Creator Patrick Ness was intending to script an angelic “civil war” if a second series had gotten the go-ahead, which indicates just how tempting a prospect the Angels can be to a writer – every showrunner wants a chance to tackle the Lonely Assassins.
This is trickier than it sounds.
Find a way to fix your gaze on one and it’ll eventually crawl inside your brain and take over.
When the episode opens, there’s the small matter of a Weeping Angel at the TARDIS console, meddling with the lights so that it can flit about the controls even with the Doctor, Yaz and Dan gawping at it.
Yaz’s efforts to properly organise the search party don’t exactly go down well with Gerald, who seems to resent having to participate at all, even when the missing Peggy is revealed to be a relation.
The exception is Professor Jericho, played by the always-marvellous Kevin McNally, who’s been conducting psychic experiments on one Claire Brown – the same Claire we last saw getting zapped by an Angel in ‘The Halloween Apocalypse’.
This sets the stage for the episode’s A-plot: the Doctor, in a confined space with limited resources, fending off attacks by the Angels and relying on her ingenuity to get everyone out safely.
Meanwhile… Bel’s back! The continuation of her trek across the universe is an unexpected diversion, but serves to remind us that galactic civilisation continues to suffer in the wake of the Flux, which may well drive events in next week’s episode.
We soon learn that they’ve done more than snack on the locals – they’ve ripped the entire village and its timeline out of causality, effectively trapping everyone within its crumbling boundaries.
Since the image of an Angel can itself become an Angel, her vision left Claire carrying a psychic passenger, and the Doctor has no choice but to dive into Claire’s mind too and find out what’s really going on.
They’re here to recapture the rogue who’s absconded with all of the Division’s secrets – and those include the Doctor’s missing memories, giving Claire’s Angel some leverage.
Having been set up as unsympathetic characters, it’s clear that something nasty’s going to happen to the couple sooner or later, but their grim fate rather does mess with the established logic of the Angels – assuming a word like ‘logic’ can be applied to a sci-fi species of time-thieving gargoyles.
Secondly, once Gerald and Jean arrive in 1901, they’re immediately accosted by another Angel and because “nobody survives it twice”, the next touch turns them to stone.
Back in Claire’s mind, the Doctor is understandably tempted by knowledge of her past in exchange for protecting the Angel, but before anything can be agreed upon she’s rudely awakened by Professor Jericho.
The scene where the Doctor attempts to destroy an image of a Weeping Angel by burning it, only for the Angel to continue reaching out for them but now it’s made of fire is particularly effective.
Emerging in front of a breach that connects 1901 and 1967, the Doctor learns the truth about the quantum extraction and the fate of her companions.
The Angel army begins to glow, trapping the Doctor in her very own magical girl transformation sequence and… are those? Is she? She IS! Our favourite Time Lord has not only been unceremoniously drafted back into the Division, she’s now a Weeping Angel to boot.
One of their number then catches up to Claire more than a century later, sending her back to the village circa 1965 where, you’d expect, the Angels would be waiting to apprehend her – except they don’t strike until 1967, on the day the Doctor shows up.
For as tense and engaging as the scenes in Jericho’s house were, and as exciting as the episode’s climax proved to be, it’s a shame that Yaz and Dan were pretty much wasted in this episode.