"What if we had ideas that could think for themselves? What if one day our dreams no longer needed us? When these things occur and are held to be true, the time will be upon us. The time of Angels."
I love that quote so much. Steven Moffat can tell a good tale!
So as the title suggests, this story sees the return of The Weeping Angels from the ever popular episode Blink from season 3. This story also features the return of the mysterious River Song. This time we are meeting her earlier in her life as she is not yet the professor that we met in the library story. The Doctor tries to do a runner when he first meets her as he is afraid of getting tied into her as ke knows her eventual fate is to die in the library. It's also weird to see River interacting with Amy given what we later find out about their relationship.
This time the Angels are not quite at their full strength and it is necessary for them to absorb the radiation of a crashed spaceship in order to rebuild themselves. The crashed spaceship is call the Byzantium which is really cool because in the library story when River met the tenth Doctor she asked him "have we done the crash of the Byzantium yet?" which makes you wonder how far in advance Steven Moffat had plotted out her story.
What's also cool about this story is that the crack returns and features quite heavily in the second part. It's sort of become tradition that a word of phrase is repeated throughout the series and then tied into the season finale such as "bad wolf" or "Torchwood". Given this then it was expected that we wouldn't see the Doctor noticing the crack that was following them until the end of the season so it's pretty thrilling to see him slowly turn round to discover the huge gash in the wall of the ship in the same shape as the crack in Amy's wall. We also discover how this crack has been slowly erasing things from time and from people's memories. This explains why Amy doesn't remember the Daleks or indeed how the people of Victorian Londom don't remember the giant cyber king that trampled half the city in the 2008 Christmas special! I'm not sure if Steven Moffat is having a dig at Russel T Davies here but the way he is erasing parts of his stories or feeling the need to explain away some of the problems with them is quite funny.
This two part story is superb! It feels so much like a proper suspenseful movie. And I like how each episode has its own feel about it with the first episode being mainly set in the caves leading up to the crashed ship and then the second episode mainly featuring the ship and the forest inside it.
I think I enjoyed this episode more this time than I did in first broadcast for two reason. Firstly because I generally enjoy Doctor Who more the second time round as the first time I'm just to excited by new Doctor Who to appreciate what is actually going on. The second reason I enjoyed it more this time can be explained in two words... Graham Norton.
Poor Graham Norton. It's not his fault but he has nearly ruined two episode of Doctor Who. When the show first came back in 2005, Norton was fronting a show immediately before it and I don't know what happened but somehow his microphone feed was broadcast over a really critical moment of that first episode. I remember being really confused as to why Autons were speaking with the voice of Graham Norton. With this two part story the forore was caused by an animated version of him dancing all across Matt Smith's face in the closing seconds as the Doctor made his big dramatic speech leading to the cliffhanger. It was an advert for the upcoming programme but I was left stunned at how they had done it. It wasn't even a tiny thing. A cartoon Graham Norton came out and danced across the screen. Everytime I see that cliffhanger now I cringe in anticipation of it happening again.
No comments:
Post a Comment