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Original Transmission
1: The Time Of Angels
2: Flesh And Stone
Cast The Doctor Matt Smith
Crew Written by Steven Moffat
Post Prod. Supervisors Samantha Hall Chris
Blatchford
Doctor River Song, after breaking into a vault located on the starship Byzantium, carves a message into its Home Box, the starship's black box device. 12,000 years later, The Doctor and Amy find the message, which has been written in Old High Gallifreyan, whilst visiting a museum which has collected the Home Box as an archaeological artifact. The message says 'Hello Sweetie' and is clearly meant for the Doctor, who then steals it with Amy and watches its security footage. This contains a message and coordinates from River. The Doctor arrives in the nick of time and catches River as she depressurises a section of the Byzantium to escape from it. River orders the Doctor to follow the ship, which flies away. The three of them pilot the TARDIS after the Byzantium which crash-lands on the planet Alfava Metraxis. There, River signals a group of soldiers from the Church, led by Father Octavian, who teleport to the planet. River then asks the Doctor what he knows of the Weeping Angels.
The soldiers set up a base camp and River reveals to the Doctor and Amy that the Byzantium's vault contained a dormant Weeping Angel. She shows them a 4-second long looped camera recording of the Weeping Angel that she managed to download from the ship. The Doctor and River go outside to look through a book of information about the Angels, written by a "mad-man" who had encountered the Angels before, leaving Amy alone in the room with the recording. Amy turns back to the monitor and sees that the Angel has somehow moved inside the recording and is now facing her. She attempts to shut off the screen by the plug and a remote, but looks away again which causes the Angel to move closer towards her. She backs off towards the door as it bares its teeth. Amy screams for the Doctor as the Angel suddenly emerges from the monitor.
Outside, the Doctor is puzzled by the fact that there are no pictures of the Angels inside the book, but then reads out a passage concerning the Angels' image: "That which holds the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel" and he suddenly realizes that Amy is in great danger. The Doctor rushes back to Amy but cannot get the door to the viewing chamber open; neither can River burn through it with her weapon, all due to the Angel deadlocking the doors and power sources. All the while the Doctor reiterates to Amy not to blink while he and River try to force their way in. He also tells Amy not to look into the Angel's eyes as the book says that "The eyes are not the windows of the soul, they are the doors. Beware what may enter there". As Amy unwittingly looks into the Angel's eyes, she remembers what the Doctor said about the images of Angels and pauses the recording on a skip in the tape. The Angel vanishes, as the recording was paused on static which was not the image of an Angel, and she is saved.
The soldiers, the Doctor, River and Amy move into the "Maze of the Dead", a stone labyrinth with dead people buried inside the walls. The entire place is dark and full of worn and aged statues. The group attempts to track down the Angel, who is believed to be hiding amongst the statues to avoid detection. However, in the process, three soldiers have their necks snapped by the Angel, which worries the Doctor as that is not an Angel's normal way of killing. To his horror, the Doctor then remembers that the native species of this planet had two heads and realises that the statues in the maze, which are single-headed, must all be Angels. They were worn and deformed after being starved of victims for centuries but now this army of Angels is waking up, absorbing power from the intentionally crashed ship to regenerate themselves. The Angel that nearly killed Amy is also affecting how she perceives things; the Doctor deduces that she looked into the Angel's eyes despite his warning whilst Amy claims she tried to look away, but couldn't. When Amy thinks her hand has turned to stone, she tells the Doctor to leave her and save himself, which he will not do. The Doctor tries to convince Amy that her hand is not made of stone and eventually bites it to make her realize. They run to rejoin River Song and the other soldiers, who have gathered in the cavern where the Byzantium has crashed, the nose of the ship hanging far above their heads. The Angel from the Byzantium uses the consciousness of one of the dead soldiers to communicate with the Doctor as the other regenerating Angels close in on all sides. The Angel tries to anger the Doctor with the fact that the soldier they are using to talk through died in fear, despite the Doctor's earlier assurances of safety. The Doctor tells the Angels that killing the soldier was their second mistake and that he will make them sorry. He asks for the trust of Amy, River and the remaining soldiers and tells them all to jump on his signal. He takes a gun from Father Octavian and explains to the Angels their first mistake:
