Terror of the Autons

Chapter The 156th, where a supposedly Machiavellian genius turns out not to be much cop, really.

Plot:

The Master, a Time Lord renegade and exile who knew the Doctor back on Gallifrey, arrives on Earth, steals the one Nestene globe left over from the previous invasion in Spearhead from Space, and brings back the Autons, because... well, it's unclear. He wants to team up with the Nestene meanies to destroy humanity, because... well that's unclear too. It's likely he's doing all this just to annoy the Doctor. Anyway, there follows a lot of convoluted attempts to blow up or hypnotise or kidnap the Doctor, or his new assistant Jo, or the plucky fellows of UNIT. In parallel, the Master teams up with the manager of a plastics factory and builds lots of prototypes of plastic objects that can be brought to life and kill people. He settles on plastic daffodils, and hires a coach to do a promotional tour of the country, giving the fake flowers away, town by town, like super villains do. The plan is to send a radio signal to activate the daffs, which then shoot a quick setting plastic over the face of anyone nearby, suffocating them; in the confusion of a wave of deaths, the Nestene invading force will land and take over. The Doctor and UNIT attack before the signal can be sent, but the Master still has time to use a radio telescope to signal the Nestene Consciousness into corporeal existence on Earth. Before it can fully materialise, though, the Doctor foils the Master's plan by... telling him not to do it. The Master is persuaded to turn on his co-collaborators, just like supervillains sometimes are apparently. The Autons defeated, the Master escapes. But the Doctor has swiped a vital component from the Master's TARDIS, meaning they are both stuck on Earth and all set for a rematch or four.

Context:

I watched this one with the whole fam, old school style: one episode a week over the course of a month. No particular reason for this, but it has been more difficult to find big swathes of time during lockdown for watching Doctor Who. Both the Better Half and I are lucky enough to be working full-time from home, and have been since the start of our isolation 10 weeks ago. On top of that, we're home schooling the three kids (boys of 13 and 10, girl of 8). The notion I had at the start of the lockdown about having extra time to tackle new projects was naive. We've done a bit of work in the garden, and streamed a few films, but that's about it. There's still time, though; the government of the UK is relaxing lockdown rules as of now, but neither myself or the Better Half need to go back into our offices to continue working, so we're going to be staying home as much as possible. This is a personal decision, but I still feel very guilty that I went with government advice before the lockdown (including travelling to London and congregating with a large number of people at a BFI Doctor Who event - not quite Cheltenham but still makes me feel bad looking back). The government were too slow to introduce strict lockdown measures, and I believe they are too quick now in lifting them; I don't want to make the same mistake again of paying their advice too much heed. Maybe I'll get to write that novel or learn a foreign language yet. Or, most likely I'll just watch a bit more Doctor Who. It's all good.

Anyway, the kids generally found the story diverting enough. The Better Half was very vocal about how rude and insufferable the Doctor acts during the story. The infamous description by the Doctor of Jo in their first scene together when she ruins his experiment, that she's a "ham fisted bun vendor" was misheard as "ham fisted bum vendor", which caused many minutes of hilarity. I had to pause the DVD to let the laughter die down.

First time round:

I'd seen a couple of intriguing clips of Terror of the Autons in black and white on Resistance is Useless; this was a documentary shown on BBC2 in early 1992 just before a season of repeats. It was just over a year later when it came out on VHS, and by this time it was in colour. Clever people, Who fans and BBC engineers, had worked out how to produce a broadcast standard colour version by merging various surviving versions of differing qualities. I bought a copy in WHSmiths when I was making a necessary trip to Durham (as I happened to be in my second year of university there). It was very exciting at the time to be getting full colour versions of some of the Jon Pertwee stories released on VHS that had previously only been available in black and white. To celebrate this unique selling point, the spines of the video boxes were adorned with a paintbrush logo, annoying the purist collectors by making them inconsistent with the rest of the collection, and meaning nothing to anyone else. Great days.

