What happens if you blink weeping angels

Although depictions vary across time, place and artistic impulse, contemporary imagery tends to cover the eyes of Justicia with a blindfold. This covering of the eyes is another attribute in common with the Weeping Angels. In both sets of images, the covering of the eyes has multiple meanings. The name of the Weeping Angels comes from the assumption that they are covering their eyes in sadness, weeping at the follies of the world and the distance of humans from grace. However, the Weeping Angels are actually covering their eyes to avoid seeing each other — if they see each other then they are permanently turned to stone.

Historically, justice was not always depicted as blindfolded. Ripa was one of the most influential of popular European emblem books of the 16 th and 17 th century. He provided elaborate descriptions of the literary references and symbolic attributes associated with Virtues, Vices and Passions, as well as the arts and sciences.

His work, Iconologica featured memorable and dramatic woodcut figures with epigrammatic verses on moral themes.

The blindfold, as well as blindness, was in Christian and Western traditions in earlier centuries wholly negative. The blindfold was a sign of censure - when humans punished each other, they sometimes put blindfolds on their victims.

When he discovered his wrongdoing, Oedipus put out his eyes; Ulysses puts his stake into the eye of the Cyclops and blinds him; Jesus was made sport of by being blindfolded, mocked and beaten.

Renaissance images placed a blindfold on Eros to mark the misguided nature of love, engendering foolishness and confusion. Fortuna was often blindfolded to denote irrationality and blindness. Blindfolds also adorned images of executed criminals, shown hanging and disgraced. By covering their eyes, the Weeping Angels not only protect themselves from being quantum locked, but also camouflage themselves, highlighting the ubiquity of statues with covered eyes.

Why then, did a blindfolded Justicia gain currency and what did this mean? Positive explanations of the deliberate occlusion of sight have been proffered, particularly that the blindfold purported impartiality. The blindfold may serve as a buffer so that judges are not tempted away from using reason.

For example, Ripa posited that only one of his seven Justices was to sport a blindfold. This was the type of Justice that is exercised in the Tribunal of judges and secular executors:. She is wearing white because judges should be without the stain of personal interest or of any other passion that might pervert Justice, and this is also why her eyes are bandaged — and thus she cannot see anything that might cause her to judge in a manner that is against reason The blindfold represented inner wisdom, lack of distraction, incorruptibility, and encouraged abstention from corrupt, self-interested dealing.

Judges were untethered from the governments that employed them and were no longer servile to God and to rulers. The image of the blindfold continues to provoke commentary about what it denotes about the relationships between sight, knowledge, wisdom, judgment and justice, and the role of law.

In modern accounts, the blindfold has been utilised to represent positive aspects of justice. Given the emphasis upon sight in law expressed through various optical metaphors in legal doctrine and popular discourse about justice, [54] theorists have relied upon the image of the blindfold to interrogate the implications of occluded vision.

Justicia is represented as a bystander — there is a divorce between the symbol of justice and the action surrounding Justicia. The perspective of the protagonist Sally Sparrow is predominant, but the audience sees more than Sally.

Her vision is limited in time and place, whilst the audience is more able to perceive the threat of Weeping Angels and also see what happens to characters after they have been touched by an Angel. The audience can see the Weeping Angels closing in on Sally, whilst she is unaware of the threat. We never see from the perspective of the Weeping Angels — they remain unknown and unknowable. Cartoonists regularly rely on a blindfolded Justicia to denote injustice.

Both the images of the Weeping Angels and Justicia denote multiple meanings of the covered eyes. Only some individuals or groups are at any given historical moment demonised by the term monster.

Heroes like Superman and the Doctor are also unnatural and inexplicable, so there is more to a monster than the transgression of laws and classificatory systems. A central aspect of horror is fear. Horrific monsters are threatening — whether physically, psychologically, morally or socially.

They are destroyers — frightening in their capacity to harm. The Weeping Angels are particularly terrifying because of the unknown — one moment a person is there, and in another they have disappeared without any explanation or noise. The Weeping Angels are a nightmare-like private threat, rather than the politically organised Daleks and Cybermen. By removing victims to another time, Weeping Angels threaten to destroy personhood. Dislocation in time is a common trope in science fiction, and often portrayed in positive terms.

