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In 6x11 The God Complex, the Doctor and his companions encounter

two weeping angels, that are merely illusions and therefore discarded as harmless.

However, back in 5x04 The Time of Angels, it was established that

"That which holds the image of an Angel becomes itself an Angel".

So, why didn't they become real, or probably more correctly, why didn't the hotel or at least the room effectively become one?

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The only right answer is "we don't know." because no one at the hotel bothered to ask or explain it.

But based on the behavior of the angels in "The Time of Angels" there are two possible answers:

  1. They didn't last long enough. Note that the video image of the Weeping Angel did not immediately turn into an angel capable of attacking Amy; it was only after the video had been on repeat for a while that it began to manifest. Similarly, the angel in Amy's eye manifested slowly, lasting well into the next episode without taking her mind over. In other words, we don't know how much time it takes for an image of an angel to become an angel in its own right. The images from the hotel may simply have gone away too fast.

  2. They weren't really images of angels. This requires us to interpret the warning very literally: an image of an actual Weeping Angel will itself become an angel. Note that the image on the video, and the image in Amy's eye, were both images of a previously existing angel that was captured in the image. We don't know if the images from the hotel were images of real angels, or simply generic "computer generated" images based on how Gibbis saw them in his mind. It's possible that the images from the hotel simply didn't count as "images of an angel" on a technicality.

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  • I like explanation #2 better
    – Valorum
    Commented Feb 7, 2015 at 20:31
  • I tend to prefer #2 as well; we know those images came from the fears of people in the hotel, so the "images" were pulled from Gibbis' mind; it's not likely that he was thinking of two specific angels at the time, especially since his fear of them was of their race in general.
    – KutuluMike
    Commented Feb 7, 2015 at 20:41
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    Both good points. I do tend to accept #1 more though, since otherwise there's no explanation why that book didn't contain at least a hand-drawn, very abstract image of an angel
    – Zommuter
    Commented Feb 7, 2015 at 21:00
  • You missed option 3: The writers forgot about The Time of the Angels, and option 4: The writers didn't care about The Time of the Angles. Continuity? What continuity?
    – FreeMan
    Commented Jul 21, 2021 at 18:13

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