N.B. there might (or might not) be spoilers in this article!

The weeping angels are back and there’s fun to be had.

It might not all hang together plot-wise, but there’s plenty of tension and a bit more myth-making in The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone. The angels can manifest themselves out of images now and speak through dead surrogates (in a tone eerily reminiscent of those ‘Hey, who turned out the lights?’ conversations of Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead).

Like my son, I wasn’t sure about seeing them move, though.

“We keep meeting in the wrong order”

The Doctor, The Time of Angels

As much as Alex Kingston puts into her performance as Dr (here, at least, as she’s not yet a Professor) River Song, I must confess I find River’s importance to the Doctor’s life rather irritating. I mean, I love The Time Traveler’s Wife almost as much as the Moff clearly does, but at no point when reading that novel did I feel Claire (or Henry) were insufferably smug about knowing more about each other’s future than the other.

‘Spoilers’, my arse, as Jim Royle might say.

I do like how some of the mystery of the crack in Amy’s wall is solved here (especially how said crack is used to explain the hand-waving away of the ginormous Cyber King of The Next Doctor as well as Amy’s lack of knowledge of the Daleks in the previous story).

We know the Moff later regretted the final scene, although perhaps not that the seduction scene exists, more that he’s not pleased with how he wrote it.

I’m not sure if he was already starting to feel that regret when he wrote the additional scene for the DVD release. Frankly though, it doesn’t really improve things. It’s still shows the Moff wants to crack Coupling-style sex jokes in Doctor Who.

For me, I’d be tempted to excise the seduction scene in its entirety, in much the same way Chuck Lorre has cut the opening sperm bank scene from re-runs of The Big Bang Theory‘s pilot episode. Like that scene, it just feels wrong and, for me, does nothing but irreparable damage to Amy’s character. Up to this point, yes she’s been a bit glib, but her trying to cop off with the Doctor the night before her wedding makes us realize (or at the very least, question) what kind of person she really is.

Or, as my wife has always put it, it shows that Rory is too good for her.

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These are my potential Target Library titles for The Time of Angels / Flesh and Stone:
— Doctor Who and the Time of Angels
— Doctor Who and the Time of Stone
— Doctor Who and the Flesh Time of the Stone Angels