The Weeping Angels are, by far, the best of the many marvellously villainous creations that have emerged in the modern era of Doctor Who, a show that I am not at all freakishly obsessed with. Even if you aren’t familiar with the show in the slightest, there’s a chance you know about or at least recognize the chilling imagery of the Weeping Angels. You’ve probably even stumbled across the two-word phrase that nails down their central, horrifying aspect.
For those who have no idea what I’m on about, then the rest of this post will sound like utter gibberish. For everyone else, then a) of course we can be friends, and b) come along as I answer a question that has been put to me for ages now, but until recently I’ve been too preoccupied with the geoscience of videogames and blockbuster movies to pay sufficient attention to. Cockapoo Bronze Sculpture
Specifically, what’s up with the geology of the Weeping Angels?
They have a geological weakness. (Shutterstock)
Before we science the shit out of these creatures, we need to recall exactly what it is they are and what they do, according to Who lore. So let’s begin, shall we?
The Weeping Angels are (almost) always comprised of stone and, funnily enough, resemble statues of angels – the kind you’d see at churches, graveyards, and so forth. Their nicknamed Weeping Angels because they often cover their eyes, giving the appearance they’re, well, weeping. As it transpires, however, any statue can be an angel, including those sinister little cherubs you see adorning the base of various fountains.
They operate by feeding off time energy. If they catch you, they send you back in time, and you live out your days in the past. They consume what is, in a manner of speaking, the potential time remaining; the chronological energy from the life you would have lived.
Light, by the way, is your friend. You cannot look away from them. You can’t, as it so happens, even blink (although you can wink and cheat a little). If you completely avert your gaze, they’ll move at incredibly fast pace – closing several tens of meters in less than a second at their best – and snatch you, sending you back in time. If you’re in a room that’s dimly lit, you’re in trouble. They can also somehow influence artificial sources of light, temporarily switching them off in order to advance on you.
The reason they cover their eyes and appear to be crying is that, if they look at each other, the same thing happens when you look at them yourself: they become “quantum locked”: frozen as non-sentient stone as part of a defence mechanism. With one exception, when you look away, they become living, but still-stony monsters, ready to feed.
If you’d like to know more about the physics behind this weird quantum freak effect, then I’d advise you pop on over to Gizmodo, which explains it beautifully. As cool as that is – and it’s a real, measurable effect, not a fiction exclusive to the realm of Who – we’re taking on bold, weird new pop-science territory here.
Sometimes, angels appear in isolation or in small clusters, as they did in their debut episode, Blink, during Tennant’s time. Other times, they appear in vast numbers, in caves or in cities, as they did in episodes in Smith’s era. Sometimes, if they’re starved of time energy, their image will fade, like a statue whose surficial features have been worn down and eroded.
There are some other wibbly wobbly timey wimey rules too. If you create a temporal paradox, it’ll corrupt the “well” of time energy their feasting off, and that reality, and you’ll capture by the angels, will cease to be. If you stare into the eyes of an angel, one will infiltrate your mind and slowly eat away at you. You can’t take any photographs or videos of them either, because the image of an angel becomes itself an angel. Stare too long at that photograph of one, and it’ll materialize out from the image into a real one.
…yes, that’s a lot to take in, but it’s highlighted two key points here. Firstly, apart from when they sneak into your mind or form part of an image, they’re invariably made of stone, no matter how many of them there are or where they appear. Secondly, their physical form is alterable; they can be damaged, so to speak.
Both give us a clue as to what their geological compositions may be, but before we give that a go, we need to recall precisely where they’ve appeared to date.
Based on the TV part of the Whoniverse, angels appear in only a handful of places: Earth, including in an unspecified town or city early on, and throughout Manhattan in 1938; the caves of the alien world Alfava Metraxis; the bowels of the starship Byzantium, which crashes into said planet; on the outskirts of a village on the planet Trenzalore.
I have no idea what the geology is like on those alien worlds, so I’m going to cheat and use their filming locations.
(Apropos of nothing, here’s a crossover fun fact for you, because I’m an enormous geek: Puzzlewood, found in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, England, was used (along with part of the Lake District) to represent the planet Takodana in The Force Awakens, just as it was used to represent Trenzalore’s angel scene, and the oxygen factory scenes of the crashed Byzantium in Who. That means Rey was pretty damn lucky not to be thieved by a hungry Weeping Angel, which is a weird thought.)
From forests to cities, they're everywhere. (Shutterstock)
Anyway, the angels. I can’t say for sure about those in the forest scenes, but the thousands in the caves of Alfava Metraxis were made of, rather magically, the same material that’s found in the Forest of Dean’s Clearwell Caves: limestone. Now that may not sound like much to you, but to a geoscientist who loves Doctor Who, that’s a bloody revelation.
Limestone is notoriously vulnerable to chemical weathering via acidic rain or groundwater. The caves here clearly formed when iron-rich, acidic water rushed into the limestone and ate away at it until the pH of the flood fluids became somewhat neutral. This is a common, well-understood geological process you can find all over the planet.
It also means that, in plenty of cases, Weeping Angels will be made of a substance that you can dissolve away into solution. Having completely lost their image in a liquid, they’d effectively be dead. That’s right: assuming you don’t have a paradox at hand or a crack in the fabric of the universe that can erase their existence, I think I’ve found a way to kill Weeping Angels.
Slightly acidic water will take far too long, though; instead, in order to quickly kill them off, why not manufacture a hugely acidic solution with the help of some willing chemists? That way, you can flood that basement of yours that somehow became infested with angels over the summer while you were away, and exterminate the threat without even requiring a Time Lord from Gallifrey.
What about those that appear in Manhattan and that unspecified UK city back in their original episode? Well, those American angels are comprised of limestone in some instances, so you’re fine there, but they’re also frequently made of granite and marble; the same can be assumed for those British time-stealers.
Here’s the thing: marble is a metamorphic rock made from limestone, a sedimentary rock. If you essentially slow-cook limestone over time, adding a bit of heat and pressure, the grains within limestone recrystallize and you get marble. Both contain calcite – a stable form of calcium carbonate – and both react to acidic conditions by dissolving. Hurrah! Your acid weaponry still works on these creatures.
If they’re made of granite, though, you’re probably in far more trouble. Granite’s an igneous rock, one formed as certain types of magma slowly cool and crystallize. There are various types of granite with slightly different mineralogical compositions, but general speaking, there’s a lot of quartz and alkali feldspar in them, both of which are based around a silicon-oxygen molecular framework.
You never know when you might run into one. (Shutterstock)
This framework means that these minerals do not react to acid rain in the way marble or limestone does. It can be eroded very slowly over time, but it won’t dissolve away. That means a granitic angel will probably catch you, if it’s hunting you down, and hyperacidic weaponry likely won’t help.
Marble Religion Statue So, if a Weeping Angel in a modern metropolis corners you, I’d suggest you take the advice of the Doctor him/herself: Don’t blink.