Doctor Who: Fear the Weeping Angels and Don't Blink

The "Doctor Who" villains known as the Weeping Angels disturb the goods guys' dreams. Bad guys' dreams too.

On YouTube, Avian Anderson discusses the Weeping Angels, considered by many to be the scariest foes that science fiction hero Doctor Who and his traveling companions have ever faced. She contemplates which basic fears they might or might not evoke: extinction (annihilation, ceasing to exist); mutilation; loss of autonomy; separation (abandonment, rejection, loss of connectedness); ego death (humilation, shame, or other mechanisms or profound self-disapproval threatening integrity of the self). She notes that the scary, scary Weeping Angels do not evoke these specific fears as clearly as many of the Doctor's other foes like the Cybermen and Daleks, so what fears do they inspire?

The centuries-old Time Lord known only as the Doctor has faced these fearsome foes in his Tenth and Eleventh incarnations (played by David Tennant and Matt Smith, respectively). These "quantum locked' villains look like ordinary statues, unable to move when anyone is looking at them. When a character looks away, even for a split-second to blink, the Angels move. Some of the less advanced Angels kill when they catch up with a person, but most instead cast characters backward in time simply by touching them. One moment, a person is standing there. In the next, that person is gone, having lived out his or her life in the past and now forever out of reach of those they've left behind. The 2012 episode "The Angels Take Manhattan" saw Amy Pond and her husband Rory Williams, two of the Doctor's most popular traveling companions (played by Karen Gillan and Arthur Darville), each vanish in a blink to leave behind their names and death dates inscribed on their shared tombstone.

Watch the video, consider Avian's speculations, and share your thoughts with her there or here with us. Oh, and tell her we sent you.

Faced with the Weeping Angels, Rory and Angel risk all, even death or getting lost in history, to spend their lives together.

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• Doctor Who: The Man Who Regrets and the Man Who Forgets

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