Unpleasant thoughts like, say… “I killed off my entire species except for myself and now I’m all alone in the universe with no company but hairless apes whose lifespans, in comparison to mine, are like those of mayflies.”?
Massive, overwhelming guilt and loneliness… sure, I think I’d try to keep as busy as possible, too.
Actually, there doesn’t. I suspect the writer (and/or director) included that shot simply to create a dramatic moment within the episode and to keep things moving along at the usual breakneck pace. I don’t think they spend any time worrying about the contradictions, temporal paradoxes or continuity issues shots like this might imply, because that’s not the sort of show they’re interested in making.
Criticising Dr Who for failing to make strict logical sense in the way we’d ask the most rigorous adult science fiction to do is like criticising an apple for failing to be an orange. In some ways, it might be a more satisfying show if the writers paid a little more attention to issues like this, but I doubt it would then get the same stellar viewing figures.
None of that makes it any less fun to speculate about these matters, as I did myself earlier in the thread, but that’s always going to be a doomed endeavour.
Well said, Slade! Some inconsistencies bother me, like the Angel Statue of Liberty, but not something like the gravestone. Oddly, the fact that there are so many obvious ways for the Doctor to get around the “fixed time” thing didn’t really bother me much at all, but I hated The Wedding of River Song for something very similar, though in that case it was the fact that they allowed the easy work-around after making it a major plot point that no such work-around was possible, and the fact that the work-around wasn’t the result of any sudden epiphany or dramatic breakthrough, but just that the Doctor changed his mind and decided that maybe NOT getting killed wouldn’t be so bad after all. Still, this episode was such a exact parallel, it really does make it look like the Doctor just can’t be bothered. Maybe Donna rubbed off on him more than we realized!
Well said.
Doctor Who has almost never been entirely internally consistent. RTD tried like hell to make it so, and in the process was taking out a lot of the fun. Moffatt seems to be trying to put the fun first.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’ve you’re ever bothered by something like the gravestone or that giant Statue of Liberty that no one seems to have noticed, just repeat to yourself: “Look! Monsters! Run!”
Yes, precisely.
Well, I mostly agree, but for me the issue with the Statue of Liberty thing was that one of the things that makes the Angels really super-scary is that you have to watch them constantly, and if you blink for a second, they’re like 20 feet closer to you instantly. Having a giant Statue of Liberty head just sort of hanging out while people look away from it (even ignoring the fact that in order to get there in the first place it had to move through NYC without being spotted by anyone) just…takes away a lot of the tension for me.
It didn’t ruin the episode or anything, but it was kind of a weak moment for the sake of an admittedly great visual gag.
Something I’ve been wondering about for a long time: What about Romana? She’s a Time Lady and the Doctor left her behind in E-Space. And what about Susan? Did either or both return somehow for the Time War and get killed then? Or doesn’t he count them?
Another point: In The Doctor’s Daughter, the Doctor tells Donna that he had children, but they died. Did he kill them during the Time War? :eek: One hopes that the Daleks got them instead. Also, he left behind Leela on Gallifrey, although that was quite a while ago. She may have died before the Time War.
What’s strange is that I’m really bothered by the gravestone and somewhat less bothered by the Statue of Liberty, even though it’s arguably a much bigger problem logistically.
It’s because I think “they put it in for a reason…and I can’t make sense of it.” That’s what bothers me.
And the issue that the Doctor can’t go back and see Amy and Rory doesn’t even bother me in the slightest. Probably for three reasons
Here’s my theory of why the Doctor can’t go back in time and rescue Amy and Rory.
From time to time bad things happen to companions. The Doctor could, if he wanted, go back in time to prevent those bad things from happening. But if he started doing that then eventually he’d feel compelled to go back in time and save Adric. But the Doctor doesn’t want to save Adric, because Adric was a tool. But the Doctor doesn’t want to admit to himself that he doesn’t want to save Adric. So to avoid confronting that dark side of himself he has manufactured an obviously bogus rationale involving fixed points in time and temporal paradoxes.
Basically Amy and Rory must be banished to the past forever so that the Doctor doesn’t have to admit to himself that he’s happy that Adric’s dead. And I think that that’s a reasonable trade-off.
