The Time of Angels: A Crashed Ship and a Message in Gallifreyan

Matt Smith is really starting to shine now. This one drops the Doctor and Amy into the far future of the human race, where we’ve settled a lot of planets and stars, and the Weeping Angels are back, which is the bit I was waiting for. They were first introduced in Blink and they’re just as horrific now, easily one of the scarier new villains from the David Tennant era.

River Song is back too, someone from the Doctor’s future who he’s somehow already met in the past (time travel is confusing sometimes!), and she’s obviously going to matter a lot. If you missed where we first met her, it was Forest of the Dead, and she’s been a question mark ever since, one the Doctor clearly isn’t going to answer for us any time soon. Steven Moffat wrote this one too, the same writer who gave us the Angels in the first place, so they’re in familiar hands and you can feel it.

What Happens

River turns up on a spaceship doing something to a box, and we find out later that she’s writing in Gallifreyan, spelling out “Hello Sweetie”. The Doctor works out the message is for him while he’s “touring” the museums for his influences, steals the cube and plays the video record inside, and it hands him the coordinates he needs to pick River up. How does she know those numbers? He gets there just in time as she’s being ejected from the ship, and no, they don’t explain how she knows Gallifreyan either.

River takes charge of the TARDIS straight away and clearly knows how to fly it, another question nobody answers, and she even sets it so it lands without that distinctive sound. I really hope that’s temporary, because I wouldn’t be happy to lose it. The wheezing, grinding landing is half of what makes the TARDIS turning up feel like an event, and I’d miss it a lot if it never came back. They follow the ship, the Byzantium, down to a planet called Alfava Metraxis where it’s crash-landed into the side of a stone labyrinth, and they get joined by a group of “religious” marines led by a Father Octavian (Iain Glen, who plays a man very used to being obeyed). The soldiers explain they’re there to destroy what’s inside, a Weeping Angel, which is a strange enough bunch to be going on with. The Doctor and River go through a diary written all about the Angels (who wrote it? Also not mentioned), and they’re looking at one looping video of the Angel while that’s going on.

Amy is the one who notices the Angel on the screen is moving, and that’s when the Doctor reads that anything that bears the image of an Angel becomes the Angel. This one is now coming for Amy. She stops it by freezing the video on the static frame, which breaks up the image, but she looked it in the eyes and that might come back to bite her (we’ll find out what later). Where the ship came down is a dead world covered in statues, so finding one Angel in all that is going to be a pain, and they split into groups to cover more ground. One group gets ambushed almost immediately, and the Angel can mimic the voices of the people it’s killed.

The Doctor works out the ship didn’t end up here by accident, and the statues are Angels too, only they’re so slow because they’ve gone without food for so long. That’s changing with the humans nearby, and they’re waking up. The whole thing is a trap. Then the Angel contacts them in the voice of a marine it’s killed and tells the Doctor he’s next, and it ends. I hate when that happens, because I’d got completely caught up and was surprised how much time had passed, but oh well, I’ll definitely be back.

The Angels Are Back

The thing I keep coming back to is how the Angels work. In Blink they only move when nobody’s looking at them, and the whole scare was built on that, you blink and the statue is closer. Here the rule gets a twist, because anything that carries the image of an Angel becomes the Angel, which is how a looping piece of video turns into a threat sitting in the room with Amy. I didn’t see that coming and it’s a nasty idea, since it means a screen or a photograph isn’t safe either. Then there’s the voice thing, the Angel talking in the words and voice of a marine it has already killed, which is horrible in a completely different way from the creeping closer-every-time-you-look scare.

The setting does a lot of the work as well. A dead world covered in statues is about the best place you could put these things, because every shape in that maze could be one and you spend the whole episode trying to guess which. It’s less frightening than Blink, as I said, and a big part of that is the squad of armed soldiers marching around, because it’s hard to be as scared when the monster has an audience with guns. Even so, the idea that an entire planet of statues is slowly waking up is the sort of reveal that has you glancing at the corners of the room afterwards.

And I haven’t stopped thinking about Amy looking that Angel in the eyes. Nobody sets up a line like that and then just drops it, so whatever it does to her is going to matter, and I’m already uneasy about it. Coming straight off the Daleks in Churchill’s war rooms in Victory of the Daleks, this is a very different kind of episode, and I like that the series is willing to change gears that sharply this early.

River Song and the Open Questions

River Song is the other reason this one works. Alex Kingston already showed us in Forest of the Dead that River knows far more than she’s saying, and here she gets to be properly in charge. She takes over the TARDIS, she takes charge of the marines, and she’s the one who explains what the Angels do. The scenes with the Doctor are where it really sparks, because he’s used to being the one who knows things and here he keeps getting handed information by someone who clearly knows more than he does about his own future.

Count up the loose ends from this one episode alone: how River knows Gallifreyan, where she got those coordinates, how she can fly the TARDIS so confidently, who wrote the diary about the Angels, and what looking into that Angel’s eyes is going to do to Amy. It mostly makes me want the next episode more, because the show is being deliberate about it and the performances (Alex Kingston especially, always one step ahead of everyone in the room) tell you somebody knows the answers.

The thing is, I don’t mind being strung along like this when the cast is this good. The mystery of who she is gives every scene she’s in a bit of extra tension, and the Doctor’s slightly rattled reactions to her are some of the most fun I’ve had watching Matt Smith so far.

Thoughts and Observations

Overall really good. Matt Smith is definitely settling into the role and the mania of the earlier episodes seems to be passing, which makes him easier to watch for a whole hour and lets the quieter moments land. This is only the fourth episode and he’s already past the point of feeling like the new guy. This is only the fourth episode and he’s already past the point of feeling like the new guy. And the scenes between the Doctor and River Song are really well done. There are a lot of questions raised by and about her that deserve more exploration, though I’d like some of them answered sooner rather than later.

The Angels seem to be a really good villain so far, definitely better than some of the others brought in under Tennant (although I’d like to see the Ood again too), and while this isn’t as scary as their first appearance it’s still really good. The best parallel is probably Alien versus Aliens, where the first one is the quiet, creeping scare and the follow-up is bigger and louder, with soldiers and guns turning up to deal with it. I’m curious whether the second half goes the same way, since the marines are about to find out how little their weapons are worth against something you can’t even look at. Slice of SciFi’s review is a fun read if you want another fan’s take on how it plays.