The Weeping Angels return in a thrillingly great Doctor Who
Chris Chibnall's Flux miniseries delivers its best episode yet
TV Reviews Doctor Who
Well that was fun! After three compelling but uneven episodes
that didn’t quite add up to more than the sum of their parts, Doctor Who delivers
the first home-run of its Flux miniseries experiment. From tense setpieces
to endearing supporting characters to cool sci-fi ideas, “Village Of The Angels” has
just about everything you could want from a Doctor Who story—including a
cliffhanger that suggests this antepenultimate episode is going to be
one of the most pivotal hours of the season. It’s stylish, spooky, game-changing fun, and it has me very excited to see whether the final two episodes can stick the landing.
The moment this episode goes from good to great is when time
displaced orphan Peggy leads Yaz and Dan to the edge of a 1901 village, where
the road suddenly drops off into outer space. It’s an audaciously surreal image,
one that helps make up for the poorly rendered CGI elsewhere. And it confirms
that “Village Of The Angels” has more on its mind than just a one-off
historical romp with the Weeping Angels. Yes, those returning monsters bring a welcome
dose of stone-faced suspense to the proceedings. But there’s a
lot here that works beyond just nostalgic affection for an iconic recurring villain too.
Most of all, “Village Of The Angels” does a really great job establishing a sense of time and place. The rogue Angel who commandeered the
TARDIS at the end of last week’s episode leads the Doctor and her companions to the village of Medderton
in 1967, where they quickly split off into their own separate missions. While
Yaz and Dan join the search for a missing 10-year-old girl, the Doctor runs
into Claire (Annabel Scholey), who’s spent the past two years living in the
1960s since she was teleported there by an Angel in “The Halloween Apocalypse.”
It turns out the reason Claire recognized the Doctor in that
episode isn’t because they’d met before, but because she’s a seer who has premonitions of
the future. Claire has spent her time in the ’60s under the inquisitive eye of Professor
Eustacius Jericho (Kevin McNally). And when the Doctor’s arrival coincides with
an Angel invasion, the trio find themselves in a sort of haunted house/home
invasion story that calls to mind co-writer Maxine Alderton’s previous script
for “The Haunting Of Villa Diodati,” as well as a healthy dose of “Hide” too. This
time around, however, the call is coming from inside the house. Claire isn’t
just touched by an Angel, she’s possessed by one too.
The simple mechanics of the Weeping Angels seem to inspire director Jamie Magnus Stone to lean into simple, evocative imagery throughout this hour, particularly in a standout sequence where the Doctor peaks
into Claire’s brain to see what’s really going on. “Village Of The Angels”
dramatizes Claire’s mindscape as a double-shored beach (or maybe a split sea, if you want to get Biblical), where the rogue Angel speaks
through Claire to reveal what’s actually going on: Like the Doctor, the Angel
is a former Division agent who’s on the run from the
organization and its extraction squad. Unlike the Doctor, however, the rogue Angel not only remembers her time in the Division but also has knowledge of the organization’s
entire history too—including the Doctor’s mysterious time working for them.
If there’s a weakness to “Village Of The Angels” it’s that
some of the various Division-related reveals and double crosses get a little
confusing to follow in an hour that also has a whole bunch of time displacement logic to keep track of too. But given that there are still two more episodes of Flux to clear everything up, it’s easy enough to roll with the punches for now. Especially when the final image of the Doctor getting turned into a Weeping Angel is such a riveting cliffhanger.
Indeed, there’s a lot about this episode that’s just plain cool,
which isn’t always the case on Doctor Who. The idea of all the residents
of a village disappearing once in 1901 and then again in 1967 is a great
sci-fi set up. And this episode is loaded with the kind of texture
that Chris Chibnall’s solo scripts are often missing. Peggy’s callous, condescending
uncle Gerald feels like a very realistic depiction of a stuffy kind of 1960s masculinity. Professor Jericho, meanwhile, offers a flipside to that. Though he’s a lonely workaholic,
he lets that experience fuel him with kindness and curiosity rather than coldness.
He and Claire make for enjoyably capable one-off companions for the Doctor’s battle
with the Weeping Angels, and I’m looking forward to (hopefully) seeing more from them in the future.
