Who Reviews The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone by Tony J Fyler

The Weeping Angels make mincemeat of their difficult second album, says Tony.

There are plenty of villains and monsters in the Doctor Who archive that really only hit viewers once, but nevertheless hit them hard and left indelible marks on their psyche. The Zarbi. The Monoids. The Celestial Toymaker. The Krotons. The Dominators. The Giant Maggots. The Drashigs. Sutekh. The Krynoids. The Robots of Death. The Fendahl. The Mandragora Helix… TV Who is littered with their legends, but they never made it back for a second bite of the universal cherry.

Such could have been the fate of the Weeping Angels too – they absolutely tore the roof off the third series of revived Doctor Who, establishing the ‘Doctor Light’ episode as a thing that could absolutely shine nonetheless. But were they a one-story wonder?

It’s important to acknowledge how much had changed in the world of Who between their first appearance in Blink and their second in The Time Of Angels/Flesh And Stone. Steven Moffatt, who created the Angels while the show was Exec Produced by Russell T Davies, now had the top job, with a Doctor he had chosen, and a new storytelling direction for the show. He also had other characters he’d created that could be brought back and used as a central part of the action.

The Eleventh Doctor’s first story had seen him defeat an alien threat mostly by the power of his reputation and a touch of smugness. His second had seen the Eleventh Doctor’s moral dilemma more or less resolved by his new companion. His third, pitting him against the cuddliest Daleks in history, had been exactly what it promised to be – a victory for the Daleks, with the Doctor scraping together the elements of a win while the Daleks, reborn and re-invigorated, naffed off to terrorise some other luckless part of time and space.

Enter the Weeping Angels, to really put the new boy through his paces.

Enter, also, River Song, looking really rather more alive than when we saw her last, striding into the adventure like it actually belonged to her – which of course, on some level, every adventure in which River Song gets involved actually does.

The fundamentals of The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone are very ‘classical.’ There’s a mystery – a crashed spaceship, a cavern of the dead, lots of statues in a cave system, and a series of locked door mysteries that become a base under siege mystery. There’s creepiness, and the Doctor being clever and saving the companion, even though in this case – as had often been the case since she arrived in his life, Amy Pond is called on to be extra-specially brave in the face of adversity and Really Creepy Things.

But there are a couple of things that need to happen in The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone to ensure the success of most of the story arc that follows it. On the one hand, the new dynamic between the Doctor and River Song needs to be established, his seemingly boyish initial reaction to her gradually overcome so that he learns to accept her complicated role in his complicated life. That’s achieved in this two-part story in a lot of less-than-subtle ways, from her sending him an impossible message to his coming to save her, to a kiss, to the high-level, don’t-companion-me banter in which he’s forced to step up and treat her as an equal. It’s also edged along by Amy Pond’s at first vaguely schoolgirl amusement that he has a girlfriend or a wife – ‘She’s Mrs Doctor! “Oh Doctor, can you sonic me…”’, which puts River above and beyond the likes of ordinary companions – perhaps to Amy’s chagrin as well as her amusement. Oh, if only she knew…

Mostly though, it comes from the brainstorming, the argument, the challenging that the Doctor and River do together in order to survive a tricky situation and save as many people as possible. It’s through that process, where they surprise each other and grow to appreciate the strengths each other possess, that the Eleventh Doctor and River Song begin their particular dance together – a dance which will of course ultimately end up with her shooting him, him failing to die, and the two of them married, to bemused looks from the in-laws. In The Time of Angels/Flesh And Stone, the ‘young’ Tenth Doctor’s bemusement at the mad, exciting woman with the never-ending hair is transformed into something that can last longer, grow deeper, and spark adventure for years to come, to the extent that this Doctor, already looking more mature in his youthfulness than the Tenth ever did, can respect her enough to let her keep her secrets, as she lets him keep his own. For the Doctor, an inveterate peeker, to maintain his self-discipline and not find out things about River Song is a mark of his respect for her after this story, the idea of ‘spoilers’ actually lessening the quality of life something he seems to respect after they tangle with Angels more than the Tenth Doctor did after an introduction to the Vashta Nerada. If their first encounter gave them a reason to respect one another, this story sets them on their intertwined path into his future and her past.

