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May 9, 2010

Plot

The Doctor discovers a message in Old High Gallifreyan engraved on the side of a ruined flight recorder from the starship Byzantium 12,000 years in the past by Doctor River Song. With Amy Pond, the Doctor takes the TARDIS to meet her before the ship crashes on the planet Alfava Metraxis. After reuniting with the Doctor, whom she has had extensive contact within his relative future, Dr. Song warns the Doctor of a Weeping Angel, creatures that cannot move when observed but otherwise can move incredibly fast, that the Byzantium was carrying, and calls for Father Octavian and his troops to join her on the surface to recapture it. Dr. Song shows the Doctor and Amy a four-second loop of security footage of the Angel as the soldiers set up base camp. The Doctor and Song review a book written by a madman about the Angels which warns that any form of image of the Angels become Angels themselves. Simultaneously, Amy finds, when she looks away, the Angel from the footage moves and begins to emerge from the screen, further trapping her in the viewing room. As the Doctor and Song attempt to free Amy, Amy is able to freeze the image on a loop break, causing the Angel to disappear and saving herself. As the Doctor and Song verify Amy is safe, she continues to believe she has something in her eyes.

To access the Byzantium and locate the Angel, the group must travel through a "Maze of the Dead", a stone labyrinth with numerous statues erected by the planet's natives that the Angel could hide among. The group splits up, with some soldiers left to guard the entrance. As they explore, the Doctor and Song come to realize that the native species of the planet have two heads, while all the statues have one; they quickly realise that every statue is a Weeping Angel, slower and weaker than the captured Angel due to lack of beings to consume over the centuries but now absorbing energy from the crashed ship. As the group tries to escape, Amy believes her hand to have become stone and cannot move, but the Doctor points out that her perception has been influenced by the Angel, and she is still fine, allowing her to flee. The group soon finds that the Angels have killed their rear guard and are using their consciousness to speak to the Doctor. The Angels reveal they have lured the group in the trap, and are planning to use their essences to further regenerate. The Doctor threatens that the Angels should have never put him in the trap, and prepares the group to act once he fires at the globe of light providing the only illumination the maze; the episode ends on this cliffhanger.

The Doctor, Amy, River Song, Father Octavian and his clerics find themselves standing on the nose of the Byzantium, looking down on the surface and the Weeping Angels, after having been caught by the ship's artificial gravity when the gravity globe burst. The group make their way to the secondary flight deck while being chased by the regenerating Angels, who have now also jumped up to the ship. All the while, Amy is counting downwards from ten without realising it. Angel Bob claims that this is a countdown to when they will kill her, after which they will take control of the universe. The Doctor asks the Angels where they can possibly expect to get the power from to take over the universe, but the Angels just laugh at the Doctor's ignorance of the situation. The Doctor turns around and then sees a giant crack in the ship's wall, identical to the one in Amy's bedroom in "The Eleventh Hour", and as seen in "The Beast Below" and "Victory of the Daleks", it is a crack in the universe. While the others escape into the ship's oxygen factory, a giant forest, the Doctor examines the crack, before noticing he is surrounded by Weeping Angels - one of whom catches him by his jacket. He warns the Angels that the crack, whilst full of energy, is not full of the energy they need (time energy); it is instead a crack from the end of the universe, a crack that will consume everyone. While distracting them with this thought, he escapes, minus his coat, and quickly follows after the others.

Just before the Doctor can reach her, Amy collapses to the forest floor, seemingly dying. Recollecting that the image of an Angel is itself an Angel, the Doctor realises that Amy has the image of a Weeping Angel in the visual centres of her mind. The Doctor tells her to close her eyes in order to suppress the visual centres of the brain and explains that if she opens her eyes for more than a second, the Angel will kill her. Before he leaves, Amy confesses to the Doctor she is unsure if she can trust him yet, as he isn't always truthful with her, but the Doctor simply informs her that if he always told her the truth, she would never need to trust him. He implores her to remember what he told her when she was seven, but Amy does not know what he is referring to. The Doctor, River and Father Octavian head off to the main control room in the hope of slowing down the descent of the Angels, while Amy is left alone with the clerics as the Weeping Angels advance. Whilst walking through the forest, the Doctor traces the origins of the crack back to the point in time and space at which it began - June 26th, 201x (the last digit is not revealed until the end of the episode). While trying to break into the control room, an Angel traps Octavian. The Doctor is helpless to save him and Octavian urges him to leave and join River inside. Just before his inevitable death though, Octavian divulges to the Doctor that River is a criminal currently in his custody, guilty of the murder of a man whose identity he will not reveal. The Doctor gives his last apologies to Octavian and hurries inside.

The crack in the secondary flight deck widens into the forest, where Amy is being guarded by four of the clerics. The Angels run away from the crack, in fear from the Doctor's warning, leaving the clerics and Amy behind. The Doctor speculates that the crack is allowing time to be rewritten and River asks him how they can close it. The Doctor explains that the best way to close it is to feed it a complicated space-time event: him. In the forest, three of clerics go to inspect the crack, which just looks like a very bright light but, after they've gone, the remaining cleric doesn't even remember that they existed. He goes to investigate the crack himself, leaving Amy truly alone and with only a communicator. The Doctor radios Amy and tells her to come to the control room. She asks why she should risk confronting the Angels and the Doctor tells her that the Angels can only kill her, but the crack can erase her from time. Reluctantly and still with her eyes closed, she follows his sonic screwdriver signal, until the Angels arrive and surround her. Since the Angels are still very scared, the Doctor informs Amy that if she walks like she can see, the Angels will remain in stone form due to their survival instincts, but Amy soon gives herself away as blind by tripping over and shouting, allowing the Angels (who are seen moving for the first time) to advance in on her. Just in time, River teleports her to the control room.

All the Angels come to the entrance to the room as they drain energy from the doors, which then open. The lead Angel, whom the Doctor has named "Angel Bob" after the man whose voice it was using, demands that the Doctor throw himself into the crack in order to save the Angels. River, as a time traveller, wants to throw herself in but the Doctor laughs at the idea, claiming that she is not even as complicated as one Angel and that only all the Angels are equivalent to him. He then realises that as the ship's power is quickly draining, its artificial gravity field is about to collapse, and he urges his friends to hold on to something to stop themselves from falling. The gravity field then collapses and all of the frozen Angels fall into the crack. This is enough to seal it, erasing them all from existence. The group escapes to the outside of the temple, and Amy is again able to see - the Angel within her mind never existed, due to the fact it fell into the crack. Confused, Amy asks how it is possible she remembers all of the clerics who seemingly "ceased to exist," but the Doctor informs her that, since they are time travellers, and time has no context in which to work, they can remember them. River, who after completing her mission is about to be teleported back to her cell in space, tells the Doctor she will see him again when the Pandorica opens (unnerving the Doctor, who claims the Pandorica is just a fairy tale), and that the man she killed was the best man she'd ever known. She is teleported back to the penal starship, with the remaining soldiers.

Amy tells the Doctor to take her home. There, she tells him that she is getting married in the morning and tries to seduce him (to which he acts alarmed). He declines to reciprocate and, whilst looking at her bedside digital clock, realises that she is at the centre of all the cracks and that the time explosion which created them occurs today - the day of her wedding, June 26th 2010. He quickly whisks her away in order to try to sort the issue out.