From MadCap's Couch - Doctor Who: "Flesh and Stone"

"The Angels will master this...'Macarena'!"

Well, last time, we left our time travelers in a heck in a bit of a sticky wicket. Under a crashed spaceship inside of an ancient temple filled to the brim with Weeping Angels that were beginning to wake up and surround the Doctor, Amy, River, and the Red Shirt Brigade.

We pick up right where we left off after a recap to get us up to speed on the goings on. We come back to the group now standing on the hull of the Byzantium, their gravity inverted now thanks to the artificial gravity. Father Octavian notes the angels are looking more like angels thanks to the radiation they're feeding off of from the ship, becoming stronger. The Doctor opens the ship up and they get in, leading to a tense scene in a corridor where the Angels start manipulating the ship to seal them in a corridor with the hatch at the far end still open.

If the gravity fails, they plummet to their deaths. However, the angels can still get in... and they do.

Father Octavian and his clerics have to hold the line while the Doctor uses technobabble to get the doors open, but at the cost of turning out the lights temporarily. As they're preparing for the Doctor's plan, Amy randomly mentions ten, the Doctor correcting her on an instruction he gave.

The bullets fly in the dark and the Angels move in the flashes of darkness à la Blink, but the Doctor does manage to sonic the door open and get everyone through. On the secondary flight deck, Father Octavian magnetizes the door to keep the Angels out, claiming that it would keep anything from opening it... and yet the wheel continues to turn on it and the other doors.

Octavian asks the Doctor how long they have, and the Doctor tells him "five minutes".

Amy says... "Nine".

The comfy chairs line is a bit of tension cutting done right.
Take note, Rose.

Needing an escape route, the Doctor opens up another chamber that leads to... a forest. A forest, filled with artificial trees. Apparently some ships in the 51st century have engines that run on air. Amy is stunned and proclaims "Eight", much to River's worry as she, too, notices it. The Doctor speed talks through the explanation to Amy and she laughs, proclaiming "Seven".

Angel Bob comes over the communicator, the Doctor sitting in the command chair to talk to him. The Doctor gets Angel Bob to say "comfy chairs", a moment that is immediately undercut by Amy saying "Six" and then insisting that she's "five"... the angels are doing something to Amy after she looked into their eyes. Angel Bob insists that the angels are almost ready to spread across time and space consuming everything, but the Doctor retorts that it's impossible, seeing as there isn't remotely enough power on this ship to do that. A sound that sounds like it came from Hell itself is heard, which Angel Bob says is the angels laughing. Why? Because the Doctor in the TARDIS hasn't noticed.

Up on a section of wall, over their heads, is another Crack. An identical crack to the one seen in the previous few episodes.

The Doctor gets the others to leave, scanning the Crack with his sonic and ends up surrounded by Angels that very nearly catch him. The angels seem to be bowing before the Crack, which the Doctor claims is the fire at the end of the universe and not something they can feed on. The distraction allowing him to escape... somehow.

In the forest, Amy, River, and the clerics move toward what they hope is an escape route. Amy begins to go catatonic. As she drops to lie on a rock, River gets Amy scanned. The Doctor returns to the group after River has a "You're standing right behind me" moment and learns from the medical scanner that Amy is dying. He ends up working out that there's an Angel in Amy's mind and learns from Angel Bob that the Angels are making her countdown... for fun. She's going to die... at least until the Doctor tells Amy to close her eyes, which she does and thus she stabilizes.

The angels surround the group, the Doctor working out the basis of a plan. He takes River and an insistent Father Octavian with him (that refuses to let River out of his sight). Amy laments that the Doctor is leaving her again, the Doctor comforting her with the knowledge that he always comes back.

Suddenly, the Doctor appears... wearing a gold wrist watch that he wasn't wearing just a short time ago as well as his coat that was left in the hands of the Angels in a previous scene. He implores Amy to trust him, promising her that he's working out what the Cracks are and tells her that she needs to remember, kissing her forehead before he disappears without a sound.

"Hello there! Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior, Rob Benedict?"

...more on that later. Or is it earlier?

River questions how the Crack can be the end of the universe, the Doctor wonders how River and Father Octavian are "engaged". River tries to play it off, but Octavian lays it out - he took River from the Stormcage facility and he's personally responsible for her until she has earned her pardon.

Meanwhile, the Doctor's device has worked out when the explosion that causes the cracks is going to happen: 26 June 2010... the day of Amy's wedding.

While they work to get into the control center, back at the clearing with the clerics and Amy, the angels are shutting off the cyborg trees. However, a bright light comes from the room they left and some angels seem to vanish as it touches them. Their motion trackers show the Angels running away from it. The clerics and Amy are naturally confused, their lead sending a pair of men to it...

The Doctor fast talks himself through some more exposition (Matt Smith in particular is great at this) about the Crack, thinking on how time can be rewritten or unwritten. Musing on the fact that Amy didn't recognize the Daleks despite the fact that she should. Or how the Cyber-King walked across Victorian London and no one remembers it. The Cracks have been erasing people and events across time and space.

To demonstrate this: back in the forest, Amy opens her eyes just for a second (though it's really 21 - yes, I counted) to look at the Crack. The lead cleric sends his last man to it, Amy asking him about the other two and see insists that there were no other two men. The lead ends up going toward the light after giving Amy a spare communicator and promising that he'll come back.

He won't.

