WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for the fourth episode of Doctor Who: Flux, "Chapter Four: Village of the Angels," which aired Sunday November 21st on BBC.
Since their debut in the Season 3 episode "Blink" in 2007, the Weeping Angels have made a name for themselves as one of Doctor Who's most terrifying monsters, right up there with the Cybermen and Daleks. Though their methods are not violent compared to the latter two, their brand of terror is also psychological in nature. Not only do the Weeping Angels thrive on the fact people don't perceive statues as dangerous and attack when they least expect it, but they're known to be a little sadistic as well. In Doctor Who: Flux, their more terrifying qualities are taken to a whole new level.
In "Chapter Three: Once, Upon a Time," a Weeping Angel was seen stalking the Doctor's companion, Yasmin "Yaz" Khan (Mandip Gill), throughout her timeline. At the end of the episode, the Angel found its way into Yaz's mobile phone and proceeded to hijack the Doctor's TARDIS. While the Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) is successful in getting the Angel out of her TARDIS at the start of "Chapter Four: Village of the Angels," she still falls into the Angel's trap -- a detail she is very well aware of. What she doesn't anticipate is the full extent of the Angel's very carefully thought-out trap for her.
At their core, the Weeping Angels are an alien species that feed on time energy and are known to employ various methods to meet that end. Their primary method is to zap people back in time with a single touch and feast on the time energy left behind by the life that person would've lived. They can even take on new forms as both Seasons 5 and 7 explored. The Season 5 two-parter episodes "The Time of Angels" and "Flesh and Stone" established that anything containing the image of an angel is itself an angel. This ability allows the Weeping Angels to possess a person's visual cortex and take control of that person's body by transforming them into an Angel.
The Season 7 episode "The Angels Take Manhattan" established that the Angels can disguise themselves as other statues, like the Statue of Liberty and even have cherub forms known as Baby Angels. As babies, the Weeping Angels like to terrorize their victims before zapping them back in time, which establishes their more sadistic nature. Not that their adult counterparts shy away from these methods, as they also show delight in trapping their victims in unexpected ways to victimize them over and over again. In Doctor Who: Flux, the Weeping Angels employ all of these methods in their elaborate trap for the Doctor in ways even the Doctor herself couldn't easily predict.
In "Chapter Four: Village of the Angels," the Weeping Angel that hijacked the Doctor's TARDIS controlled it long enough to reach the destination it needed to reach, in this case, the rural town of Medderton. In the small town, the Doctor encounters Claire Brown (Annabel Scholey) again for the first time since "Chapter One: The Halloween Apocalypse." In the previous episode, Claire established she knew the Doctor and that she would meet her again in her future. She was also being stalked by Weeping Angels, one of which imprinted itself into her eye before zapping her back in time to 1967.
During her time in Medderton, Claire was being studied by a psychologist called Prof. Jericho due to her ability to have premonitions. This was how she knew about the Doctor without having met her, which the Weeping Angels found useful. She also started having hallucinations about turning into a Weeping Angel, which naturally gets the Doctor's attention. When she learns the details about why the Weeping Angels are interested in Claire, the Doctor learns there is a Rogue Angel who worked for The Division residing inside of her. This is how the Doctor learns that the Weeping Angels don't work entirely on their own and that the Angels are actually after the Rogue Angel who ran away while possessing dangerous knowledge about both The Division and the Doctor herself.
In exchange for Claire, the Rogue Angel asks for the Doctor's protection against the Weeping Angels that are a part of The Division's Quantum Extraction Squad. However, the Doctor knows better than to take the Rogue Angel at their word. It turns out the Angels were never really after the Rogue Angel, but rather used the Rogue Angel as bait to lure the Doctor to where they needed her. Once they got her to the isolated town of Medderton -- which the Angels themselves extracted off the face of the Earth -- they separated the Doctor from her companions by zapping them back to 1901 so that they could helplessly witness the Doctor's successful capture.
With nowhere else left to hide, the Weeping Angels were able to strategically corner the Doctor and turn her into one of them in order to return her to The Division. This is the first time the Angels were able to successfully capture the Doctor, and all they had to do was exploit two of her weaknesses: her compassion for others and her desire to learn about her missing past. The fact the Weeping Angels were able to do this at all added a terrifying new layer to them: as a group, they're highly strategic when they need to be and will use whatever means necessary to achieve their goals.
To find out if the Doctor goes back to normal, new episodes of Doctor Who: Flux air Sundays on BBC.