The Weeping Angels make a much-anticipated return to Doctor Who...

Much as James Cameron transformed Ridley Scott's low-key horror Alien into an SF war-movie with Aliens, the re-appearance of Steven Moffat's quantum-locked 'weeping angels' from season 3's extremely popular 'Blink' similarly ups the ante, finding The Doctor and Amy reunited with The Doctor's annoyingly all-knowing future wife River Song, and trapped with a bunch of semi-clerical marines in a 'maze of death' straight out of Dante's Inferno.

From the quiet tale of M.R.James-style horror that was 'Blink', 'The Time Of Angels' ushers us into a period of out-and-out war with an army of the malevolent creatures that can only attack you when you're not looking, and turn into stone statues when you are.

New wrinkles have been added - it seems that the Angels' very nature is itself infectious, and that after a nasty - and pretty scary - run-in with a video-generated angel, that our increasingly-resourceful heroine Amy Pond has been infected, and is in the process of turning into one of the creatures herself...

The pace of 'Time Of Angels' brings Moffat's season 5 back up officially to the relentless gait of the RTD era after the gentler speed of the initial two episodes was ramped up in last week's 'Victory Of The Daleks'. Adam Smith's direction can do little to inject moments of reflection in a script this action-packed. The pace to come is set with an Entrapment-style rescue of River Song (Alex Kingston), caught in an act of larceny on a Gallifrean starship but rescued millennia later by a message left in the ship's 'black box'. Elegant, and the type of long-term SOS we've not seen since Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect were rescued by Zaphod Beeblebrox when they dropped their towel in a lava-flow in The Hitch-Hikers Guide To The Galaxy.

The Weeping Angels themselves are still a terrifying prospect, but Moffat has perhaps done well to extend their powers and reach beyond that which he originated in 'Blink'. Now it turns out that the Angels have infected an entire planet with their own quantum-locked nature, and that their evil reach can even spread out to living beings via a brief video-clip shown on a loop.

The Dantean landscape of the Maze Of Death is impressive indeed, and if we have seen devices such as radio messages from the dead in new Who before - I refer to Matt Smith's conversation with 'Sacred Bob' - it remains a chilling device.

We get a few new clues as to the potentially negative influence that River Song is to have on The Doctor's future, as she seems to be in cahoots with the military organisation trying to destroy the Angels, and refers to her time 'in prison'. Is she 'The Master' with a dose of Y-chromosome? Has The Doctor been - or will be - truly seduced by evil?

"'Time Of Angels' is clearly a part-homage to Aliens, with its series of doomed para-military grunts"

Moffat is not afraid to reference the horror and other TV and movie sources that he loves, and 'Time Of Angels' is clearly a part-homage to Aliens, with its series of doomed para-military grunts, who suprisingly - given their quasi-religious nature - seem reluctant to pray as they face their ends.

Murray Gold's score seems to be looped in from previous episodes and not terribly personal to the events of 'Time Of Angels', which is a shame; one wonders if the sound-mixer on new Who simply has a series of 'Gold-loops' to inject into scenes without paying the composer to actually punctuate key moments in any particular storyline. The result increasingly becomes a background drone of elevator music.

This first section of the two-parter clearly has a significant denoument in next weeks 'Flesh And Stone', and therefore has the burden of the 'middle-section-drag' of many dramas. This was alleviated by Amy's encounter with the video-generated Angel, the most effective of the clashes in this episode, and no minor tribute to Ringu either.

'Flesh and Stone' must naturally continue in the vein in which 'Time Of Angels' has begun, but one can only hope that the gentler and more introspective nature of early season 5 will return again to provide some variation of pace in the series. Matt Smith continues to impress as The Doctor, though I noted more high-speed Tennant-style dialogue in 'The Time Of Angels' than I have yet seen.

Let's see how this one concludes next week. It's certainly a welcome return for a truly inspired Doctor Who nemesis.

EXTRA: The creeping horrors before The Time Of Angels

The Weeping Angels in Doctor Who's Time Of Angels are not the only quantum-locked creepers in horror history...

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