The Doctor, Amy, River Song, Father Octavian and his clerics find themselves standing on the nose of the Byzantium, looking down on the surface and the Weeping Angels, after having been caught by the ship's artificial gravity when the gravity globe burst. The group make their way to the secondary flight deck while being chased by the regenerating Angels, who have now also jumped up to the ship. All the while, Amy is counting downwards from ten without realising it. Angel Bob claims that this is a countdown to when they will kill her, after which they will take control of the universe. The Doctor asks the Angels where they can possibly expect to get the power from to take over the universe, but the Angels just laugh at the Doctor's ignorance of the situation. The Doctor turns around and then sees a giant crack in the ship's wall, identical to the one in Amy's bedroom in "The Eleventh Hour", and as seen in "The Beast Below" and "Victory of the Daleks", it is a crack in the universe. While the others escape into the ship's oxygen factory, a giant forest, the Doctor examines the crack, before noticing he is surrounded by Weeping Angels - one of whom catches him by his jacket. He warns the Angels that the crack, whilst full of energy, is not full of the energy they need (time energy); it is instead a crack from the end of the universe, a crack that will consume everyone. While distracting them with this thought, he escapes, minus his coat, and quickly follows after the others.
Just before the Doctor can reach her, Amy collapses to the forest floor, seemingly dying. Recollecting that the image of an Angel is itself an Angel, the Doctor realises that Amy has the image of a Weeping Angel in the visual centres of her mind. The Doctor tells her to close her eyes in order to suppress the visual centres of the brain (in the same way you would cover your ears to stop yourself hearing noise). The Doctor is frank with Amy, telling her that if she opens her eyes for more than a second, the Angel will kill her. Before leaving, Amy confesses to the Doctor she is unsure if she can trust him yet, as he isn't always truthful with her, but the Doctor simply informs her that if he always told her the truth, she would never need to trust him. After admitting she does, in fact, trust the Doctor, Amy is again confused when he tells her it is crucial that she remembers what he told her when she was a seven year old. Amy asks the Doctor to tell her what she said, but the Doctor states this isn't the point - she must remember, not just be told. The Doctor, River and Father Octavian head off to the main control room in the hope of slowing down the descent of the Angels, while Amy is left alone with the clerics as the Weeping Angels advance. Whilst walking through the forest, the Doctor traces the origins of the crack back to the point in time and space at which it began - the 26th June, 2010. While trying to break into the control room, an Angel traps Octavian. The Doctor is helpless to save him and Octavian urges him to leave and join River inside. Just before his inevitable death though, Octavian divulges to the Doctor that River is a criminal currently in his custody, guilty of the murder of a man whose identity he will not reveal. The Doctor gives his last apologies to Octavian and hurries inside.
The crack in the secondary flight deck widens into the forest, where Amy is being guarded by four of the clerics. The Angels run away from the crack, in fear from the Doctor's warning, leaving the clerics and Amy behind. The Doctor speculates that the crack is allowing time to be rewritten and River asks him how they can close it. The Doctor explains that the best way to close it is to feed it a complicated space-time event: him. In the forest, three of clerics go to inspect the crack, which just looks like a very bright light but, after they've gone, the remaining cleric doesn't even remember that they existed. He goes to investigate the crack himself, leaving Amy truly alone and with only a communicator. The Doctor radios Amy and tells her to come to the control room. She asks why she should risk confronting the Angels and the Doctor tells her that the Angels can only kill her, but the crack can erase her from time. Reluctantly and still with her eyes closed, she follows his sonic screwdriver signal, until the Angels arrive and surround her. Since the Angels are still very scared, the Doctor informs Amy that if she walks like she can see, the Angels will remain in stone form due to their survival instincts, but Amy soon gives herself away as blind. Here, we see for the first time the actual movement of the angels, as they turn to face her and move towards her. Just in time, River teleports her to the control room.
