Story 207 - The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone

In which the Doctor takes Amy to a museum in the far future. Here he sees a Home Box, the flight data recorder of an old spaceship, which is covered in strange markings which he recognises. He steals the box and they retreat to the TARDIS. In the ship, the Doctor tells Amy that the language on the object is Old High Gallifreyan, and its message - "Hello Sweetie!" - is intended for him. The recorder shows images of River Song on the spaceship which the box belonged to, thousands of years previously. There is also a set of space / time co-ordinates, and an instruction to leave the TARDIS doors open with an oxygen bridge extended.
River Song has been travelling in a ship called the Byzantium, which belongs to a rich man named Alistair. She is there under false pretences, however, as she wants to see what Alistair has hidden in his hold. She is discovered after leaving the message on the ship's Home Box - the only part of a spaceship guaranteed to survive a crash, which she knows will end up in a museum, which she knows the Doctor will one day visit. She deliberately allows herself to be jettisoned into space - where the TARDIS is now ready to pick her up. She urges the Doctor to follow the Byzantium as it flies off.
The Doctor is not happy to see her, as he knows that she seems to have knowledge of his future. Amy thinks their bickering makes them sound like a married couple. The TARDIS arrives on the planet of Alfava Metraxis, where the Byzantium has crashed into an ancient ruined building. This belonged to the long-extinct two-headed Aplan people. The planet is now host to a large human colony.
A short time later, a group of soldiers arrive at the crash site, led by Bishop Octavian. Amy is surprised to learn that they are a military-religious order known as the Clerics. Octavian reveals that River is their prisoner, released from jail to help them with a mission. River reveals that what Alistair had in his hold was a Weeping Angel.

The creature had been in a weakened state due to its captivity, but now it will be feeding on the radiation leaking from the shipwreck's engines. Octavian's mission is to capture and neutralise it before it can threaten the colony. The Doctor manages to patch in a video clip from the chamber where the Angel is being held to the Clerics' command centre. River has a book about the Angels, and the Doctor spots something odd about it. There are no pictures. Amy becomes trapped in the command centre and see the Angel approaching the camera, as though it could see her. It then emerges into the room as a 2-D image. The Doctor has read the book and discovered that an image of an Angel can itself become an Angel. Amy manages to use the video remote control to stop the creature.
Octavian leads everyone into the ruined building, which proves to be a vast mausoleum, full of statues of the Aplan dead. The Angel has escaped the spaceship and it begins to pick the Clerics off one by one. One of the soldiers, a young man named Bob, it removes his voice-box and uses it to communicate with the Doctor. Amy starts to imagine that she has rock dust in her tear drops, and thinks that her limbs are turning to stone. As they approach the spaceship, the Doctor comes to realise that he has made a huge mistake. The Aplans had two heads, yet all the statues have only the one. They are all Weeping Angels, starved and in degraded form but drawing energy from the radiation.
The Angels close in on the Doctor's party and they find that the spaceship wreck is high above them and out of reach. The Doctor destroys a light-giving gravity globe to allow them all to jump up to the hull of the craft.

The Angels soon follow, and the Doctor's party make their way to one of the control rooms. A huge panel opens to reveal a forest in an artificial environment - the means by which spacecraft can have an oxygen supply on long flights. They must cross this forest to get to the forward command deck. The Doctor has noticed that Amy has been very slowly counting down, without even realising it herself. The "Bob" Angel tells him that she has an Angel within her, and the countdown is to her death. The Doctor has Amy close her eyes. He is suddenly aware of a bright light in the control room, and sees that it is emanating from a crack like the one he had seen in Amelia Pond's bedroom. The Angels break in but are distracted by it, though they manage to pull his jacket off. He will go on ahead with River and Octavian whilst Amy will follow on with the rest of the Clerics. The Doctor suddenly returns to speak to her after she thinks he has gone. The Clerics see a bright light in the forest and one by one go to investigate. After each leaves, the remainder seem to have no recollection of those who have just left. Amy takes a quick look and recognises the crack in space / time. It is swallowing people up, removing them from time so that no-one remembers them.

The Doctor, River and Octavian reach the forward control room, but the Bishop is seized by an Angel. The Doctor cannot save him, but he gets him to admit why River has been in prison. Octavian says that she was guilty of killing a man. As soon as the Doctor looks away the Angel kills Octavian. The Doctor then guides Amy towards them. The Angels disregard her. In the control room, the Doctor has Amy and River hang on to any handrail will hold them. The engines are failing, and he knows that as soon as they stop the artificial gravity will fail. When this happens, all of the Angels fall through the forest and are consumed by the crack. Gorged on the temporal energy they held, it closes up.
Back outside, the Clerics prepare to depart, and River gets ready to accompany them back to prison. She refuses to tell the Doctor about her crime, or about their next meeting - other than to warn about the "Pandorica", which Prisoner Zero had also mentioned. The Doctor has heard of this, but dismisses it as a fairy story.
The Doctor decides that it is time to take Amy back home, and the TARDIS arrives at her home in Leadworth on the night she left. He discovers that she is due to marry Rory Williams in the morning, and is shocked when she tries to seduce him. He drags her back into the TARDIS, determined to put things right between her and her fiance...

