The Time of Angels

Hooray for a return to form! Scary monsters that are scary, and not multi-coloured! This week whilst not pulling at the inventiveness or narrative scope of the first two episodes at least manages a perfectly passable tale.

"Es ir lu, they he lue abiliors!"

One thing that's grinding away at everyone's nerve has finally caught up with me. The gross incompetence of whoever they've hired as sound engineer. The iPlayer's subtitles tells me the above quote should actually read "Yes they're blue! They're the blue stabilisers!", but over Gold's incessant music harping away and the TARDIS sounding like it's trying to digest The Master again, most of the lines were lost. Something that's cropping up with increasing regularity. By the season finalé it's likely be a black and white ensemble with speech cards over-cut by Gold playing on the piano whilst burning in the fires of hell.

"But you're just a recording, you can't move!"

The return of the Weeping Angels was always going to be a hard one for Moffat, after all, how can you improve on perfection? His answer is you can't, but you can take the piss out of the church while you're at it. Something I heartily welcome. All the same we see some new stuff brought to the table, such as Weeping Angels taking influence from The Ring and stealing a dead man's voice. Moffat also addresses a question that's been around since Sally Sparrow - if they've been around for so long, why don't they just die? Indeed in this episode we see what happens when they're left on their own for thousands of years.

"I didn't escape, the Angels killed me too"

Moffat does in this episode what he does best, chilling misdirection. Much like the "so who's typing?" moment in The Doctor Dances, Moffat takes a couple of opportunities in throwing the viewer off, such as mentioning the Aplans have two heads, only for The Doctor and River to realise the miles of statues they've been walking through have only one and sacred Bob speaking from beyond the grave, these little chilling touches show Steve still has it, but the narrative did feel a little drawn out sometimes.

"I once had dinner with the chief architect"

This episode is unusually awash with outside references, possibly to make up for the fact that this is the first one not to feature the crack, I was so proud in spotting the above quote was a reference to "The Curse Of The Fatal Death" for example, I stuck it on wiki. Other little nods besides River and her book include "The biggest museum in the universe", the gravity globe and naturally the Angels. Of course this is also the first episode not to mention "Twenty minutes" in any shape.

A good overall effort, if slow and occasionally unhearable, and bodes well for it's conclusion, so long as Graham Norton doesn't start dancing across the Byzantium.