Troughout the first four series of the revived Doctor Who, it seemed as if. Moffat
could ... Blinkvi is generally accepted as one of the most frightening episodes in.
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Getting to Know e Angels: Steven Moffat’s Biggest Mistake. Resubmission essay by Magnus Hølvold, 07006747
“You can't kill a stone. Of course, a stone can't kill you either, but then you turn your head away... Then you blink... And oh yes, it can.”i
Doctor Whoii is arguably as much a part of the modern British cultural heritage as the work of William Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde. It has been aired and lampooned all over the world and has grown even more popular with the revival of the show in 2005 iii. Doctor Who revolves around a “timelord” called the Doctor and his travels through space and time in his TARDIS, a time machine that looks like a British Police Boxiv. e Doctor is usually accompanied by one or more “companions”. While the companions would change, the Doctor was always the same person. When the actor portraying the Doctor left the series, they would arrange for the Doctor to “die” and “regenerate” in a different body and with a different personality. In this way, the show's creators over the years have been able to keep the show fresh. Steven Moffat was one of the most productive writers on the Who writing team after the revival; he wrote one storyline for each of the four first series – two of which were two-parters - winning several awards for his effortsv. As Moffat's track record shows, he revels in terrorising his audience by turning the familiar into a threat and confirming that there are indeed monsters under your bed, and that the statue did in fact move while you weren't looking. roughout the first four series of the revived Doctor Who, it seemed as if Moffat could do no wrong, and the most terrifying and unsettling of Moffat's creations are
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the Weeping Angels. Blinkvi is generally accepted as one of the most frightening episodes in the history of Doctor Who. In Blink, the Angels are described by the Doctor as “e Lonely Assassins”, a race of creatures that have evolved to freeze into what looks like stone angels when observed by any other living creature. Unfortunately, while the Angels may be impossible to kill in their stone form, their effect on the viewer is not impervious to the mistakes of the writer who created them and the team bringing them to our screens. For the fifth series of Doctor Who, Steven Moffat – now chief writer and executive producer – brought the Weeping Angels back, triumphantly stating in an interview for the behind-thescenes featurettes of the show; “Let's be clear; I'm running the show, and those were my monsters, and they were incredibly popular, so I'm bringing them out for a- a lap of honour.”vii is victory lap may have been the single biggest mistake Moffat has made, turning uncanny stone statues that sneakily displace you in time and space into generic killing machines.
Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. […] Don't turn your back, don't look away, and don't blink! Good luck.viii
Blink opens on a dilapidated house into which the character Sally Sparrow enters. She is taking pictures of the interior of the house when she discovers something written on the wall, hidden behind decades-old wallpaper. Ripping off the wall paper, she reveals a cryptic warning: “Beware the weeping angel”, followed by “Oh, and duck! No, really, Duck!” increasingly worried by these warnings, she finally reveals her own name behind the wallpaper (“Sally Sparrow duck, now!”) just in time for her to duck and avoid a stone that comes crashing through the window. As she points her flashlight through the window, she sees a stone statue in the yard. e statue resembles an angel with its hands to its eyes as if weeping. e message on the wall ends; “Love from e Doctor. (1969)” e initial effect
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of these writings on the wall, even though they are textual rather than vocal, are strongly related to the power of the acousmatic voice in cinema as discussed by Michel Chion in e Voice in Cinemaix. e message is represented within the frame, coming from a source unseen. e uncanny sense conveyed is that the person who wrote the message is somehow there without being present in the space. Not only that, this person also knows that Sally is in danger years before she was even born. If someone holds the power to tell the future, there is no telling what other powers this so-called Doctor has. e moment the viewer sees the final piece of the message, the “voice” on the wall is not just de-acousmatised but transformed to “the already visualised acousmêtre, the one temporarily absent from the picture, [which] is more familiar and reassuring.”x is is only true for the viewer, of course, a Sally has never seen nor heard of the Doctor.
