I love how the Angels are extrapolated here. I had actually wondered before about what happened if an Angel were, say, under video surveillance. And what happened if the Angels got weathered or broken while in stone form. And I had wondered about the logistics of the Angel who puts out the light in the basement.

Now we know that they just absorb all kinds of energy — electricity, radiation, potential energy of life forms. We know about the image business — including, apparently, a mental image. Which is amazingly freaky. Just for the kids, the concept that the Angel can now come out of the TV and get them — yeah. And then this clarifies that cheesy tag to “Blink”, where we saw all these statues that clearly weren’t Weeping Angels. Turns out, hey… any statue could actually be one of them.

And I just love the weathered, decayed Angels — all the creepier. This is basically Tomb of the Cybermen for the Angels — solidifying them as an ongoing threat, illustrating their background and a bit more of how they work and what their actual threat is. It makes them feel well-rounded in a way I didn’t imagine they could be from their earlier appearance. Before, yeah, they were clever. Now they feel rather brilliant and dangerous. More than just a gimmick, as it were.

I hadn’t quite hit on it, or hadn’t thought of it in ages, but the perfectly sculpted design was always a problem for me. Everything about the Angels, the first time around, was a little too cleanly designed, from their appearance to their abilities. This story roughens things up a bit, gets under the surface, without undermining them at the height of their presentation. There’s something more unnerving about an organic, imperfect thing — especially if its imperfections make it all the more desperate.

It’s the imperfect, organic element to the Cybermen that makes them fascinating. Not necessarily seeing a rotting chin, but the knowledge of what they are and what their motivation is. Nothing is creepier than the rather pathetic mantra “We muzzzzst surviiiiiiive…” and then knowing what that entails. There’s almost a certain sympathy for them, which is all the scarier because you know that won’t be reciprocated. You’re being played on several levels.

Likewise, what makes the Daleks fascinating is their intense, blinding emotion and the way it manifests itself — in their schemes, in their voices, in their mannerisms. It’s an imperfection that they refuse to admit, as it defines their being. Again, you can kind of understand their way of thinking. What makes it scary is that, like an angry parent, there’s no arguing with it.

For a monster to get under the skin, I feel like one needs to be able to get under theirs — just enough to understand what you’re up against, and why. It’s the futility of reason that leaves us stranded.

And I think that’s why, after this episode, the Weeping Angels feel to me like the first proper, classic Who monster to come around since the early ’70s.

After Pertwee’s era, we got a few interesting one-offs and a few so-so recurring characters or monsters. In the new series we got some decent stuff like the Ood and Judoon. But no really powerful recurring monsters or villains, with their own mythology. The kind of thing where you watch just because they’re going to be in this episode. Never mind Dalek/Cyberman/Master level; I’m talking about the second tier — the Sontarans, Ice Warriors, Yeti, Silurians, Autons.

Right now, I think the Angels may hover just a little below that first tier. They’re not Daleks or Cybermen, but they’re more memorable, more fleshed-out, and have more draw than Sontarans or the Yeti. If they appear again over Matt Smith’s era, I think they may be permanently associated as his antagonists, the way that we associate the Cybermen with Troughton or the Master with Pertwee.

That’s how well Moffat has extrapolated them. And likewise, many of Moffat’s other monsters remind me of all the attempts in the 1960s to find a follow-up to or replacement for the Daleks — the War Machines, the Quarks, the Krotons; the Vashta Nerada, Prisoner Zero, the Smilers. Two of them call on the same everyday edge-of-perception quality that makes the Angels so interesting; the other just stands there and stares at you, apparently inanimate but creepy.