Sunday, May 2, 2010

Creepy Stone Angels Getting Creepier

(Yes, I realize I never posted anything about "Victory of the Daleks", but frankly I haven't felt a drive to write anything about the episode. It wasn't bad by any means, but I just don't feel like writing a review of it, especially now that I'm a bit behind in posts. So I'm going to skip it. Shoot me.)

(Actually, please don't. Or at least not in the face. Or below the belt. Oh God not below the belt.)

The past two weeks have been very exciting for me on the Doctor Who front. Finally, Steven Moffat, our new Executive Producer (replacing Russell T. Davies), brought back the Weeping Angels, creatures that helped make the Series 3 episode "Blink" into such a wonderful episode. Steven had taken a simple concept, and made it brilliant: creatures that are forced into a stone "existence" whenever they are looked at, but the instant that there is no one looking at them, they move fast as hell, and they "kill" their targets by sending them into the past and then consuming the energies of the potential lives they would've lived. It was a decision with the potential to save fairly big money from the season budgets for bigger, grander episodes while allowing the Doctor and his companion to film another episode at the same time by not requiring their presence nearly as often (episodes of this sort are generally referred to as "Doctor Lite" episodes, and have been done before, like with "Love and Monsters" and "Turn Left"). But frankly, "Blink" was so much better than any of the other "Doctor Lite" episodes, and better than even some of the episodes with the Doctor fully involved (I'm staring at you, "Fear Her"). Not to mention this was also going to be the return of Alex Kingston as River Song, for the first time since "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead" (which were two brilliant episodes in my opinion).

So we start with two "concurrent" events (I use the parentheses because it's made clear within minutes that events are actually happening 12,000 years apart). River is strutting through a spaceship as though she owns it, while the Doctor and Amy are...visiting a museum in the future. Amy soon points out that it's the Doctor's way of "keeping score", which earned a couple laughs and seems very true. They come across a "Home Box" (described by the Doctor as being like a black box, but designed to return to it's planet of origin in case it's ship crashes, which has a message carved into it in "Old High Gallifreyan". This leads to probably one of my favorite moments in the episode, where the Doctor starts telling Amy about how the words used to hold unimaginable power, only to have to tell her seconds later that the message that River is seen blow-torching into the box simply says "Hello sweetie". The Doctor naturally steals it and is able to get video recordings from it, allowing River to basically communicate coordinates and a date to the Doctor, allowing her to blow a hatch which sucks her right out into space...and into the waiting arms of the Doctor standing in the doorway of the TARDIS. Very smooth. With River's help, they chase the ship, and she uses her unbelievable piloting skills to land the TARDIS, without the usual sounds, and promptly explains (to my great amusement) that the sound is because the Doctor "leaves the parking brake on". Not kidding here. It also got big laughs out of the people also viewing it last weekend at the weekly screenings in my building. River tells the Doctor that they are after a Weeping Angel being carried within the crashed "Byzantium" (an event actually referenced in "Silence in the Library"...I swear I love the ability of the writers to make all of these details fit together so nicely between seasons), and they are soon joined by "Clerics". Yes, the religious types of Clerics, only with body armor and automatic weapons. Militant holy men: I love it! They set up shop and show a four second looped recording of the Angel held within the ship, but poor Amy gets locked into the trailer with the recording playing just before the Doctor reads a passage from a book supposedly about the Angels: "That which holds the image of an Angel becomes an Angel". And of course, Amy looks the Angel, who just happens to have come OUT of the screen as a projected image, right in the eyes before the Doctor can tell her not to.

