Friday, May 07, 2010

The time traveller's wife/murderer and the not-so-nice assassins

Doctor Who Episodes 5.4/5.5 - Time of the Angels / Flesh and Stone

  • Steven Moffat's son referred to the scene where the angel jumps out of the TV as the scariest thing he has ever watched on TV. Well he clearly haven't watched that Japanese horror film. Having watched so little film and TV, I initially didn't realise this is where the idea came from, though.
  • I don't like the fact that they now changed the physics of the angels (if there is still any physics that is):
  1. First, in Blink an angel cannot move when someone watches it, in a way similar to the standard quantum mechanical interpretation of a wave function collapses into a single state when an observer measures it. Now the angels don't seem too bothered looking at each other, they can move while the audience (us) is watching, and they may even freeze just because they think they are being looked at! (Maybe Moffat is trying to tell us that the Copenhagen interpretation really doesn't make any sense...)
  2. Secondly, they no longer kill "nicely" by pushing people back in time (although it never made much sense to me.)
  3. Thirdly, you will now die if you look at the eyes of an angel. The idea of "that holds the image of an angel becomes an angel" is nice, but I'm quite sure Sally Sparrow has taken some images of the angels...
  • Actually, imagine if there are two different species of angels, one of those you must look at them without even blinking, and the other you cannot even look at them or you will die, and the two species look identical...
  • The countdown bit is quite surprising and creepy.
  • The sequence inside the forest doesn't quite work for me: the angels thinking they're being watched? The Doctor getting angry in The Beast Below is fine, but again here (twice) seems too much. But there are two good things: the "angels turning their head" moment is going to become a classic. Also, clearly there is a future doctor jumping back to this point in time! ("Clearly" when you watch it for the second time that is...)
  • There are more and more evidence that Moffat is playing his timey-wimey ideas throughout the whole series, so instead an episode making sense in the last minute, it might take an entire series to make complete sense only in the last few minutes of the finale! (at which point all the mystery about Rory's badge, the wrong clock, duck pond, future doctor holding Amy's hand, two men in black appearing in a deja vu manner, etc. will be solved!)

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