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ok but look at this gif
it looks like karen and matt are about to kiss CAN WE JUST
LIKE IF SHE HAD JUST TURNED HER HEAD A LITTLE FURTHER
ALSO HER FACE
that is all
(gif by pondspondsponds)
REBLOBBGFNING FOR COMMENT
I THINK YOU ARE ALL MISSING THE POINT OF THAT ENTIRE EXCHANGE, JUST SAYING
No, no, the correct response is “Look! Arthur and Matt almost kissed! If Arthur had just turned his head a little more…”
Okay, so I’m just going to try to catalog what things are in the canon about the Weeping Angels.
This is interesting to me, because they only have three storylines/ 4 episodes. It’s not like they’ve been developing over decades, or have dozens of hours of on-air history or anything. Discrepancies in the Angels’ behavior/ physiology/ appearance from episode to episode are more damning than variations with Daleks, Cybermen, etc.
Things established in Blink:
- It’s an Angel when you see it. All we know is that if you look at it, it turns to stone. Not “It pretends to be stone” or “It appears to be made of stone,” but “It is a hunk of stone in the shape of an Angel.”
- An Angel does not choose to turn to stone. It’s a function of the Angel’s biology that when it is seen, it turns to stone. It cannot opt in or out of being stone. “Thinking” you can or can’t see it doesn’t matter (continuity error in The Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone)
Related to this, Angels turn to stone. Not copper, bronze, brass, plastic, etc.- We don’t know what the creature itself looks like. If they turn to stone when seen, they must not be stone when they are unseen. Because you cannot observe an Angel without it being forcibly turned to stone, the Angels cannot be shown moving onscreen. (continuity error in The Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone)
- When stone, the Angels cover their eyes so they do not accidentally see one another. Because the Angels are themselves living things, seeing another Angel (or being seen by another Angel) means one or both of them is turned to stone. This fact of their biology saved Sally Sparrow and Video Store Guy in Blink. When the Angels saw one another in a ring around the TARDIS, they were all turned to stone, and trapped as such because none of them could move. (continuity error in The Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone)
- Angels feed off time energy. The Angels send people back in time the same number of years they would have continued to live, and feed off the energy given off in the transferral (or something). This is why they wanted the TARDIS, and why they feared the Crack in the Universe. Moffat did acknowledge this discrepancy in Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone.
Things established in The Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone:
- The image of an Angel is an Angel. This is particularly problematic in The Angels Take Manhattan, because there are images of the Statue of Liberty everywhere, yet none of them come to life and zap anyone. This also creates questions about all the people with SOL postcards, T-Shirts, photographs, paintings, computer desktops, etc. Shouldn’t all those people be in mortal danger right about now? Why isn’t anyone worried about that?
- Angels can strip peoples’ neocortexes and use them to psychically communicate? I don’t know, that was a weird one.
Things that are problematic in The Angels Take Manhattan:
- Angels are made out of everything. Stone, bronze, copper, etc.
- Angels do not look like Angels. Not just “they’re decrepit and damaged” like in Time of Angels/ Flesh and Stone. The Angels in Manhattan take all kinds of forms. They’re colonial settlers, children, babies, and Lady Liberty, in addition to traditional Angel forms.
- Angels do not take the Angel pose. None of the non-Angel-shaped statues cover their eyes when seen. There are some Angel statues whose eyes are covered, but by and large the other statues do not.
- How the fuck did Lady Liberty get to that hotel? I had assumed from the preview that there was some mass power outage, and so Lady Liberty could not be seen. This was patently not the case in Angels Take Manhattan, so am I seriously meant to believe NO ONE, in a city of millions of people, had Lady Liberty in their line of sight for her ENTIRE WALK to Winter Quay? We heard her walking, so it’s not like she magically flew or disapparated or anything. When Rory and Amy were jumping off the roof, there were cars driving in the street below. But no one saw her?
