Village Of The Angels: Ranking - 136

    Village Of The Angels

(Series 13 'Flux', Dr 13 with Yaz and Graham, 21/11/2021, showrunner; Chris Chibnall, writers: Chris Chibnall and Maxine Alderton, director: James Magnus Stone)

Rank: 136

  'Oh look, there's future me in many years' time over there through the crack in the village. I wonder what he's doing? And what are those green-ray discs,  they look weird. Oh look, he's watching Doctor Who. Again. In another pricey new format. Who'd have guessed it?!' 

 

 I was so worried about this one, dear readers. There we were, in the middle of a season-long arc that wasn’t really making much sense and was under-whelming at best, when we switched to a new writer (Maxine Alderton who doesn’t get enough credit for her two DW stories) combined with an old foe that, let’s face it, might look ridiculous in the wrong hands. I mean, the Chibnall era was even struggling to do the Daleks properly – what chance a cheap looking statue that moves only when you’re not looking and whose super power is sending you back in time? Nobody had written for the Weeping Angels outside their creator Steven Moffat – maybe he was the only one with the magic touch? However, much as the rest of ‘Flux’ is a pile of nice and slightly odd ideas that never quite coalesce this is an honest-to-goodness brilliant DW story, one that stands up on its own without the rest of the series and easily one of the highlights of the Chibnall era. It’s properly scary for starters and adds to what we’ve seen the Angels do before without contradicting them: this time they can come to life out of mere drawings not just still images, they have the power to invade the Tardis (something very few aliens actually do, although there is thought to be at least one Sontaron still rattling around in there as he’s never seen again in ‘The Invasion Of Time’), they can now possess humans and (mega cliffhanger spoiler alert) they can even take over the Doctor herself. The concept of a whole village being taken out of time really ups the stakes, making this feel like an old Pertwee story, while the idea of a psychic luring the Doctor in on their behalf through her curiosity is the perfect way of capturing this timelord – note for all invading monsters: forget the threats, invitations and kidnapping companions, if you want the Doctor’s attention give them a conundrum they can’t resist. Giving the Angels a whole ‘missing village’ to run around in (of which there are several in England, abandoned through plague or the industrial revolution mostly though, not invasion by time assassins with wings) gives us a new angle we’ve never had before whilst giving this story the feel of the ever-popular ‘Blink’. And if the angels could cause so much damage in one house what could they do with a whole village? (I do wonder, though, why they chose a Village without a church and thus without any gargoyles or statues; equally it seems odd they haven’t invaded other European countries yet - if there’s ever a Weeping Angel invasion of Paris we’re all toast). The concept of two locations in splitscreen, as a ten/seventy-seven-year old stare back at themselves (without the risk of the Blinovitch limitation effect of other stories because they’re physically apart) is prime Doctor Who, tweaking and twisting a formula as old as time itself and still finding new things to say with the idea that what you do in your past still impacts your future in ways you can never understand. ‘Village’ has almost nothing to do with the rest of ‘Flux’ mind and if there’s a fault then its not one of this story so much as the ones that follow it, because so many of the interesting ideas here are never explained or resolved properly – this plot is just left hanging in the ether once the cliffhanger is dealt with frustratingly easily in final Flux part ‘Survivors’. What happens to Peggy, a ten year old left in a village after her parents are murdered? That plot point is just abandoned when a new idea comes along and is undone almost immediately the following week anyway, but it would be nice if somebody thought to actually, well, care about somebody else in this story. The same with Dr Jericho: for this episode he’s a rather good surrogate companion, a dotty professor like Whos of old that risks life and limb and who will even spend years travelling with Yaz and Dan, but in future stories he’ll barely get a line. Much better, surely, to have written him out here heroically doing something rather than dying later unheroically doing not much at all. Most of all, of course, that marvellous cliffhanger is squandered, resolved almost straight away as the next episode starts in a plot that just kick-starts the next part of ‘Flux’ before the toys from this one have been properly tidied away. That’s a shame for all sorts of reasons, not least because the remaining episode of Flux feels so empty and this one feels over-full, stuffed with so many good ideas you can’t always take them in. Still, that’s in the future staring back at us across that time chasm – for now, in the ‘present’, this episode is such a strong return to form, with the ESP scenes between Dr Jericho and Claire spooky and atmospheric, Yaz and Dan are becoming a really strong double-act and Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor was never better written for than here where she’s smart, feisty, curious, angry and funny all at once but in a very scatterbrained 13^th Dr way that’s entirely her. It would easy to dismiss the Chibnall era if it was all bad but at its best, here and with ‘Spyfall’ ‘Haunting of Vila Dedosa’ ‘Rosa’ and ‘Eve Of the Daleks’ DW is as strong and daring and thrilling as it ever was. It’s the average of the other episodes that can’t even get the basics right that makes this period seem so poor and these stories stand out so much. After all, this is proper DW, telling the same old story and dancing with death and time but in a whole new inventive way that leaves you gripped to the edge of your seat and, well, trying your best not to blink, not just because of the monsters but because so much is going on you’d hate to miss something.

+ There are some great lines week. The 13^th Doctor so often feels like a karaoke version of Drs 10 -12 put through a blender without a persona of her own, but she feels more ‘herself’ in this story than any other and her lines with Dr Jericho and Claire are a hoot. Take the scene where the Doctor boasts about how she can date where she is because of a coat then, on finding she’s eighteen years out, blames it on people having old coats lying about confusing her. Or the one where she says she came in because the door was open...once she’d opened it, anyway. Or riffing on playing scrabble with George Eliot (who allows for names, apparently). Or being grateful in an impossible situation because at least she’d not being eaten by a dinosaur. Egotistical, cheeky, defensive, silly, optimistic – there should have been a lot more moments like this.

- Everything relating back to the ‘Flux’ story arc, which won’t match up properly for another story yet (and even then barely) and just leaves you scratching your head like they did in the last four. The ‘relationship’ between Bel and Vinder, for instance, isn’t interesting enough to make you care – its just two character we haven’t properly met yet who once used to be together and whose scenes are dropped into the action at the most random of times in this episode, killing the mood completely. So they were together once. So what? We don’t know who they are yet – they haven’t earned our interest, certainly not compared to the sheer amount of other things going on in this story. Even after they end up getting involved with the Tardis crew separately you never quite lose that feeling of ‘so what?’ The worst part of the story is the after-credits sequence which is all about them and just kills the atmosphere like a stone after that stunning cliffhanger. First rule of writing, any writing: if you have the perfect ending don’t follow it up with a second unnecessary ending that doesn’t even feel like an ending – and then not mention it the following week. Second rule of writing: if you suddenly feel inspiration and write something this great then please please please don’t ignore it to go back to business as usual the week after!