The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone were written by Steven Moffat, and were first broadcast on 24th April and 1st May, 2010.
The story sees the return of the Weeping Angels, as well as River Song at an earlier point in her timeline than the Library two-parter, in which she was seen to die. It will transpire that every time the Doctor sees her, it will be an earlier point in her life, so her timeline is running backwards in relation to his.
This was the first story which Matt Smith and Karen Gillan worked on.
Moffat had agreed to take over show-running Doctor Who around the time that the Library story was being made, and Russell T Davies had guessed that he had further plans for River Song as a character. It was inevitable that we would get to find out how she came to know so much about the Doctor when he did not know her.
I don't think that it was any surprise either that Moffat would bring back the Weeping Angels after the huge popularity of Blink. The creatures had even beaten the Daleks as favourite monsters in polls.
When the Daleks had been brought back in 2005, RTD had elected to show how powerful just one of them could be, before unleashing huge armies of the things. Moffat had shown just a small group of Angels in their debut story, so now he too thought it was time to show an entire army of them.
The ploy did not really work as well as expected. They had been the perfect monsters for Blink, confined as they were to just one creepy old abandoned house. They don't work quite so well as an army. The degraded looking ones in the caves look okay, and they are effective in the darkened forest setting, but don't seem to sit right in a more high tech environment.

Their modus operandi seems to have changed somewhat as well. They go around breaking people's necks, whereas before they threw you back in time and fed off potential energy - the life you didn't lead. Here they are just plain killers. The business about one of them getting inside Amy's mind is new. In Blink, the whole point was that you kept looking at them as to do as the story title suggested meant they could move and grab you. Here, Amy is told to do the exact opposite - keep her eyes closed rather than open. Fans were also disappointed when they opted to show one of the Angels actually moving.
As well as Alex Kingston reappearing as River, the main guest artist is Iain Glen as Octavian. He is best known for his regular role in Game of Thrones these days. Jorah Mormont appeared in every season and was one of the few main characters to die at the Battle of Winterfell in the final season.
Alistair, owner of the Byzantium, is played by Simon Dutton, and one of his security guards - the one we see in the opening shot suffering delusions from River's hallucinogenic lip-stick - is played by Mike Skinner. He is better known for The Streets music project, which is basically just him. The director of these two episodes - Adam Smith - knew Skinner as he had directed some of his videos. The only other cast member worth noting is David Atkins who portrays the Cleric Bob, as he continues to voice the lead Angel after his character has been killed.

As far as the story arc goes, the Doctor finally sees one of the cracks which have been following the TARDIS since Amelia's bedroom, and we learn that anyone entering them is removed from time - as though they never existed. This might start to explain why Amy did not recognise the Daleks, and why she lived with an aunt - with no mention of her mother and father.
River mentions the Pandorica in relation to her last encounter with the Doctor in her timeline. Prisoner Zero had also referred to this.
Some things introduced here will take on greater importance in the future, as we will meet the Clerics and their militarised Church again next season.
The museum which the Doctor and Amy visit at the start of the story is said to be the final resting place of the Headless Monks.
We also have mention of River being in prison for the killing of "a good man", whom Octavian says many people thought a hero.
River claims that she was taught how to pilot the TARDIS by the best - adding that the Doctor wasn't around that day.

Overall, a good story but not a great one, for some of the reasons stated above. Personally, the second episode is let down for me by the coda in Amy's bedroom. It's one thing for a companion to have romantic feelings for the Doctor, but Amy comes across as a bit of a tramp here. She just wants sex with him, despite it being the eve of her wedding. I disliked the character for the rest of the season. Mini-skirted sex-mad kissograms might be fine for Coupling, but not for Doctor Who, Mr Moffat.
Things you might like to know:

• The Curse of Graham Norton Part 2. The initial broadcast of Rose in March 2005 had been slightly marred by sound interference in the scene where Rose first encounters the Autons, then the Doctor. The sound feed from the live Graham Norton-hosted Strictly Come Dancing studio could be heard on screen. Here, just at the climactic moment leading up to the cliffhanger, the BBC in their infinite wisdom thought it would be appropriate to run a cartoon ident of Norton as an advert for his show which was to follow - completely ruining the moment. Norton acknowledged this soon after when he had a cartoon Dalek exterminate the cartoon him in his show.
• There is a scene in the TARDIS where River claims that the TARDIS isn't supposed to make its iconic wheezing / groaning sound. It does it because the Doctor always leaves the brakes on. She also mentions the "blue stabilisers" which stop the ship rocking about, which the Doctor also ignores. This sequence was actually added late in the day when the first episode was found to under-running. It replaced another sequence which was to have been shot on the beach which had to be cancelled due to bad weather. The brakes business is nonsense, of course, as there have been other TARDISes seen and heard on screen which all make the same sound - so it's highly unlikely that every Time Lord leaves the brakes on. The man who created the sound effect - Brian Hodgson - claimed that it is the ripping of the fabric of space and time, and he should know.
• Fans are eagle-eyed, and many picked up on the apparent continuity error in the second episode where the Doctor goes back to speak to Amy after leaving her in the forest. He was in his shirtsleeves when he left her, as his jacket had been pulled off by an Angel, and yet on his return we see a glimpse of the sleeve of his jacket. Not an error at all, this would be explained later...
• The beach where the TARDIS lands is the same one that had doubled twice before as Bad Wolf Bay.
• The Doctor is seen to accidentally pull a hand-strap off the ceiling in the Clerics' command centre. Matt Smith was notoriously clumsy on set and he really did accidentally break a strap in rehearsal. As it seemed to fit his character, he filmed the scene again with the strap being pulled off.
• As well as the events of The Stolen Earth and Journey's End being forgotten - and presumably Doomsday as well if Amy didn't recognise a Dalek, the Doctor surmises that this might be why the appearance of the Cyberking over Victorian London never made it into the history books. The Tenth Doctor had been puzzled by this at the time. Moffat appeared to be using the cracks to get rid of continuity obligations - giving him a blank slate for future stories. The problem with this is that it is a house of cards. Remove just one significant story and other connected stories should also never have happened - such as the very events which led to the Doctor's last regeneration. The problem is compounded when later stories, by the same writer, acknowledge that The Stolen Earth / Journey's End did not get erased from time. Davros even has footage of his last encounter with the Doctor in The Magician's Apprentice.