Previously on Doctor Who…

That’s right, folks. It’s the return of River Song.

Here’s a link to Cracked.com instead. It’s okay, I won’t blame you.

The episode begins with a hallucination. Specifically, a guard aboard a spaceship has been kissed by someone wearing hallucinogenic lipstick, and he’s having the trip of a lifetime. Somewhere aboard this ship, a femme fatale is causing trouble.

It’s River Song, whom you may remember from series 4’s “Silence in the Library” and “Forest of the Dead.” Thanks to the wonders of time travel, she’s someone who knows the Doctor very well, even though he doesn’t know who she is yet. Dressed in ballroom attire, she breaks into one of the ship’s rooms to vandalize its black box with blow-torched graffiti.

12,000 years later, the Doctor and Amy are walking through a museum in the distant future. There, the Doctor notices the very same black box with its graffiti writing. It turns out the writing is an ancient, forgotten Gallifreyan written language. Its message? “Hello Sweetie.” The Doctor and Amy steal the black box out of the museum, take it aboard the TARDIS, and watch some of its security footage. They see River Song standing next to an airlock, surrounded by armed guards. River looks directly at the security camera, says some time/space coordinates, and blows the airlock.

The Doctor sets the TARDIS to those coordinates, and arrives just outside of the airlock as River goes flying into deep space. He opens the doors to the TARDIS and catches her. Love her or hate her, River Song just managed one of the most badass escapes using time travel ever.

After the title sequence, we cut to both the Doctor and River piloting the TARDIS in an attempt to follow the ship River just escaped from. As if River knowing how to pilot the TARDIS wasn’t weird enough, she then points out some blue stabilizer switches that stop the TARDIS from doing that shaky-rocky thing it does during flight. She then parks the TARDIS on the ground without the engine making its classic grinding noise. Yeah, it turns out it only makes that noise because the Doctor drives with the breaks on. Curiously, River jokes that she learned how to fly the TARDIS from someone other than the Doctor.

By the way, before anyone here cries “plot hole” at River’s black box escape, Amy beats the audience to it. She asks how River pulled that off. River knows the Doctor’s habit of visiting museums to keep score of his exploits, and that the black boxes from those star ships always end up in museums in the distant future. Therefore, it was inevitable that the Doctor would run across a black box with Gallifreyan writing on it and follow the coordinates she left in the security footage.

Anyway, when everyone steps outside, they find that the ship they were following (The Byzantium) has crashed onto a cliffside, right on top of an ancient abandoned temple of the Aplan people. River then uses some sort of device to call for help from some friends who just arrived in orbit of the planet. They turn out to be a bunch of soldiers. Why was River spying aboard the Byzantium and now calling for military help? Because the ship was carrying a Weeping Angel.

For those of you who need reminding or have never seen the Weeping Angels before, they made their first appearance during the episode “Blink” in series 3. They’re a unique kind of assassin. When you look at them, they freeze into stone statues. However, not unlike Schroedinger’s cat, they change when they’re not being observed. If you turn your back to them or even just blink, they move. And they’re pretty damn fast. They can run up to you and kill you within a blink on an eye. They also absorb all sorts of energy to stay alive. During the episode “Blink,” they grabbed their victims and hurled them backward in time; for every year the victim lived in the past rather than their original timeline, the Weeping Angels absorbed a sum of time energy. They’re called Weeping Angels because, well, they look like angelic statues and they have to cover their own eyes to keep from looking at one another. Because, yes, they freeze into statues even if they look at themselves.

Back to the story. Amy notices the way River flirts with the Doctor, and starts to tease him about it. She then asks the Doctor the question that many of us want to know: “Is River Song your wife?” Of course, he doesn’t answer. I doubt even he knows for sure. The Doctor, Amy, River, and Bishop Octavian (it turns out the military men are all members of the church) meet in a capsule where they look at a 4-second loop of security footage River found of a Weeping Angel statue.

The Doctor points out that the crashed Byzantium has to be leaking radiation like crazy, and the Weeping Angel is likely absorbing it all to become stronger. The Doctor then tells the bishop to “lock and load.” And we have yet another topic where the Eleventh Doctor is different from the Tenth Doctor. The Tenth Doctor was still dealing with his issues of the Time War to such a degree that he hated the military, people who carry guns, and all forms of violence (unless he was the one who was dishing it out. He was a fun Doctor, but he was also a major hypocrit). So while the previous Doctor spent an entire two-part episode demanding that his military allies in UNIT not do a damn thing back in series 4, our current Doctor just told a gun-toting bishop that somebody might have to get shot tonight.

