Day 761: Flesh and Stone

Flesh and Stone, as a piece of television, does one thing that feels very wrong in the context of Doctor Who and one thing that feels very right in the context of Doctor Who. Overall it's a good episode, if perhaps not quite as strong as The Time of Angels. But when it gets interesting, it tends to deviate from being reasonably poor to actually magnificent.

So, we see the Weeping Angels move in this episode. And whilst in the context of the episode it provides something that's reasonably creepy, it doesn't work in the context of the fuller series. You see, the appeal of the angels is that they are feasible monsters. They are the sorts of monsters that you could encounter in the street, or on TV, because their design is so simple and their methods of operation are such that they can be perfectly hidden from prying eyes - except of course when those eyes turn away. But the problem with this scene is that we can seen the Angels, and yet they are moving. It stops the magic of the creatures as a whole, because it removes the viewer's point of view from the overall story, making the Angels purely and completely fictional. In my opinion, it's the greatest misstep of Series 5, and not the best showing from the production team.

So why can I forgive this episode? Because it does something that the Davies era never really did. With respect to ongoing story arcs, Davies made them be mostly in the background of stories where they weren't really noticed by the main characters until the series finale. The only problem with this is that it begins to stretch the credibility of the story, particularly in Series 4 with Rose popping up on random screens just when the Doctor looks away from them. Moffat changes this, by having the Doctor openly notice the story arc 5 episodes into the 13 episode series. The Doctor sees the crack that has been making random appearances throughout the past couple of stories and acknowledges it, before trying to figure out what it means. We learn that it represents something from the end of the Universe, and that it also has the power to rewrite time. It also forms an integral part of the conclusion of the story, which all goes to show one simple thing: this story arc proves to be more of an arcing story than Davies' arcs.

The arcing story of the crack works by appearing throughout the series, each time giving more information and building upon the overall story of the series. It makes the whole of Series 5 feel connected, as if it's one giant storybook with little adventures dashed away within it. And beyond all of that it makes the story arc feel like a real story. You can believe that when the Doctor sees something wrong that he'd follow it up and not just dismiss it as a coincidence, only for it to come crashing down in a big way come the series finale. It's this attention to the overall narrative of the series that acts as one of the many reasons why Series 5 is my absolute favourite series of Doctor Who, and why it's such a joy for me to watch again.