That’s a whole lot of canon that got either sidestepped, rewritten, or ignored over the course of four episodes. Moffat’s a man with great ideas, but he’s shit with long-term plotlines and continuity.
And anyone going “CONTINUITY IS A HUGE ISSUE IN DOCTOR WHO IT’S NOT JUST MOFFAT GOD YOU’RE SUCH A HATER,” this is continuity over the course of four episodes. If he can’t keep it together for four episodes, there is something wrong. Sorry I’m not sorry.
I think the problem here is that you’re making rules and “facts” where there really aren’t any. Like, there’s a lot of assumptions here. Just because the Angels behaved a certain way in one story, doesn’t mean they can’t act differently in another. All their stories have been completely different scenarios, with arguably completely different Angels.
- We don’t know what the creature itself looks like. This is true. However the Angels weren’t really shown moving on-screen. The lights in Flesh and Stone were constantly flickering. We saw them appear to move, however it’s strongly suggested that they were actually just going back and forth between their forms really really quickly. Hence why they were moving so slowly.
- The image of an angel is an angel. True, however I don’t think it’s ever been established that an image of an angel has to become a physical entity. It can, but it doesn’t have to if it doesn’t want to. As for why the Angels didn’t just zap everyone back in New York? Well, because they already had a functioning farm. They didn’t want to take over the earth afterall, they just wanted a solid food supply. I mean, you wouldn’t just eat all the world’s livestock in one go, would you? You’d breed them and keep a steady flow of them incoming.
- Shouldn’t all those people be in mortal danger right about now? Why isn’t anyone worried about that? Why would they? The Statue of Liberty isn’t an Angel anymore. The paradox wiped out the Angels, meaning they never got the chance to transform it.
- Angels do not look like Angels. At the end of Blink a whole bunch of statues are shown, most of which do not look like Angels. Just because we only see Angels in Blink, doesn’t mean that’s the only form they have. I mean(like another poster said), you wouldn’t look at a grey squirrel and assume all other squirrels *must* be grey, would you? The Weeping Angels are called Angels because that’s the most common form they take. Nothing suggests they can’t come in different forms.
- Angels are made out of everything. River says these Angels are “transformed”, so they weren’t “born” like the stone Angels we’ve seen previously, so it makes complete sense that they may look or work differently. This is a new ability, however not an inconsistency, because we’ve never been told that they can’t do this. It’s also likely that the Angels in this episode are older than the ones we’ve seen previously, so perhaps they just evolved? It’s not a crazy development, it makes sense that they’d “gain” more disguises as they evolved and lived in a different environment. Also at the end of Blink they do show one or two metallic looking statues.
- Angels feed off time energy. The reason they didn’t do this in Flesh and Stone is because the strong Angel(the one who crashed with the Byzantium), was already at full power, so had no need to send anyone back in time. The weak Angels also had no energy to do so, and once they were strong enough they had no desire to, because at that point they were rushing to get to the centre of the ship. Why would they waste the limited amount of energy they already had?
- How the fuck did Lady Liberty get to that hotel? Well it’s a quay so it’s right next to the water, so presumably it just hopped over through the water. Although honestly, this is something you’re really not supposed to think about, just like the Cyberking, and half the other “silly” things in the show.
- An Angel does not choose to turn to stone. This is true, however in the episode it is fairly vague. It could still be possible for their bodies to “think” they’re being observed, even when they aren’t. We don’t really know enough about their biology to say for certain. We only have this line from the Doctor, who may not even be right, seeing as he also knows very little about them.
Everything else you mentioned aren’t really plot-holes… they’re just new abilities and behaviours that we haven’t seen before. That doesn’t necessarily make them inconsistencies. They are allowed to evolve and develop, afterall. It’s not like the Angels in Manhattan were the same ones that were in Blink. They could be centuries older, and therefore more developed. We honestly don’t know. I think the point of them is that they’re supposed to be mysterious and unpredictable.