The Angel of Liberty was pretty farfetched. Especially when you consider that an image of an angel can turn into an angel. How many pictures of the Statue of Liberty, how many little souvenir figurines, are there in the world? Did I miss that part?
In a similar vein, I really thought they would have the elevator be dangerous. If you looked at the back you could see a picture of the Statue.
Here’s my question:
The PI in the beginning, and then Rory walk into an apartment with a bedridden, dying man. We’re then told that they’ll be trapped in those apartments until they die, with any escape attempts landing them right back in the apartment courtesy of the angels.
So did they just have to sit there and watch the body decompose?
Finally got around to watching the latest on iTunes.
That may very well be the single worst Dr. Who episode I’ve ever seen. Jesus Christ, the whole episode was just stupid. I mean, I’m not usually too bothered by lack of continuity, but the Angels are completely rewritten every time they come on the show. There’s absolutely no consistency in them. This one barely even bothered with the whole, “don’t blink” angle.
Speaking of continuity, while I don’t mind it so much when it’s not there between different episode, a lack of continuity within an episode is just shit writing. Case in point: the Statue of Liberty. The implausibility of it walking across Manhattan to stand by a building with no one in one of the most populated cities in the world noticing it, the fucking thing never did anything! It was completely useless to the plot, literally just a sight gag that meant nothing, and wasn’t all that amusing to begin with. Amy and Rory spend five minutes gazing tearfully into each other’s eyes, and the stupid thing just sits there for the entire time.
The whole, “If you read it, it becomes fixed and you can’t change it!” What the hell does that mean? Just because something’s written in a book, it doesn’t mean it has to happen. A tombstone is not proof that someone died, it’s proof that someone made a tombstone. Dig that fucker up and make sure there’s a body in that grave. Then make sure that body’s actually Rory’s. Then go back in time to some point during the fifty years between the Angel attack and his death, and say “hi,” because just because he dies there, doesn’t mean he had to spend his whole fucking life there. Hell, forget what the Doctor could do. Have Rory and Amy hop a train to San Francisco, and get Herb Caen to drop a note in the society page for the Doctor to swing by and pick them up. I mean, Jesus, we see the Doctor do just that in this episode, when he goes back to the Chinese vase makers and has them encode messages on the vase for River.
It was a stupid, desperate attempt to have a tearful farewell to Amy and Rory, and still give them a happy ending, and it simply doesn’t work on any level. Their departure was so nonsensical and internally inconsistent, that it simply didn’t work on an emotional level. Which is a shame, because these were two of my favorite companions, and they deserved a much better send off than this.
Romana apparently went on to a long life in the expanded universe material, she became er president or prime minister or the time lords?(sue me I can’t remember the term used)
I’ve been wondering myself what the deal is with Susan, was she his real granddaughter? He claims he did have children so I guess it is possible. But who runs away on a fugitive joyride in a stolen vehicle with their grandchildren?
What bothered me the most was the baby angels giggling. The angels in *Blink *were frightening, partly because they were speedy and silent.
Yeah, the cherubs bothered me on a couple of levels. For one thing, the angels now, instead of being a race of creatures that turn into statues, instead somehow possess statues that already exist. But the cherubs were supposed to be immature angels. So… angels make a point of only possessing age-appropriate statues? Okay… And the one cherub blowing out the match didn’t make a lot of sense, either. I thought they were supposed to be incapable of movement when in statue form. Except, apparently, they can breath?
NuWho loves to overuse monsters, look what they did to the Daleks. The Angels need to be given a LONG rest.
A coda. What happened to Brian afterwards? The BBC just released a storyboarded and narrated, but not actually shot, sequence. It’s really quite lovely.
Awesome. Thank you so much for sharing.
As the commenters are saying. Oh the feels. They really should have put this in the episode instead of the stupid statue of aangel…
Wowzers. That was beautiful.
On the subject of the Christmas teaser, at first I thought the guy in the hat was Geoffrey Rush but on closer inspection (and checking IMDB) it’s Richard E Grant. Who, incidentally, played the Doctor in various radio plays. In case you were wondering.