Sea Devils And Die: GeroniMoffat's Doctor Who In The 2010s

"Whenever an image of an Angel is created, it can become an Angel" - what, like the one on the back of your eye? That's recorded by your optic nerve until your brain processes it, and remains there until you forget it? Yes, it happens very quickly, but what is time on that level to a being that exists in the quantum?

Which is maybe why there's dust and shite coming out of Amy's eye,what wit her having stared at one too long?

Loved the episode.

> what with her having stared at one too long?

he said later that it was because she'd looked into its eyes. think it was also in her imagination, like the stone hand.

so many rules...

i liked that the angels never moved when our eyes were on them. and think about the alternatives - some bloke in an angel costume or expensive cgi.

There are likely to be hundreds of well-earned complaints about the Graham Norton plug...

Beeb apologies for crappy Norton trail

Why is the bbc behaving like a US channel even before Cameron and Murdoch Jnr. get their hands on it?

in "blink" the weeping angels were all people in costume, directed to hold really still. i don't know if they're still doing it that way, but good lord is it effective.

also, if you don't like river song, it's p. funny to remember that someday she's going to be tending to digital children in a computerized tampon commercial for the rest of eternity.

They're still people in suits in this one too, which is impressive given the final effect.

Fantastic episode, by the way. Adored the pre-titles teaser too.

Glad they set this in a gigantic space labrynth rather than yet another identikit industrial spaceship.

The con artist thing sprung from realising that's how Moffatt originally wrote Captain Jack but there's something way way shifty about her. Also "ssh, spoilers" is an annoying catchphrase.

Angels that break your neck and inhabit your body is a good innovation though, because angels that zap you back in time are not very scary when you have a working time machine.

Thought there might have been something really obvious about the eye dust thing, like maybe Amy was wearing contact lenses that reflected the angel or something.

Amy-Doctor relationship really good in this one, I like how she's constantly taking the piss out of him.

Loving almost everything about this series so far. Lots of MYSTERY.

Angel projecting image on her soul. At least that's my reading after that 'Doors to the soul' bit and reading about Ficino's theories of love and pneumatic phantasms early this morning.

To wit:

It is enough that someone looks at him: the pneumatic ray emitted by the other person will penetrate through his pupils into his spiritual organism and, on arrival at the heart, which is its centre, it will cause an agitating disturbance and even a lesion, which can degenerate into a bloody infection. In the opposite case, for instance when the subject is fascinated by the eyes of a beautiful woman and cannot stop looking at them, he emits through his pupils so much spirit mixed with blood that his pneumatic organism is weakened and his blood thickens. The subject will waste away through a lack of spirit and through ocular haemorhage

Weirdos.

Actually, ocular ghost stories are quite interesting - didn't Ringu also have an element of their being something fracture or wrong with the affected person's eye? Kipling's The End of the Passage also great for this.

Also like the way the Doctor calls her "Pond!"

Has a Holmes/Watson vibe (except that she's way smarter and sexier than Watson, obviously)

Good ep - best moment easily Amy's getting trapped in The Ring. Nice cliffhanger speech, too - good way to end it.

Just looking at that spoilery article, and noting the date on it... though it's been accurate so far.

My point is that there's implicit fourth wall, when I don't think there should be.

I'm not sure what you're talking about -- the way I'm reading this is that the viewers ought to see the Angels moving when none of the other characters are watching? That would be a terrible idea, because it sets us outside of the fictional world specifically as viewers, whereas if they don't move when we're watching, we implicitly become wrapped up in the narrative and thus IT IS SCARIER BECAUSE WE'D BETTER KEEP ON EYE ON THEM TOO. Like, I was actually doing Amy's blink-one-eye-at-a-time thing as she was getting trapped in the APC-thingy (and I doubt I'm the only one who got that wrapped up into it)!

I have enough faith in Moffatt to be able to write himself out of the 'how come these angels can look at each other?' corner.

who's pirating this tho when its on iplayer?

people whose computers are utterly incapable of playing Flash video

oh i always forget about the downloadable version

people whose computers are utterly incapable of playing Flash video

disgusting savages

That would be a terrible idea

Agreed, which is why I can easily handwave it away. Doesn't mean it isn't a writing inconsistency though.

didn't Melissa solve this upthread? only the Actual Angel has proper working eyes...that we've seen.

And the groups of Angels are only moving when the lights are out, right?

Which does rather provoke the question of how they themselves see.

Just a thought: that diary really doesn't belong to River Song, does it?

That's a good point. The Church guys seemed to know a bit about it too...

I'm about THIS close to going down to Ladbrokes and placing a bet on who it does belong to.

Amy Pond has kind of gone from hero to zero over the last couple of episodes :( Pout, pout, allure, sigh, be useless, make lame joke, pout again, sigh, get really scared, almost die, have brilliant idea written into the script for you, pout, pout, allure, sigh, duhhh, pout

Oh that was great. I especially liked that Amy closed eyes alternately -- I was thinking Sally should have done that while watching Blink.

Pity about the brakes thing -- it would have worked so much better as a joke if she'd said "It's not supposed to make that noise; you just can't drive/u r doin it rong" and left it at that.

what, like the one on the back of your eye?
The trailer has a bit with the face of an angel coming up in her eye, so I think that might become a thing.

Don't see how the fourth wall thing is an inconsistency: the angels are affected by anything living looking at them. We're looking at them, ergo they don't move. Are there any other things in Who universe that are similarly affected by a quantum-type "observation" but aren't affected by the eyes of the great british public?

