I thought the bit about knowing your future was that knowing your future allows you to change it which makes that fore-knowledge risky because it can create a paradox. I don't think that has anything to do with the bit about reading things about the past causes that past to become an immutable fixed point. That's something else. It doesn't explain anything and, IMO, just adds another, less sensible, rule on top of all the other ones and provides yet another way that future stories (and probably past ones) will conflict with the rules.

I mean the Doctor better not read any more history books or all the inaccuracies which he tends to scoff at will become inevitable truths in an instant!

Not really comparable to a written account of things as they happen, happening to the readers themselves, written by someone who was there. But if you can't see the difference, perhaps that is why you have such a problem with it.

So how did the history books come about if not from the accounts of people who were there? Amy didn't write her last page about events as they happened. She is talking after the fact from her own recollection. Neither is it she who typed the text that the Doctor is reading. That was a printing press set up by someone else entirely and possibly edited by an editor in the meantime.

It's irrelevant anyway. You're just debating the likely veracity of the information (and I've already given an example of how it could have been a deliberate lie) but the veracity doesn't seem to matter to your argument because seeing it with your own eyes is the absolute maximum veracity you can get and yet you are discounting that as a reason to prevent the time traveller from going back and changing things. If it's not about the veracity then what's it about?

What is the conceptual difference between the Doctor seeing Amy had grown old waiting for him (as in The Girl Who Waited) and the Doctor reading a book from Amy saying that she had grown old waiting for him?

What allows him to go back and change that fact in the former and not the latter?

You seem to grabbing this thing about reading with both hands and not letting it go. It's nothing to do with reading. It's nothing to do with books. It's no different whether River tells the Doctor something, the Doctor reads it in her diary, or he sees the evidence of the past events himself. What matters is whether he believes it to be the truth, and the dangers of changing it if it is.

History is written by the victor. Most of what is read is a partial and not wholly accurate account. It doesn't help your argument.

Also, I am not doubting that seeing something with your own eyes is the ultimate veracity - but you seem to not understand the fact that there would be different eyewitness accounts from a time traveller changing things, and someone not affiliated with the time traveller viewing the same events... You don't seem to want to grasp that for some reason, and have ignored it.

One final thing, the Doctor sees things in a way that is very different to how anybody else sees things - he alone understands which events can be changed and which can't. That's never been in question. So how come that in itself isn't good enough for you?

Hmm. I guess I never looked at it like that because there have already been examples of the Doctor knowing full well what has happened but is happy to change it anyway (e.g. the Girl Who Waited). Plus the whole notion of having Fixed Points in time that you can't change implies that all the other points in time can be changed as much as you like!

Events caused by time travel, like Amy and Rory being sent back in time, are not the sort of thing I would expect to become fixed points as they actually alter the timeline and bringing them back would just be putting it back to the way it should be. You'd think that would be far less dangerous than the alternative.

Still, even if it's about knowledge of the future, the written word just isn't reliable enough to bring that kind of certainty. Particularly when the suggested event would be completely counter to what you'd expect to happen.

That whole thing with River's wrist, for example. If River knew how to get out of the Angel's grasp without breaking her wrist then why would she have any reason to believe an account that says that she did so? She'd just extricate her hand some other way and then avoid any paradox by lying about it when she wrote the journal. Similarly, if there's no logical reason for the Doctor to not go back and visit Amy and Rory other than some bit of text that says he didn't then all he has to do is go back anyway and let history work out how that last page got to be written.

I kind of addressed it the first time but basically I'm ignoring it because I don't understand what you're saying. What is this difference? I see no difference. I don't even know what you mean by eye-witness. Once he goes back in time there is nobody other than him who knows how things originally turned out whether he went back because he read what would later happen or went back having seen what would later happen.

Perhaps a specific example would help? Take the following scenarios:

A) Amy gets sent back in Time. The Doctor is about to go after her when a 70 year old Amy gets out of a Taxi and says "where have you been, I've been waiting decades for you and you never came"

B) Amy gets sent back in Time. The Doctor is about to go after her when a postman hands him a letter which says it's from Amy and that she's been waiting for decades for him but he never came.

In what way is A different from B in terms of these "eye-witnesses"?

A is essentially the scenario from the Girl Who Waited

B is essentially the scenario from Angels Take Manhatten

In A he can go back and rescue her thus changing the timeline. In B he says he can't as he's just read it and isn't allowed to change it.


That might explain why some things are ok to change and others aren't but that wasn't what was portrayed in that episode. What was portrayed was the idea that knowing what happened by reading about it always means you can't change it. Which even if you can be certain about the veracity of what you're reading (which you can't) makes no sense given that we know he can change things that he knows happened having seen it for himself.

Perhaps not. The Doctor has said in the past that there are some events that can't be changed, and some that shouldn't be changed, and some that are specifically in flux, and can be changed more easily.

Amy and Rory's predicament was not exactly a fixed point, it was an unstable point, like a frozen lake that's been walked on a little too often. You can't un-crack the ice once it's been disrupted.


She didn't have any means of extricating her hand without breaking it. And at that point, she hadn't written the account. When she wrote about it, her account was accurate.

I think in the case of the angels take Manhattan the real reason has to be that he can't risk the possible paradox- on top of the other stuff that's happened, making the entire area highly unstable. The book was written- and he knows how it should happen because of that ( whether some of it may be fictional or not. If he tries to change any of it then he runs the risk of the book not being written at all, or at least being totally changed. ... and they've had that book all the way through the adventure in that time and place. If there's a paradox involving that book (on top of everything else) it could 'explode the book' or some other effect of the paradox caused and wipe them out at the same time.

Something that might be risked with other scenarios suddenly becomes a lot more risky when you combine all the factors from this episode.
They were lucky not to blow a chunk out of the earth where New York used to be already.

That's not really the issue anyway.

The issue is why not wait a couple of decades then meet them in Belgium or something. It was a minor point for me- but something which I would possibly call a plot hole. Certainly not a hole in the episode at all. BUT, a possible conflict with other stories? And possible future episodes.Maybe.

I've said before- River could have had a line saying she thinks she might have caused the whole thing because she went there looking for evidence of what happened to her parents. She wanted to try and prevent it or just do something about it at least. And the Doc could have said something like now she's made it so they can't even visit them. Her meddling with the time vortex and jumping in and out has made not just New York of that time unstable but Amy and Rory's lives thereafter have to be kept totally stable or the results could be catastrophic.

Then they both have a cry and a hug and the Doc tells her to cheer up, tells her they were happy. Very happy, be glad of that, and they both then smile and cue end credits.

I'm obviously no script writer, but that bit at the end with them in the Tardis could have benefited from something like that. Just a very minor adjustment I think, but anyway- the episode was still great I though, and I didn't even notice this very slight problem when I first watched it

If there are different Doctors, then there could be different Amys', different Rorys', different Rivers', etc... that could criss cross into different timelines, that may be why it could be seen as confusing

They have just shown the Angels in Manhattan episode and he didn't go for her because he couldn't change the timeline but because he believed another paradox could tear New York apart - apparently paradoxes do that.

It was then Amy's choice to be with Rory knowing that they couldn't come back and she would never see the Doctor again.

Didn't Amy bring The Doctor back by remembering him at her's and Rory's wedding? She remembered the raggedy man, so couldn't she have done that again?