This is the big one. The Weeping Angels. Don't get me wrong. I loved "Blink" as much as anyone. I jumped at all the right places and grew attached to characters that I'd never seen before and would presumably never see again. I gave a few suspicious looks at my local artwork. I loved the Weeping Angels and considered them the creepiest Nu-Who villains since the Devil and possessed Ood in Season 2's "The Impossible Planet"/"The Satan Pit." It's a fantastic episode, and I would recommend it to anyone, familiar with Doctor Who or not. But then the Angels came back. Although their first reappearance in Eleven's "The Time of Angels" was a nice surprise and validated every single person who had shouted at Sally Sparrow to just close one eye at a time when Amy did it for us, and although they were still scary, the bottled fright of "Blink" wasn't there. Without the Weeping Angels stalking their victims on the familiarities of Earth and having a bit more mystery and misunderstanding about them, we missed the level of discomfort and confusion that scared us the first time. And then there came "The Angels Take Manhattan" in Season 7. While the end of that episode hit me almost as hard as did Nine's regeneration in "The Parting of the Ways" and Rose's departure in "Doomsday," there's no escaping the fact that the plot was actually really really stupid. The Statue of Liberty was a Weeping Angel? How does that even work? I honestly believe that Moffat came up with the image of a living and malevolent Statue of Liverty and constructed an episode around it. Unfortunately, the premise was too ridiculous to be frightening. There had to have been a better way for Amy and Rory to make their theoretically (and hopefully, for the sake of emotional honesty) final departure. The worst part of what has happened to the Weeping Angels is that they were originally the scariest and most effective antagonists created in the reboot rather than drawn from the past, but over-explained and over-exposed by Moffat. He's the creator of some incredibly eerie bad guys--the clockwork droids, the gas mask zombies, the Weeping Angels--but a lack of moderation has spoiled the eeriest of them all. At some point, we stop jumping when the Angels appear out of the dark and start wondering if the Lego Daleks are going to come back. Disclaimer: I promise that I do actually love Doctor Who. And I don't totally hate Steven Moffat.
Fiction buff and writer. If it's on Netflix, it's probably in my queue. I've bought DVDs for the special features and usually claim that the book is better than the movie or show (and can provide examples). I've never met a TV show that I won't marathon. Follow on Twitter @lah9891 .