While the Doctor and River look up some old documents about the Weeping Angels, Amy goes back inside the capsule to look at the security footage. The recording changed. The Angel has moved. The door of the capsule closes itself and locks Amy in. Outside, the Doctor reveals to River that he doesn’t quite know who she is yet. The Doctor begins to notice that there are no pictures of Weeping Angels in the documents they found. Meanwhile…

The recording moved again. The remote can’t turn the TV off, and Amy can’t seem to unplug it. Amy turns away again…

Outside, the Doctor and River find out that any image of a Weeping Angel becomes a Weeping Angel. Then it suddenly occurs them that Amy, who is watching recorded footage of a Weeping Angel, may be in trouble.

Yeah, Amy turned away again and now the video has jumped out of the freaking monitor. The Doctor and River can’t get into the locked capsule while the Angel is controlling it. Amy is fucked. That is, until she realizes that all she needs to do is get rid of the image. She grabs the remote control, waits for the split-second blip when the loop in the footage restarts, and then tries to turn it off. That manages to distort the image of the Angel enough for it to technically no longer be there. The monitor turns off, the doors unlock, and all is safe. Amy is a genius.

The clerics/soldiers blow a hole into the side of the Aplan temple (called The Maze of the Dead because the Aplans buried their deceased into the walls) and enter. The Doctor kicks a glowing gravity ball into the air for some light. Unfortunately, the temple is filled to the brim with old Aplan statues. Looking for the Weeping Angel will be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

It turns out Octavian has some words with River. She’s supposed to be in prison, and the Doctor doesn’t know that yet. If he does find out, Octavian is afraid he won’t help them. So… who is River Song?

Everyone splits up to explore the temple, our three heroes (The Doctor, River, and Amy) sticking together. Something appears to be very wrong with Amy’s eye, but she gets distracted from that when she stops to talk to River for a moment. She asks River if she’s the Doctor’s wife, but River refuses to answer. If River is the Doctor’s wife, you’ve got to hand it to her for not being the jealous type. The Doctor travels across time and space with young women by his side all the time, and she doesn’t seem to have a problem with it.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the temple, some of the clerics are starting to disappear. They’re being lured away from the group by calls on their walkie-talkies from people who are already dead. Everyone rushes to the aid of a cleric named Bob when he flips out and attacks one of the Aplan statues that mistook for a Weeping Angel. While Octavian scolds him, the Doctor tries to comfort him into using his fear to his advantage.

Everyone decides to group back up and explore the temple together. The Doctor says that when this is all over, he and Amy should go back in time and visit the Aplans before they died out. He goes on about how lovely they were, and how they had two heads. The Doctor and River start to feel uneasy, but they’re not sure why. Then it hits them: the Aplans had two heads, but the statues in their temple all have single heads. The Doctor asks everyone to turn off their lights for a split second. When they turn their lights back on, the statues had moved.

It turns out every statue in the temple is a weathered old Weeping Angel. They’re slow and weak and are missing their wings, but every last statue is a Weeping Angel. The Byzantium didn’t crash into that temple by coincidence; the Weeping Angel onboard hijacked the ship and crashed it into the Aplan temple because that’s where all of its weakened buddies were waiting. And now with the radiation of the ship slowly leaking into the temple (don’t worry, our heroes are inoculated), they’re all slowly growing stronger.

Poor Bob got lured away by an Angel posing as one of his fellow clerics, and he gets killed. The Weeping Angels then use Bob’s voice to talk to the Doctor over the radio, and taunt him by warning that the one healthy Angel from the Byzantium is coming after them. And the Angels are no longer displacing people in time to collect their energy; they’re snapping necks and taking names (well, voices). However, the Angel also reveals that it’s no longer on the Byzantium, meaning the ship is safe ground if they can get inside of it.

Everyone runs to the ship, but Amy gets stuck. Her hand has turned to stone, and she’s stuck grabbing onto a wall. She tells the Doctor to leave without her, since her life isn’t important and she wants to the Doctor to go on and live his life with River. However, the Doctor points out that her hand hasn’t turned to stone, but the Angels are just making her hallucinate. They got into her head somehow.

The Weeping Angels corner our heroes on all sides, and they’re stuck under the hull of the Byzantium. Even worse, the Angels are absorbing the energy from their lights and the gravity ball. When the lights go out, nobody can see the Angels, and they can go absolutely hogwild. But that’s okay, because the Doctor has a very cunning plan:

He’s got a gun.

And that’s it. To be continued. This is one good old scary episode of Doctor Who. Well, it’s scary enough anyway. A kid could still watch it, but don’t be surprised to see them jump off of the sofa a few times. The Weeping Angels are some of the scariest villains Doctor Who has seen in years, and it certainly helps that they’re a lot more brutal this time around. I’m not what you would call a fan of River Song, but she’s a lot more tolerable now than she was during the last series. It’s also nice to see that the Doctor isn’t a total hypocrit about guns and violence.

See how this story ends in “Flesh and Stone.”