Time Of The Angels/Flesh and Stone
(Series 5, Dr 11 with Amy and River Song, 4 with Leela, 24/4/2010-1/5/2010, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Adam Smith)
Rank: 182
'Ooh I've been zapped by the Weeping Angels and sent back in time to the point when I started writing this website. What do you mean I have to sit through 'The Timeless Child' 'Orphan 55' and 'Time and The Rani' all over again?!?'
Stuff the angels, this is the time of the Moffat! This here is the big re-set button, the first story to be filmed in a whole new era: new Doctor, new companion, new showrunner, new producers, new aesthetic new everything. Even a new logo for the Tardis doors, at least to anyone who’s joined since ‘The Claws Of Axos’ in 1971 (it’s the ‘St John’s Ambulance’ design on the doors, lost when they repainted the prop’s doors. Being a nerd Moffat had wondered where it had gone and wanted it back. He’ll refer back to it in ‘The Bells Of Saint John’). The most experienced person in front of or behind the cameras in any major way is Alex Kingston who’s had just two episodes playing River Song. In 2010 there was real doubt, not least from inside the BBC themselves, that Dr Who would ever outlast both Russell T Davies and David Tennant. Obviously they could and everyone soon shook off the doubt as soon as they saw the rushes back for this story, but there’s a nervous tension in the air to it too that comes from more than just the invasion of Weeping Angels. In many ways it’s an even tougher assignment than Russell T Davies had when he brought the series back from oblivion, when most of the people behind-the-scenes thought nobody would be looking anyway, but now Dr Who is huge news and the biggest thing on television and everyone is looking on, wondering if there can ever be life in this show post-David Tennant. They’re even making this story back to back with ‘The End Of Time’ as early as July 2009 in the broadcast gap between ‘Planet Of The Dead’ and ‘Waters Of Mars’. It’s a very different thing going from being the occasional writer of a show to the one who’s in charge of it and having to set up a new era that’s similar enough not to scare longterm fans away but different enough to seem like more than copying. Steven Moffat excels at that here, with a story that hasn’t quite got things right yet, being darker and sexier in tone than what it will become, yet nevertheless runs the moment it hits the ground by having an episode of, err, walking past some stationary statues.
Yes as the title rather gives away (just like the old days of putting ‘Daleks’ and ‘Cybermen’ in the title of everything) this is the long awaited return of The Weeping Angels. On the one hand they make things intrinsically easier: Moffat’s biggest success story in Dr Who so far were clearly the gangly gargoyles, but after the Doctor-lite episode ‘Blink’ fans were crying out to give the quantum time-locked statues a proper showdown with the Doctor. Last time around The Doctor was only there for a ‘Blink and you miss it’ cameo too, but now we get to see how Matt Smith’s Doctor handles them up close. And what could be better than one episode but two? They’re a proven hit and knowing that they’ve worked gives Moffat the biggest confidence boost he can, while making sure fans from the ‘old’ days tune in even if they think they won’t like the show after Tennant. Last time around too we were told they were mere scavengers on their uppers – this time we’re on their territory and they’re more organised and dangerous. This re-match was so obvious a one that we’d have been annoyed if Moffat had done anything else and he takes everything that made them so scary the last time round and ups the ante for a Dr Who story that’s as close as any individual story to a Who horror movie with more jump-scares than a shivering Tigger.
