Despite being such a visual enemy the Weeping Angels once again appear in a really good audio story with Albie’s Angels. It puts focus on Helen and her family in a way that’s not embarrassingly out-of-nowhere and heavy handed like in the past and it really works. Now I’m a little late with this review so paradoxically this has already appeared on my “Top 10 Doctor Who Stories of 2022” list so its quality might not come as a surprise, but hey-ho… let’s take a look anyway!
The Doctor (Paul McGann), Liv (Nicola Walker) and Helen (Hattie Morahan) arrive in 2025 Soho because of that tried and true reason of “The Doctor has detected an anomaly and wants to investigate it”. Helen goes off to look by herself and enters a record shop where the owner, Jase Harper (Robert Whitelock), gives her some “forms to give to Al” and then leads her to a booth where a Weeping Angel zaps her back to 1963. There, in the same record shop, she meets her own brother Albie (Barnaby Jago) who went missing after he was disowned by their Dad when it was found it he was gay (this was a particularly good example of the bad “out of nowhere” Helen revelation I talked about in the opening paragraph) The two hit it off, with Helen obviously keeping her identity a secret, and go back to his place but meet an Angel on the way there, managing to trap it under an icy pond.
While Helen is introduced to Albie’s landlord in Mrs. Denny (Anjella Mackintosh) and his (secret) partner in Bailey (Alex Mugnaioni) The Doctor and Liv meet Denny in 2025 wearing Helen’s necklace and put two-and-two together. Turns out Jase Harper sends a message to his older relative Jack Harper in 1963 about how to find the Angel Helen has just frozen and capture it, then they use it to send messages between them on which records to keep in storage because they’ll become major collectables in the future. What The Doctor and Liv find out is that there is a second Angel that is actually the partner of the one trapped by the Harpers and is out for revenge…
The story is part drama dealing with how homosexuals were treated in the past (and sadly still sometimes in the present…) and part time travel story, and it really works well.
The Continuity:
The overall “Connections” cover, which really works as a cover for this story as well given the Weeping Angel being front and centre.
While I’m not going to list all of the Weeping Angels appearances (the list has got that big now!) I will point out that this isn’t Liv and Helen’s first meeting with the stone creatures as they encountered them in the Doom Coalition story “The Side of Angels”. Obviously there are also mentions of the whole Stranded storyline as well, with Liv sarcastically asking if they hadn’t already done enough damage to the 2020s already…
Overall Thoughts:
Albie’s Angels is a good story, not wall-to-wall action but instead does a good job of mixing genuine drama with an entertaining sci-fi time-twisty tale. Recommended and definitely the highlight of the set.
In the end Mrs. Denny calls the police on Albie after finding his secret, Bailey is sent back to the late 1800s when the Angel in 63 gets him, Albie soon joins him when he and Helen are trapped with the Angel (but it doesn’t touch her, presumably because she’s already been zapped once), and The Doctor and Liv arrive in time to save Helen and free the tortured Angel from the grasp of the Harpers. Jack Harper is Angel’d and that causes a paradox due to Jase Harper being erased from history and therefore unable to send instructions on how to capture the Angel in the first place. The two Angels embrace and vanish along with the Record Shop and its entire history. Helen stays in the TARDIS upset about finding out that her missing brother’s vanishing was something so horrid (on top of just the gay hatred in general!) and is relieved to hear that The Doctor and Liv found both Albie and Bailey together in Victorian London and set them up with Professor George Litefoot so they’ll be safe and even recorded a special song called “Song for Helen” as a thank you to her.
It’s a very sweet ending, which is good because it would’ve been so easy to do a bittersweet or even tragic ending here, but sometimes you need a happy one now and again…
Hogan Reviews 