The Weeping Angels stats are provided in the ‘Aliens and Creatures’ supplement for the Doctor Who game. Completed before the airing of ‘Time of Angels’ it understandably only uses the information provided in ‘Blink’ but how accurate is it?
The problem is that some creatures shouldn’t have attributes. In ‘Blink’ you can’t talk to them, you can’t fight them, either you’re looking at them and they’re stone or you blink and you’re instantly sent back in time.
A fighting attribute is provided but we’re talking about creatures which are impossibly fast. There is no chance of dodging out of the way or defending yourself. That is what makes them so terrifying.
The main challenge the player characters should face when encountering Weeping Angels, their only chance of avoiding a one way trip to the past, is not blinking. I think the Resolve is the most appropriate attribute to determine if they can do this.
A ‘Yes but’ would indicate they’ve kept their eye on the Angel but their movement rate is halved as they can’t keep an eye on where they’re going. A ‘No but’ would indicate that they blinked but opened their eyes again so the Angel is only inches away from them. Anything lower than that and the player character is despatched.
The longer they go without blinking the harder the task check should be. Loud noises and any distractions also make things more difficult. They only have to take their eyes of a Weeping Angel for a second to seal their doom.
The Awareness attribute also has an important role to play. It determines if the player characters have spotted the Weeping Angels in time. Their success, or their lack of, would determine how far away the Weeping Angel is when they first see it.
‘Aliens and Creatures’ calls the Weeping Angels ability to send people into the past ‘Temporal Exile’ and that their victims die of natural circumstances before their current existence.
DI Billy Shipton is an exception to this rule. He manages to survive several hours past the point in which he was originally sent into the past. This could be a ‘Yes but’ result for the Weeping Angels, something the Doctor did (after all he had to make sure that Billy survived to give Sally his message) or just Billy’s resolve to see Sally again.
If the Weeping Angels derive nourishment from potential energy, the Doctor says they live on it, does such an occurrence delay this sustenance? Do they only get it when the person dies or when they actually send them into the past?
Their feeding method must be the only kind where it actually increases the amount of food available to them. If Kathy Nightingale is any indication many of those sent back into the past will end up having children, swelling the potential number of victims for the Weeping Angels.
Their Temporal Exile seems to be natural, no technology is ever suggested to be involved. Along with their locked quantum state it seems that the Weeping Angel had a very peculiar evolution.
It has also never been indicated that the Weeping Angels have the ability to travel in time themselves. Indeed their origins are a mystery even to the Doctor, who says that no one knows where they came from.
‘Time of Angels’ indicates that they can’t travel through space unaided, they have to hijack a spaceship to do that. They don’t seem to be tool users, they are unarmed and don’t wear anything over their stone bodies.
There could be two explanations for this. Firstly that they’re not that intelligent, indeed ‘Aliens and Creatures’ suggest their ingenuity is below average, or secondly they just don’t need to invent or make anything. Virtually immortal they can simply stowaway on other species vehicles.
With the additional information provided in ‘Time of Angels’ I’d say that the Weeping Angels are actually pretty intelligent so prefer the latter explanation. After all they are clever enough to follow Sally Sparrow to track down the TARDIS.
If they don’t have space ships can the Weeping Angels actually fly? Certainly they have wings but are they just for show? The answer can be found in the scene at the police station.
Sally sees two Weeping Angels perched on church opposite the window. In the blink of an eye they have travelled the distance between the two buildings and are now either side of the window.
They could have climbed down one building and then scaled the other but as fast as they are they aren’t that fast. Note that a Weeping Angel is unable to close the shorter distance between Larry in the house.
From this I would say that they can indeed fly. This makes them an even greater threat. It makes it easier for them to reach remote locations. The player characters might think they are safe securing the front door only for the Weeping Angels to break in through a window of the second floor.
Flying does pose a problem for the Weeping Angels. If anyone looks up they’d turn to stone and plummet to the ground. Much more noticeable than a statue standing in a garden. Luckily for them few people ever look up.
The Doctor says that you can’t kill stone. From this we can take it that when in their quantum locked state a Weeping Angel can’t be harmed. Even if parts of them could be broken it could be possible for them to be reassembled. In fact breaking them into parts makes more of the Angel that needs to be kept an eye on.
‘Aliens and Creatures’ also indicates that Weeping Angels have below average strength. Consider that four Angels are able to force open the police garage door and carry the TARDIS all the way back to the Wester Drumlins estate. This would suggest they have a strength of 4 or above.
It is impossible to know how much of their quantum locked state relates to their unseen form. They may not even be humanoid, although they must have a shape and mass. This is because they can exert force on others, ‘touch’ their victims and occupy an area of space that allows them to be ‘seen’ by anyone looking in that direction.
There is still much to be discussed about the Weeping Angels and potential for further adventures.
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“Note that a Weeping Angel is unable to close the shorter distance between Larry in the house.”
They’re the ultimate travel-at-the-speed-of-plot creature, impossibly fast until it affects a major character. I’d definitely make them “environmental threats” rather than traditional statted monsters, as you suggest, if I ever came up with something to do with them.
(The ones from the two-parter are so different, and bend of break Blink‘s rules, that I’d have made thema different thing entirely, but that’s another matter.)
“It is impossible to know how much of their quantum locked state relates to their unseen form. They may not even be humanoid, although they must have a shape and mass. This is because they can exert force on others, ‘touch’ their victims and occupy an area of space that allows them to be ‘seen’ by anyone looking in that direction.”
The Weeping Angels would look exactly the same as they do in their quantum locked state, only not stone. “The moment they are seen by any other living creature they freeze into rock, no choice, it’s a fact of their biology, in the sight of any living thing they literally turn to stone. ” So in other words, they are only changing the matter they are made from into stone.
‘Time of the Angels’ shows us that the Weeping Angels do change their form. The starving Angels are less defined, like stone worn away with age. As they feed they become more and more like crafted statues that we are familiar with. I think this indicates that there is some process of transformation taking place.
The quantum lock aspect just solidifies and locks them into a particular form. We can’t say for certain than an unobserved Angel looks like a statue, because we could never look at one to confirm that. They very well might look like a statue but then again they might not.
In the second part of The Time of Angels, Flesh and Stone, we see a Weeping Angel turn its head when it realizes Amy can’t see it. Other than the fact that its moving, it looks exactly like it does when it was quantum locked.
‘The Angels Take Manhattan’ has brought a lot more new information about the Weeping Angels, suggesting that they ‘infect’ statues. It could be that they are formless initially and inhabit the body of a statue.
Yet their unobserved physical form can’t just be stone. Putting aside a statues lack of flexibility some like the Statue of Liberty doesn’t actually have legs underneath the toga so it must be moving by some other means when not observed.
In ‘Time of The Angels’ they can’t be inhabiting statues made by the natives, as the Doctor points out they have two heads, yet the Weeping Angel statues only have one. Could the Weeping Angels have remodelled the statues on the planet, does their natural form look like a statue or did they inhabit unchiseled rock and shape it themselves?
Each time the Weeping Angels appear we get more information, but whether we’ll learn these answers will depend on the writers.
Personally I think the Weeping Angel in the scene you mentioned was just ‘peeking’ because it wasn’t entirely sure that Amy couldn’t see, so it didn’t relax into its natural state. What this scene does indicate is that there is some form of consious control and the Weeping Angel has to be aware that it is being observed to get Quantum Locked.