Well, the good old gravity globe. Our heroes make their escape into the Byzantium, but are quickly faced with a difficult situation. In order for power to be re-routed so they can flee further into the ship, the lights must go, while they are stuck in a corridor with four Angels. Octavian decides to take River’s word that the Doctor can be trusted, though she amusing dodges the question of whether he is “some kind of madman”. Hmmm.
Is it possible he wrote (or, rather, will write) the book about the Angels? Steven Moffat is quite a master at sleight-of-hand and misdirection, as we will see later in the ep.
We see the outlandish spectacle of the Angels advancing in between shotgun flashes, and Amy begins to count down from ten to one, the numbers casually inserted into her dialogue over the course of the next scene. It’s obvious this has something to do with her looking into the Angel’s eyes in the last episode. Octavian is clearly astonished that the Angels are capable of fighting against the magnetisation of the door. In the midst of all this action, the Weeping Angels’ complete Otherness is constantly shown to us. They are so different that they offend in every way.
From Bob will learn that the Angels are “feasting” and believe they will become strong enough to consume the entire universe: “We shall have dominion over all time and space.” The Doctor scoffs at this – how could there be enough energy here to transform the Angels into something that powerful? In answer there is a series of dreadful screeching noises from the Angels outside the secondary flight deck. Horrified, River asks what the sound can be. Bob tells her. “It’s hard to put into your terms, Dr. Song, but as best as I understand it, the Angels are laughing.” And there is that disquieting alienness again. We and they are unable to really grasp each others’ frames of reference, even with the intermediary of Angel Bob.
“Laughing?” the Doctor asks.
“Because you haven’t noticed yet, sir. The Doctor in the TARDIS hasn’t noticed.”
Hang on. In The Eleventh Hour, Prisoner Zero said something almost identical about the cracks in space and time: “The Doctor in the TARDIS doesn’t know.” And, sure enough, the crack appears right there in the secondary flight deck. Why do they both talk about “the Doctor
in the TARDIS,” when he clearly is not? Is he? And how do they both know all about this when he doesn’t? I have some speculation on this, which I’ll get to in a minute.
When the Doctor is left alone to investigate the crack, he has to escape the Angels and, as a result, loses his jacket. I’d be prepared to bet good money that this is for a narrative purpose. We learn something about the crack (or at least this particular one). It contains pure time energy “the fire at the end of the universe”. This is, as it turns out, a danger to the Angels and not something they can feed on. What do we already know about the end of the universe? The Toclafane (the word coming from a Gallifreyan
fairytale, perhaps significant, perhaps not) are trapped there. Will they be revisited by the show at some point? The idea that they are the ultimate fate of the human race is, as RTD put it, “darker than the pits of hell”. In Forrest of the Dead, River said that she and the Doctor have been to the end of the universe. When might that be in his timeline? I have some speculation about that, too.
Meanwhile, the countdown has reached four and Amy is in a bad way. “Amy. Amy. Amy. What’s wrong with Amelia?” The answer brings out the Angels’ alienness and evil again. The image of the Angel has travelled up her optic nerves into the vision centres of her brain. Like the Angel that came out of the monitor screen in the last episode, it is climbing out of this “screen” in her brain and into her mind, coming to kill her, switch her off. The countdown is actually a countdown to this; the Angels are making her count to make her afraid, “for fun, sir.” Just what are these things? The Doctor’s solution, asking her to close her eyes and thus “pause” the image, is actually a clever inversion of the rules in Blink.
After a brief altercation that reveals something between and River and Octavian to the Doctor, Amy is left with Clerics. Except that the Doctor comes back to talk to her. But is it the same Doctor that just left? I’m going to stick my neck out here and say no. A Doctor who is almost certainly from the future, probably the season finale, has come back to pay a visit.
“use your eyes; notice everything ... look around you, actually look ... look closer.” He has his sleeves rolled up, when we see they are fastened immediately before and after this short scene. He is wearing a jacket, one with a different design to the one he lost earlier, again only in this short scene. He is not wearing his gold watch, the one we always see him wearing (and, again, the one he is wearing just before and after this short scene); in fact, the one he
is wearing looks uncannily like Rory’s watch... Interesting that this just happens to be when Amy has to keep her eyes closed and so she won't notice. The way television is made now, it’s spectacularly unlikely that this is a series of continuity errors.
And his attitude to Amy is totally different, arguably more loving than anything we’ve seen before. It really is as if he is closer to Amy, or that he knows bad things are in store for her. He tells her she must remember what he told her when she was seven. She must
remember. But before this, she asks him about the crack and he says he doesn’t yet know; he’s still trying to work it out. Is this, then, the “Doctor in the TARDIS” who doesn’t know, who hasn’t noticed? Has he just landed silently by not leaving the breaks on? If it is a future Doctor, he has just crossed his own timeline, a dangerous thing. During the conversation, he glances in the direction River and Octavian (and maybe himself) have just gone. As if he must not be seen.