On the other hand,
though, it’s a crazy suicidal move that rather boxes the writer in: The Weeping
Angels worked in ‘Blink’ because they were a threat against inexperienced
Humans in a modern-day setting. Every child watching, at least in Europe, would
come across a gargoyle statue somewhere and the more inquisitive ones would
have already asked their mummies and daddies why they’re there (and nobody
would be able to give a satisfying answer. I mean the truth, to scare away ugly
demons by using even uglier carvings, seems like nonsense to any right minded
child). The Angels don’t talk so there’s no great moral philosophical debate
here, for the most part they don’t even move (at any rate not when the camera’s
on them) and fans know their modus operandi well by now: all you need to do to
defeat them is ‘don’t blink’. Just as Terry Nation did with The Daleks and Kit
Pedlar/Gerry Davis with The Cybermen Moffat also killed his monsters off pretty
thoroughly last time, never thinking he would use them again. But while ‘Time’
is never as imaginative or rounded a story as ‘Blink’ it’s a very clever sequel
that has the Angels do things we’d never seen them do before. Moffat was a big
fan of the ‘Alien’ franchise and admitted the way the sequel ‘Aliens’ didn’t
simply repeat the ‘alien in a Human tummy’ aspect that was so memorable but
went somewhere new, having the story be about ‘Humans lost in an alien world’,
after a spaceship crash-lands on the planet Alfava Metraxis. Now there are
hundreds of the things and the fact we’re on a landscape that somehow manages
to be full of both rocks and trees gives them so many places to hide. The
moment where the soldiers have all been brainwashed into walking off to their
doom abandoning Amy who can’t see what’s going on at all is proper hiding
behind the sofa stuff. They can also talk, borrowing the voice of soldier Bob
(naturally the only one The Doctor properly talked to and did his usual I
promise to get you out of this’ speech, just add to the guilt) and using him to
taunt The Doctor. The Angels, mute and sending people back in time for food as
much as anything, now have an actual personality, vindictive and mocking, which
comes as a surprise. They’re still scariest when they’re quiet, though. A lot
of Moffat’s ideas for the series so far have come from parlour games, including
the gasmask kid of ‘The Empty Child’ walking with open arms (every child has
tried to be a zombie at some point) and The Weeping Angels come from games like
‘Statues’, where the child that’s designated ‘it’ is blindfolded and has to
guess where the other children are to catch them. Only in ‘Time’ it’s even more
so: Moffat was trying to think up ways to make the Angels even scarier and
decided to make Amy blind, like the game. Here she has to walk with her eyes
tight shut so that the Angels don’t guess that she isn’t looking at them and
the idea of having something terrible around you that you can’t even see adds a
whole new element of horror that wasn’t in ‘Blink’. Considering that this story
is easily the simplest story Moffat wrote (it’s basically 100 minutes of watching
enemies that don’t move while walking past them, a giant game of hide and seek)
it really is unbelievably tense at times, with a scare factor even greater than
before.
Thankfully the spaces in
the plot leave lots of room for other things, such as the long awaited return
of River Song. As far as both writer and actress were concerned her one
appearance in ‘Silence In The Library/Forest
Of The Dead’ was it and all those other adventures River mentioned would
happen off-screen, in the viewer’s imaginations. But it seemed obvious to us
that she would have to come back, to the point where I can’t have been the only
fan expecting her to be The Doctor’s full-time companion once Moffat took over
from Davies. The trouble is, like The Weeping Angels, she was written as a
one-shot character where the mystery and the fact she knows him better than
practically anyone while he doesn’t know her at all was the entire point of
River. How can that possibly work with her as a full character when we know
what the mystery is and even more than that have seen how it ends? And yet it
works, Moffat hastily going back though his old script and picking out the
throwaway mention of ‘The Crash of the Byzantium’ as a setting (note the scene
of The Doctor checking out the name of the crashed spaceship and giving a
double-take). Moffat makes River every bit as worthy as the closest The Doctor
is ever going to get to a conventional romance work softening her up in some
ways and toughening her up in others, so that we see even more signs of how
ruthless and anti-authoritarian River is abut also the gentleness behind it. So
here she is returning, at the peak of her romance (from her point of view), leaving
messages for The Doctor in ancient artefacts he discovers while going round the
Delirium Archives museum (actually Brecon Cathedral, how on Gallifrey did they
get permission to film there?!) and landing on top of a surprised Doctor as she
takes a leap into the Tardis. Her entrance sums up a lot of what River will
become, not just landing on top of a protesting Matt Smith in a clinching way
but her sheer certainty that he will always be there for her come what may.