I was also really moved by the scene where Mrs. Hayward speaks
to Peggy across time to explain that she’s actually a grown-up version of the
time displaced little girl. It’s both hopeful and tragic in the way the best
Weeping Angel stories are. And I’m excited to see what happens to Peggy,
Dan, Yaz, and Jericho now that they’re trapped in 1901 with no Doctor and no
way home. Given that Professor Jericho and Peggy are both characters in search of a family, maybe the time hop will bring them together as a surrogate father/daughter duo.
When this hour isn’t
spinning it’s multi-generational Medderton story, it’s checking in on Bel, who
finds herself in a subplot that’s part “Ascension Of The Cybermen,” part “Utopia.” She seeks refuge on the half-destroyed planet Puzano, where she learns that Azure
is offering to “save” survivors of the Flux by transporting them into
Passenger (a.k.a. trapping them in a sentient prison). It’s just enough to check in on the ongoing Ravager thread without letting it overwhelm the episode. And it’s another reminder that casting an actor as charismatic as Thaddea Graham for such a small but seemingly pivotal role is one of the smartest choices Chibnall ever made.
Indeed, “Village Of The Angels” is the strongest episode of Flux yet, if not just one of the strongest episodes of Chibnall’s era as a whole. It’s cohesive, entertaining, and atmospheric in a way the show has often struggled with over the past two seasons. The characters pop, the villains are scary, and the surprises are genuinely surprising. What more could you ask for from a village on the edge of the universe?
Stray observations
- Yaz’s knowledge of how to organize a missing persons search
is a really nice, specific use of her background as a cop. - Love you Bel, but I wouldn’t list “conveying important information
in a timely manner” as one of your special skills. Coordinates should’ve been
the first thing you recorded in your holographic message to Vinder! (That happens in a rare mid-credits scene, in case you missed it.) - Jericho mentions being among the first British soldiers to liberate
the Bergen-Belsen
Nazi concentration camp during World War II. - Two fun Weeping Angel moments: The version from Claire’s drawing
bursting into flames when the Doctor tries to burn the paper, and the polygraph machine printing out the image of an Angel. - Will we see any more from that skeptical guy who was zapped by an Angel while counting gravestones? Or was he just a one-off suspense builder?
- Love to reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!
69 Comments
Hmmm, this one wasn’t overstuffed for once and it was all the better for it.
I’m guessing the preacher dude who got grabbed went wherever it is the rest of the village went, which was apparently not the pocket village.The Division stuff feels like broader story stuff, the kind of stuff that probably won’t get dealt with until the Holiday specials. Or at least I hope that’s the case because otherwise the last two episodes are going to go back to being super overstuffed.No check in the Victorian era dude this week. He’s probably still the least explained part of this whole thing.
I think the implication was that everyone who was sent back to 1911 was turned to rubble, like Peggy’s Great Uncle and Aunt.
Love this one! It kept me on the edge of my seat. It felt like the “good old days” of Doctor Who. And gosh that was a while ago.
Enjoyed this a lot, it got bogged down a bit near the end by the Division stuff and other Flux-related stuff that isn’t getting resolved until the finale but it did end on a heck of a cliffhanger.
this was truly great stuff, comfortably the best of Jodie’s entire run for me. more confirmation (if any was needed) that the main thing Chibnall has been missing in his episodes is a co-writer as good as Maxine Alderton. presuming the horror elements and characterisation were hers (seems like a fair bit given those were also a strength in Villa Diodati) and the Division stuff was Chibnall’s, this struck the perfect balance between the two without succumbing to over-plotted incomprehensible mess like last week. and goddamn, if that cliffhanger wasn’t an all-timer for the show. actually can’t wait to see where we go from here!
I agree. I loved this. For me it was by far the best of the Chibnall/Whittaker era. I’d give it an “A” not an “A-” but I don’t care much about grades. So of course these comments are filled with all sorts of negativity! I’ve enjoyed the frenetic pace of “Flux” but this slowed it down just a tad and concentrated mostly on one story while still keeping things moving. The story of the Angels and the Professor and Claire was a great base siege/horror movie type story that could’ve made a great standalone. The idea of the 1901 and 1967 versions of the village meeting in space like that was interesting. Seeing the Doctor turning into a Weeping Angel is just something you either think is awesome or cheesy. The far future story was integrated well. This was a great episode of this dorky ass goofy ass show. Not sure what more people want
The main thing Chibnall’s been missing in his episodes is “letting people other than him write things.” He’s put way too much time and energy into justifying writing credits on basically every episode of his run when he’s just not good at that part of it. It’s not as bad as some of the drek he wrote on Torchwood, but close. If he’d step back and focus on the plotting and put the writing in other peoples’ hands, this would have been a much better era for the show.
