Tom Salinsky

Doctor Who Series 5 Episode 4 - The Time of Angels

Note: this review contains spoilers throughout.

The first two-parter of the season has been, since 2005, something of a graveyard slot. Aliens of London, Daleks in Manhatten and The Sontaran Stratagem all struggled to accumulate fans with Rise of the Cybermen, while not so widely disliked, still seen as one of the revived series’ weaker entries (maybe it benefited from sharing a season with the very controversial Love & Monsters and the generally derided Fear Her). After the very significant wobble last week, Time of Angels needed to pull something out of the bag.

This is also the point where the season starts hitting its stride (although these were the first episodes filmed!). Four episodes in, we can start to get a sense of what “The SmithMoffat years” are going to be like. A couple of themes are emerging here. One, slightly odd, one is floating outside the TARDIS. Currently, three out of four stories have featured such scenes, starring the Doctor, Amy and now River Song.

Another is recycling. I grumbled that much of both The Eleventh Hour and Victory of the Daleks was reused from earlier episodes, often early RTD episodes. Here we have Mr Steven Moffat hubristically giving us a double sequel to his very well-received Blink and his not-quite-so-rapturously greeted Silence in the Library two-parter. And yet despite very overtly recycling Professor Doctor Song and the Angels, finally this starts to feel genuinely fresh, energised and galvanised.

It helps that this is an adventure in the truest sense of the word. The threat in The Eleventh Hour was rather intangible, and part of the point of that story was to show the new Doctor effortlessly swatting a fairly feeble opponent. The Beast Below, for all its virtues, was a story about concepts and the moments of supposed jeopardy, mainly involving the Smilers, were the weakest aspects. Victory of the Daleks gave us Daleks which barely exterminated anyone, preferring to stage an impromptu fashion show for their mortal and defenceless enemy rather than gun him down. What’s satisfying about The Time of Angels is that by the time we get to that heavily-trailed cliffhanger speech, the Doctor and Amy are in All Sorts Of Danger.

But it’s not all scares. The pre-titles sequence is very Moffaty, and entirely implausible but artfully constructed and brilliantly paced, putting the viewer just far ahead enough to feel clever (and able to follow it) but not so far ahead that it feels predictable and boring. Cheeky jokes at the series mythology are always welcome, especially when they are played as brightly as Smith, Gillan and Kingston play them here. And if it seems early on as if that woman from ER is reading script pages from that David Tennant episode about the shadows, while on the set of Earthshock, that nagging feeling of overfamiliarity is extinguished entirely once we descend into the caves and the shoes start dropping one-by-one. The Angel on the videotape is not just an image… Amy is turning to stone… the statues only have one head… All beautifully mounted by director Adam Smith and played with total conviction by the entire cast – fuck me, that’s Iain Glen, that is! Only the Weeping Angels taking Bob’s voice seemed to bring back unwelcome memories of Silence in the Library (oh and that cartoon Graham Norton reprising the opening moments of Rose).

And it’s partly the grace notes that elevate this script – these aren’t Eric Saward’s stock mercenaries; they’re a bishop leading an order of gun-toting clerics. River Song is not just a flighty archaeologist with an extensive shoe budget, but an escaped criminal of some kind. And double extra bonus points for “the crash of the Byzantium” being one of the “have we dones” from Silence in the Library. Who knows what “picnic at Asgard” will turn out to be?

It’s always dangerous to judge a two-parter on the basis of part one, but Flesh and Stone would have to be ghastly to drag this episode down, and if it’s great – or even good – then this story could be one of the all-time classics.

Provisional rating: four-and-a-half stars.