It’s a very different dynamic to last time though and not just because he wears
a different face this time: The Doctor is half-expecting it now and the story
is less about whether he should trust River but how much he should trust her.
Moffat’s been doing some more thinking and is carefully setting up all sorts of
arcs here: that she killed a ‘good man’, that she’s serving time in prison,
that she wasn’t always a professor (thus moving her further away from his
original template, of Benny Summerfield in the ‘New Adventures’ novels).
Perhaps most of all, he’s seen her die: there’s a couple of cut scenes that
they really should have left in here, from Amy’s remark in the Tardis that The
Doctor ‘looks as if you’ve seen a ghost’ to River’s puzzled breakaway telling
him ‘What are you so guilty for? I know that look well’ (alas they also drop
the great comedy line of River’s that the next time they meet ‘I’ll slap you
for something you won’t even have done yet’. ‘I’ll look forward to it’ he replies.
‘I remember it well' she says).
I adore the scene where
River takes command of The Tardis and understands it better than The Doctor
ever has, revealing after forty-seven whole years that the familiar ‘wheezing
groaning’ sound in very Terry Nation Target novel is a result of The Doctor not
knowing how to take the stabilisers off – it’s such a clever way of re-establishing
the character for anyone who missed her last time, that she not only think she
knows this stuff, she really does and she really has been a big part of The
Doctor’s life. It also sets up their –Romany’ relationship where they have
different strengths and weaknesses, switching who defers to who at different
moments (The Doctor is the moral compass with all the bright ideas, while River
mops up all the technical knowhow and details he’s oblivious to while she’s far
happier to get her hands dirty). You already know these two would do anything
for each other, even though The Doctor is still plainly trying to work out just
why he feels that so strongly so soon. River
still isn’t quite right though, less flirty and more protective (it speaks
volumes that Alex Kingston, who was told nothing about River’s origins until
the rehearsal for ‘The Impossible
Astronaut’ assumed she was playing The Doctor’s lover in ‘Library’ but
began to wonder during the making of this story if she was playing his mum).
She nails the part all the same though – she was already great in ‘Library’ but
she’s fabulous here, while the fact that she looks physically older really
helps the dynamic, making it seem more natural for her to boss The Doctor
around (though see ‘Husbands Of River Song’
for how it might have worked had Moffat gone with his original idea of casting
an older actor to play The Doctor here).
Matt Smith too works his
socks off, enjoying acting off her and though Moffat writes him as a bit cold
and distant here (more like the 4th Doctor), yelling at Amy to move
when she’s scared (rather than cajole her as he later would) Matt’s performance
is so full of warmth that Moffat quickly tweaks his character in the other
stories (it’s particularly noticeable because of that old scene where a Doctor
from the season finale comes back and speaks to Amy in a much warmer human way,
helped by Matt really getting into Who and falling in love with the 2nd
Doctor, who’s far more of a humanitarian). It’s as if Moffat was writing for
Capaldi’s Doctor three seasons early. Not until after Amy and Rory’s last story
(another Weeping Angel story that neatly mirrors her first) does he become this
cold again. Generally the 11th Doctor is surrounded by friends but
here he’s being treated as a soldier and it doesn’t suit him one bit. What is
already a natural part of his character though is the clumsiness. It apparently
took a ridiculous amount of takes before director Adam Smith was happy with the
take of everyone jumping on cue because Matt was a beat out every time, while
he thought a scene in rehearsals of Matt accidentally breaking part of the set
on trying to hang on was such an intrinsic part of his Doctor he got him to do
it again for real in front of the cameras. There’s meant to be multiple outtakes
of Matt getting his lines wrong and babbling ‘The Angels are full of forests!’,
an anecdote told by so many people who worked on this story that it’s even
become a popular t-shirt amongst fans. He’s already superb and very different
to Tennant’ more troubled and grown-up Doctor, though he’ll get better yet as
Moffat understand him more.