When she returns to her friend Kathy's flat, we see the Doctor for the first time in this episode. Rather than being present in the scene, he is on a TV screen in the flat for no apparent reason, finishing his “Don't turn your back” speech, a speech we get to know a lot better by the end of the episode. Sally then notices that the Doctor is on a multitude of screens in the same room, though she still does not connect the man on the TV with the Doctor. e next morning, Sally brings Kathy to the house. When Kathy sees the angel, she immediately takes a dislike to its countenance, and Sally is convinced the angel has got closer to the house. Not that it could have, of course, it's just a stone statue. Often, we will see something at one time of day only to have it look closer, further away, bigger or smaller at another time or from a different angle. We always convince ourselves quickly that it was simply a trick of the light, but there's a moment of uncertainty when we first discover that this inanimate object seems to have moved. Worse than the idea that it has moved is the fact that it is obviously trying to hide the fact that it even can move and that we have
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caught it in the act, so to speak. is is directly related to the definition of the uncanny given by FWJ Schelling which seemed to be the only concise definition Freud could more or less accept: “the term 'uncanny' applies to everything that was intended to remain secret, hidden away, and has come into the open”xi with one modification: We have not fully uncovered the secret. ough Freud argues against Jentsch's idea that the uncanny arises from intellectual uncertaintyxii. As someone claiming to be Kathy's grandson appears at the door of the old house with a letter for Sally, Kathy is taken by the Angel in the garden. is is done in a sequence of shots where we never once see the angel move. It appears closer to the house, then it is looking up from behind its hands, it is inside the house, behind a door, and before Kathy knows what is happening, she is in a field in Hull in 1920. When Sally arrives in the room Kathy was in, there are several angels in the room, but no Kathy. Sally moves in front of one of them, and it shifts its position in the split second we cannot see it. e effect is visceral and immediate. is is a fly-on-the-wall perspective in the literal sense; we are part of their world, which means that we have no external power over the angels. Jentsch argues that Hoffman's automaton Olimpia is particularly uncanny as we are guided away from thinking too closely about her inhumanity and so we are “not given the occasion to investigate and clarify the matter straight away”xiii. is is largely the situation we find ourselves in with the angels, except that in our case, it is by force that we cannot investigate.
Sally sees the Doctor again on a screen in the video shop Kathy's brother works in. Initially, his image is paused. Apparently, this video is an “easter egg” found on 17 different DVDs. Eventually, the video is unpaused and the Doctor speaksxiv. When Sally makes a flippant remark about his explanation of time, he responds; “It got away from me, yeah.” She responds and appears to be answered yet again. To us, this is not an uncanny scene, as we already know the Doctor and are waiting for the reveal of how he is doing this, but
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again someone is speaking directly to Sally through a pre-recorded medium and his acousmêtre remains intact for her. roughout Blink Sally is contacted and communicated with by voices from the past. Not only through the Doctor's written and recorded messages, but Kathy's letter, written before either of them were born, and the return of Billy Shipton the same day as he disappeared but 38 years older. e uncanny notion that our own choices and actions are somehow predetermined or controlled by someone else is one that even Freud himself admits toxv having felt.
As Sally goes to the police, it becomes obvious that the angels are stalking her, playing with her. ey could easily take her, but they choose instead to appear outside the windows of the police station and they “take” detective Billy Shipton rather than Sally. Like Nathanael in e Sandman who finds himself haunted by the demon Coppeliusxvi, Sally can feel the effect of these apparently living statues; “Okay... cracking up now.” she says as they appear and disappear again outside the police station. We do not know why they do this, and beyond the angels feeding off potential energy and hoping to use the TARDIS as a never-ending source of this energy, their motivations and psychology remain obscure. We can only guess how and what they think. is gives them more psychlogical power, as we do not know when, where or how they might decide to strike again.
