Bringing together two of Steven Moffat's most popular additions to Who's mythology, the first two-parter of Season Five saw the Doctor team up with his future missus, River Song, to recapture an escaped Weeping Angel from the catacombs beneath a crashed spaceship. While never coming close to matching the scariness of 'Blink' or intrigue of 'Silence In The Library', Moffat spins a suspenseful, action-packed yarn which is about as close as Who will ever get to riffing on James Cameron's Aliens. This is Moffat when he could still tie together a large number of interweaving plot strands and character arcs without becoming over-complicated, and despite the volume of detail underpinning the episode's basic narrative, it's all surprisingly easy to keep up with. True, replacing the Angels' 'killing with kindness' threat with a more standard neck break reduces their distinctiveness by several orders of magnitude, but it's a small sacrifice to make when the story wouldn't work as well with any other monster and one of the additions to their arsenal (their ability to physically manifest themselves through captured images, including the mind's eye) is inventive enough to compensate. The army of clerics is a bit of a bust, with no narrative reason given for their religious bent, but River is a welcome return and both the character and Alex Kingston's performance are less grating than they would become in later years. Of the new elements, Karen Gillan continues to put her endless charisma to good use, playing Amy with greater depth than Moffat writes her and sneaking suggestions of self-doubt and uncertainty behind her sarcasm. Where Moffat does deserve credit is his handling of the season long arc, feeding viewers just enough information about the cracks in time to raise even more questions while turning what seemed like a continuity error at the time into a brilliantly played reveal in the season finale. He also has Matt Smith imitate the TARDIS noise, which is just about the best thing ever.
28-year old English writer with a borderline obsessive passion for films, videogames, Chelsea FC, incomprehensible words and indefensible puns. Follow me on Twitter if you like infrequent outbursts of absolute drivel.