Slightly less successful
is what Moffat does with Amy. Not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong
with the part as written or performed: she just isn’t as fully drawn as The
Doctor or River yet. Moffat seems to have started out with the intentions of
making her independent and sassy and she’s at her best in this story when she’s
joining up with River and ganging up on him, but at other times Amy is as much
of a helpless hapless peril monkey as she’ll ever be. Rose fell into the trap a
few times too, but we’re approaching Peri levels in the way so many soldiers
give their lives up to help her when in reality they’d have no doubt left her
behind a long time ago as a jeopardy to their mission. We see her scared and
alone, feeling abandoned by everyone, which gives us insight into just how
young and inexperienced Amy still is for all her bravado and confidence, but
neither writer nor actress have quite got that join right yet, so the Amy we
have here is either all brave or all scared and not much in between. We already
know that Amy is quite a social being though and here more than ever, before
Rory joins in the fun and games, she’s very much the junior partner, so being
left behind is very much a calamity in a way it wouldn’t necessarily be for
Rose or Martha (though Donna would have screamed the planet down). Poor Amy
really does through it this story, not just having people yelling at her and
disappearing when they’re meant to be protecting her with eyes tight shut, but
even worse realising how little she knows the Doctor.
She’s also oddly sexual, aggressive
in a way no other companion – not even River – has been, something that seems
to have come out of nowhere despite the fact she was working as a kissagram
when we first met her model self. It makes sense in some ways – it’s not every
day your handsome imaginary friend comes to life and a natural next step to
want to make sure they’re real – but Amy’s first response at seeing The Doctor
as an adult was to hit him with a frying pan, not snog him in case he
disappears again. ‘Victory Of The Daleks’ too, a story crying out to be much
later in the run when timelord and companion know and trust each other better,
went by without so much as a flirty comment. So why is Amy’s response to the
end of this story that rather odd tag scene where she sexily poses for him in
her bedroom (while he’s totally oblivious, naturally) and talks about not
wanting to get married in the morning. You can understand why anyone would get
cold feet over such a big decision and commitment and she’s had one of those
days facing certain death that make you re-think your life priorities, but it’s
not like she’s only just met Rory and doesn’t have any feelings for him;
they’ve been a couple for a decade by now. It’s not like being with The Doctor
has made her question what real love is and Rory isn’t the sort of abusive
boyfriend we were wondering about, with lots of red flags (if anything, that’s
Amy as things turn out). If anything she should be desperate to get back to her
wedding day so she can at least have that in case something dangerous happens
to her again. Moffat has since admitted that it’s one of the scenes of his he
really doesn’t like, that he played it for laughs as Amy being caught up in the
heat of the moment but that it really didn’t work done like that. And it’s even
worse in the lengthy ‘cut scene’ added to the DVD/Bluray as an ‘exclusive’
where Amy finds out about all The Doctor’s previous companions and assumes he’s
up to something nefarious. Even as screened, cut down, it annoyed a lot of fans
with 43 complaints sent in that it was ‘inappropriate’ for family viewing
(although by contrast there were more than 6000 purely for the pop up advert
for the Graham Norton show ‘Over The Rainbow’ on afterwards which turned up
during the big emotional climax, which a technician sheepishly admitted they’d
set up twenty seconds earlier than planned. Why did it always seem to happen on
his shows?! See ‘Rose’. Maybe that’s
why the Chibnall era never did better. Maybe it’s actually a good luck charm
for each showrunner? ) What’s weirder is that they don’t do more with it:
there’s a sort of half-hearted attempt at a love triangle in next story
‘Vampires In Venice’ and then it’s never mentioned again, Amy getting it out of
her system. What’s even odder is that if Amy has such a jealous streak why she
gangs up with River and immediately trusts her, even more than The Doctor does,
rather than standing around her entrance into the Tardis, hands on hips, going
‘what the hell is going on here then?’
