The Time of Angels- I've got a theory, and it definitely isn't bunnies
Yes, I am seeing this whole episode as one big Dungeons and Dragons game. Hey, it’s not my fault they had to go and call themselves clerics… Crap, now all I’m going to think about is what Steven Moffat’s take on the traditional, ‘You’re in a tavern. The barkeep is looking for adventurers to help with a rat problem in the basement…’ start to a campaign would be like.
Enough spoilers here to fill a bag of holding. Or at least make it finally feel like you’ve got something in there, idk…
That guy looks stoned out of his mind. Er, wait, nevermind- he actually kinda is. 0_o
I want her shoes. I probably couldn’t walk in them very well, and they look like they could be really uncomfortable too, but I want them anyway.
Y’know, I’ve gone to art museums and made up shit about the paintings, but I hadn’t thought of doing the same thing at history museums. (I must do this now)
Huh, we should start making regular black boxes be able to fly back like that or something. That’s a really good idea.
’What does this say?’
“’Hello, Sweetie.’”
Brb- lol-ing forever. Think he has a habit of having to steal notes people left him from museums?
See? I said her showing up in an evening gown meant guaranteed badassery. Also, that is the single most elaborate ‘hi, can you give me a ride?’ call I’ve ever seen.
’But…it didn’t make the noise.’
‘What noise?’
‘You know, the **…’
‘It’s not supposed to make that noise. You leave the brakes on.’
‘Yeah, well, it’s a brilliant noise. I love that noise.’
**normally I’d say ‘vworp-vworp’ here, but I just don’t think that does justice to whatever the hell that sound Matt just made here was
Ditto on the sound effect!love. That is all.
So… River was taught how to fly a Tardis by the ‘very best’ (who was apparently not the Doctor, but who I’d assume had to be another Timelord), and knows the Gallifreyan language… Is she a Timelady?
My, I hadn’t thought that River annoyed Ten that much when he met her in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. Or is Eleven just less forgiving when he looks back on those memories?
’Ah! I’m going to be a professor someday, am I? How exciting! Spoi~lers!’
I’m not sure if she really has no idea and is genuinely surprised here, or if she’s just teasing him.
And when did he get so pussywhipped? Hopefully we get to find out what the circumstances had to have been for the Doctor to have told her his name. It’d explain so much.
What’s irking the Doctor more: River just being River, or the fact that that she and Amy are getting along so very, very well?
Twenty clerics? That’s not a well-balanced adventuring party at all! They at least should’ve brought a rogue, a wizard (or sorcerer), and a paladin. A ranger and a monk-with-improvised-weapons-skills too, if they could manage it. (Especially the monk. Ah, Kevin… you made that a fun game. =D) *sigh* These guys probably aren’t even high enough level for this campaign…
’Doctor, what do you know of the Weeping Angels?’
Well, someone’s day just went from ‘bad’ to ‘dammit universe, stop mistaking me for a Joss Whedon show on Fox’.
Dungeon Crawling: There’s an App for that.™
Eleven doesn’t seem to want to let Amy come along for anything that he knows in advance could be really dangerous. Other Doctors I’ve seen were like, ‘Well, shit. You’re already here, so just stay close and try not to get yourself killed’, whereas he’s more, ‘I said no! Just stay in the damn car!’
I love how after he explains the extreme danger they’re in, Amy’s just all, ‘Whatever. Gossip-y speculation tiem nao!’
I’m so gonna get me one of those angel statues someday. I don’t even care if I’m still living at a place with a yard, I’d stick that thing on that little foot-and-a-half-wide balcony-thing that a lot of apartments around here seem to have if I have to. Wonder if they already make statues like that for gardens (as opposed to the ones they use for fancy headstones in cemeteries, bit too creepy to get one from an actual grave-marker company), or if I’d have to get it commissioned.
’Sweetie, I need you!’
Ha ha, the Moff’s gonna end up killing me if this keeps up.