Overall enjoyable episode, but the Angels seem to have whatever powers are necessary for the plot at this point, including being able to move when people are looking at them (or can they just do that on the TARDIS?) They’re becoming the sonic screwdriver of villains.
The Angel in the TARDIS was taking advantage of the choppy lighting, moving within the brief blackouts.
It’s impossible for someone not to blink eventually, but one of their problems as monsters is they cover exactly as much ground as needed for the scene and plot, no more, no less.
It quickly makes their scenes as repetitive as a chase scene in an old mummy movie. There’s a slow mo move to the only escape route, keys fumble in locks, people stumble over packages carelesslely left in the middle of the floor…
Yeah, I think this is the main reason why they were perfectly good villains in Blink, but every time they’ve featured since then has sharply diminished their value.
I get that too, feels a bit like the Borg after their first outing too.
Oddly, the problem I have with this setup is that it seems like they can only move when they’re not been seen… so if there’s three people looking at them, two can blink normally, right? They can just take turns closing their eyes and *someone* is always going to be looking. That should make them trivially easy to keep still for long dialog dumps. But instead, sometimes that’s true, and sometimes they move if just one person looks away or blinks. It’s… inconsistent.
exactly, very inconsistent. I found this whole episode so frustrating
yes, at one point when liverpool comedian blinked, but the others didn’t, the angel moved. then they only moved if all of them looked away. then now they can move if someone is in front of them even if bits of them are still visible?
I’m legitimately shocked Who writers have restrained themselves from making The Doctor a Weeping Angel until now. You knew as soon as they became regular enemies that it was going to happen sooner or later.
I expected them to go for a companion before the Doctor. We’ve had companions become Daleks and Cybermen before, but the Doctor remains largely unchanged.
Mark it: This is the exact point where Flux’s success or failure has actual stakes beyond what general emotions it leaves us with at the immediate end!
The first three parts before it were good-not-great, and largely unambitious; if the second half ended up stumbling over the finish line, it wasn’t something that’d instill strong opinions, it’d be something we’d look at a few years down the line and go ‘well, that was weird, moving on’.But now? Now it’s reached a quality level that would mean a crap ending actually disappoints, and had wild enough ideas that, if they’re fumbled, causes legitimate problems for future writers. Hopefully the quality level keeps up, but we’re at the point where I can actually worry!I do like the character they gave to the Angels as a ‘people’, though. They’re demonstrably very cruel, but they’re cruel in a way that means they take well to organization. They strike me as the sort of people who end up as abusive cops or soldiers, who love having an air of legitimacy to their cruelty. I’m wondering if that’s something they’ll use with Dr. Jericho as things go on; while he’s clearly a fairly upstanding soldier, he probably came in contact with people like that in the military (especially with the mention of the concentration camp; that suggests some Nazi Stories in his past).
This episode didn’t work quite as well for me because the Division/dark, secret history of the Doctor suuuuuuuuuuucks as a concept. And also because I’ve never been a huge fan of the angels, they too implacable an opponent.
The Division’s details have been kept a secret from the audience for way too long at this point. Chibnall is operating like an underconfident magician at this point in the story who is so afraid of the audience that he won’t even let us see him fanning out the cards or tell us that he is going to predict what is drawn from the deck.The fun at this stage of the game should be how is he going to pull this off, not what is even happening.
I’m all, “How is the Division still around if the Master killed all the Time Lords?”
I’m not certain that The Division isn’t meant to be entirely separate, and perhaps even antagonistic to Gallifrey. They employ Timelords like they are apparently employing everything else, but something in this series (can’t remember the line) gave me the impression that they were not fond of other Time Lords meddling in their affairs.What I’m confused about —and don’t expect to have clarified at all— is why the Judoon captured The Doctor in the last special, but apparently didn’t question her at all. They’re obviously upset about something she did while in The Division, which means they probably know about it, but no seeds were planted then for what’s happening now. It all just seems like Chibnall saw all the criticism of his stories and decided that he could fix it by continuing to dig down.