It’s a relief that we didn’t get another episode of ‘School Reunion’ style bickering,
but it’s rather odd in context (is Amy’s play for The Doctor a power move to
regain him for herself? Or a subconscious reaction to River being – spoilers –
her daughter and wondering if she needs to make out with The Doctor in order to
have her?)
Like ‘Spearhead In Space’ and ‘Rose’ Moffat purposefully gives us a
plot that’s easy to follow which all these complex characterisations are taking
shape: basically, don’t get caught by The Angels or you’re dead. There are no
sub-plots, no organisations to overthrow and the only even hint at a
political-social comment (that the army is actually an off-shoot of the Church,
a side product of a new Crusades) is left to explore for another episode (‘Boom!’) Just a group of soldiers struggling
for survival, in a repeat of the old Troughton ‘base under siege’ story, just
with the difference that the base is the whole planet and everyone is trying to
get out, not keep things in. It’s odd seeing The Doctor surrounded by soldiers
again and they’re an empty lot compared to UNIT, with only the commander brave
enough to stand up to The Doctor (the Brigadier never let any of his troops
call The Doctor a coward for not being in the frontline, so that’s new!) really standing out. When The Angels are
working the way they did in ‘Blink’, standing around looking menacing, they
work nicely and there’s a real tension across the story, especially a clever
cliffhanger where all hope really does seem lost.
However they’re weaker
than before in a couple of key ways. One is that they ‘kill’ by taking people
over, ‘disappearing’ some and leaving the others with distorted memories so
that they aren’t remembered at all. Even given some extra timey wimey
crack-in-the-wall stuff confusing things (this season’s big bad) it takes away
from the really scary and unique abilities the Angels had before, of sending
you back into the past away from the people you loved and forcing you to start
over again with nothing. The way that ‘Blink’ was written the Angels were
taking people out of time because that’s how they fed, that it was a food chain
sort of thing and the lives lived by Humans were a tasty snack, which makes a
sort of internal logic (though I’ve no idea on why they pick on one of the
shortest-lived species in the solar system; go track down the eternals or
something!) It’s not the ‘memories’ they stole, nor the ‘years’ someone should
have lived, but the life they’d made for themselves, like someone had pressed a
ginormous re-set button. This story makes it clear though how much glee they
take from snuffing other people’s lives out and in doing so they’ve become like
every other monster. It’s simply not as existentially scary. Amy
being ‘Blind’ is also the logical sequel to ‘Blink’, a cure that’s almost as
bad as the disease (personally I’d much rather be sent back in time than lose
my sight – not least if its an era when I can see the missing Dr Who episodes
that don’t exist any more). There’s also the new addition that ‘whatever holds
an image of an Angel is an Angel’, which is just nuts. How would that even
work? How can a being possibly have control over an image of itself? That goes
double when The Angels work just as well from Amy seeing them in her ‘mind’s
eye’, her subconscious apparently giving up control to a CCTV image. How would
that have evolved naturally? If it was most other races in Who you’d assume
they’d developed the ability through their own technology, but the Angels never
seem to have the need for any. You get the feeling that this scene is here for
nothing more than to give us at home an extra jumpscare just when we think
we’re ‘safe’ in a spaceship with the doors closed and to give us a scene of The
Doctor saying something along the lines of ‘Don’t think about them, don’t even
think – think and you’re dead!’ It’s also weird that the soldiers, on realising
where they are and working out what’s happening, don’t hurl the TV monitor in
their crashed spaceship out the window and lock themselves safely in there.
