The Doctor is back in New York City this Christmas to team up with a masked superhero, but how can he even go on “an epic New York adventure” when the TARDIS can’t go anywhere near the Big Apple?
“The Return of Doctor Mysterio” on December 25 will show the Doctor violating some of this own time travel rules apparently.
Some photos of the special were posted via the Doctor Who Facebook page, including one in particular that might provide a clue, showing the TARDIS all up in smoke. Is it because of those crazy “time distortions” formed in the very messy “The Angels Take Manhattan?” You might remember that at the end of the episode, a Weeping Angel in 2012 sent Amy and Rory back in time, ending their tenure on the TARDIS. The Doctor shrieks that going back for them would “rip New York apart.” The Doctor cries out to Amy, “I will never be able to see you again!” Fixed time’s a bitch.
We get it. You vape.
It’s a moment that really resonated with a lot of viewers, but it left even more scratching their heads as to why the Doctor wouldn’t just land on Montauk and take the LIRR in or some other equally as practical alternative.
Supposedly, such “time distortions” are formed by “time travels, anachronisms, or time fissures.” So “anachronisms” in the Whoverse include people meeting themselves at different points in time, which happens with Rory during the episode. And “time fissures” are rips in the fabric of space-time, connecting two points in time, one that the Doctor forcibly, angrily creates to fly the TARDIS to 1938.
The Doctor and Amy reading back-to-back in Central Park at the start of "The Angels Take Manhattan."
Throughout the course of the episode, 1938 and 2012 New York City become what we might call a “temporal clusterfuck,” with the final implication being that all of New York was permanently off-limits for the Doctor.
Throughout the episode, the gang has paradoxical pre-knowledge of their future from a book written in 1938, and a lot of Weeping Angel activity created a “wall of temporal energy” that made landing the TARDIS akin to “landing a plane in a blizzard.” But sure, the Doctor does it anyway with something like a time anchor, effectively forcing ten pounds of shit into a five-pound bag and wounding the space-time of the city in the process.
Sure, like landing a plane in a blizzard ... neatly beside a staircase.
Later, they discover something of a “battery farm,” where the Weeping Angels hoard humans to be repeatedly sent back in time, which is how they feed. Rory is one such victim, and the only way to undo it is for Rory and Amy to commit suicide, thus creating one helluva paradox that poisoned all the time energy the Angels were devouring. The whole thing could also have potentially destroyed the city, too, but love is worth it, which we are reminded of when the one surviving Angel sends Amy and Rory into the past.
Does the Doctor know about Zest's happy hour sushi deals?
Someway, somehow, the Twelfth Doctor will be able to not only land in New York’s Christmas of 2016, but he will also be able to find really good sushi and hang out with a superhero.
