A message left on a museum artefact brings the Doctor to the rescue of River Song, at a point in time before his first encounter with her, but after her first meeting with him. River is helping a militant group of Clerics led by Father Octavian investigate the Byzantium, a spaceship which is smuggling a dormant Weeping Angel. By the time the Doctor, Amy and River catch up to the vessel, however, it has crashlanded atop a ruined Aplan temple. To reach it, they must traverse a mortuary labyrinth filled with crumbling statues. Too late, the Doctor realises that the Weeping Angel is not alone -- and that he has walked into a trap.

On July 17th, 2007, Russell T Davies asked Steven Moffat to be his successor as Doctor Who's executive producer and showrunner. Moffat had been a fan of the programme since he was a young child, and had provided Davies with scripts on an annual basis, starting with 2005's The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances. Although it meant delaying or sacrificing several of his own projects, Moffat was reluctant to turn down his self-described dream job. His decision was cemented following a September 24th meeting with Doctor Who's other executive producer, Julie Gardner, and BBC Controller of Fiction Jane Tranter. Two days later, Moffat notified them that he planned to accept Davies' offer; he was formally contracted on October 26th. A second component of Doctor Who's future then slid into place in early December, when Piers Wenger agreed to succeed Gardner as both Head of Drama for BBC Wales and executive producer of Doctor Who.

Moffat and Wenger would take over Doctor Who with Season Thirty-One, which would enter production during the summer of 2009 and was expected to debut around Easter 2010. Although this meant that they had twenty months to plan their first set of episodes, Moffat was keenly aware that Doctor Who required a much greater commitment of time than most shows. As such, he quickly began pondering the season's key elements. He already knew that one pillar of his tenure would be the character of River Song, whom he had introduced in 2008's Silence In The Library / Forest Of The Dead. Although its conclusion had seen River die to save the Doctor's life, Moffat had established that their relationship extended well into her past and his future. Moffat took a delight in stories which toyed with chronology in unconventional ways, and he wanted to slowly reveal the connections between the two characters.

Steven Moffat anticipated introducing both a new Doctor and a new companion

By the end of 2007, David Tennant had indicated that he intended to leave Doctor Who in the last of several specials overseen by Davies, which would bridge an intentional gap between Season Thirty in 2008 and Season Thirty-One. Since the Doctor's last regular companion, Donna Noble, had been written out at the end of Season Thirty, Moffat therefore anticipated introducing both a new Doctor and a new companion. Around January 2008, he started work on his season premiere with this in mind. That spring, Tennant reconsidered his decision after learning of the emerging plans for Season Thirty-One, and Moffat devised an alternative plan which would retain the Tenth Doctor. On April 16th, however, Tennant confirmed that he would exit Doctor Who alongside Davies and Gardner.

The structure of Season Thirty-One would hew closely to the pattern established by Davies: out of the thirteen-episode run, most installments would be standalone adventures, with the exception of three two-part stories scattered throughout the year. Moffat was keen to introduce a number of new concepts, and avoid focussing a lot on old monsters. Nonetheless, he was eager to bring back one of his own recent creations: the Weeping Angels, who had proved enormously popular after their introduction in Season Twenty-Nine's Blink. He decided that his first two-part story was the ideal vehicle for the return of both the Weeping Angels and River Song.

At the same time, Moffat was aware that a sequel often proved to be a pale imitation of the original, and so he intended to craft a story very different from the small-scale, claustrophobic Blink. For inspiration, he looked to the classic 1979 science-fiction film Alien and its successful 1986 follow-up, Aliens. In Alien, the protagonists battled a lone monster aboard an isolated spaceship. Aliens upped the stakes significantly, depicting an entire planet overrun by the creatures. Moffat strove to emulate this approach by confronting the Doctor with a host of powerful Weeping Angels, as opposed to the four scavengers encountered by Sally Sparrow in Blink.

Moffat began writing the serial's opening installment, The Time Of Angels, around the start of auditions for the Eleventh Doctor in November. Whereas every Doctor to date had been played by a white actor, it was now agreed that candidates from other racial backgrounds would be considered. Amongst them was Paterson Joseph, a former Casualty regular who had been in Moffat's 2007 serial Jekyll and the 2005 Doctor Who story Bad Wolf / The Parting Of The Ways. Moffat himself anticipated choosing a performer who was older than the relatively youthful Tennant.

