Flesh & Stone

[tardis_stowaway]

I’ve been rather absent from LJ for the past few days.  My internet at home has been nonfunctional (AT&T would probably have better customer service if it were run by actual monkeys with keyboards), plus I was out of town this weekend.  I've been getting my fix through a mix of coffee shops and parking outside the library after hours to get wireless from my car.  Grrr.  Anyway, apologies if I’m negligent in replying to anything!

 

 

Despite all of that, I’ve managed to see the Weeping Angel two-parter.   

Overall, I thought “The Time of Angels” was decent, with a mix of clever, scary, funny, intriguing, and otherwise awesome bits mixed in with a certain degree of fail.  “Flesh and Stone,” on the other hand, makes me want to run up to Moffat and give him a big, wet kiss because I love it so very, very much, despite some flaws.

 

Moffat promised a dark fairy tale vibe, and “Flesh and Stone” delivered in a fantastic way.  Amy had to walk through the woods and amidst a group of monsters, blind, without displaying fear or hesitation.  Y’all know how I feel about fairytales; that moment practically made me swoon.  Alas, I think I lose some literary cred from the fact that it took me until 20 minutes after finishing the episode to suddenly exclaim out loud, “Oh, man!  Red riding hood!” about her totally not coincidental hoodie color.  Now I desperately want there to be some sort of fic connecting Amy's fairytale arc with Rose as the Bad Wolf, but I have no specific ideas.  Anyone?

Alongside the fairytale, “Flesh and Stone” made some great use of science fiction.  A forest of cyborg trees in a spaceship to provide oxygen?  Awesome!  (Probably not as efficient as algae, but I suppose it could have served dual duty as a recreation area.)  I really liked the way the story used the fact that spaceships have artificial gravity and that the equipment could probably still run even if the ship was on a planet. River Song’s message to the Doctor also made great use of the potential of time travel. I love it when the show uses the genre to its potential!

Speaking of River, in ToA I disliked her every bit as much as I did in SitL/FotD (flying the TARDIS better than the Doctor?  WTF?), but F&S surprisingly managed to make her much less grating to me.  Mostly, I think it was because F&S made explicit that she is not trustworthy.  If her morality is ambiguous at best, then she starts to seem a magnificent bastard like John Hart on Torchwood, and that’s much more interesting and in keeping with her arrogant ways than the idea of her as the Doctor’s impossibly special space wife.  Interestingly, the same episode that told us that she’s a killer also had her displaying empathy and warmth toward Amy, something she’d been seriously lacking. (Earlier, the Doctor TOLD her to hug Amy and River provided a half-assed arm clasp. WTF?)    I still don’t count myself a River fan, but I am now moderately intrigued by the mystery about her, and I will not enter into any future appearances with quite so much of a cringe.  On a side note, when Octavian told the Doctor that River “killed a man” and then paused, my brain filled in with “in Reno just to watch him die.”  Until further notice, that is her crime in my mind. 

Next, some gripes, starting with continuity!  Not having had a chance to read others’ responses yet, I can only assume that I’m not the first to notice the rather huge alteration in the angels’ powers and goals since their appearance in Blink.  In Blink, they killed by sending people back in time with a touch, and looking into their eyes wasn’t mentioned as a problem.  Here, I didn’t notice a single mention of sending people into the past; they killed mostly by snapping necks, or by invading the mind through eye contact.  I guess the new ability doesn’t bother me, but why not even a mention of why this batch wasn’t killing through old age?  Also, in “Blink” the angels would freeze each other as stone if they looked at each other (hence the weeping posture), but here I’m pretty sure there were some instances where some angels had others looking at them and still moved. 

Much as I loved Amy’s walk through the woods, I wish she’d been given a little more to do besides keeping her eyes closed and trying not to die.  Also, I’m divided on the final scene between her and the Doctor.  It was a super cute scene, but a human’s unreciprocated affections towards the Doctor gave me unpleasant reminders of how poorly that arc with Martha was handled.   I really didn’t want anything similar with Amy, but I take heart from the fact that Amy is dealing with her crush not by pining but by being as aggressively determined to mate with the Doctor as Donna was NOT to mate with him. Hee!

 

Random points:

-Amy’s countdown was SCARY AS HELL, as was the sequence where the cleric soldiers kept leaving as the others forgot their existence entirely while she sat blind and helpless.   Well done, show!   

-In ToA, River announces that there is a thing on the spaceship that can’t ever die.  Please tell me I’m not the only one who thought “Jack?!?”  The Doctor even gets this look like he’s wondering “IT B HARKNESS SEX TIEM NAO, Y/Y?”

-In ToA, I facepalmed a bit when the two of the three black guys in the cleric troop went off on their own and promptly got killed before anyone else.  Did we really need the black dude dies first trope to be quite so obvious?

-Why can the Doctor frequently not hit the broad side of a barn, temporally speaking, but he’s able to pick up River with accuracy within feet and seconds? 

-OMG THE TRAILER FOR VAMPIRES OF VENICE HAS ME SO EXCITED!!!!  IT REQUIRES CAPSLOCK AND FLAILING! RORY FIGHTS A VAMPIRE WITH A BROOM AND AMY GOES UNDERCOVER AND WHY IS IT NOT SATURDAY YET?!?!