After three episodes that were frankly dreadful, this two parter is something of a welcome return to form. There is something incredibly refreshing about an ultimate threat to everything that isn’t either the Daleks or something else from the orignal series and some of the scenes were genuinely scary.

It isn’t perfect however. Moffatt seems to have forgotten that his creations send you back in time rather than kill you ( admittedly the weakest element of Blink) which makes the chief clerics laboured self sacrifce rather daft, and the bizarre and overlong final scene did dissipate the tension somewhat.

However all in all this was a promising sign that this season might not be the complete bust I wrote off a few weeks ago. Now, if they oculd just do something about his horrid costume….

Joel, I also don’t get the bit of the Angels simply killing their prey. I had to ask via post, and it was explained by others that they snapped the necks of the soldiers so that they could then use their vocal cords to entice the subsequent soldiers to their deaths. However, once the Angel started using Bob’s voice, I don’t understand why the Angel needed to outright kill the Chief Cleric. I agree that this killing goes against what was explained in “Blink”. The Cleric should have been sent back in time.

Aside from this, I thought “The Eleventh Hour” was terrific fun, “The Beast Below” was just OK, and “Victory of the Daleks” was awful. “The Time of Angels” and “Flesh and Stone” were very good and great, respectively.

There’s three thousand years between the Angels we saw in Blink and these Angels. Given that, I don’t really find it a huge problem that the older Angels needed to eat everyone’s time energy, and these Angels are focussed on killing people quickly so they can get to and use the ship’s energy.

Maybe eating people’s time energy is a bit long term? Like sitting down to have lunch and then digesting it?

Joel, Prof, i think you’ll find that the Angels are just being cruel and evil. the Angels on earth sent people back in time to feed off of their displaced energy, these Angels had all the energy they could want from the wreck of the Byzantium. they have no need to feed so you got to see their evil nature.
the Angel killed the Chief Cleric because it could and because it was fun. the Angels are evil and malevolent and that makes them even more scary to me.

It’s odd to me too how people reactions are so different to the episodes that have gone before. I loved the first one, hated episode two and really liked episode three, go figure.

these two episodes are by far the best of the series yet. fingers crossed for the second half of the season.