All the Angels come to the entrance to the room as they drain energy from the doors, which then open. The lead Angel, whom the Doctor has ironically nicknamed "Angel Bob" due to the way he killed a cleric, demands that the Doctor throw himself into the crack in order to save the Angels. River, as a time traveller, wants to throw herself in but the Doctor laughs at the idea, claiming that she is not even as complicated as one Angel and that only all the Angels are equivalent to him. He then realises that as the ship's power is quickly draining, its artificial gravity field is about to collapse, and he urges his friends to hold on to something to stop themselves from falling. The gravity field then collapses and all of the frozen Angels fall into the crack. This is enough to seal it, erasing them all from existence. The group escapes to the outside of the temple, and Amy is again able to see - the Angel within her mind never existed, due to the fact it fell into the crack. Confused, Amy asks how it is possible she remembers all of the clerics who seemingly "ceased to exist," but the Doctor informs her that, since they are time travellers, and time has no context in which to work, they can remember them. River, who after completing her mission is about to be teleported back to her cell in space, tells the Doctor she will see him again when the Pandorica opens (unnerving the Doctor, who claims the Pandorica is just a fairy tale), and that the man she killed was the best man she'd ever known. She is teleported back to the penal starship, with the remaining soldiers. Amy tells the Doctor to take her home. There, she tells him that she is getting married in the morning and tries to seduce him (to which he acts alarmed). He declines and realises that she is at the centre of all the cracks and that the time explosion which created them occurs today, the day of her wedding, 26th June, 2010. He quickly whisks her away in order to try to sort the issue out.
Analysis by Cuisle The return of the Angels was something every Doctor Who fan had been looking forward to. Blink was one of the scariest and most intriguing stories for a generation. Two questions had to be asked in the run up to this double bill. 1) Would this story live up to its predecessor. 2) How could the Angels in Blink be more scary this time around? The answer to the first question is yes. This lived up to expectations. But it was a very different story. Blink was quite low key, few special effects, and self contained within Sally Sparrow’s experiences of contact with the Angels. Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone was a space epic with a crashed spaceship, magnificent underground caverns, treeborgs, and an amazing fifty-first century vision of religion! It had to be viewed in a different way.
In part one, by far the most gripping scene is when Amy is trapped inside the transporter with the image of the Angel from the video. It looks as if she is completely doomed for a while, except this is part one of a double bill, part way through the series, so she has to survive! The simplicity of pausing the image when the video loops is so in keeping with the most classic and memorable moments of Doctor Who. Then the real surprise is that the Angels aren’t sending people back in time, now. They’re just plain murderous. Three of the militant clerics end up dead before The Doctor, River Song and Father Octavian realise that the statues around them aren’t memorials to the Applans, but Angels who have been there so long they’re starting to decay from starvation. They’re in the heart of an underground maze full of deadly Angels and its too late to go back.
Angel Bob, the voice of murdered cleric Sacred Bob, being used by the Angels is as creepy as the left over voices used by the Vashta Nerada in the episodes where we first met River Song. The sense of fear and people being picked off one by one by the enemy also harked back to The Library. No surprise since that was another of Stephen Moffatt’s acclaimed episodes. There was no sense of the same old thing happening over again, though. And there was no happy ending this time. Father Octavian’s death was a stark, real moment when a man faced his end with dignity and The Doctor found himself unable to do anything to help. It was a moment for grown up viewers rather than the kids watching for the scares and the monsters.
The question everyone has been asking since the second episode went out seems to be ‘is Doctor Who too adult for kids’. But it is a stupid question asked by those who would like to throw us back to the bad old days of Mary Whitehouse. Children are not bothered by the sort of things they’ve seen on Doctor Who. They’re not going to be bothered next week by the ‘scantily clad’ vampiresses in Venice. They’re not in a tizzy about the end scene of Flesh and Stone when Amy uncharacteristically came on to The Doctor and he had to literally fight her off him. She was fully clothed even when giving him the ‘come hither’ eyes from her bed. There was no overtly sexual language. The scene sat oddly at the end of the epicness of the double episode. But quite obviously it was meant to lead into something happening in the next episodes. Amy’s unexpected behaviour made The Doctor realise that time was seriously out of joint and something had to be done. Trust The Moff. Get a t.shirt with that slogan on it. He knows what he is doing. Amy’s seduction scene will make sense. And for heaven sake stop worrying about the length of her skirts and other nonsense.
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