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| A Weeping Angel |
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 Name: The Weeping Angels, known in some circles
as the ‘Lonely Assassins’.
Format:
Television show and Book
Time of Origin: Exact origins unknown,
but they have been shown on Earth in the present and on the planet
Alfava Metraxis in approximately the fifty-first century.
Appearances: Indirectly confronted
The Doctor in "Blink";
had more direct conflicts with him in "The Time of Angels/Flesh
and Stone", "Touched
by an Angel" and "Magic
of the Angels". Illusionary versions of them appeared
in "The God Complex".
Doctors: Indirect encounter with the
Tenth
Doctor; Eleventh
Doctor.
Companions: Indirect encounter with Martha Jones;
Sally Sparrow, Amy Pond, River Song and Rory Williams.
History: As a race, the Weeping Angels are definitely
one of the most mysterious adversaries The Doctor has ever encountered,
possessing a truly unique relationship with time and the rest of
the universe, their origins a mystery even to the Time Lords and
The Doctor describing them as being irredeemably evil. The most distinctive
detail about the Angels is that they exist in a state that The Doctor
described as ‘quantum locked’,meaning that they do not
exist when they are being observed by other beings but instead freeze
into solid rock. While the Angels cannot do anything in this state
- although it has never been specified what would happen if an Angel
was shattered while it was rock, presumably because the Angels would
always get out of the way of attempts to shatter them -, they move
at such a fast rate that they could easily eliminate anyone who found
them if their potential victims so much as blinked while looking
at them. Their apparently preferred method of feeding was to send
people back in time to essentially live themselves to death - The
Doctor described them as ‘the only psychopaths in the universe
to kill you nicely’ -, the Angels consuming the potential energy
of the days their victims would have lived if they’d remained
in the present (It was implied that each Angel had a particular ‘target
date’ it sent victims back to, one Angel sending someone back
to 1920 while another sent victims back to 1969, The Doctor himself
noting that another man who came back to that date must have been
attacked by the same Angel that sent him and Martha to the past).
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| Blink |
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On
an interesting note, the Angels always sent their victims back in
time by around forty years at least under normal circumstances in
order to limit the possibility of their victims interfering in their
own pasts and creating a temporal paradox that would contaminate
the Angels’ ‘food supply’, although some Angels
were capable of feeding on temporal paradoxes so long as they simply
created the potential for the paradox to occur without taking direct
action themselves (If the Angels became involved they would ‘feed’ on
themselves). Interestingly enough, the only person to record the
history of the Angels - apparently a madman - stated that anything
that held the image of an Angel became an Angel in itself, to the
point where people could even be ‘infected’ by Angels
if they stared at an Angel’s eyes for too long as the image
would become ‘imprinted’ on their retinas. The Angels
could also gain power by absorbing excess radiation from their surroundings,
although this method would not provide them with sufficient sustenance
to exist under normal circumstances unless they were in an area with
a particularly high amount of radiation, such as a crashed spaceship.
The Doctor’s first recorded encounter
with the Angels occurred when a small group of four Angels, apparently ‘living’ in
a house called Wester Drumlins on the outskirts of London, seeking to
acquire the TARDIS, stole the TARDIS key and sent the Tenth
Doctor and
his companion Martha Jones back to 1969 during a visit to 2007 when they visited
Wester Drumlins, hoping to use the TARDIS’s time energy as a power
source to increase their food supply. Fortunately, a complicated time
loop that The Doctor and Martha had set up in their future resulted in
a young woman called Sally Sparrow - whose best friend had been sent
into the past by an Angel, Sally’s subsequent investigations revealing
that various cars had been found abandoned around Wester Drumlins in
the last two years - acquiring information from them about the Angels’ plot,
The Doctor having acquired that information from Sally during a brief
encounter between the two in 2008 before the Angels sent him and Martha
back to 1969. Using Sally’s notes - which included a transcript
of a ‘conversation’ that the two had thanks to The Doctor
recording himself saying his part of the conversation and setting it
up as an ‘Easter egg’ hidden on the seventeen DVDs she owned
thanks to The Doctor helping a friend set himself up in a DVD production
company, Sally responding to it as she watched it for the first time
-, The Doctor and Martha were able to record the message to warn Sally
of the threat posed by the Angels and provide instructions on how to
stop them. By tracking down the TARDIS in the Wester Drumlins cellar
- Sally having acquired the TARDIS key when she found it hanging from
an Angel’s hand earlier -, Sally and her friend Larry Nightingale
were able to activate an emergency recall circuit that The Doctor had
encoded on the DVDs along with the message, causing the TARDIS to travel
back to 1969. At the same time, the four Angels that had been trying
to attack the TARDIS as it dematerialised were left trapped in a circle
facing each other, all four of them frozen forever as they were stuck
staring at each other, unable to look away and restore their ability
to move.
