Time of Angels Reviews

From Denofgeek: Nonetheless, you have to give Steven Moffat some fairly hefty credit here. Appreciating that we’re all pretty much au fait with the idea of not blinking when the angels are around, and appreciating that it’s hard to make us jump out of our seat in the same manner that he did the first time round, he’s still got a few ideas to make his finest monster creations very effective.

The centrepiece moment for them in The Time Of Angels was the marvellous slight homage to a certain Japanese horror movie (not mentioning it for fear of spoiling it for those who haven’t seen it!), where Amy finds herself locked in the bunker-esque vehicle staring at seemingly recorded footage of what’s supposedly the only weeping angel in the vicinity. He slowly builds it up, and you just know something’s going to happen. And just as you’re thinking that the angel doesn’t look quite as scary this time round, the damn thing jumps out of the screen.

From Telegraph.co.uk: Matt Smith again showed that his is likely to be the most subtle portrayal of the Doctor since Patrick Troughton, leading this viewer to wonder whether this could be his Tomb of the Cybermen! His spiel to the Angels that you should never put him in a trap was a great way to close the episode, even if his shooting of the anti-gravity globe was a slightly curious twist on the cliffhanger, and one is left genuinely curious as to exactly what will happen next week.

From Shadowlocked: The pace of 'Time Of Angels' brings Moffat's season 5 back up officially to the relentless gait of the RTD era after the gentler speed of the initial two episodes was ramped up in last week's 'Victory Of The Daleks'. Adam Smith's direction can do little to inject moments of reflection in a script this action-packed. The pace to come is set with an Entrapment-style rescue of River Song (Alex Kingston), caught in an act of larceny on a Gallifrean starship but rescued millennia later by a message left in the ship's 'black box'. Elegant, and the type of long-term SOS we've not seen since Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect were rescued by Zaphod Beeblebrox when they dropped their towel in a lava-flow in The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy.

The Weeping Angels themselves are still a terrifying prospect, but Moffat has perhaps done well to extend their powers and reach beyond that which he originated in 'Blink'. Now it turns out that the Angels have infected an entire planet with their own quantum-locked nature, and that their evil reach can even spread out to living beings via a brief video-clip shown on a loop.