Amy eventually stops the recording by turning off the screen at the exact moment the image flickers, and the Doctor gets into the trailer. And shortly after, they set out. In a manner even creepier than before, the Clerics start dropping one by one, each one having their necks broken and their voices stolen. As the Doctor starts to realize that all of the creepy, deformed statues are really just weakened Angels, Amy begins to experience strange happenings, such as rubbing an abnormal amount of dust out of her eye and thinking her hand is made of stone and therefore stuck to what it's grasping (a problem which the Doctor soon remedies by literally biting her, proving it to be an illusion). The Doctor communicates with an Angel, who is using the voice of a character known earlier as "Cleric Bob", who amusingly gains the name of "Angel Bob", who tries to anger him, but that simply provokes the Doctor. This leads to one of the Doctor's best speeches so far this season, used previously in promos:

"There's one thing you never put in a trap if you're smart. If you value your continued existence, if you have any plans about seeing tomorrow, there's one thing you never, ever put in a trap: me."

And then, just as he shoots the gravity ball providing light to the room, the first part ends. This created a great deal of rage in the viewing, with three of my friends leaping up and yelling at the TV. I wasn't particularly surprised.

"Flesh and Stone" starts us out by showing the outcome of the Doctor's plan: the Doctor, River, Amy, and the remaining Clerics are all standing on the outer hull of the ship, the gravity ball having reversed the gravity for them as it was shot. They make their way inside but are quickly followed, with the Doctor being forced to cut power to the lights in order to open the next doors. They do manage to escape, but not for long. They reach the secondary flight room, and despite the Clerics' best efforts, the Angels begin to open the doors. However, the Doctor discovers multiple things. First, he discovers a massive door that leads into a huge forest in the ship, designed to act as an oxygen source. Second, he realizes that Amy has begun randomly counting down vocally, and realizes that her visual cortex is basically holding an Angel inside ("That which holds the image of an Angel becomes an Angel"). With the Angels getting closer to breaching the room, he insists that River and the Clerics take Amy into the forest, at which point he comes face-to-face with the Angels, and, unable to keep eye contact with all of them, ends up with an Angel holding him back by his coat. It's at this point in the episode where I was happiest, because the glowing cracks like the one in Amy's room finally started to get an explanation.

I'm going to digress for a moment here. Every season since the show's return in 2005 has had a buzzword or some object/concept that persists through the season and ends up connected to the events of the finale. Series 1 had Rose using the power of the Time Vortex to spread the words "Bad Wolf" through history to lead her back to the Doctor in his conflict against the resurrected Daleks. Series 2 had the Torchwood Institute. Series 3 had "Mr. Saxon". Series 4 had the disappearance of planets and later the whole "Doctor Donna" thing. And of course the specials after Series 4 had the bits about "The Doctor's song is ending" and "He will knock four times". But the frustrating part? These things would persist through their episodes, teasing us along like the whole "Save the Cheerleader, Save the World" thing from the first season of Heroes, but there would then be a rush to explain everything once they hit the end of the seasons. What I can appreciate with how Moffat is doing things is that we're being told a fair bit right now about the cracks (that they contain "the end of the universe" and have the power to erase anything caught in them from existence in all times), and we'll now see the Doctor working over time to combat them through the rest of the season. Yes, they have the potential to be used as a huge retcon button for everything that has happened in the past of Doctor Who, but I trust Moffat not to go too overboard. And why should I overreact about this when technically the new series probably retconned a fair number of events from the original twenty six seasons?