The
Doctor’s next encounter with the Angels took place when a long-dormant
Angel that had been salvaged in an archaeological dig on the planet
Razvahan was discovered on the spaceship Byzantium in the fiftieth
century shortly before it crashed, the Eleventh
Doctor being alerted
to the presence of the Angels by the mysterious River Song, who infiltrated
the ship and carved a message in Gallifreyian in its ‘home
box’ - a black box that homed in on a habitable planet after
ejection-to provide The Doctor with the necessary coordinates to
rescue her when she ejected out the ship after being caught. Tracking
the ship to the planet Alfava Metraxis, where it crashed after its
warp drive suffered a phase shift, River revealed the presence of
the Angel to The Doctor, The Doctor quickly realising that the Angel
could gain strength by feeding on the energy of the damaged engine.
Aided by a platoon of Clerics - the soldiers of a future version
of the church - that had been dispatched to help River stop the Angel,
the team found the Angel in the Maze of the Dead, a series of catacombs
underneath the palace where the Byzantium had crashed filled with
statues of the dead built by the Aplan race before they died out
four centuries ago. When a four-second clip that River had recovered
from the Byzantium’s security cameras began to move as the
Angel in it became ‘animated’, it nearly attacked Amy
when she was studying the recording out of a lack of anything else
to do, but Amy was able to stop the Angel by freezing the tape in
the moment before the four-second loop could repeat itself again,
although she was left with the feeling of having something in her
eye.
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| The Time of Angels/Flesh and
Stone |
|
Exploring the Maze of the Dead, The Doctor realised that
the statues in the Maze were actually ‘recharging’ Angels
as every statue had only one head where the Aplans had possessed
two (The Doctor speculated that the team had either been stupid or
a perception filter had been used to stop them noticing), the Angels
using the radiation from the warp drive to restore themselves. Using
the cerebral cortex of a murdered Cleric, the Angels were able to
communicate with The Doctor over the radio, using a variation of
the Cleric’s personality to tell The Doctor what they were
planning to do. Having reached the Byzantium, The Doctor was able
to get the Clerics up to the ship and away from the Angels by destroying
the gravity globe - a device to create illumination while floating
in the air-to create an ‘updraft’ that drew the team
up to the Byzantium due to the ship’s still-active artificial
gravity after they jumped on The Doctor’s signal. Arriving
in the secondary control room, The Doctor discovered a crack in time
similar to the one that existed in Amy’s room when she and
The Doctor first met ("The Eleventh Hour"). Retreating
into the artificial forest the Byzantium used to supply oxygen, The
Doctor learned that the Angels were drawing on the energy of the
crack in time, which was caused by a temporal explosion (The Doctor
would later learn that this crack was caused by the TARDIS exploded
("The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood") due to the manipulations
of an outside source ("The Pandorica Opens/The
Big Bang")),
intending to use that power to spread their domain across all of
time and space. Realising that Amy was ‘infected’ by
an Angel from her previous encounter with the recording, The Doctor
had her close her eyes in an attempt to ‘starve’ the
Angel out of the vision centre of her brain before it killed her,
although this required her to keep her eyes closed so that the Angel
couldn’t finish the job.
With the Clerics keeping guard of Amy, The Doctor and
River set out for the primary drive control room - the Bishop of
the team being killed during the journey -, but after the crack erased
Amy’s guards, Amy was left trapped in the forest surrounded
by Angels. Communicating with Amy, The Doctor attempted to guide
her to the primary control room by turning her radio into a ‘radar’ to
try and trick the Angels into thinking that she could see, but this
idea failed when she dropped the radio, Amy only just being saved
when River managed to activate the ship’s teleport with some
of the last of the ship’s power as the Angels confronted them
directly. Although the Angels could feed on the residual energy of
the crack, the crack itself would consume them unless it was sealed,
prompting them to try and force The Doctor - a complex event in time
and space - to hurl himself into the crack so that his death could
seal it. However, The Doctor was able to use the Angels to seal the
crack by deactivating the ship’s artificial gravity, casing
the Angels to fall into the crack, their combined presence serving
as a complicated enough time/space event to amount to the same ‘level’ of
complexity as The Doctor himself. With the Angels erased after they
fell into the crack, Amy was cured of her ‘infection’ by
the Angels as the Angel that had infected her now never existed,
although The Doctor, Amy and River retained memory of it due to their
experience as time travellers.
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| The Time of Angels/Flesh
and Stone |
|
The Doctor confronted the Angels once again when a small
group of six Angels who fed on temporal paradoxes attempted to trigger
a paradox by sending Mark Whitaker - a lawyer from 2011 whose wife
Rebecca was killed in a car accident in 2003 - back in time to 1994,
just after he had received an envelope containing several fifty-dollar
bills dated before 1994 and a note that appeared to be from his future
self, containing instructions on what he should do in the past as
well as suggesting that he could save Rebecca. Although The Doctor
was able to track Mark down in the past, he decided to leave Mark
in the past after Mark told him about the note - neglecting to mention
the note's suggestion that Mark could save Rebecca -, reasoning that
Mark’s involvement in the events described in the note was
essential to preserve his own timeline. Although The Doctor was able
to follow Mark by using Mark’s CV to monitor his activities
and ensure he didn’t make too many changes to his history,
dropping in during such occasions as Mark’s first kiss with
his future wife or an incident where Mark won sixteen thousand pounds
due to a lottery ticket he found in a magazine, Mark generally stuck
to his own rules by adhering to the instructions in the letter, setting
himself up as a business consultant using his knowledge of the future
and occasionally helping his younger self’s career.
