(761) Flesh and Stone

I was thinking before watching this episode that I would like there to be more Angel stories. But at the moment we have to enjoy what we have. The opening episode set things up nicely but the thing about this story is that it follows the trends of previous two parters and that is the second half is not as strong as the opening episode. The cliffhanger (without Graham Norton) was resolved quite cleverly when they were basically standing upside down from where they were. In the early part of the episode where they are in the tunnel there is some nice editing to help them move whilst they can’t be seen to move. Another good editing moment comes when they are surrounding the Doctor in the control room and he is looking at either side of him.

I like how Amy is slowly and subtly being turned into stone. She started counting down from 10 and saying numbers in the middle of conversations. She gets into the situation where she has to close her eyes to stop the angel inside her killing her. I thought that this was quite a clever moment. She is well used in this episode because even though she can’t open her eyes, she has to navigate the woods whilst trying to avoids the angels. This is clever writing from Steven Moffat (wonder how much longer I will be writing this).

The sight of angels in the forest are really good. This is the episode where you see them moving for the first time and I really liked it. There is something just as creepy about them moving than if we don’t see them moving. The way that they are defeated could be argued to be a bit of a cheat because they get sucked into the crack through consuming all the energy and gravity letting them down. Personally I thought that was quite a good idea and the only practical way that they could be defeated.

There is a nice bit where the Doctor goes off and the Doctor seems to come back but he appears to be wearing his jacket even though he lost it in the control room. At this time it would appear to be a continuity error but it becomes quite important at the end of the series.

I thought that the death of Octavian was a shame because it was a nice performance from Iain Glen. River Song is revealed by Octavian to have killed a good man. This starts a mystery about the identity of the victim. I thought that Alex Kingston was good in this episode.

The ending of this episode caused a bit of controversy because weird people got their knickers into a twist that Amy was acting inappropriately towards the Doctor. To be honest I thought that this was all a bit of hogwash as there has been snogging between Doctors and Companions and it all seemed to be something about nothing.

Amy’s Date was mentioned earlier in the episode and the full date was revealed before the very end and the date is June 26, 2010 which is when the final episode of the series was broadcast. This was good at the time because it made it seem that something big was going to happen on this date because a date hadn’t been put into a story so much like this.

I don’t think that this episode has quite the punch that the previous episode did but there were things in it that I found it entertaining. The series is moving along quite nicely and apart from The Beast Below, this series has shown that it could survive without David Tennant.