As for Yaz and Dan, they’re easy prey for another Weeping Angel and find themselves whisked back to the village, only now they’re in 1901. They find the missing Peggy here, but that’s about it for the town census, as the Angels are at this point in history too. We soon learn that they’ve done more than snack on the locals – they’ve ripped the entire village and its timeline out of causality, effectively trapping everyone within its crumbling boundaries.
Back in ’67, once the Doctor’s been beaten back to the basement by the advancing Angels, Claire decides it’s time to ‘fess up to what the audience has already glimpsed. Much like Amy in ‘Flesh and Stone’, she’s got an Angel in her mind; one that’s been lurking ever since she had a premonition of this day’s events. Since the image of an Angel can itself become an Angel, her vision left Claire carrying a psychic passenger, and the Doctor has no choice but to dive into Claire’s mind too and find out what’s really going on.
Quite a lot, as it turns out. The rogue Angel hiding out in Claire’s brain is on the run from its kind, but this is far from aping Patrick Ness’s civil war ambitions. The Weeping Angels in this episode are a tactical squad working for none other than the Division. (Or just ‘Division’, as the Angel insists on calling them. Is this merely an affectation or some kind of hint?) They’re here to recapture the rogue who’s absconded with all of the Division’s secrets – and those include the Doctor’s missing memories, giving Claire’s Angel some leverage.
While this is going on, we cut back to Gerald and Jean, who have discovered the quantum extraction that’s displaced the village. Having been set up as unsympathetic characters, it’s clear that something nasty’s going to happen to the couple sooner or later, but their grim fate rather does mess with the established logic of the Angels – assuming a word like ‘logic’ can be applied to a sci-fi species of time-thieving gargoyles. Firstly, Gerald gets zapped back in time because he happens to touch an Angel while it’s in a statue form, but why? Not only have we already seen people touch Angels while they’re quantum-locked with no ill effects, Jericho and Claire do so later in this same episode and are fine.
Secondly, once Gerald and Jean arrive in 1901, they’re immediately accosted by another Angel and because “nobody survives it twice”, the next touch turns them to stone. And then they just kind of… explode. Fair enough, but we know that people do survive it twice, because that was the point of the Angels’ battery farm in ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’. (The Doctor Who audience tends to notice these details in the same way they notice, say, when an Angel the size of the Statue of Liberty is able to move around New York City unseen…)
Back in Claire’s mind, the Doctor is understandably tempted by knowledge of her past in exchange for protecting the Angel, but before anything can be agreed upon she’s rudely awakened by Professor Jericho. The Angels have made it into the basement, which means it’s time to leave through the only other route the Doctor can find – an old tunnel that runs to the edge of the village, but which also passes right through the heart of the dig-site-meteorite-thingy the Angels used to reach Earth in the first place.
