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.