This shows the significance of time in the construction of personal identity. Alasdair MacIntyre maintains that persons construct their identities via coherent narratives. People integrate the various facts and roles of their lives together into meaningful, continuous timelines by filtering relevant from irrelevant features followed by foregrounding the most relevant elements and allowing the rest to fade into the background. She finds herself instantly in a land as foreign to her as another country, without any access to those things she cared about, that were important to her.

The Weeping Angels inflict an inexplicable type of violence upon characters, not only upon the person transported back in time, but also the people that they leave behind. The tragedy of the loss of what might have been is demonstrated by the transportation of Billy, whom Sally meets only a few minutes before he becomes a victim of the angels. Billy is sent to London where he lives a normal lifespan, and later dies on the same day he first met Sally.

The tragedy is thus for what might have been, even though both Sally and Billy have created second lives for themselves. The Weeping Angels highlight the extent to which we are time and place bound. Thus the Weeping Angels are feared because of the potential harm they can inflict. The harm inflicted by the Weeping Angels raises questions about the modus operandi of justice and the extent to which justice generates fear through threats to personhood. The idea of Justicia as exciting fear is not necessarily problematic — the wicked should fear justice.

For example, in his description of seven Justices Ripa emphasizes fear. Thus Rigorous Justice was described as:. A skeletal figure like that used to depict death, in a white robe This figure teaches us that rigorous justice does not pardon any crime, no matter the excuse given The fearsome aspect of this figure demonstrates that this sort of Justice is frightening to the people and that there is no occasion for the law to be interpreted lightly.

If justice is done through the law, then we should examine the ways in which a subject experiences legal subjectivity. The legal subject does not pre-exist law, but is constituted and constructed by and through language. It provides a basic model of our understanding of other people and for our understanding of ourselves. By emphasising particular attributes, and ignoring or excluding other attributes as irrelevant the law may undermine, transform or remove what a person cares most about.

Our personal identities depend, at least in part, on there being a comprehensive thread of narrative in our lives, about past, present and future. Much has been written about the restriction, selection and exclusion of the narratives of participants in the courtroom. This results in a disruption to an integral aspect of what it means to be human. Our narratives of what matters to us, often at moments of great stress and importance, are forced to fit within general formulae not of our making.

At the same time, however, imprisonment can be understood as contributing to a destruction of personhood. It removes a person from time and space — it disrupts their normal life trajectory without the benefit of amnesia:.

In jail, I lost everything that made me me : my family, dog, business, house, studies, friends, freedom, clothes, make-up, choices. All I had was myself, my mind and my heart. Although imprisonment is regarded as more benign than physical punishment the Weeping Angels encourage us to question whether this is necessarily so.

Imprisonment removes a person from their life, they might be permitted limited contact with family and friends, but this is in an restricted, artificial environment, a prisoner is removed from many of the cares of his or her life prior to imprisonment.

Even though a sentence may be finite, the long-term stigma of imprisonment may be such that hopes and stories are disrupted.

Likewise, the Weeping Angels keep their victims physically and mentally unchanged while shattering their identity as the persons they were, shattering their sense of self temporally.

We invest ourselves contextually, and the Weeping Angels pluck us from our contexts and deposit us elsewhere. Arguably the same is done in the name of justice — whether through restrictions on narratives of integral significance to our personhood telling us what is important, ir relevant, or through imprisonment removing us from the cares by which we defined ourselves. Carroll has argued that we feel horror of monsters not only due to fear, but also disgust.

He argues that monsters are something that humans do not want to have contact with — we recoil from them and feel nauseated by them, even when the threat of harm has been removed.

Their beauty can be contrasted with another type of statue — gargoyles. Although gargoyles have had multiple meanings, their ugliness was intended to represent evil, a comforting notion that evil was easily recognised through external stigma. They have been explained as scaring people into coming into churches by reminding them of evil in the world, or to assure that evil was not inside the church. When the Weeping Angels are on the attack, they become increasingly horrifying, caught in threatening poses with arms raised and vampiric teeth exposed.

But by the time their victims and the audience see beneath their beauty it is too late. Given their ostensible beauty, why then are the Weeping Angels so horrific? This is because they work their evil by using a natural process, blinking, in order to attack humans. The Weeping Angels are particularly unsettling for the viewer, as through editing and our natural compulsion to blink, we feel as though the Weeping Angels have moved while we have blinked.