However, The Doctor was alerted to a problem when Mark’s
past self unexpectedly tracked down his future self’s role
in his life in May 2001, young-Mark making physical contact with
his future
self and triggering a Blinovitch-level explosion (Similar to the
energy triggered when The
Brigadier met his future/past self ("Mawdryn
Undead")). With the resulting fire having destroyed most of
Mark’s property, including the original note he received from
his future self and the copy he’d made to leave in the envelope
he’d received before the Angel sent him back, The Doctor realised
that the Angels must have left the note as it was otherwise impossible
for Mark to rewrite it; the note had been written on psychic paper,
and thus its contents were displayed in the handwriting of whoever
held it. With Mark having vanished while The Doctor was busy hypnotising
his past self to forget this encounter, The Doctor, Amy and Rory
- guided by a future version of Rory who had been sent back from
2003 due to an encounter with an Angel - tracked Mark to the moment
when he was planning to save Rebecca by delaying the lorry that would
have crashed into her. Although The Doctor was able to convince Mark
that his actions would undo his own timeline, as saving Rebecca would
mean that he never had a reason to want to go back in time - thus
potentially undoing their relationship as it had been at least partly
prompted along by the indirect intervention of his future self -,
they were then cornered by the Angels before they could move Mark’s
car to give the lorry the chance to continue on its route.
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| The God Complex |
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Fortunately, The Doctor was able to give Rory instructions
to set a trap for the Angels before Rory allowed himself to be sent
back
in time to become the future version they’d encountered earlier.
While trapped in the past, Rory spent the month he’d needed
to wait to catch up with his companions persuading the farmer who
owned the field where they’d confronted the Angels to set up
a series of concealed cameras and monitors, The Doctor activating
them just as Rory was sent into the past, the monitors trapping all
six Angels in a circle as they were arranged in such a manner that
a monitor was always showing at least one Angel to one other Angel.
With all but one of the Angels trapped in the camera circuit before
The Doctor destroyed it by trapping the system in a loop as he had
a camera record its own monitoring signal, The Doctor concluded that
the situation was resolved; the missing Angel would go on to become
the Angel that sent Mark into the past in the first place in a desperate
attempt to change its own past. As compensation for everything that
Mark had gone through over the last nine years, The Doctor took him
back to his university days so that he could have one last conversation
with Rebecca even if she wouldn’t know who he was, Rebecca
assuring the stranger that, if she was his dead wife, she would have
wanted him to move on after her death and find someone new rather
than spend his life mourning her. In an unexpected bonus twist, contact
with Rebecca shorted out the time differential caused by Mark’s
time in the past, resulting in him regressing back to the age he
had been before the Angels attacked him, allowing him to start his
life over in the present using the resources he had gathered in the
past.
The Eleventh Doctor faced a solo Angel once again when he
discovered that aspiring magician Sammy Star was using an Angel that
he had discovered in his act, causing his various assistants to 'disappear'
on-stage when it was really the Angel - which he kept in a box when
it wasn't 'in use' - sending the girls into the past. Although The
Doctor attempted to warn Sammy about the danger of making a 'deal'
with the Angel, Sammy was unconcerned with anything other than his
upcoming television debut... a fact which greatly concerned The Doctor
and Amy, as the result of an Angel appearing on television would
be the creation of multiple Angels manifesting from the resulting
image. Fortunately, with the aid of some of the Angel's past victims
- who had 'lived' their way back to the present -, Amy was able to
delay the Angel by taking the current assistant's place while wearing
dark glasses, thus delaying the Angel as it didn't know when she
wasn't looking at it. Although the Angel sent Sammy into the past
when he tried to attack Amy for interrupting the act, The Doctor
was able to stop it taking any more people by putting it in front
of a mirror, subsequently leaving the new Angel that manifested from
the reflection staring constantly at the original Angel, disguised
as a statue that The Doctor identified as Memorial for the Missing
to reflect those that the Angel had banished into the past (The Doctor
unconcerned about Sammy as the fact that nobody had heard of him
in the present suggested that he died in the past in obscurity) ("Magic
of the Angels").
Although the Weeping Angels have yet to return
in person, when visiting a prison ship that created illusions of
peoples' fears, Gibbis, an alien whose race is known for its pathological
desire to surrender, encountered illusions of the Angels as his greatest
fear, most likely due to the fact that the Angels are completely
relentless and will simply kill their victims where other aliens
might allow their vanquished foes to live as slaves. |
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| Season 29 (New Series 3) - Volume 3 |
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| Season 31 (Series 5) - Volume 2 |
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Touched by an Angel
(Jonathan Morris) |
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Magic of the Angels
(Jacqueline Rayner) |
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