But then they’ve gone to
the trouble of lots of location filming, in some truly lovely places and a lot
of the fun in this story can be had looking at the scenery which at times
really does seem like an alien planet. What’s more it’s one that has different
geography, being more like Earth than the all-desert or all-quarry planets
we’re used to seeing. That’s Southerrndown Beach in Dunraven where the Tardis
is parked at the end, in the first ever bit of filming done for the Moffat era
(a shoot complicated by the tide coming in far earlier than expected; it was
still an easier day’s shoot than Davies had with the space pig in ‘Aliens Of London’ though!), Aberthaw
Quarry and Puzzlewood, in The Royal Forest Of Dean, which was the in-place for
BBC location filming in this era (‘Merlin’ shot there practically every episode
and we got to know every last tree across five years!) Perhaps best of all are the Clearwell Caves,
claustrophobic and suffocating yet simultaneously huge. The moment when The
Doctor does something clever with his sonic screwdriver and effectively turns
the light on, showing the sheer enormity of where they are, is one of those
scenes that really doesn’t get enough praise: it turns the story from one you
think is a small affair that The Doctor has under control to a moment when you
wonder if even he is going to get out of this one.
Unfortunately no matter
how wonderful the location filming is, it is basically the same story over and
over again in different locations, everyone scrambling to safety that isn’t
there rather than following a route out of trouble. Seeing that we’re in so
many different locations miles away we don’t see people get from one place to
another either: for the most part they’re just there when we start another
scene, or sometimes they’ve been zapped by some clever gadget or sucked through
the black hole of the end (sadly they lost a shot of the reveal at the beach,
which should have been from Amy’s point of view as she firsts risk opening her
eyes, dropped because the horrendous weather meant the shoot over-ran. They
tagged a few days after shooting moving on to ‘The
Eleventh Hour’ to cover it). Having a story where the enemy can’t talk and
are literally stock-still statues for most of the screen time, which leaves an
awful lot of the 100 minutes to fill with other things. Some of them are pretty
awful minutes too to be honest: the soldiers in this story are no UNIT and
quickly wear out their welcome, while the scenes of Amy alone with her eyes
shut and abandoned again feel like an eternity for us every bit as much as they
do for her. This really is an awfully static story at times, with people
standing around a lot waiting for something to happen, which could really have
been told in a single episode without losing too much. It feels much more like
‘classic’ Who than anything else Moffat ever wrote too: 99% of it is linear
(more about that confusing 1% in a minute), it alternates between loud and soft
moments throughout and everything is either a big set piece or talking. We get
River’s entrance, the Angel attacking Amy by camera You could tell these scenes
in most any order and still tell much the same order.
The end, when it comes,
is the same way that ‘Army Of Ghosts/Doomsday’ ended too: do something clever
and open up a ginormous hole the baddies can be sucked into while you hold on
for dear life (I mean, I remember doing this in my Dr Who stories, but in my
defence I was seven and the villainous monster threatening my Whazzle-Doctor
was indeed a vacuum cleaner, so at least it made sense when I did it). The
Doctor could, by rights, have set this up hours ago and avoided all that loss
of life (though that would have been a very short and boering story from a TV
point of view). It all feels less liner than ‘Blink’, more disjointed and less
complete, so less satisfying a story somehow.
In terms of dialogue,
though, Moffat has rarely been better. He’s setting up all sorts of concepts
and characters here and nails practically all of them (until that weird
ending), while also offering lots of dark humour to compensate for the darker
than usual story. A lot of them come from the typical Moffatt formula of having
two people have two different conversations in the space of one, shedding light
on one thing while confusing about another and teasing us with what’s really
going on (something he’d been doing
since his ‘Press Gang days in the early 1990s). Octavian asks River about The
Doctor ‘Do you trust him? He’s not some kind of madman? ’ and there’s a
significant pause before she says ‘Absolutely I trust him, utterly ignoring the
other line. Amy teases a serious looking Doctor about being ‘Mr Grumpyface
today’ and then naturally enough asks if River is his wife. He replies ‘yes’
and several million fans lean forward in expectation ‘I am Mr Grumpyface today’
he replies, carefully ignoring the other question (not least because he doesn’t
actually know yet. Stick around for ‘The Wedding Of River Song’ if you want to
know, though the title isn’t necessarily the giveaway it seems). There’s also
the ending when River flirts with him, having escaped the Angels being sucked
to their doom, ‘you me, handcuffs, does it always have to end like this?’ On
the face of it, this is a typically natural flirty bit of banter from a
