Blink
Story 186, Episode 734, Series 3 Episode 10
Doctor: The Tenth Doctor
Companions: Martha Jones
One of the most brilliant single episode stories in Doctor Who history, Steven Moffat crafts an airtight narrative about time travel.
The Review
This episode was an afterthought, a story barely featuring the Doctor, cobbled together with some ideas Steven Moffat had bouncing around in his head. The result is stone cold brilliance. There are three components to this, one is the performances, anchored by Carey Mulligan as our hero, Sally Sparrow. Sally explores an old ruined house to photograph it, and there she meets the Weeping Angels. Her best friend is whisked to 1920, and a police officer that asks her out is sent to 1969 with the Doctor and Martha. For barely appearing in person, Tennant is ever-present as the Doctor through a recorded address that again sees him firing on all cylinders. Secondly, it’s the Weeping Angels, one of the most ingenious monsters of all time. They’re stone angels, but only when you’re looking at them, look away for an instant and they move, impossibly fast, directly toward you. The design of the Weeping Angels is chilling, going from appearing to be crying to lunging with fangs and teeth. It’s little wonder that they’ve become iconic villains now treated with the same respect as the Daleks and Cybermen. The killer bit is when you realize: the camera counts as a pair of eyes too.
What really elevates this episode it is all one big paradox. Sally’s future boyfriend Larry has found recordings of the Doctor speaking hidden in DVDs, but doesn’t know what they mean. It’s half of a conversation had with Sally, that the Doctor only knows because Larry writes down the conversation while Sally and the Doctor are having it. The ending completes the loop where a year later Sally happens to run into the Doctor and Martha, before they get stranded in 1969, giving him the transcript so he can make that video when he is stranded. It is all genius. The shock horror of seeing Sally’s friend Kathy taken and Sally immediately meeting her grandson after Kathy got sent back to 1920, and falling in love with a cop only to immediately see him as a dying old man is brutal stuff. The horror of the Angels: they don’t kill you, but they separate you from your life forever. Blink is a puzzle that keeps revealing himself until the loop is completed, a love story between Sally and Larry, and a horror story with the Weeping Angels. It is one of the finest scrips: period.
Not until Heaven Sent would Moffat at last write a story that is so complete, emotionally affecting, and rewarding as this one.
10/10 Two perfect tens in a row! Series 3 on a roll.
Reviewing Doctor Who from Start to Finish 