the Kevin Costner version of Robin Hood. One of the good points about the movie.
Somebody on another website explained it. Amy’s timeline became fixed for the Doctor, with her dying at age 87. River can visit to drop off the manuscript because the book already exists; River is already part of Amy’s life in the past. The Doctor can’t visit her because it would risk changing something, which would lead to a paradox that could destroy New York. The fact that he can’t land the TARDIS there is secondary.
Overly sentimental and largely nonsensical ending to an otherwise excellent episode.
I still expect to see the Ponds in the 50th Anniversary next year.
I can’t imagine them being left out this close to filming. There’s always a way in sci-fi. If nothing else it could be a new scene with the Doctor before they end up in NY.