The Judoon are the masterminds behind Division. The we are stupid cops is just a cover.
The implication I’m getting is that the Division is some other, more powerful entity that is/was using Time Lords just as it’s using the Angels and whatever else. If all the other Time Lords are gone that’s all the more reason they’d want to get hold of the Doctor again.
The character stuff was really lacking.
I think the Division f*cked up somehow and created the Flux and now need to Doctor to fix it. And Chinball can wrap up all this Timeless Child/Division stuff before the handover to RTD.
Chibnall can but I grow ever doubtful that he will. I think RTD will have to spend most of his first season back tying up all the loose ends that Chibnall has left strewn all over the place.
I thought this was better than last week’s sludge, but not nearly as good as the first two episodes. It felt like it padded out plot information that could have been told in a few scenes into a whole episode.The fundamental inarticulateness of the Angels feeds one of Chibnall’s biggest weaknesses. He tries endlessly to manufacture drama by blocking characters from communicating, and believes wrongly that hiding motivations generates audience engagement, when instead it stifles it.
He then relies on a big reveal, except he’s really bad at writing them. Poor Whittaker tries her best, but she is regularly defeated trying to deliver the info dump monologues she’s given.
Because characters (and audiences) are kept so much in the dark, intermediate scenes get stripped of potential drama. Characters are blocked from developing any motivational details that might upset the reveal, and instead of engaging in meaningful subdramas along the way, characters are constantly forced into inert situations where they wonder what is happening.It made no sense why the Angel hiding in Claire didn’t talk to The Doctor as soon as possible to avoid being cornered by the other Angels, except Chibnall just has a weakness for this kind of setup. And the scene by the ocean ended up being unnecessarily drawn out for the amount of information actually delivered. It felt like a stereotypical scene between an American tourist trying to order a meal from a Parisian waiter, loudly sputtering in disbelief that escargot are snails.
And while it’s possible to make the Long Obfuscation work as a dramatic structure, it needs to be rare and Chibnall doesn’t have the chops to pull it off in the first place.
I’m enjoying the Bel and Vinder stuff, but the message she left him was an excruciating example of this. “I don’t have much time, so I can’t go into too much detail about anything, I have to make sure that I use my time to efficiently to communicate to you all the important information you’ll need to find me, and not waste time on meaningless exposition or other rubbish, so anyway my coordinates are -BZZZTT…”
Honestly if it was standalone and they reined it in a little I probably would’ve liked it but personally I think it might be one of the worst episodes of NuWho I’ve seen in a longtime simply because it does the Moffat thing of having the “rules” for angels change on a whim as convenient, most egregiously how they can now move while people are looking at them. Also the core twist for the end, where the Angels go for the Doctor instead, felt bizarrely drawn out given they’d revealed themselves as the Doctor much earlier in the episode, so could’ve gone for her at any moment really.Though I will say McNally’s performance as Jericho was fantastic and I wish that he was a companion, especially given how as much as he’s a great comedian Bishop can’t seem to act all that well.
Having the rules ‘change’ is fine by me as long as there’s a strong idea backing it up, and The Time of Angels has a couple dozen crammed into 90 minutes. This not so much, though it was definitely the best episode since The Haunting of Villa Diodati.
See if the rules change then it breaks the suspension of disbelief of them being a threat to me. Because now they can do anything I don’t care because I know that anything will happen to allow them to be defeated.
I don’t really care about plot minutiae like that. If a story’s good it’s good. If I did I wouldn’t be a massive fan of Doctor Who.Basically, I agree with this.
It’s not plot minutiae though when it’s the entire mechanic moving the episode. And I don’t tend to agree with Moffat, especially when his habit of constantly having to have his “spin” on things for no reason but to do so was one of the worst things about his showrunning.
Therein lies the difference. For me, the fact that it changes the rules of Angels is the least of the episode’s problems.And he didn’t change them ‘for no reason’. He did so because it better fit the story and tone of The Time of Angels, and Doctor Who at its best is a sandbox which can do pretty much anything. It’s a massive universe.
