Howling:Interesting questions from The Time of Angels


 * The Angels convince Amy that her hand has turned to stone. Karen Gillan previously play the Soothsayer in Fires of Pompeii, who was turning to stone, beginning with her hand. Since the show has previously connected up separate characters played by the same actor in various ways (e.g., Gwyneth/Gwen) this may not just be a throwaway.
 * The 11th Doctor has no problems giving salutes, being referred to as "the equivalent of an army", being around people with rifles, and firing a gun. This implies that he's come to terms with his past as a soldier (in the LGTW). However, he hates being called "Sir", which implies that he's an enlisted man, probably something like the Gallifreyan equivalent of a Special Forces Commando.
 * The whole thing about images brings up interesting questions about quantum locking. The tricky thing about the observer problem in (Copenhagen Interpretation) quantum mechanics is, what counts as an observation? Taking a recording and then later observing that recording seems to count, as the Angel was locked while being recorded. But, what if no one had ever observed that recording? That brings up all kinds of interesting Timey-Wimey stuff: whether or not the Angel is locked depends on events that will happen in the future, on whether or not someone later observes the recording. If the future is in flux, then it's not actually determinate at any time whether the Angel is locked. (In fact, all of this stuff is problematic in CI QM in general, which is why people have been so interested in other interpretations that don't have any special place for observers in the first place.)
 * What religion are the Clerics? From the titles, you'd expect Anglican or Catholic--but they never mention Jesus, even when talking about praying, and they have no Christian symbols anywhere on their uniforms or equipment. While the name "Christian" is apparently a sacred name to them, so is "Octavian"--most famously connected to the first Emperor of Rome (who declared himself a God) and an Antipope, and one that's been a dead name for so many centuries that the idea of a future saint by that name seems unlikely. (So is "Bob", but, while that's originally a pre-Christian name, it's also the name of five Catholic saints. And besides, it doesn't seem plausible that they're SubGenii or anything.) I think Moffat was explicitly leaving their religion unspecified.
 * There's something Douglas-Adamsy about the idea of asking an army of clerics to keep watching them, but I can't pinpoint what it is that makes me think that. However, the very DNA-ish stuff about what you can do with two heads makes me think that there is something here too, and they're both probably intentional homage to DNA (but probably nothing more meaningful than that). --Falcotron 10:23, April 25, 2010 (UTC)
 * Shooty and Bang Bang ?


 * Who was the mad man who wrote the ancient angel book and what happened to him ?
 * How did the byzantium angel end up on Razhaban ? What or where is Razhaban anyway? 86.26.137.154 10:11, April 27, 2010 (UTC)

What I find most interesting: What if the angel statues we know as 'the weeping angels' aren't actually the original ones. As has been proven, you can create new angels by taking an image of them (film, picture, drawing). What if someone (who later went mad and wrote a book about it) made a sculpture of a creature he knew little about. He would have created the first stone weeping angel. Thoughts please. Anon

Both interesting points.

The whole "ancient book, on a horrifying subject no one else dared write about, written by a madman" thing is about as H.P. Lovecraft/Cthulhu mythos as you can get. And the idea of someone bringing the horrors into our world by constructing an image of them, as well. In fact, there are lots of oblique Cthulhu mythos references here. And even more if you drag in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.

Anyone who's ever played the tabletop RPG game Call of Cthulhu knows that if someone hands you a book like that, exception if both Byzantium and a faux-Arabic-sounding place like Razhaban are involved, you're about to trade SAN points for MAG points. And if the author wasn't torn to pieces by invisible flesh-eating demons hiding in the shadows, he's likely to have vanished only to appear in another time and place, his last vestiges of sanity stripped from him in the process.

However, I don't know if any of the specifics are so much Lovecraft references as they are generic stock horror elements of the modern (post-Lovecraft) genre. In fact, Lovecraft himself argued that most of his ideas were already stock features of Gothic horror; the only thing he added was to get a group of writers to share their mythological inventions--and, since he and Robert Chambers had apparently come up with some of the same elements independently of each other, even that was not an innovation.

At any rate, the important point about the exotic names and terrible books in Lovecraftian horror (and earlier Gothic horror, and much post-Lovecraftian horror) is that they're much spookier if the details are never explained. And the same goes for the powers of the supernatural entities--just keep mentioning one new power ever so often and people's imaginations will make them worse than you ever could. --Falcotron 11:09, April 27, 2010 (UTC)

Also, speaking of the Cthulhu mythos and Robert Chambers:

In August Derleth's post-Lovecraft reworking of the Cthulhu mythos, one of the Old Ones is Hastur, the King in Yellow, the Tattered Horror of Horrors, He Who Cannot Be Named, who dwells on the shores of the Lake of Hali on Aldebaran, who appears in the vision of madmen and artists, and turns all cities into echoes of Carcosa.

In Vincent and the Doctor, we have the Doctor joining forces with mad artist Vincent Van Gogh to fight a yellow alien monster. And it's written by Richard Curtis, who in the past has talked about wanting to write a horror parody but something else always comes up.

No idea if there's any connection there, but I guess we'll know in a few weeks. --Falcotron 11:12, April 27, 2010 (UTC)

One more thing I can't resist mentioning, from a Call of Cthulhu module: "Once I was sure we were out of earshot of the clergy, I conferred with the doctor about the accursed book. He was of like mind that there was something terribly wrong with its contents, but we could not conceive of what it could be." --Falcotron 11:17, April 27, 2010 (UTC)