On December 6th, Steven Moffat informed Piers Wenger that he intended to offer Matt Smith the role of the Eleventh Doctor

After just three auditions on November 17th, these preconceptions were vigorously challenged by an actor called Matt Smith. He was already familiar to Moffat as an unsuccessful candidate to play John Watson in Sherlock, a modern-day adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories developed with Doctor Who writer and actor Mark Gatiss. But whereas his interpretation of Watson had been deemed too reminiscent of Sherlock's star, Benedict Cumberbatch, Smith's unique take on the Doctor belied his twenty-six years, and the unusual physicality which he brought to his performance proved highly memorable. Following a second audition, Moffat informed Wenger on December 6th that he intended to offer Smith the role of the Eleventh Doctor.

Around the same time, Moffat finished his first draft of The Time Of Angels. In Silence In The Library, he had included several throwaway allusions to other adventures shared by the Doctor and River. Although these references had not been intended to have a larger significance, one of them -- “the crash of the Byzantium” -- became the starting point for the new script. Moffat had also formulated more of River's backstory, and he now knew that she would eventually be revealed as both the Doctor's apparent killer -- a crime for which she would be incarcerated -- and his wife. Although neither the putative murder nor the wedding would be more than obliquely referenced at this stage, the foreknowledge led Moffat to write the interactions between the Doctor and River as if they were an old married couple.

Smith was formally contracted for Doctor Who just before Christmas. His casting was announced to the world on January 3rd, 2009 during a special edition of Doctor Who Confidential. The second installment of the Weeping Angels story came together during the early part of the year, with Moffat completing his first draft on March 12th. Over the next month, the remainder of the Season Thirty-One production team was assembled. Wenger recruited Beth Willis as a third executive producer, while the producer's duties would be shared between Tracie Simpson and Peter Bennett; a formal announcement was issued by the BBC on April 15th.

Karen Gillan had a small role as a Soothsayer in Season 30's The Fires Of Pompeii

Attention now turned to the Doctor's companion. At this stage, the character was called Lucy Sparrow, reusing the surname of the central protagonist in Blink. Moffat had recognised how successfully Davies had used Rose Tyler to reintroduce Doctor Who to the viewing public in 2005, and he wanted the new companion to fulfil the same function in 2010. An initial round of auditions took place in April, with one actress coming highly recommended by Willis. This was Karen Gillan, who had previously had a small role as a Soothsayer in Season Thirty's The Fires Of Pompeii. Having impressed the production team, Gillan was asked to return in mid-May to perform some scenes opposite Smith. Their chemistry was palpable and, later that day, Gillan learned that she had been cast as the Doctor's new companion. The news came as a particular delight to her mother, who was a big Doctor Who fan. The announcement was made to the press on May 29th.

Beyond the obvious changes to the regular cast, it was agreed that Season Thirty-One was an appropriate time to overhaul Doctor Who's visuals, both because the previous designs had now been in place for half a decade, and to reflect Moffat's intention to infuse the programme with a fairytale aesthetic. When it came to reimagining the TARDIS interior, there was also a pragmatic consideration: the set constructed for Season Twenty-Seven had been limited by the space available at Unit Q2 in Newport, the studio facilities which housed Doctor Who at the time. With Season Twenty-Nine, the programme had moved to more spacious confines at Upper Boat. Since the standing Hub set for the spin-off series Torchwood had recently been demolished, a new TARDIS console room could be twice the size of its predecessor.

Over the summer, production designer Edward Thomas devised a set that replaced the previous coral veneer with glass and chrome. Indeed, the central column would be a single piece of hand-blown glass, fabricated by Bristol Blue Glass in Bristol. The previous control room had only implied the existence of doors leading deeper into the TARDIS, but multiple exits would now be visible. Several sets of stairs would also allow action to take place on different vertical planes. Thomas took the opportunity to define individual functions for the six panels of the central console: communication, diagnostic, fabrication, helm, mechanical and navigation. The new set was constructed adjacent to the old version, which would be retained for use in Neil Gaiman's forthcoming The Doctor's Wife; although intended for the latter part of Season Thirty-One, it would ultimately be postponed to the following year.

For the outer police box shell, Moffat wanted to move closer to the original design used in the early Sixties. He was particularly influenced by the appearance of the ship Tardis in the Doctor Who feature films released by Aaru Pictures in 1965 and 1966. As such, the revised police box would be bigger than its predecessor, painted in a brighter blue with a more striking white trim around the windows. At Gatiss' suggestion, a St John Ambulance badge was added to the TARDIS door for the first time since The War Machines in 1966.