Reaction:

I'll start by saying that Spearhead from Space - the Auton story that, like Terror, kicked off a new series of Doctor Who the previous year - is one of my all-time favourite Doctor Who stories. Even if you don't like it as much as me, I think you'd have to concede that it made a big splash: first ever colour story, introducing a new approach and new regular cast for the show, and it's all made very glossily on film. Plus, it has a great new monster race, who work well both visually and conceptually: they like all things plastic, they copy people, they create a soldier class that look like shop window dummies; it's all very good stuff. Down to the smallest detail, Spearhead gets it right. The sound effects for example, are very distinctive and memorable - the buzzing drone sound that accompanies an Auton whenever it's close, the satisfying whirr when the guns emerge from their plastic hands, the "ka-choo" whoosh when they fire. All this and more made it almost certain that there would be a sequel. A year later, and here it is, a technicolour blast to re-introduce the Doctor and UNIT to the nation's Saturday afternoons.

The second invasion plan of the Nestene Consciousness is not, though, quite as solid as the first. In Spearhead, they arrive in small numbers, take over a plastic factory secretly where they can mass produce troops, then gradually replace people in positions of power with plastic facsimiles while smuggling those troops into multiple cities as shop window dummies, waiting to be activated. This is all pretty sensible (it should be, as the Nestenes clearly have been monitoring Earth broadcasts for a while, and cribbed their plot from old episodes of Quatermass). In the sequel, they don't bother with starting small, nor copying people in positions of power, and the main thrust of their invasion plan is to hire a coach and very slowly do a magical mystery tour of the shires of England, handing out plastic flowers in giant Frank Sidebottom heads; stealth is definitely not in it. By some miracle, despite their drawing massive amounts of attention to themselves, the Doctor and UNIT don't find out about this activity until the Autons have given out enough of these flowers to endanger a significant number of lives. Or so they say. Presumably, they have allowed for the percentage of households that have thrown their plastic flower away, or left it in a drawer, or even put it on display in a room that won't have any people coming in to it at the crucial moment when the signal is sent. If the idea is that the deaths have to happen all at the same time to create diversionary chaos, it seems a bit of a wonky plan, to say the least.

What, or rather who, has happened to make the plan so silly compared to last time? The Master. He loves an over-complicated plan to the point of ridiculousness. This isn't just fan snarkiness after the fact either, it's a key and intended part of the character. In later stories in other eras, he is said to be someone who would "delay an execution to pull the wings off a fly" or "get dizzy if he tried to walk in a straight line", but it's right there from day one too. There's a conversation when the Doctor and the Master finally meet in Terror where the Doctor comments that the Master's contribution to the Nestene plan is "vicious, complicated and inefficient", and that this is typical of his way of thinking. Now, one already has a monster in this story that can't invade a planet unless there's a convenient plastics factory to hand; it may seem to be stretching things too far to also add a villain that deliberately delights in making things unnecessarily convoluted.

The problem is that the Master was conceived without any obvious motivations for his actions (more on that later), and also to be a vehicle for a specific actor; this later aspect of the character's genesis makes up for any other deficiencies: Roger Delgado is perfectly cast, works well as a foil for Pertwee, and can suavely deliver any line or action, no matter how crazy. The action has been cleverly structured to keep the Doctor apart from his adversary until the end, with only a brief phone call before that (this approach must have made an impression on the young Russell T Davies as he reused it later in The Sound of Drums). Obviously, if the Master can sneak into UNIT HQ in disguise when the Doctor's out to put in a Nestene-controlled plastic telephone flex as a trap, then he could probably just sneak into UNIT HQ in disguise when the Doctor's in to, you know, shoot him. Shoot him, if you want him dead - just shoot him. To me, Delgado plays this as just a game, that the Master doesn't really want to kill the Doctor, but needs to keep up the pretence. The only time the script gives him something to which he can't grant verisimilitude is at the climax, where the Master has to volte face and turn against the Nestenes. Delgado tries his best, but it's pretty unbelievable, and would be a hard ask of anyone to find some truth in that moment.

