Who Review: The Time of Angels

Aliens is my favorite science-fiction movie on days when it's not Serenity, so I'm rather amazed at myself that I needed an internet review to point out that "The Time of Angels" is to "Blink" (3.10) as Aliens is to Alien.

Now the reviews that I've seen are sharply divided as to whether the "what you never ever ever put in a trap" speech at the end was brilliant or horrible, and perhaps because I saw no trailers for this episode and also because it reminded me about the best part of "The Eleventh Hour," I very much thought "Welcome, Mr. Smith. Welcome back, Mr. Moffat, we missed you."

(Completely tangential, but I wonder how long it's going to be before the Matt Smith Doctor introduces himself as "Dr. John Smith" as so many others have done.)

But that's not to say that the rest of the episode felt stilted at all. We actually have some honest-to-God characterization of this new Doctor - he likes to go to museums and keep score, somehow. I'm really not clear on that, but it was funny when both River Song and Amy Pond (theme naming by Mr. Moffat, perhaps?) came to the same conclusions.

I have not seen The Ring, but I know enough to know it was referenced in the episode, and while that's certainly a terrifying concept... didn't Sally Sparrow take a picture of an Angel back in "Blink?" I'm not sure the Angel-coming-out-of-the-television was particularly well-realized either, because with the grain and flickering, I almost expected it to start saying "Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope..."

I knew it when Mr. Moffat was announced as the new showrunner that his scripts weren't going to all be of the same caliber as his efforts in the first four seasons. But comparing this to "The Beast Below," it almost seems like he let someone else ghost-write the latter story. This is easily the best episode of New Who since, oh, er... "Blink," also by Stephen Moffat. But since "Blink" is one of the five best Doctor Who stories ever, let's instead say that, not counting "Blink," "The Time of Angels" is the best episode since "The Empty Child," which was also written by...

PS: KAREN GILLAN'S LEGS

Doctor Who Has Been Ripping Off Star Wars Since The End Of Time

...which, of course, had the turret battle thing (A New Hope). Then we had "The Eleventh Hour" which wasn't much of a Star Wars ripoff only because Star Wars never did anything with its one shapeshifting character other than make it the first casualty of hand-choppery in the series, and then shoot it to death with a poison dart, thus raising the question of why anyone would have elected to clone an army from a man who cannot aim, because killing his partner in that situation was stupid compared to, say, killing her captors. Or shooting her with a laser that couldn't be traced. Or not outsourcing the job anyway. Enough about horrible horrible movies, the point is, "The Eleventh Hour" was fairly (aaack, erm, cough) original as far as Doctor Who goes.

After that, though, was "The Beast Below," which featured the trash compactor from A New Hope cleverly disguised as a giant space whale's tongue. It also had an action girl Queen who ran around in a disguise and finally broke down at the end (sound familiar)? And "Victory of the Daleks" had well, a Death Star run.

(PS- how did it take the show 47 years to do Daleks in WWII, since the Daleks were originally based on the Nazis? Seriously.)