We feel empathy for the plight of the fictional victims. Can and should we consider justice in the same terms? We do not tend to see law or justice at work. The law affects, constructs and drives our actions, yet the law tends to operate without being seen. We are governed and yet we do not know about it. The law is relatively invisible in its operation, and like the Weeping Angels, it moves without being seen.

They look like any other statue. Amy died aged 87 at some point prior to after allowing a Weeping Angel to send her back in time, hoping to be reunited with her husband who had just been attacked by the same Angel. She was buried beside Rory in a graveyard in New York City. The Weeping Angels are odd. They are actually any statue as seen with the Cherubs and the Statue of Liberty. They essentially symbolize having the courage to face your past. Its kind of like saying you have to be brave enough to face your past, but also you must learn from it so it cannot consume you preventing you from enjoying your future.

TV : Blink. Weeping Angels in the form of "babies". Weeping Angels grew weaker from starvation without their usual energy supplies to keep them fed, with the stone wearing away over years. This wearing could become so severe that they might not look like their original forms anymore, losing their wings and becoming more like a typical statue of great age. Weak Angels did not have the same speed as their "healthy" counterparts.

They could regain their appearance and restore themselves if re-energised. A single hour was all it would take for them to restore themselves. River Song once indicated that the Weeping Angels had the ability to transform ordinary statues into Angels or at least animate and control them, and give them the abilities of true Angels such as quantum-locking.

TV : The Angels Take Manhattan It is also known that the kiss of a Weeping Angel had various abilities and effects, including transforming kissed people into complete duplicates of other individuals, which died after a matter of weeks; an Angel's kiss could also suck a kissed victim of their life energy, reducing them to dust.

A starved Weeping Angel. TV : The Time of Angels. The Weeping Angels could move their victims back through time with a touch. They would then consume the potential energy from the lives the victims would otherwise have led. They could move people through both space and time, as Kathy was touched in London , but ended up in Hull in ; Billy Shipton was touched inside a parking garage and arrived in in an outdoor location. TV : Blink The first time Rory Williams was touched was in an archway in a park, and he arrived in a street; and the second time he was touched was in Grayle 's cellar, and he arrived outside Winter Quay in the same time period.

This appeared to indicate the Angels could choose whether or not their victims were sent through time, or they simply lacked this ability at their infant stage. TV : The Angels Take Manhattan The Tenth Doctor theorised that getting touched by the same Angel as someone else would send you back to the same time as them when both he and Billy Shipton got sent back to The Weeping Angels could also feed on other types of energy, such as radiation given off by a Galaxy class Star Liner , or the electrical energy in electronics.

This would cause lights to flicker, making it easier for them to get around their quantum-locking. The Angels were very strong, being able to break through steel doors, force magnetised wheels to turn, and snap victims' necks without difficulty. The Weeping Angels had a unique and nearly perfect defence mechanism: quantum-locking, which caused them to turn into harmless stone when being observed.

TV : Blink It could also happen by instinct when they believed they were being watched. TV : Flesh and Stone When not being observed, they could move incredibly fast, though they appeared to slow down the closer they got to their prey; they appeared to like "playing with their food".

However, quantum-locking meant that they had to cover their eyes when in their stone form, as if they saw each other they would be trapped forever. Anything with the image of a Weeping Angel, such as pictures or film, also gained the abilities of an Angel and would eventually become an Angel, provided the image wasn't broken. The Angel's reflection would be perpetually staring at itself for as long as the Angel were reflected, however, once the new Angel came into being, as long as the Weeping Angel continued to stare at its own reflection, more would be created.

When victims looked an Angel in the eyes, the Angel could infect their visual centres, creating an image in their mind.

The victim could be mentally influenced by the Angel until it became fully grown, at which point it could escape the person's body, killing them. This ability could only be stopped by shutting down the visual centre, by means such as having the victim keep their eyes closed, and even so, it is believed the ability would resume if the victim were to reopen their eyes. Examples of mental influence included making the victim count down the minutes to his or her death, and making the victim hallucinate that a limb was petrified.

As the Host were already angelic in appearance, the transformation consisted of liquid rock being expelled from the face and coating them; instead of an Angel "popping" out of their heads. If a Weeping Angel became trapped in a CCTV system, it would be able to follow its victim in the image created by the camera, and not in the real world. However, the effort this cost the Angel caused it to solidify in the real world and crumble into dust.