As we come into the denouement, the Doctor's acousmêtre is intact for Sally and Larry, though they are now certain the Doctor is trying to help as they appear to be enacting the missing half of the Doctor's conversation. When one of the Angels appears in the house, its fangs are bared and talon-like fingers are reaching for Sally and Larry. As they escape to the basement, the Angels affect the only light bulb in the room, making it blink repeatedly. Again using the camera as a literal fly on the wall, Sally and Larry enter the
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TARDIS, leaving us alone with the Angels. Even now all we see is the TARDIS rocking back and forth when it is dark, as the angels shake it. When the light bulb flashes, the TARDIS stops moving and the angels appear – as always – immovable like rock. e director, Hettie Macdonald, teases the viewers by letting us see even the direct cause of their motion happening before our eyes but never the Angels themselves in motion. We never gain the upper hand in the situation and so it is a great relief as the TARDIS dematerialises and the Angels are stuck, forever observing each other. e episode ends with a final repetition of the “Don't look away” speech intercut with images of completely innocuouslooking statues, Moffat and Macdonald delivering a last sting to the viewer's sensibilities.
It is obvious that the Angels are unsettling creatures. ey have become a favoured monster of Doctor Who fans and have the capacity to frighten even adults. Whether you are reading Jentsch, Freud or Chion, it is not hard to see why. Jentsch would suggest that this is in part a question of intellectual uncertainty that we are not able to clear up. You believe the statue might have moved, but there is no way for us to satisfy our curiosity without looking away. No matter how hard we look at them, how hard we study them, the very act of studying them precludes our full understanding of the Angels because they will not move. Whenever we are not looking at the Angels, they could be absolutely anywhere. In this, the angels share similarities with the acousmetric voice discussed by Chion, though in some respects reversed. In the same way a voice is a sign or a representation of a being's existence, a statue is the representation of a being. In other words, the Angels are a voice without a body as well as a body with no voice. When we can see the Angels, their “voice” is anchored in the form of a statue. en we look away and the angel becomes an acousmetric voice with the power that implies. In the words of Chio;, “ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience, and omnipotence.”xvii Angel statues are meant to be a reassuring,
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guarding presence. Like a mother to a child. ey are the double as guardian spirit, but these angels hide their faces in their hands, signifying not necessarily weeping, but looking away, ignoring our plight. When they are beyond our field of vision, they deny their children the reassurance of the mother's voicexviii, and as they skulk behind our backs, “the meaning of the 'double' changes: having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.”xix Our old, familiar guardian angels have become hidden and secretive to us; ey have become the uncanny Weeping Angels.
Vision, perception and representation are all important to Moffat's view of the world. e nanobots of e Empty Childxx tried to reconstruct the human race based on the visual image of a boy with a gas mask, making the mask part of their physiology. roughout Silence in the Library and Forest of the Deadxxi, we are presented with the goings on in the library through a television set in the simulated world of the computer, and the girl in the computer moves around the library as a floating lens. e “ghosting” in the space suits as their occupants die are also a representation of the person's consciousness rather than the actual mind of the person dying. In e Girl in the Fireplacexxii, e Doctor and his companions are on a spaceship that looks onto various rooms in the 18th century almost as if it were a theatre stage or a film. Finally, Blink is packed from start to finish with references to vision and light and its importance: Sally is a photographer, e Doctor appears on the video screens, the flickering lights and a prevalence of looking through windows, which give us a view to the other side of a wall and simultaneously limits that view significantly.
“What if we had ideas that could think for themselves? What if one day our dreams no longer needed us. When these things occur and are held to be true, the time will be upon us. The time of angels.”xxiii
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e first episode of the new Angels story, e Time of Angels, starts as a new Doctor and companion land by an old catacomb into which a space ship has crashed, carrying a Weeping Angel. e Doctor immediately makes a complete about-turn on his previous opinion of the Angels, saying “A Weeping Angel is the deadliest, most powerful, most malevolent life form evolution has ever produced.” which is far from the lonely assassins who let you live to death. is sudden turn from the hidden foe to an open menace turns out to be a theme of the “Blink sequels” and one that negates the uncanny power of the Angels. Before I go through this, however, I will look at some of the aspects that work.