To help him develop his concept of the Doctor, Matt Smith took to writing short stories

Meanwhile, Smith was formulating his approach to the Doctor. He had now watched every episode of Doctor Who made under Davies, together with a sampling of serials from the show's twentieth-century iteration. But instead of drawing upon earlier interpretations, he was determined to make the Eleventh Doctor a departure from anything that had gone before. To help him develop his concept of the Doctor, Smith took to writing short stories, including one in which his Doctor and Albert Einstein travelled back to ancient Egypt. He also thought in terms of the performances given by Peter Sellers, the star of movies like The Pink Panther and Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb. Another influence was French actor Jacques Lecoq, who was celebrated as a teacher of physical movement on stage.

For the Eleventh Doctor's clothes, Moffat had originally envisaged an outfit which took pirate attire as its starting point, and perhaps incorporated the more modern aesthetic of the 1999 science-fiction film The Matrix. However, Smith was resistant to this approach, and became increasingly unhappy with each new variation that was suggested. With time running short, he convinced a dubious Moffat to let him try a combination of tweed jacket, braces and bow tie, echoing the professorial look of the mid-twentieth century. To Moffat's astonishment, the result suited Smith to a tee.

In keeping with the placement of the initial two-part story in each of the four previous seasons, The Time Of Angels and its sequel were positioned as the fourth and fifth episodes of Season Thirty-One. Unusually, however, the production team decided that they should be the first to go before the cameras, forming Block One of the recording calendar. Moffat, Wenger and Willis were well aware that the forthcoming run would be the most pivotal for Doctor Who since its 2005 relaunch, as they sought to reassure audiences that the programme would live up to the high standard set by Tennant, Davies and Gardner. With this in mind, they wanted to give Smith an opportunity to settle into his role before filming his all-important debut episode. This would mark just the second time that a new Doctor began his tenure by recording something other than his first adventure. The Fifth Doctor, Peter Davison, had initially taped his second story, Four To Doomsday, while his introduction in Castrovalva was actually the fourth of his serials to be shot.

A concerted effort would be made to recruit directors who were new to Doctor Who

As part of the production team's drive to refresh the visual appeal of Doctor Who, it was agreed that a concerted effort would be made to recruit directors who were new to the programme. The first to be hired was Adam Smith, who would be in charge of Block One; having made a number of music videos for acts like the Chemical Brothers, he had latterly directed for shows like Skins. Adam Smith was keen to help forge a close bond between the series' newest stars, and he worked with them to develop the dynamics of their characters' relationship. Given the pulse-pounding situations in which the TARDIS would deposit them, he even encouraged the two actors to share an adventurous thrill ride. The result was a frenetic boat excursion off Cardiff Bay, which proved more to Gillan's liking than Smith's.

The first day of filming for Doctor Who's thirty-first season took place at Upper Boat Studios on July 10th, more than a week ahead of the main shoot. The day was partly given over to make-up tests for Smith and Gillan, but the monitor footage of the Weeping Angel in the Byzantium cell was also recorded. Principal photography then began on July 20th, by which time the new companion had been renamed Amy Pond. Only eight weeks had elapsed since the completion of Tennant's swansong, The End Of Time, but it had been almost fifteen months since the end of Doctor Who's last full production slate. The venue was Southerndown Beach, at Southerndown in Ogmore Vale, which had previously posed as Bad Wolf Bay for episodes such as 2006's Doomsday. Now it served as the Byzantium crash site, although unfortunately shooting had to end early when the tide started to advance more quickly than anticipated. July 21st was also spent at Southerndown Beach, but the elements again conspired against the production. The team now had to contend with torrential rain, compelling Moffat to rewrite some of the planned material so that it could be relocated to the TARDIS console room. As a result, certain elements taken from Gillan's audition piece -- such as Amy reflecting on her first visit to an alien planet -- had to be dropped.