character who loves teasing The Doctor and seeing him blush, but on the other
we know that this is exactly how River’s story ends. It’s the first time we at
home, along with The Doctor, know something River doesn’t and it shifts how we
treat the character from now on. I’m always a sucker for libraries and museums (the
closest mere Humans can get to time travel) so the opening in the Delirium
archive is right up my street, with the Moffat idea of The Doctor and River
leaving messages for each other across time (it’s also where the headless monks
from ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ will end up in a
bit of pleasing fan continuity although there’s no sign of them just yet). There’s
also the bit of improvisation of The
Doctor ask in which one Rory is and signalling with the length of his nose, an
ad lib on the day (Matt knew Arthur Darvill well before shooting and he’ll get
his own back with various chin gestures!) There’s also a blink-and-you-miss-it
cameo by Mike Skinner (aka ‘The Streets’) a musician who’d been a big Who fan
and was at the peak of his fame (reviewing his debut single which had come in
the post was virtually my first job as a junior reporter so I was keeping an
eye on him and in this era he was big, though most people have to ask who he is
now. I liked it by the way, so of course take full claim for all the success
he’d had since!) Somehow the cast get by and nail their characters impressively
quickly, but you can tell, if you go back and watch these episodes out of
sequence, that their characters aren’t quite set yet: the Doctor’s a bit too
manic, River Song’s a bit too weird and Amy’s a bit too wet. Oh well, every era
has to take time and settle down and even if ‘time’ isn’t the enemy the way it
was with ‘Blink’ the word ‘time is one that’s going to be cropping up a lot in
Moffat stories, as nearly a separate character. Which is perhaps why this story
feels so out of place – apart from the Doctor of ‘The Pandorica Opens/The Big
Bang’ (complete with tweed jacket) coming to comfort Amy from the future
everything here is told in strict chronological order (they even draw attention
to it with Amy’s countdown from ten, which she says so unconsciously I thought
it was a mistake that was allowed in when she randomly said ‘nine’ out of
nowhere). There won’t be many stories like that with Moffat behind the wheel!
That’s the one risk this
story doesn’t take, perhaps because it takes so many others, many of which it
really didn’t need to. Most of them pay off big time: considering they barely
knew each other the three leads have an amazing instinctive natural chemistry
(legend has it that Matt Smith and Karen Gillan went on a ‘bonding’ series of
activities waiting for filming to start, which she mostly loved and he was
mostly terrified of! It worked for their friendship though, they’re still very
much besties today). The scenery is first class. Even the title is clever
(‘Flesh and Stone’ is actually Moffat’s son Josh’s suggestion – episode titles
will be Moffat’s Achilles heel throughout his run and this won’t be the last
where junior has to save him). Having The Angels in their home world rather
than ours is a great way of getting them to do something new. Considering all
the obstacles in making this story (the inevitable nerves and sense that nobody
knew what they were doing, plus a torrential downpour that deflated everyone’s
optimism and caused a costly remount that ate into everyone’s holiday time –
and even then resulted in a slightly different arrival for River, replacing a
more elaborate three page sequence) it’s a wonder it turned out anywhere as
good as it did. It’s the new things that The Angels do and the new things we
learn about Amy that let this one down slightly. It’s nowhere near up to
‘Eleventh Hour’ for imagination or invention (even if it’s one up from the
recycling of ‘The Beast Below’ and ‘Victory Of The Daleks’) and there’s already
a sense creeping in that Moffat won’t be able to keep up the pace now he’s in
charge of a full year rather than one story. The result is a story that’s
popular with fans for making the Angels even more of a threat, but for me it’s
a little one-note, with a nervy cast and even nervier writing, without as much
of the usual saving grace of humour or lightness of touch that are Moffat’s
hallmarks as much as the heavy emotion and horror we get here (‘Blink’ is more
satisfying rounded and the stakes are higher in ‘Time Of The Angels’). Like the
Doctor says while speed-reading his angel book ‘not bad, bit boring in the
middle’. Still, one story has to be the first made under a new regime and the
wonder is more that a story with so many firsts hits the ground running, even
with a monster that mostly stands perfectly still. It’s also a lot better than
a lot of us had been expecting, both from the highs of the Davies/Tennant era
and the fact that the Weeping Angels were getting a sequel. This is the time of
not just the Angels but Moffat and his stock was never higher than here. Surely
things can’t go wrong when everything is working so well? I mean it’s not like
we’re going to get an oddball story now after all that work to win over a
mainstream audience like, I don’t know, sexy vampire fish or something?...