It was a great opening scene, but I seriously found it difficult to care about this one, or even pay attention. Not just because of Karen Gillan's MySpace style of acting but it was like... what's happening and why are we here again? Gallifrey runes or something? Oh I dunno let's blunder into a big cave full of the most deadly things in the universe armed with a bunch of flashlights that we know will go out and a bunch of guns that we know will be useless.

Isn't that Dr Who tho?

I guess so, but this time around there was no sense of why any of it mattered. What were the stakes? Who knows?

I said to mr spacecadet "this cave is very pretty but why are they in it anyway" and he said "they have to make the planet safe so the human colonies can arrive, duh" and I still didn't see why they had to go in and not just wait for something to come out, but hey, it WAS very pretty

Hmmm. Well I suppose one answer to that (but I guess it's not really what you're getting at) is that there's a load of humans living on the planet. (leading to that quite good line 'You're like rabbits! You get everywhere! I'll never have to stop saving you!').

Caring... well, I kind of wonder, not necessarily in your case, Tracer, whether the over-the-top end-of-everything-all-the-time, convergence-of-all-plotlines aspects of the later RTD/Tennant series might contribute to that.

As for the relationship between Amy and the Doctor, would definitely agree with you in the daleks one (and with people who pointed out the Donna/Tennant + unused episode nature of that one), but I thought the relationship was really good with the last one. I get a feeling of Amy and the Doctor both feeling their way round each other still - with Amy appearing more confident than perhaps she is (like after the Ringu moment) almost blase, like a girl pretending to know more than she does because she doesn't want to appear silly, and the Doctor trying to look after her but in a way that isn't too overbearing and doing this a bit cackhandedly (ie, in quite an unTennanty, lolEnglish sort of way). Amy's got loads of questions, but she can't really ask him, she's sort of found out that she doesn't get clear cut answers that are useful to her etc.

Writing that down, it seems like quite a lot to be taking from it, I realise, maybe too much, but I feel it's there nevertheless, and I'm enjoying it much more than anything between Tennant and his assistants. (Ecclestone/Rose was also quite good tho).

xpost sorry. trigger finger happy.

there's a load of humans living on the planet

Oh yeah. I completely forgot about that. Which is my point, really. It's not that there aren't technically high stakes it's that I never felt them. In "Blink" the stakes are purely personal but they're gigantic. Humanity won't be wiped away or anything but it just feels tense the whole way through.

Yep, wd agree with that.

Blink is unique for a Who episode tho structurally, conceptually. It's like complaining that Aliens lacks the tension of Alien (Moffat's used this analogy himself to describe the difference between the two WA stories).

Another funny thing was the Bishop guilt-tripping the Doctor about having to tell the dead soldier's families. What makes him so sure he's going to survive this himself ha.

I quite liked the episode, but I had allowed Angels + River Song to let me expect something as brilliant as Blink and the library eps put together, and it was rather limp compared to that. Blink was always going to be a one-off (think I said upthread I was nervous about bringing the Angels back for that reason), but the library episodes were also pretty tense and compelling while much closer structurally to a standard plot, so I still had slightly higher hopes.

(Thought the colonies weren't there yet but were due soon - which doesn't actually change the argument on the thread, just shows that the "why are we doing this?" really wasn't spelled out, if it was all loaded into one throwaway line whose details are pretty unclear to me now)

In "Blink" the stakes are purely personal but they're gigantic. Humanity won't be wiped away or anything but it just feels tense the whole way through.

Yes it would, the Angels were after the TARDIS then they would have fucked up all time for all time.

Didn't really give a shit abt that TBQH and it still felt tense!

Can someone remind me what that thing was in the Tennant finale about the weeping angels being or being related to timelords or something?

The "you can't kill a stone" thing annoyed me in Blink. You'd think someone would at least try taking a sledgehammer to one of them.

Oh wait, it was nothing.

Rassilon declared that the two Time Lords who opposed him (who covered their eyes in the same way as the Weeping Angels) were 'monuments to their shame, and will stand witness as the Weeping Angels of old'.

xp

According to the Doctor, "[The Weeping Angels] are as old as the universe (or very nearly), but no one really knows where they come from."

from wikipedia - can't find anything Timelordy there.

I dunno, that line about the Tardis brakes -- quite a good joke, surely? And I also got the sense that Riversong was lying about it anyway, to show the Doctor up in front of Amy.

Best episode of the season so far -- thought (whoever said the opposite upthread) that it certainly matched up to Silence in the Library. Still not convinced by either Matt Smith or Amy yet, but that "rabbits" line did feel like a definitively Smith-ian, rather than Tenant-style delivery. A bit less snarky, a bit more sing-songy. I'm not sure that adds up to a whole personality, yet, but we're only four episodes in.

Also, glad this episode wasn't quite as BREAKNECK RUSH as the last few. I like that Smith speed-talks his Exposition Moments, but I wish he'd enunciate a little better sometimes.

Agree about the slower pacing being good. Though I found all of the episodes fun, everything could be such a whiz-blur that I often felt inclined to stop caring about the plot mechanics altogether. I think someone may have already made the comparison earlier in the thread, but they'd feel like those old Who four or six-part serials crammed into an hour.

that's modern tv though - all shows eat up loads more plot than they did 10 or 20 years ago

Y'all know that was Mike Skinner off the Streets as the tripped out security guard at the beginning?

> that's modern tv though - all shows eat up loads more plot than they did 10 or 20 years ago

i find the opposite. things like flash forward have one plot point an hour and 35 minutes of filler (and 15 minutes of adverts)

that said, i've just watched the entire Sapphire and Steel and if that was any slower it'd stop.