ere is one change in the Angels that is highly welcome. Expanding on the importance of representation to the uncanny power of the Angels, they are given a new power: “at which holds the image of an angel becomes itself an Angel.” e Doctor's companion Amy is trapped in a room as the Angel in a 4-second looping video clip shifts its position between the flickers at the end of the loop. e Angel starts to materialise outside the screen, and is only stopped after Amy has looked it in the eyes despite warnings from the Doctor not to. is encounter embeds the image of the Angel in Amy's “mind's eye”, which slowly takes over Amy's mind until she – in the second part, Flesh and Stone – starts counting down from ten involuntarily. Surrounded by Angels, she is forced to shut her eyes in order to keep the Angel inside her from materialising in her mind's eye. It is like trying to hide in a circular room with no furniture. ere is a group of soldiers guarding her, but they disappear into a crack in time one by one, leaving her alone and supremely vulnerable. e importance of perception and sight is also ramped up in this storyline in other ways. Here, all flashlights make a sound that is particularly strong as they sweep them across the camera. e sound designers have thus imbued the flashlights with a palpable sense of the power of perception. is becomes particularly important as the soldiers in this
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episode carry guns with a flashlight attachment, an ironic twist as the gun itself is useless against the Angels. Near the end of A Time of Angels, the cast realise that the catacombs with thousands of stone statues are in fact not filled with statues but Angels. e realisation that they have been walking among thousands of Angels, trusting them to be inanimate objects, is uncanny indeed. Finally, as the first few soldiers are lured from the group and killed, their voices are used to call up the other soldiers, asking them to “come and see.” Again, a reference to perception.
ese are some of the major strengths of the representation of the Angels in e Time of Angels and Flesh and Stonexxiv, but even within these strengths, the greatest weaknesses are found. I used the word “kill” to describe what the Angels do to the soldiers because in this story, that is what the Angels do. In Blink, you do not know what happens when you are taken by an Angel. You could end up at any random time in any random place, left to make your way in a world you've never known. However, if your enemy snaps your neck, you are quite simply dead. is is certainly a threatening prospect, but there is nothing uncanny about being dead. Moffat tries to overcome this by using the voices of the soldiers as a voice for the angels; the dead become our enemies, but this does give Angels a voice. e lack of a voice is important for more than the reasons previously discussed: If you cannot communicate with something, its motivations are hidden from you. e Angels use their newfound voice to let the characters know their motivations and their feelings, solidifying and demystifying them. In many ways, this is similar to what has happened to vampires in the past half a century. Authors like Anne Rice and filmmakers like Joss Whedon have contributed to an exploration of the psyche of vampires, demystifying them to the point of ridiculousness. is is the point where Stephenie Meyer is able to turn vampires into romantic leads in stories aimed at teenaged girls.
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ousands of Angels are now feeding off the radiation leaking from the hull of the crashed space ship. Leaving aside the fact that they now feed off radiation rather than the potential energy of living beings, there is a big issue with the masses of Angels. Suddenly, the fight becomes impossible and the advance of the Angels inescapable. e inevitability of the advance of the Angels removes all elements of hope and the viewer is left to wait for the Doctor to come up with a brilliant last-minute plan to save the day (which he of course does). ere is nothing uncanny about this inexorable advance of these Angels of Death as we know what they want and we know where they are: everywhere. e only person left in uncertainty is poor Amy, stuck between the Angel in her head and the Angels around her. is where the final blows against the Angels as uncanny harbingers of doom are struck. It turns out that since the Angels are not currently paying that much attention to Amy, they haven't noticed that she can't see. ey believe her to see them, so they freeze. In other words: You can trick the Angels by walking as if you can see. Suddenly, the angels are all too human. If you can cheat an Angel, it holds no power over you. e power of the Angel was the very instant you cease to observe them, they are faster than – well, the blink of an eye. en, the Angels move. On camera, in the shot, the Angels start to turn their heads and move their arms. It is visually a well executed sequence, but within a second of the Angels moving, they lose every ounce of power they had left over the viewer. We are removed from the action as we become witness to their motion and can observe relatively impassively as the rest of the episode transpires.
e Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone both work very well as episodes of Doctor Who. ey make for a suspenseful and at times heart-racing adventure that is good fun and a little bit terrifying for the whole family. As “sequels” to the most uncanny and unsettling of all Moffat's creations, however, they have lost something crucial: Uncertainty and
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candidness. As I have shown, Blink is fuelled by Jentsch's uncertainty, Freud's resurgence of the hidden and Chion's acousmêtre, all of which are linked to the power of perception. In the “sequel”, Moffat and the team of filmmakers try to introduce new elements of perception, but work against themselves throughout in an attempt to “ramp up” the episodes and make them “bigger” than Blink. My mind is cast repeatedly toward Alienxxv and its sequel Aliensxxvi. Alien was about a small crew of “space truckers” being terrorised by a single, menacing presence that would sneak through the ducts of the space ship, turning it from a home to a place of terror. In Aliens a large group of trained fighters go into enemy territory to fight a swarm of these aliens. As you can tell from this brief description, the similarities between the two first Alien films and the Weeping Angels stories are striking on a surface level. While Aliens is a terrific gung-ho action film, it holds very little of the horror and suspense of its predecessor, and this is very much the case for the Angels. I will not suggest that it would have been a wise choice to make another Angels story exactly like Blink. Whenever you make another story about the same subject, you have to go deeper in some way. So the greatest mistake Moffat made was not any of the individual aspects discussed here, it was to bring out the Angels for their ‘lap of honour’ at all.
BIBLIOGRAPHY Chion, Michel, e Voice in Cinema, ed. by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) Freud, Sigmund, e Uncanny, ed. by Adam Phillips, (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2003) Jentsch, Ernst, On the psycholog y of the uncanny (1906), ‘Angelaki: Journal of eoretical Humanities, 2 (1997)
ENDNOTES: i
Doctor Who: Blink, dir. by Hettie MacDonald (BBC, 2007), t. 28:30.
ii
Doctor Who, dir. by various (BBC, 1963-2011).
iii
Doctor Who as a TV series was on a hiatus between 1989 and 2005 (save for a made-for-TV movie in 1996), after which it was helmed by Russell T. Davies as chief writer and Executive Producer through 2009. For more information: Unknown author, ‘A Brief History of a Time Lord’, BBC official site, [accessed 29 november 2010].
iv
A call box for the use of the police or the public to contact the police that was in essence a miniature police station with various facilities for police officers to use. For more information: Unknown author, ‘Police Boxes’, History of the Metropolitan Police, [accessed 29 november 2010].
v
Unknown author, ‘TV CRAFT WINNERS Round-up’, British Academy of Film and Television Arts website, [accessed 29 november 2010].
vi
Blink, dir. by Hettie MacDonald (BBC, 2007).
vii
Steven Moffat (in interview), video clip: ‘Doctor Who Confidential – Blinded by Light’, BBC – Doctor Who – Weeping Angels, [accessed 29 november 2010].
viii
Blink, t. 03:00, 32:50 and 41:40.
ix
Michel Chion, ‘e Acousmêtre’, in e Voice in Cinema, ed. by Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 16- 29.
x
Chion, p. 21.
xi
Sigmund Freud, ‘e Uncanny’, in e Uncanny, ed. by Adam Phillips (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 2003), pp. 121-162 (p. 132).
xii
Ernst Jentsch, ‘On the psychology of the uncanny (1906)’, Angelaki: Journal of eoretical Humanities, 2 (1997), 7-16 (p. 11).
xiii
Jentsch, p. 13.
xiv
Blink, t. 15:00.
xv
Freud, p. 144.
xvi
E.T.A Hoffmann, ‘e Sandman’, [accessed 29 november 2010, downloaded as ‘PDF’], p. 9.
xvii
Chion, p. 24.
xviii
Chion, p. 17.
xix
Freud, p. 142.
xx
Doctor Who: e Empty Child and e Doctor Dances, dir. by James Hawes (BBC, 2005).
xxi
Doctor Who: Silence in the Library and Forest of the Dead, dir. by Euros Lyn (BBC, 2008).
xxii
Doctor Who: e Girl in the Fireplace, dir. Euros Lyn (BBC, 2006).
xxiii
Doctor Who: e Time of Angels, dir. by Adam Smith (BBC, 2010), t. 28:40.
xxiv
Doctor Who: Flesh and Stone, dir. by Adam Smith (BBC, 2010).
xxv
Alien, dir. by Ridley Scott (20th Century Fox, 1979).
xxvi
Aliens, dir. by James Cameron (20th Century Fox, 1986).