Octavian gets the door to the flight deck open and lets River in to get to work. The Doctor is so distracted by the thoughts of the Crack that he does not notice until it's too late that an Angel has grabbed the Father. He insists that the Doctor go on without him and insists that he not trust River Song. She ended up in the Stormcage because she murdered a man, a good man and a hero to many. Octavian avoids telling him who, and decides to face his death with dignity, the Doctor giving respect to the man before leaving him.

River's working on a teleport despite the Doctor insisting otherwise.

"Stand quickly, or James Gunn will pull you into a Marvel franchise!"
"Oooh!"
"Amy, NO!"

Amy now sits alone in the forest with the communicator, after listening to the last cleric disappear the Doctor gets in touch. She explains the situation and the Doctor apologizes for leaving her there, using his sonic to give her a noise to follow while keeping her eyes closed. He explains the stakes to get Amy moving - if the time-energy catches her, she will be completely erased and will have never existed. With a proximity detector, Amy will now have to walk like she can see... which muddies up the Angels, but we'll get back to that.

The Doctor is apparently planning to feed the Crack a complicated space-time event - namely himself.

Amy, surrounded by Angels and the tension is at an all-time high as she works her way through the angels (with the Doctor not being a particularly encouraging sort) until she trips over a root and we get the first instance of an Angel moving onscreen, which ruins a great deal of their power and menace. They realize that Amy can't see and begin to swarm... and River teleports Amy out at the last possible second. An overjoyed Doctor tells River that he could kiss her. "Maybe when you're older".

The power fails and the door to the Forest opens, showing a cavalcade of Angels. Angel Bob tells the Doctor that the Angels want him to throw himself into the Crack to save them, promising to spare Amy and River. However, the Doctor reveals his ace in the hole, having Amy and River hang onto something as the gravity fails and the Angels all fall into the Crack, closing it.

And then on the beach where this all began, we get the wrap up. Amy is now free of the influence of the Angel, the Angels getting consumed means that the Angel in her mind never existed. Amy questions how she can remember everything even when the others couldn't, the Doctor explaining that her status as a time traveler has changed her perspective. Also, while this Crack is closed, the explosion that caused it is still going to happen... or is happening... or already happened. It's all a bit timey-wimey, really.

"...but where's the fun in that?"

River is taken back in handcuffs by more clerics, hoping she has earned her pardon this time. The Doctor questions her about what Octavian said, River confirming that she did kill a man - the best man she ever knew. She doesn't give spoilers about that, but does tell the Doctor that she'll see him again soon. Quite soon, in fact... when the Pandorica opens.

Once back in the TARDIS, Amy asks the Doctor to take her home, but not for the reason that he thinks. Returning to that house in Leadworth, Amy shows her wedding dress and you just know the Doctor is having some serious Déjà vu with another redheaded bride. After explaining her situation, Amy...

Hang on, I need a moment for this one.

Amy sexually assaults the Doctor. There's really no way to sugarcoat it, Amy outright gets grope-y in a way that would have people calling for heads if the genders were reversed. This is kind of the problem with Moffat's writing in some places. The man is not afraid to mix sexuality with Doctor Who - despite what some of the purists say, I've made my views on that clear before - and he's a really brilliant writer, but every so often you get a scene like this that is just... uncomfortable.

Amy pays for this later with a bit of emotional damage, but still. It's something that gets brought up in the next episode and then never really again. To Moffat's credit, he has expressed his change of opinion about the scene, now regretting having included it.

Regardless, getting snogged has gotten the Doctor's mind straight on the subject. The Cracks have everything to do with her, saying that he needs to get her sorted out right away. He pushes her into the TARDIS, looking back at the clock as the date changes over to midnight on 26 June 2010... the date of the explosion.

Flesh and Stone is a little bit of a disappointment after how well set up and executed The Time of the Angels was. While that episode gave us more lore for the Weeping Angels, this one starts their downward slide. Their first appearance in Blink was so insanely well done, what might have been unintentional meta with the Angels' lack of movement while onscreen - meaning that the viewer is someone that they have to keep still for. That gets broken here, and honestly not for the better. I know it may be a personal choice, but I prefer that aesthetic and now it's just gone.

Granted, it gets somewhat better later, but it's like when someone tells you how Strawberry Fields Forever is actually about. It loses some of the magic.

See...right here? This is about where the Angels should have realized they were boned.

We also get a bit of confusion with how the "Angels can't move unless they're being observed" thing works. The Doctor in Blink tells us that not being able to move while being seen is a fact of their biology like breathing is for us. Here, though, they can be tricked into triggering it if they think you can see them? The Doctor has a throwaway line about them not being interested in her because of trying to get away from the time field, but I don't understand why that has anything to do with that. It's like telling me I can stop breathing and survive it if someone happens to be whistling near me. Two things that have absolutely nothing to do with each other.

Also the obvious set up for River is obvious, but we won't get into that until we're deep in Series 6, so let's put that on the backburner for the time being. Don't worry, we'll come back to it in due time.

Next time, we deal with the consequences of the final scene of this episode - except not really. The Doctor, realizing that terrible mistakes have been made, picks up Rory from his stag party to save the impending marriage of Amy and Rory. A trip to Venice in 1580 will set things right, or so it seems. Something sinister is going on at a school for girls. They're creepy, don't like sunlight, and can't be seen in a mirror...

Next time, it's Vampires in Venice!

Be there!