Just because they don’t act the same way they did three seasons ago doesn’t mean their canon is being “ignored”. They’re smart creatures, with varying motivations and abilities. They’re not always going to act the same or have the same abilities.
At the end of the day we know fuck all about them as a species. We’ve been given hints to how they work, but we really have very little information to go on. So it’s not really fair to interpret how they sometimes work, as how they *must* always work. The only “rules” they’ve been really given are:
- They turn to stone when observed.
- It’s biological.
But again, these only apply to the Angels in Blink. Who’s to say they can’t evolve?
Can I just add that in Blink, while being observed by Sally (and thus turned to stone) that an Angel drains the energy out of a light bulb in the basement?
While being watched, while stone, it drained a light bulb. And that was in Blink, the first episode the appeared in.
I’m not saying that canon isn’t a little screwed up, but it’s Doctor Who. The cannon has been screwed up since day one.
I still cry about the cyber king.
OMG EVERYONE PLEASE PRAY. This girl is from my town, shes in my grade and this is her last tweet…shes been missing since 6:20pm today. A cop just came to my house and questioned me since she was over yesterday. PLEASE KEEP HER IN YOUR PRAYERS. THIS IS SERIOUS!!!!!!!!! IT WONT HURT YOUR BLOG, I PROMISE!! COPS ARE CHECKING EVERY LOCAL HOTEL AND GOING TO EVERYONE OF HER FRIENDS HOUSE THAT THEY KNOW OF #HELPFINDKARA <—START THAT TREND ON TWITTER
Am i terrible for thinking: Maybe she should have used that last tweet time to call the police..
But seriously let this girl be safe, she’s beautiful xoxo
^^she was hiding. she didn’t want to talk.
a
In addition to tweeting this she also called a cab. The police are pretty certain she’s just run away. No signs of intruder or forced entry. The cab driver identified her and said he dropped her off at the train station. Don’t believe me GOOGLE IT!
It’s great that you guys have big hearts but my dash is getting cluttered by posts about that poor shepherd boy that keeps getting menaced by a wolf.
Dear Dad,
By this time, the Doctor has told you what happened. Please try not to blame him or yourself. We are safe and happy, really. Amy is gorgeous as ever, and I’ve taken up photography a bit as you can see.
The woman bringing you this postcard will tell you more. Much more. I’ll leave that to her.
We miss you, Dad, and we love you. We’ll be waiting for you. Just don’t get here too soon, okay?
Someone needs to water the plants.
Love,
Rory & Amy
Yeah I knew this one would come in handy NO WHY WHY DO THAT NOT EVEN SENSE I CAN’T…
I do not even understand why they couldn’t just MOVE OUT OF NEW YORK. Or is the Doctor not allowed to go anywhere in the 1930’s anymore? THEY’RE NOT ON ANOTHER PLANET! AND EVEN IF THEY WERE! WHY THIS I DO NOT ACCEPT NO NO.
NEW HEAD CANNON: A future version of the Doctor went back and picked up Amy and Rory and they travel with him. THAT’S WHY THERE ARE NO DATES ON THE HEADSTONE. YOU CANNOT CONVINCE ME OTHERWISE.
… you’ve been up so late you’ve decided the Doctor’s real name is Rumpelstiltskin.
Guys GUYS
What if Time Lords are like Weeping Angels?What if they absorb the energy from displacing someone in time?
What if that’s why the Doctor needs companions? What if that’s why he can never just take them for an hour, but always weeks at a time?
And he’s so guilty about it that he tries to make sure their life is extraordinary BUT STILL.
this is a follower appreciation post because if you think about it when 1 person follows you it’s not just a number it’s like a whole real person who breathes and eats and hits its pinky toe into furniture i mean it has legs and everything DO YOU REALIZE HOW MUCH OF A BIG DEAL IT IS
Love for everyone!
I have so few followers I know you all by name. Love for you all!
