Doctor Who: Flesh and Stone

[seawasp]

I will cut for spoilers:

Alas, the second half pretty much did nothing to remove this one from the Hall of Lame. It's rather frustrating because there are a lot of good PIECES in here, but they're disjointed and interrupted by Lame.

Still nothing to ease the pain of the Suddenly Munchkined Angels. In fact, all of this just raised more terribly annoying questions about the things (starting with "and explain to me why they haven't long since taken over the universe?"). First, why is it that they have suddenly completely and utterly changed their behavior and powers? When we met them, they were chronovores. They didn't kill people; they touched them and sent them back in time. This, combined with their super-speed and creepy "I'm not alive, I'm a stone! Nothing to see here, just blink" trick makes them MORE than scary enough as antagonists. Why in the hell do they now:

• Consume energy in apparently almost any form (like cut-rate versions of my own Werewolves)
• Kill people directly (including apparently breaking necks, etc.,)
• Have the apparent ability to take someone's brain for the purpose of providing dialogue
• Suddenly become duplicated through images, including frickin' MEMORIES of images?

      This kind of thing just annoys the heck out of me. While I didn't LIKE the Weeping Angels to begin with, they were at least fairly well defined and my main dislike was due to the fact that if you followed the rules, they should be either trivially easy to defeat, or 100% victorious, almost instantly.

      The addition of More Super Munchkin Power doesn't make this better, it exacerbates the problem. With the above abilities, they should be able to conquer the frickin' universe faster than almost anyone else could imagine. The "observation" requirement for keeping them stone is ill-defined and, in the latest episode, badly broken.


Dr. Song still doesn't work for me, though I slightly reserve judgment in case she does turn out to be a Timelord. I'd prefer it to be Romana but  the Rani will do.

I do like Matt Smith's Doctor, and I like Amy Pond. I just hope we'll get some better episodes out of this. So far we've had 5 eps, of which I've liked two reasonably well, tolerated one, and consider two very very lame.

Comments

[sorek.livejournal.com]

I agree with much of what you said. The "we keep you around as meat so we can use you to talk" was grabbed right from "Silence in the Library". There it was mildly cool, and made sense in a handwavium sort of way (last recorded thoughts becomes a voice for the aliens). Here, at best there's a throw away line explaining how, and no explanation as to why (other than to mess with the Doctor).

Again I sort of like them turning other people into angels, or at least semi angels, like Davros reconstituting a Dalek army one molecule at a time.

But can someone provide any explanation on how Amy survives? Bueller? Bueller? Anyone?

Maybe that's the reason they haven't taken over the universe? They're Kryptonite is not just sight, it's echo location, x-ray, , PET scan, CAT scan, MRI, magnetometer, gravity-meter, tricorder, smell-o-meter ,timey-wimey gizmo, etc. The more technology that "sees" the more restricted their movements are, as long as you don't record their eyes.

Or maybe the writer(s) didn't have a frickin' clue. Amy should be dead. D*E*A*D, dead.

And can I mention, I'm really getting tired of the whole "the Doctor's Companion is the most important person in the entire space time continuum, without whom the very fabric of reality trembles"?

Rose/Bad Wolf, DoctorDonna, and now Amy. It's getting old.

Note, I don't count Wilf. He's a very limited case, he gets a pass. I also don't count Martha.

Still, can we go back to companions just being people? They come, they stay, they do stuff, sometimes they leave, and sometimes they die.

"Spare me your egotistical musings on your pivotal role in history. Nothing you do here will cause the Federation to collapse or galaxies to explode. To be blunt, you're not that important"

[richardboustead.livejournal.com]

Amy's Magical Survival(TM) is based around a rather questionable assertion that the angel in her mind is feeding off her sight. Take 1 dose of Handwavium at this point. By closing her eyes, she "starves" the angel, so it no longer has the power to kill her. Add 1 dose of Inexplicium. Then, after the Angels have all fallen into the time-field, they cease to exist. So Angel Bob never existed, so he never could have come out of the TV, and never could have put the Angel in Amy's mind. Finish your course in Belief-suspension with the final dose of Yeahrightium.

[sorek.livejournal.com]

Actually I was referring to the scene near the end where she's surrounded by angels, can't see so she can't freeze them and walks through them based on a proximity-sensor that goes beep beep beep and by faking the ability to see. She falls down and ruins whatever illusion of sight she had, and they still can't get to her.

My feeble fan-answer is that they didn't really want her dead, they wanted her to open her eyes and become an angel, continuing the theme of really wanting to really anger the Doctor.

[richardboustead.livejournal.com]

Ah, that scene is even worse. In "Blink" the whole twist was that the stoneskin thing was involuntary, and the TARDIS dematerialization 'tricked' the angels into staring at each other, forever unable to move (until the bulb goes out).

In Flesh and Stone, suddenly it becomes a voluntary choice. The explanation the Doctor gives is that the Angels are running scared from the Time Crack, and have chosen to freeze as they assume Amy can see them. When butterfingers gives the game away, they realize they're free to move, and begin inching towards her in patented HorrorMovieExaggeration Mode, until she's saved at literally the last second by River's teleport.

It's also the only time we ever see them move, which is kind of their gimmick - they're scary pretty much because you never see them move. (and Ryk's list of superpowers of course).
That one scene demystified them a staggering amount.

No, in this New Series, they've got the characters down. Now work on the stories a bit more please.

[seawasp]

The other thing about their first appearance is that as you NEVER see them move -- EVEN THE ONES OUT OF SIGHT OF THE CHARACTERS -- it indicated that either it wasn't just sight but any other sense, or that they were using the Fourth Wall itself as an observer. If WE could see them, they were unable to move.

The new story trashes that cute, almost lit'ry possibility, and as you say also takes away part of the scariness of their basic nature, the fact that they're ALWAYS immobile stone statues... which somehow keep moving when you're not looking.

[voradams.livejournal.com]

1. Yeah, the weeping angels are lame-ish. The biggest problem is the paradox.

1. Angel on Byzantium
2. River Song contacts Doctor
3. River saved by Doctor
4. Angel crashes ship
5. Angel sucked into crack, removed from history
6. Go to 1..um wait...

I thought Moffitt was smarter than failing time travel 101.

The problem with River Song in mho is that she is close to Bernie Sommerfield, who has a large cult following in the UK (she appears in the books and audio plays during the interregnum).

I did however liked a companion getting a pash on. So many passive unrequited love during RTD period (Ok, I grant Jack as a great example who is also an exception).

Vampires in Venice is better Dr Who. The crack in time gets interesting as well.

[seawasp]

No, that's not a problem. The Doctor OFTEN ends up with such paradoxes, but it's stated that he, and his Companions, are Time-Irrelevant; they remember things that no one else does, and their personal timelines can survive paradox.

Yes, I know, she *IS* Bernice Summerfield with the name changed, basically (same people involved to a large extent). That doesn't excuse it, in a way it makes it worse because Bernice was a companion to the Seventh Doctor, IIRC. They've been re-using stories from that era, in a way that makes little sense (Family of Blood was a Doc Seven story with Bernice as the companion -- and other differences which made the original story make sense and the new one suck boulders through a garden hose).

If they were going to bring in Summerfield, they should have brought her in, not done a cutesey sorta-clone of her with a different name. I would still have been annoyed, especially if they did it the same way (i.e., no explanation for who she really was, how she met the Doctor, etc.), but at least they'd have precedent to point at.