This angel video is so much better than the video of the girl in the well from Ringu/The Ring. Does the exact same things, except it doesn’t do a bitchy week-long waiting period, and you don’t have to watch a crappy montage of random shit rejected from someone’s film school project first.
My mom says that Amy’s like the girl in horror movies who decides to go into the dark basement all by herself in this scene. I mostly agree, but I think Amy is at least smart enough that she’d bring her cricket bat to smack whatever’s down there upside the head. (She gets points, and maybe a few more minutes before being killed, for trying.)
Wait, River’s familiar with all of the Doctor’s regenerations? She so has to be a Timelady! If she knows all his faces, to the point where she has somehow gotten actual pictures of all of them, then she’d have to be just to have been able to find each incarnation and recognize them as being him. And if she’s possibly encountered/known all of his past-selves despite Ten being the first one to have met/seen her (in his timeline, still no idea which of him River will first meet in hers), she might even be a regeneration of someone the Doctor already knows. The Master? Definitely flirty enough, and knows exactly how to push the Doctor’s buttons just like he does. Romana? Haven’t actually seen episodes with her yet, but she’s not only a Timelady, she was also a companion (and a rather close one from what I've heard), so she gets to be on the list. Probably stretching this even further here than I should, but could she perhaps be the Rani? I dunno, Six seemed to imply that he’d maybe like her if she wasn’t such a raging bitch, so it could be possible…
’That which holds the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel.’
Oh shit.
Hooray for pause buttons!
‘Something in [her] eye’? Crap.
’Believe you me, I have no intention of going back to prison.’
No idea what River did, but it must be pretty bad if doing work release with the Weeping Angels of all things is what she’s willing to do instead of whatever her original sentence was. Wonder if it’s the same prison Prisoner Zero was in?
I’m sure those two guys Father Octavian just sent off by themselves will be totally fine.
There’s sand pouring out of Amy’s eye now. She’s turning into one of them, isn’t she? If her eye counts as something ‘holding the image of an Angel’, then… FFFUUU-
Hmm… River’s rather reluctant to talk to Amy about the Doctor’s future here given how freely she seemed to throw around references to it earlier. Maybe I should put the Doctor himself (or herself) on the list of River’s possible secret-identities? The whole ‘oh btw, someday I’m going to get myself mostly-killed, and then randomly regenerate into a girl’ discussion would be just a bit awkward, especially this early in Amy and the Doctor’s relationship, and I think she already has enough things to make her O.O face at in this episode.
Do they not have horror movies anymore in the future or something? Did the Moff finally write one and make the rest of the creative community say ‘fuck it, we can’t top that’ by the time the stuff in this episode happens? Angelo should really know better than to go check out things in a completely dark area that his friend (who had a flashlight, it should be noted) isn’t coming out of, especially when they’re supposed to be looking for things that’ll kill them if they can’t/don’t see them.
Oh dear. Bob’s been given a pep talk. Methinks poor Bob is this episode’s next red shirt.
If this were a story with Ten, I get the feeling that some bad joke or other remark made in poor taste about Angelo/Angels would’ve been made be now. Maybe not, though, since this is also the Moff writing and not RTD.
Bit stupid of them not to notice that all the statues in the tomb built by a two-headed race are all only single-headed. Granted, I hadn't thought of it either, but the Doctor is supposed to be a hell of a lot smarter than I am.
Told you the clerics weren’t high enough level for this. *looks at cleric spells in the 3.5 Player’s Handbook* Shit, either they’re really stupid (WIS should not be your dump stat if you’re playing clerics, boys), or they’re not even level ONE. To think, most of this could’ve been avoided if only someone had cast a Detect Evil spell, or taken a wand of it. OR cast a Light spell while they're at it, fuck...