PROSE : Touched by an Angel If a video recording of a Weeping Angel was made, then once the video became an Angel, it could exert significant power and influence over and through any system directly exposed to the recording the Angel came from - a projection of one Angel created from a looped recording displayed the ability to deadlock a vessel's entire system even when it had no deadlock seal, and protect the vessel's walls against penetration by methods such as thermal cutting.

The Weeping Angels did not naturally possess intelligible voices, TV : The Time of Angels although they could still produce horrific screeches as a form of laughter, TV : Flesh and Stone and the infants could produce childlike giggles. TV : The Angels Take Manhattan The Angels could take the consciousness of someone who had died and speak through it to communicate, as they used the Cleric Bob , whom they killed, to talk with the Eleventh Doctor. Because of their defence mechanism, Weeping Angels were very hard to kill, being immune to all kinds of weapons.

However they were capable of starving to death if left without time energy for too long. TV : Blink Another way of defeating them, and the only way of killing them apart from starvation, was to cause a paradox which would poison the time energy they used to feed. Weeping Angels appeared to have the ability to reform themselves when destroyed in their stone form, however.

An Angel reformed itself when it was destroyed by the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, despite missing its right arm. TV : Good as Gold. A group of Angels were also killed or at least, dispersed to the point where their consciousnesses could no longer affect anyone when the Doctor used CCTV cameras to film them, while also having each Angel viewing all the others through the screens.

This caused the Angels to dissolve into the screens. Victims could avoid the Angels by winking rather than forcing their eyes open and not blink. When asteroids formed together to create the planet Earth , three Weeping Angels were trapped inside the planet.

During the Egyptian era, a Weeping Angel was found at the entrance to a village. During an eclipse, the Angel killed most of the village, save for one girl.

Tracking the survivor to the tomb of the emperor, the Angel was defeated when the girl rearranged the mirrors, trapping the Angel in stone form. However, the girl then looked into the frozen Angel's eyes, and it is indicated that she thus became a Weeping Angel herself and remained with the trapped Angel.

Justin Richards speculated in his book The Secret Lives of Monsters that the story of Medusa was inspired by "an actual monster" that had the ability to turn people to stone with one glance. He included this theory in his section on the Weeping Angels. During the Renaissance , the three Angels who were trapped in Earth as it formed were discovered inside marble blocks.

Believing it was a miracle, a group of priests and believers formed the Order of the Three Angels , and commissioned Michelangelo to "release" the Angels. There they encountered the Weeping Angels, who sent Amy to In , a Weeping Angel attempted to attack the Eleventh Doctor and Amy while they were attempting to photograph ghosts for the Society for Psychical Research.

In August , before and during the Battle of Mons in Belgium , Weeping Angels were seen hunting soldiers from both sides. This caused some to believe that angels were coming to save them from the horrors of World War I. While on the run from the Voord , Gabby Gonzalez opened the package, causing the Weeping Angel within to grow and displace her back in time to the meeting between the Doctor's companions in Paris, Gabby guessed that the Weeping Angel was deliberately chosen and placed to send her back the proper length of time to change history.

After defeating an alternate Twelfth Doctor , the Eleventh Doctor promised to find the correct Weeping Angel and to plant it to ensure history continued on its current course. While the Weeping Angel was in the package, a viewing device kept it docile. In , the Weeping Angels were using New York City as a "farm" due to its massive population, and transformed most of the statues in the city into Angels themselves.

They would keep victims imprisoned in Winter Quay and send them back in time whenever they tried to escape. When River Song investigated Kliener, she used hallucinogenic lipstick to cause him to kiss the Angel he was using; allowing the Angel to drain Kliener's life energy and kill him. Crime lord Julius Grayle also had the same Angel that Kleiner fed and several baby Angels in his possession at this time. He kept the adult manacled in his office, torturing and damaging it, and the babies locked in his dark cellar.

In response to the captive adult Angel's distress, at least two other Weeping Angels watched over Grayle's home, disguised as ordinary statues. They eventually attacked when it was left defenceless. The Statue of Liberty approaches Winter Quay. However, Rory jumped from the Quay's roof, creating a time paradox as an alternate timeline in which the Angels kept Rory imprisoned in Winter Quay until he died of old age already existed , which poisoned and killed the majority of the Angels.