July 22nd and 23rd saw the scenes in the Clerics' encampment taped at Aberthaw Quarry in East Aberthaw. Cast and crew then headed for Gloucestershire for the next two and a half weeks. First, scenes in the Jungle Vault aboard the Byzantium were filmed at Puzzlewood, near Coleford in the Forest of Dean. This work began on July 24th and 25th, prior to a day off on the Sunday. The team remained at Puzzlewood for the whole of the following week, from July 27th to 31st. Recording on the 29th included the enigmatic scene of the Doctor travelling back through his timeline from the season finale, The Big Bang, which was part of the year's overarching storyline. Wet conditions continued to plague the shoot at Puzzlewood, forcing considerable rescheduling. One consequence was that Stephen Martin-Walters could not complete his scenes as Crispin, and so many of his lines were instead shared amongst his fellow Clerics. Moffat also give the Doctor a line of dialogue to explicitly acknowledge the persistent rain.

After the weekend, production resumed at the other Gloucestershire location: Clearwell Caves at Clearwell, which posed as the Maze of the Dead. Recording there spanned August 3rd to 8th. In addition, a second unit led by first assistant director Dan Mumford returned to Puzzlewood on the 4th to record Octavian's revelation about River's incarceration. Another second unit was active on the 8th, shooting inserts under director Alice Troughton; she had previously handled The Doctor's Daughter and Midnight during Season Thirty, as well as five stories for The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Following a rest on Sunday the 9th, cast and crew returned to Upper Boat Studios for the next several days. August 10th and 11th focussed on the set for the Byzantium's secondary flight deck. The itinerary for the 12th comprised material in the shuttle and the corridors of the crashed Byzantium, alongside some effects shots. More Byzantium sequences followed on August 13th, including those in the Home Box room and additional corridor footage which took place both during and after the vessel's final flight. Most notably, Kingston and Smith performed River's fall through space into the TARDIS. Work on the sets for the secondary flight deck and the shuttle continued on the 14th, when a number of inserts were also taped. After the weekend, production resumed on August 17th for scenes on the Byzantium's primary flight deck. They were completed on the 18th, when various pick-up shots were also recorded. Finally, August 19th marked the first time that cameras rolled on the set for the new TARDIS console room.

Although this marked the end of the main shooting schedule, a number of scenes remained to be filmed. Fortunately, Adam Smith was moving directly onto the season's third production block -- consisting solely of the season premiere, The Eleventh Hour -- during which he could catch up on the outstanding sequences for the Weeping Angels story. As such, additional TARDIS scenes were recorded at Upper Boat on September 24th and 25th. Bute Park in Cardiff was the venue for the prison guard's hallucination on the 29th, while the next day saw Brecon Cathedral in Brecon become the Delirium Archives.

Amy's bedroom walls were painted blue to visually reinforce her connection with the TARDIS

Even after The Eleventh Hour had wrapped, a handful of segments for The Time Of Angels and its sequel were still incomplete. On October 12th, the closing sequence in Amy's bedroom was taped at the Vicarage in Rhymney, as were more inserts. This work had to account for several possible dates for Amy's wedding, since Moffat intended for the season-long story arc to climax on the actual broadcast date of The Big Bang and the transmission schedule had not yet been finalised. Additional pick-up shots were taped at the Vicarage on October 14th, and then at Upper Boat on November 12th and 25th. In between, on November 20th, the final scene was remounted at Upper Boat, with Amy's bedroom now realised as a set. Its walls were painted blue at Adam Smith's suggestion, in order to visually reinforce her connection with the TARDIS.

By February 2010, Episode Two was still without a title, as Moffat struggled to find an appropriate phrase which incorporated the word “Angels”. Finally, his son Joshua pointed out that this was unnecessary, since the presence of the Weeping Angels would have been well-established during Episode One. Playing on the phrase “flesh and bone”, he suggested Flesh And Stone as an alternative, and the name stuck.

The Time Of Angels was broadcast on April 24th. Unfortunately, during the tension-filled cliffhanger, the BBC chose to run a colourful trailer along the bottom of the screen. The advertisement featured an animated version of presenter Graham Norton and touted his talent competition, Over The Rainbow, which would air immediately after Doctor Who. Several thousand viewers lodged a complaint with the BBC about the distraction, and the Corporation issued a formal apology on April 27th. Happily, there was no repeat of the incident when Flesh And Stone aired on May 1st. Doctor Who's start time remained slightly mutable, with The Time Of Angels scheduled for 6.20pm and Flesh And Stone positioned five minutes later.

• Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition #26, 30th December 2010, “The Time Of Angels / Flesh And Stone” by Andrew Pixley, Panini Publishing Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Complete History #64, 2016, “Story 206: The Time Of Angels / Flesh And Stone”, edited by Mark Wright, Hachette Partworks Ltd.