Back to things, the Doctor slips away without his coat and rejoins a now dying Amy, and realizes that the Angel inside of her will kill her in a matter of seconds, and forces her to close her eyes and keep them closed, shutting down her visual cortex and therefore pausing the Angel. He then leaves with River and the leader of the Clerics, Father Octavian, who explains that he is "engaged to River, in a manner of speaking" and therefore must accompany her, while the rest of the Clerics are left trying to hold an ever expanding group of Angels back by maintaining constant eye contact. On the way, the Doctor discovers that River was in prison for killing a man and was only released to assist with the mission, and that she is officially in Octavian's custody. As they reach the primary flight room, River works on a way inside, but Octavian is attacked by an Angel and is held in a headlock, knowing that he will be killed the moment the Doctor isn't looking. He tells the Doctor not to trust River, and the Doctor rushes into the flight room. Meanwhile, the four remaining Clerics are witness to the appearance of a bright light that frightens off all of the Angels. As three of the Clerics leave to check the light, the remaining Cleric suddenly loses all memory of his three partners ever existing, scaring Amy. She momentarily opens her eyes and sees that the light is coming from a crack like the one in her bedroom, and panics. The Doctor is informed of the light, and he realizes that the cracks are rewriting history, and only a "complicated space-time event" such as himself can close it. He angrily lashes out at River as they try to solve the numerous problems. The Doctor begins guiding Amy towards them using her communication device, but she is soon surrounded by frightened Angels. She is initially able to walk past them unharmed as their survival instincts make them believe she can still see them, but soon she trips, revealing herself as being essentially blind, and in a genuinely creepy moment we finally see actual movement from the Angels as they turn toward her. She's saved just in time, though, by a teleport repaired by River, but soon after the Angels open the doors to the primary flight room, and Angel Bob demands that the Doctor throw himself into the crack to save the Angels. River offers, insisting that she's complicated enough, but the Doctor scoffs at her and denounces her as not being close (in what I saw as being a pure Sixth Doctor ego moment). Luckily, the Doctor yells at Amy and River to grab a hold of something, as he comes to realize that the Angels' consumption of the ship's radiation will soon cause the artificial gravity to die, and the entire group of Angels fall into the crack, sealing it and removing them from existence.

As the episode closes, River prepares to return to her orbiting prison ship and mentions something called the "Pandorica", which the Doctor insists is only a "fairy tale" (this was also mentioned by Prisoner Zero in "The Eleventh Hour", meaning it's yet another buzzword concept). Amy insists that the Doctor take her home, and in probably the most shocking scene in any season of Doctor Who, throws herself completely and heavily at the Doctor, trying to seduce him on the night before her wedding. The Doctor drags her back into the TARDIS, insisting that she's somehow involved in the massive explosion big enough to create those cracks throughout time and space, revealing that the date he calculated as the day of the explosion was in fact Amy's wedding day.

I just want to tackle the final scene for a moment...What the bloody hell? If Rose's love for the Doctor (and to an extent, the relatively more tame attractions of both Martha and Jack towards the Doctor) was a way of trying to break the original series' taboo for close, romantic relationships between the Doctor and his companions, Amy's actions in "Flesh and Stone" were an attempt to completely and totally shatter them, and frankly I'm glad that the Doctor resisted. As amusing as her actions were and as refreshing it may be to have a companion who is almost as assertive as Donna was, I have to say that the suddenness and the extent of Amy's actions were quite a bit startling and more than just a little awkward. Doctor Who just seems to have a thing about weddings and marriages being tricky, strange events that rarely end happily and/or as expected.

Despite my mixed feelings about Amy's actions at the end of "Flesh and Stone" and the potential of the cracks as a massive retcon button, I have to say that "The Time of Angels" and "Flesh and Stone" did not disappoint. I always seem to enjoy Alex Kingston in anything she works on (I've been a fairly big fan of ER for years, and I especially love her as River Song), and the Weeping Angels are probably one of the more memorable villains to ever come out of Doctor Who (of course outside of the big, often reused ones like the Daleks and the Cybermen). These episodes took monsters that were already creepy to begin with and took that creepiness factor to a new level. My only real complaint is that the cracks seem to have made it so that the Angels will never appear again, which is a shame because they were something for Moffat to be proud of.

Next week we get the Doctor, Amy, AND her fiance Rory traveling to Venice, and coming face-to-face with vampires. Will these vampires do us all a favor and not sparkle? Will the whole Amy-trying-to-jump-the-Doctor's bones issue be swept under the rug? We'll have to wait and see.

(At some point this week I should have some more posts up, involving my thoughts on my current progress rewatching Torchwood and hopefully something about video games, seeing as that's what this blog is supposed to officially be about, so that I can show that this won't simply be full of Doctor Who love)