Then, abruptly, he is dressed exactly as he was before and is some distance away, with River and Octavian. Hmmm. As well as discovering that River has been released from a prison called Stormcage, in Octavian’s custody, to earn a pardon, we hear that a massive explosion somewhere and somewhen has cracked all of time. The Doctor tracks the source of this explosion to “Amy’s time”.
While we intercut with Amy and the clerics (who are all consumed by the crack and are thus erased from history altogether). The Doctor begins to sort of piece things together. As the he says in The Beast Below, he thinks a lot and it’s hard to keep track of his own thought process. This time, an apparently throw-away question from The Eleventh Hour comes back, as do his questions from Victory of the Daleks and even The Next Doctor. “Cracks, cracks in time, time running out – couldn’t be, couldn’t be. But how is a duck pond a duck pond if there aren’t any ducks? And she didn’t recognise the Daleks. Okay, time can shift, time can change, time can be rewritten. Ah. Oh! ... Time can be
unwritten ... Been happening all around me and I haven’t even noticed. A Cyber King, a giant Cyberman walks over all of Victorian London and no one even remembers!”
The actual exchange in The Next Doctor is –
Jackson:
The events of today will be history, spoken of for centuries to come.
The Doctor:
Yeah. Funny, that.
There was some behind-the-scenes collaboration between Moffat and RTD on the specials. So, who knows how long all this has been set up for?
Amy wants to know why the crack is following her. But is it that simple? Or is that what we are expected to think? She identifies the crack by opening her eyes, which she can do for a second without dying. Strange, then, that she keeps them open for a full ten seconds without any ill effects. Hmmm.
Octavian’s death is a moving scene, but it also reveals to us that River “killed a man, a good man, a hero to many”. When the Doctor asks who, Octavian tells him, “You don’t want to know, sir, you really don’t.” What? She didn’t kill the Doctor in his future/her past, did she? Imagine that. At some point he finds out that she is his future murderer and so develops a relationship with her, as a prisoner (though, of course, the Time Traveller’s Wife shenanigans mean that he will have
already developed a relationship with her, from the perspective of his timeline). We’re so mind-boggled by this and by Octavian’s death that Moffat can pull some wonderful misdirection. When the Doctor enters the primary flight deck and River says she is trying to get the teleport working (“Octavian’s dead; so is that teleport,” the Doctor replies), it goes right over our heads; we don’t even really hear her. We definitely don’t “notice everything.”
Once Marco goes the way of the other clerics, Amy is left alone in the forest, trying to walk as if she can see (I’m not sure that logically works, but it’s good drama). The scene progresses, with the Doctor’s fear for her making him increasingly angry. Then the Angels start moving, slowly moving, as if they are testing the waters. But only
we can see them. Some may think this spoils their mystery, but to me it is an extraordinary and disturbing moment. We the viewers are given a “privileged” and once-only glimpse past the quantum lock – we are seeing something forbidden.
Then we are into the endgame. Amy is saved – that teleport came as a surprise, didn’t it? – and the Angels all die, or rather are erased from history, but it is their own fault for draining all the ship’s power. Mass slaughter, but the Doctor’s hands are clean!
It’s a bit problematic. The Angel is no longer in Amy’s mind, because it never existed in the first place, so what about all the other causal effects? If the Angels never existed, why are our heroes on this planet in the first place? Why was River on the Byzantium? Why did the Byzantium crash? What about Octavian and the clerics? Perhaps we will learn the answers to these questions. At this stage, we’re told that the memories of time travellers are immune to the paradoxes caused by the crack. River tells the Doctor he will see her again (his future, her past) when the Pandorica opens. The Doctor says that’s a fairytale, which is exactly what he said about the Toclafane. “Doctor! Aren’t we all?” she replies. There’s something going on here, something to do with memories, fairytales, dreams and the reality of someone’s existence. Perhaps a Weeping Angel is not the only thing that can be alive in someone’s mind (or “memory”, as the Doctor conspicuously puts it in this final scene). I'd guess that the Doctor and River's trip to the end of the universe will be in the season finale, and that this is when she has met Amy before.
So, that final hilarious scene in which Amy basically wants to jump his bones, the night before her wedding to Rory. We understand a little more about her motivation for this in the next episode (from the Doctor’s point of view, anyway – LOL i.e. not just the obvious). Here he is certain that this is wrong, not just morally but also as a space-time event. They are in her house five minutes after they left. Hmmm. It’s always five minutes. He said he’d be back in five minutes at the start of The Eleventh Hour, and at the end of that episode he said he could get her back five minutes ago. As I’ve noted, at the end of the Eleventh hour the TARDIS clock flips over to the next day, shifting from AM to PM instead of the other way round. Here on the clock in Amy’s bedroom, on exactly the same midnight, exactly the same thing happens. It is now the wedding day, the day that the Doctor earlier identified as the source of the explosion causing the cracks. The date? 26/06/2010
This is the date the season finale will air in the UK. Are we excited yet?