It’s a massive universe.But that’s the annoying thing, it’s a “massive universe” that is increasingly just the same tired monsters that are then drastically changed rules-wise rather than imagining something new.
It’s a fair argument, but I’m willing to accept such things if there’s a genuinely good story to be told with them.
Could he not just come up with a new creature to suit the story instead?
He could, but there were interesting things to be done with the basic concept, but expanded. And I stand by my statement that the added elements to the Angels in the S5 two-parter were fascinating and creative extensions of the basic ideas behind them. “What if we had ideas that could think for themselves? What if one day our dreams no longer needed us? When these things occur and are held to be true, the time will be upon us. The time of Angels.” is a genuinely terrifying and worthy addition to the concept of the Angels. So no, not ‘drastically changing the rules because you have no new ideas’ that Mortal Dictata implied. And I ultimately don’t care that much about seeing the Angels move—it’s one moment meant to shock the audience in an action-horror story. It’s not a big deal to me anymore than the fact that in Midnight the ship doors are open for way longer than they should be.
Hell, the Angel farm in The Angels Take Manhattan was also a chilling idea, for all that story’s lack of polish. I’d have to re-watch this one again to see if it has anything interesting going on.
McNally would be a great subject for a future Random Roles.
Great episode but I do have a few questions. The Weeping Angel that got on the TARDIS came through Yaz’s phone. It is the same one that was possessing Claire, who was sent back to 1967 by a different Weeping Angel. So does that mean they can be in two or more places at once?
The Doctor mentions that the psychic effort required to do all of that must be tremendous, which does at least suggest that it’s possible, but difficult.
The best thing I can say about Chibnall is that the lazy impersonation of Doctor Who he writes has gotten slightly better this season
“The single best Doctor Who episode on which Chris Chibnall has a writing credit” is admittedly a low bar to clear, but this sailed over it nicely and is yet more evidence for the case that if Chibnall had just relaxed and concentrated on producing the series and running the writers room rather than inflicting 5-7 of his own scripts per series on us in the process of finally writing the fanfic opus he’s been carrying around in his head since the 1980s, we might be looking on the Whitaker era as an all-time high point rather than the deeply compromised mess that it ended up being.Hell, I’d go so far as to call this a better use of the Angels than The Angels Take Manhattan, which is…not what I was expecting to say when I saw the preview last week.That all said, it’s frustrating that it wasn’t even better: this was a story that sold itself (successfully!) on its narrative propulsion, so cutting away to the relatively slow-paced Bel/Vinder plotline was just deadly to the sense of urgency it was otherwise doing a really good job of maintaining. And they really needed the extra minutes: you never had the slightest idea what Old Peggy was doing or why, the tunnel in the basement came out of nowhere, and the aerial shots of the Angels coming out of the rock made no visual sense: all of these were problems that could have been solved with a minute or two of establishing scenes.
Vinder & Bel are adorable & I am pulling for them even though I still can’t quite grasp how they fit into the larger story quite. Likewise the Angels are great villains even though I can’t quite see how they could be motivated to work for The Division or how their society or politics could work since they can’t even talk to each otherBoth Claire and little Peggy are interestingly ambiguous, sympathetic but maybe a bit more complicit with the Angels than they are saying?
They are probably the doctors parents. I know there was a similar story arc with River Song, Amy, and Rory, but remember this is a Chibnall story!
It seems like the Angels can communicate psychically from the way one of them was “talking” to the professor.
That angel was talking through the TV speakers. It wasn’t visualized perfectly, but they did flash back to the broken TV as the angel’s voice was warbling slightly.
While I liked the episode, I am surprised that people loved it so much. For me 2 has been my favorite, then 3, 4, and 1.
I wonder if Dan and Yaz will stick around and be bridge companions to the new Doctor. They work well together I think
Given that the to-air-in-2022 specials have already been wrapped by the BBC and that the nu-RTD show probably won’t even start shooting until late `22, I’d be honestly surprised: that’s a lot of time for a working actor to sit around twiddling their thumbs even if RTD wanted either of them along.That said, it would certainly be nice to see poor Mandip Gill get the chance to act in some scripts that remember to write her a character.