POSITIVES + Moffat’s
first cliffhanger as showrunner is a great, great cliffhanger, right up there
with anything in the history of Dr Who and a good sign as to the 11th
Doctor’s ability to turn things around from despair to optimism with nothing
more than a lot of nattering and a sonic screwdriver. Just compare this to how
Doctors 12 and 13 especially behave when beset by problems: The Doctor and co
are trapped in a cavern, surrounded by thousands of Weeping Angels. The guards
who were meant to be all too literal ‘lookouts’ have just been murdered. The
Angels have suddenly and alarmingly found their voice, using the dead Human Bob
to talk through and tell the Doctor all the awful things they’re about to do to
everyone there. They’re also taunting him, using Bob’s voice to say that he
trusted The Doctor to get him out of trouble and he let Bob down – and now he’s
going to let everyone else down. Amy doesn’t know it yet but she’s busy turning
into an angel herself with sand pouring out of her eye and blinding her. We
know everyone is in a cave so there’s no way out and nowhere to run. It all
looks properly hopeless. How are they going to get out of that one then?! I
won’t spoil it but unlike some two-parters the solution is no cop out either
but a logical way out based on a tiny bit of continuity mentioned a good forty
minutes earlier that everyone watching forgot long ago if they noticed it at
all. What’s more The Doctor isn’t scared but boasting- you’re brought back next
week not because you think he’s going to die but because you can’t imagine why
he might be smiling. That’s properly good writing right there, you don’t get
that in super hero films, soap operas or fantasy quests about jewellery and
orcs. No wonder I love this show!
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Touched By An Angel’ (2011) is an 11th
Doctor novel by Jonathan Morris and released in the gap between the two halves
of series six. It’s a slightly different Weeping Angels story than usual in
that they don’t just take one person back in time but interfere at the point of
death, destabilising the timelines in a ‘Reaper’ type way so they can eat lots
of Humans as a feast instead. It doesn’t quite work on that score, given that
The Angels aren’t given much of an opportunity to do the sort of things they’re
good at (the horror of having to start a new life before you were even born),
while as a non-speaking foe it’s also quite hard to work out what their plan
actually is. There are some touching moments though, as a husband thinks his
wife has miraculously survived a terrible accident, only to find out she has to
die after all. Really, though, this story is a little too much like ‘Father’s Day’
for its own good (it’s a husband not a dad, killed in a lorry crash rather than
a car, with Angel statues not Reapers but in every other detail it’s much the
same story).
‘Magic Of The Angels’ (2012) is one of the Dr Who
‘Quick Reads’ released for Britain’s annual reading week designed to get young
children hooked on books. Would Jacqueline Rayner’s novella be the one to do
it? Probably not to be honest. The Angels do act much more like their usual
selves in this one but they’re such a visual monster they don’t really work in
prose where they stand around not doing much, while the story feels too
juvenile for ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ never mind the main series, with a feel actually
more like Russell T Davies’ post-Who series ‘Wizards and Aliens’. The 11th
Doctor, Amy and Rory are on a London sightseeing trip when they stop to see
magician Sammy Star at a local theatre, who’s assistants really do disappear
for good. Could it be that there’s a weeping angel in the cabinet? There’s a
neat bit with The Doctor going undercover at an old people’s home, but even
that feels a bit off for its intended audience (what young kid is going to
understand their sacrifice to the young because they’ve already lived full
lives?)
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