God, this moment where they notice just how many statues are around them is exactly like when you’re reading creepypasta and you get to the line that lets you know that things have gone/are going horribly wrong:
A few years ago, a mother and father decided they needed a break, and they wanted to head out for a night on the town. They called their most trusted babysitter. When the babysitter arrived, the two children were already fast asleep in bed, so she just had to sit around and make sure everything was okay with them if they woke up. Later that night, the babysitter got bored and went to watch TV, but she couldn't watch it downstairs because they didn’t have cable downstairs (the parents didn't want their children watching too much garbage). So, she called the parents and asked them if she could watch cable in their room. Of course, the parents said, it was okay, but the babysitter had one final request... she asked if she could cover up the angel statue in their bedroom with a blanket or cloth, because it made her nervous. The phone line was silent for a moment, and the father who was talking to her at the time said, "Take the children and get out of the house... we will call the police. We do not have an angel statue."
(I’ve usually seen that one with a clown or owl statue instead, but the /x/ archive had this version as well, and it’s too good a coincidence not to use it here.)
Huh. Not all the ‘Angels’ are angels. Did the ones without wings lose them because of the years of deterioration, or are the winged ones simply more common, so they’re where the name came from?
So if no one knows how the race that built this maze supposedly died out, isn’t it possible that the Angels sent them all back in time like they did to Ten, Martha, and Sally Sparrow’s friends, and then these people just hid from their ancestors (depending on when they were sent to) or were sent back so far they became their ancestors? Can the Angels even send people back far enough to create paradoxes like that? I know their powers are many-times stronger in this episode, but I still don’t know if they’re that much stronger. (Add them to the superpowers section of How Stuff Works.com that doesn’t-exist-but-should-someday.)
Ooh, Father Octavian’s remark about notifying the soldiers’ families touched a nerve with the Doctor there.
Ack! Amy is turning into an Angel!
The Weeping Angels are about to close in on them and kill them, and Amy’s upset that the Doctor bit her hand to prove to her that she was in fact okay and capable of moving. People on this show decide to focus on the weirdest damn shit.
’They’re very keen for you to know that, sir.’
Jeez, the Weeping Angels are assholes. (Are they having a contest with the Daleks?) It’s like everyone in this episode is doing whatever they can to get at the Doctor: River with her teasing/trolling (and Amy happily playing along with it), Father Octavian reminding him of the consequences everyone else will have to deal with after he’s left, this…
’Didn’t anyone ever tell you? 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.’
‘And what would that be, sir?’
‘Me.’
*bang*
As awesome as this moment is (and it is quite awesome), he sure talks an awful lot for someone who’s supposedly in a hurry. 0_o
Completely understand people getting so pissed about the Graham Norton banner ad on the screen here when this aired in the UK, btw. I mean, I understood before, those things are fucking stupid to begin with, but now that I know what it was actually interrupting, it’d almost be like if when I saw LOTR: The Return of the King in the theater they’d switched to that dancing-popcorn-and-candy-‘let’s all go to the lobby and get a treat’-ad in the middle of Frodo finally throwing the Ring into Mt. Doom. Wtf were they thinking? (I use the term ‘thinking’ loosely btw, I know damn well they were not.)
Okay, what? They somehow leave the caves and end up in a forest next week, and now instead of not looking away/blinking, they have to keep their eyes shut? I’m confused now… I feel like I've missed something in the first part that would explain what I'm seeing for the second, but I know I can't have. No zeroes or cracks this time, though. Must be saving that for next week.
I liked this episode, it was a nice-but-odd mix of ‘things that make me laugh my ass off’ and ‘things that make me go “oh shit”’, but I feel like I can’t really judge it properly/fairly/fully until I see part two. Matt’s still doing a great job (his ‘annoyed’ face is hilarious), Karen is adorable, and Alex Kingston is just… ♥
But! As much as I’ve been loving River in this, and as curious as I am about just who she is and her past/future with the Doctor, I think I kind of don’t want to ever find out the truth about her. I’m afraid it’ll be like the shark in Jaws: it’s absolutely perfect until you actually get a good look at it, and then it’s beyond disappointing. It’s this impressive, fearsome thing for most of the film, and then when you see it’s really just a shitty puppet, it puts a huge damper on all the good things the movie had going for it before the reveal. If they someday decide to officially explain exactly who/what River is, it most likely won’t live up to anything we’ve imagined her to be. Anyone else feel this way?