They could be in other stuff in the time between seasons I would think
Yes, but RTD is going to be writing and Mandip isn’t white. My hopes on that front remain very low.
Oof. Accurate, but oof.
To work as the doctor, an actor has to be able to pull off a scene like the one in this episode where the doctor walks in on the professor and Claire, spouting a bunch of nonsense that is both amusing and at the same time deadly serious, but also completely taking charge of the situation. Jodie Whittaker has always had that quality even when the material for her doctor was less than the greatest
I really liked the scene where she met Eustacious. She was funny and convincingly sold some very Tennant-esque silly-yet-clever dialogue.
The scene where she threatens the Weeping Angel was much less successful. When she said she was “putting them on notice,” she didn’t sound like a thousand-year-old space traveller who strikes fear into the hearts of villains throughout the galaxy…but as a Karen threatening a manager at a Wal-Mart. And this has been a consistent problem: she just isn’t scary! Maybe that’s sexism talking, but the Fugitive Doctor is much more imposing, and I can think of many actresses who can sell intimidating better than Jodie Whitaker does. Again, I find her delightful in the more warm and funny scenes, but she doesn’t sell the turn-on-a-dime switches to menacing in the way that other Doctors, especially Eleven, did.
To be fair, she hasn’t been written with any sense of power and menace. Her Doctor is passive and reactionary and her stories haven’t had any sense of stakes of them. It’s hard for her to have that sorta bad ass quality if she hasn’t been written to have it.
Now that I think of it, I do remember a scene from Broadchurch where she was very scary toward someone who wronged her family. It would be neat to see this show channel that aspect of Whitaker’s range.
“Village Of The Angels” dramatizes Claire’s mindscape as a double-shored beach (or maybe a split sea, if you want to get Biblical) This teased at a memory of mine while I was watching it, but I didn’t make the connection until reading this summary: There’s an island in Japan where during low tide a narrow road opens and you can walk to a much smaller island about 500 meters away. It’s both sandy and strewn with small stones like this scene alternatingly is (Honestly a bit confusingly, like they filmed it twice in two different locations and cut them together). It’s called Angel Road.
Yaz’s knowledge of how to organize a missing persons search is a really nice, specific use of her background as a cop.I’m just glad they remembered she used to be a cop. There were moments in earlier episodes where that experience could have come in very handy but the writers just seemed to forget about it.
“Used to be?” Did she quit, or get fired? I can’t even remember.
Is she to be returned to her old life minutes after leaving it?
Yes, this is more like it! A lot happened without it feeling scattered; there were some nice ideas and a genuine sense of dread. The churchyard even had the feel of old Dr Who. I could see Sylvester McCoy in that village.
Why do the angels have more lines than the Doctor?
“…the Doctor peaks into Claire’s brain…” sets off bizarre and disturbing images.
Perhaps “…peeks…” would have been better.
We seem to be focusing on definition 8 of ‘division’. What if the the division is the one between time and space, and that their job is to maintain it, or in effect be it? Which, given the expositions in episode 1, sort of kind of maybe makes sense. I find it hard to believe that something so apparently fundamental as ‘The Division’ could be a smaller part of something else.1: the act or process of dividing : the state of being divided
2: one of the parts or groupings into which a whole is divided or is divisible
3: the condition or an instance of being divided in opinion or interest
4: something that divides, separates, or marks off
5: the act, process, or an instance of separating or keeping apart
6: a self-contained major military unit capable of independent action
7: a portion of a territorial unit marked off for a particular purpose
8: an administrative or operating unit of an organization
9: a group of organisms forming part of a larger group specifically : a primary category of the plant kingdom in biological taxonomy that is typically equivalent to a phylum
Best use of the Weeping Angels since series 5. Been really enjoying this story. Hope it ends well.
Wait, if the Angels could psychically unlock that tunnel door in the basement… why couldn’t they unlock any other doors to the house and get down there sooner?
It was a decent episode overall but I don’t like just how many powers they give an already perfectly simple creature. I never liked the image of an Angel idea from years back, and the fact they can reform broken images like the drawing and even create their own in the lie detector makes them incredibly powerful. With all these abilities the only thing they’re stopped by is the script needing them to fail.