Doctor Who: 13 Cool Details Revealed In Steven Moffat's Time Of Angels Commentary

6. There Was Almost A Subplot About The Writer Of The Weeping Angel Fact Book

Doctor Who The Time Of Angels Eleventh Doctor River Song
BBC Studios

Speaking of that base camp, this is where the Doctor examines a book that contains lots of information about the Weeping Angel species.

The episode never tells us where this book came from, and that's because Moffat chose to remove an entire subplot about its origins, simply because he was running out of story space.

He intended to reveal that the book had been written by one of Octavian's clerics. This cleric came on the mission we see in the episode, encountered an Angel, got zapped back in time, and then wrote the book, allowing the Doctor to access it in the future.

Moffat also states that he really wanted an Angel to zap someone back in time (something that never actually occurs in this episode, despite it being the Angels' most prominent power), which was another reason why he wanted to include this subplot.

But then again, he also wanted the Angels to be more "vicious" than they were in Blink, which explains all the neck-snapping we see in The Time Of Angels.

In this post: 
Doctor Who
 
Posted On: 
Contributor
Contributor

Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!