More than that though, this story had to prove that the Weeping Angels were more than the ultimate in jump-scare monsters. That they were the ultimate jump-scare monster seems unquestionable – Steven Moffatt had set them up to be precisely that, monsters who got you if you blinked. But like, say, the Giant Maggots (the ultimate squirm-scare monsters?), there were weaknesses to the Weeping Angels that had to be overcome if they were to have a life beyond Blink – they had no dialogue, for one thing. And, once you understood they were looking to zap you back to the past and feed off your temporal potential, you more or less knew their gameplan 100% of the time – right? There could be little about them that was creepy in the long-term. They couldn’t plan anything – after all, how would they discuss it, when as soon as two or more of them were gathered together, they turned to stone?

That’ll teach you to underestimate Steven Moffat.

Tackling these long-term weaknesses head on, he added substantially to the legend of the Angels in this story – the notion that whatever captures the image of an angel becomes itself an angel is hugely messed-up on many levels, but it does rather tackle the question of how you ever get more angels. Unlikely to reproduce through personal contact, the Angels here become a kind of quantum-level event – which makes a sort of sense of their being quantum-locked when observed. They generate through direct observation, through image-capture, essentially conquering anything that looks at them too hard. An evolution of the idea that you have to look at them to keep them dormant, the notion that if you look at them too hard, they’ll grow themselves inside you is very, very nasty – almost like a parasitic wasp, but…y’know…quantum.

The idea of pulling the Doctor and friends through a necropolis en route to the stricken ship is scary enough, with twisted statues seemingly carved out of the cavern rock already pretty creepy. When we discover what they really are, something that made only fleeting appearances in Blink becomes crystal clear – the Angels can wait. They can out-wait whole civilisations if they need to – in fact, they have little option but to wait if they get quantum-locked. But they can hide in plain sight as the ancestors of your species, and they’re waiting for you to take notice of them. That’s not exactly planning, as such, but it adds an extra dimension to the jump-scare monsters – the idea of patience.

And then, when things get serious on board the ship, there’s a horrible, effective scene where the Angels gain a way of having a voice – usually, when they touch you, you’re dust and temporal potential. But they clearly have ways of keeping you alive, to use your voice as their own if it proves necessary. It’s a particularly effective, cruel way to give these monsters a way of interacting, but that’s Steven Moffatt for you – deep down, any chance to be a git, he’ll take it if it helps him tell the story, and this definitely does. It expands what the Angels can do, and gives them the opportunity, should it be necessary, for them to have a group consciousness and a vocal interaction with non-Angels.

Finally of course, The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone does the thing you least expect it to be able to do – it gives the Weeping Angels a plan, an instinct, a job to do, in terms of harnessing the power of a highly complex temporal event to feed themselves en masse and bring their quantum-locked army back to life. The crash of the Byzantium was not the accident it seemed to be, but a deliberate place to achieve their greater end.

The Time of Angels/Flesh And Stone achieves so much more than it really could be expected to – it sets River and the Eleventh Doctor off on their dance, it shows significantly more of the new Doctor’s personality than anything has to date (his anger, his faith in Amy, his brain working out the things it needs to know in order to keep people safe around him and more besides), and it absolutely expands the scope of what the Weeping Angels can do. It is, somewhat perversely, arguable that the story adds too much to the Weeping Angels’ abilities and reality – certainly the ‘whatever captures the image of an angel becomes itself an angel’ angle was never used again with anything like the success it has in this story. But in terms of the challenge of taking a one-shot jump-scare monster based on a schoolyard game and giving them a broader history and a wider scope within the Doctor Who universe, The Time of Angels/Flesh And Stone is an absolute triumph.