The other key difference between Spearhead and Terror of the Autons is the producer Barry Letts, who is also on directing duties. The story a year before had been produced by Derrick Sherwin, and Sherwin had commissioned and handed over the structure and scripts for the rest of the year too. Terror of the Autons is the first opportunity for Letts to fully put his stamp on the show. The accent is much more on family-friendly fun; the scientific and military aspects of UNIT are toned down and the adult self-possessed assistant Liz Shaw is replaced by Katy Manning, who plays Jo as a child, getting things wrong and falling into trouble. The succession of different captains assisting the Brig is replaced with a permanent character in the shape of Mike Yates. The introduction of the wicked uncle character of the twinkly, sly Delgado as the Master completes the UNIT family, as they have since become known. This format, with increasing breaks for off world adventures with The Doctor doing jobs for the Time Lords - another change Letts would make, but which obviously there's no sign of yet in Terror besides the hint of a Time Lord turning up to offer guidance - would remain in place for the next three years.

As well as cast, there's tonal changes instigated in this story. The Doctor Who stories broadcast in 1970 starting with Spearhead were in colour, but they didn't have the colour of Terror of the Autons, and the stories that followed it. It's positively gaudy in places. Again, the changes go towards the more fun and family-friendly - the Autons aren't silent killers accompanied by that sinister buzzing noise anymore, they speak, which makes them less frightening somehow. It wasn't enough of a change, though, to avoid this episode being considered controversially frightening by many at the time - with dolls coming to life, policeman turning into blank-faced killers, and so on. There was quite an outcry. This would be something that they would continue to tweak as things went along, until the balance was right. This spirit of innovation extended to the technical side too. Letts as director pushed the technology, with lots of use of cutting edge green-screen work, to such an extent that a lot of it looks rubbish now. I can't fault the ambition. If it weren't for the existence of Spearhead from Space as a yardstick, it would be fine, but because of it's sequel - practically remake - status, the comparisons can't be avoided. For all its triumphs, Terror looks a bit tacky compared to the original.

Connectivity: 

Plastic. Both the alien consciousness in Terror of the Autons and the alien pathogen in Praxeus love plastic.

Deeper Thoughts:

The Conan Doyle Master Plan. The story told often afterwards about the creation of the character of the Master, is that Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks, having seen the relationship between the Doctor and the Brigadier as something like that between Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson, realised that the Doctor needed his equivalent of Professor Moriarty. They were referring, as most people do when they allude to Holmes and Moriarty, to the perception that's grown up about what that protagonist / antagonist relationship was like, not what's written in the books. Moriarty appears in only one Sherlock Holmes story, and is mentioned in a few more. I've read a number of Sherlock Holmes stories and have never come across any reference to Moriarty. You couldn't miss the Master when he was first introduced - he was in every single story for a year. Given the nature of Doyle's character (a shadowy figure that guides and protects the criminals of London in exchange for a cut of profits), he could have been behind any of the plots of any of the books, I suppose, but he most definitely wasn't a front man, as the Master is. He only shows his hand in The Final Problem, as I understand it, in retaliation at Sherlock's impact to the schemes in which he has a vested interest. There is a clear and understandable motivation for Moriarty: he's a criminal kingpin.

The Master doesn't have such a motivation. If he were a mercenary, or at least were a bit mercenary, it would make sense of his teaming up with the Autons for profit, but there's no sign of that, and no evidence in stories before or since that either Time Lords or Nestenes use cash. As noted above, if his aim is to destroy the Doctor, he could go about it much more efficiently, and he passes up at least one obvious opportunity to do this in every story. He clearly wants to get the Doctor's attention, often going out of his way to ensure his supposed nemesis finds out about whatever plans he's got on the go. But why? With a blank space in place of a rationale for the character's behaviour, successive writers and the audience at home have filled it in with all sorts of ideas and theories, some more sensible than others. A prevailing fan theory for a long time in the 1980s explained the rivalry by imagining that the Master was the Doctor's brother; other stories have suggested - not necessarily very effectively - that he's just an amoral agent of chaos, and stories after Delgado's sad untimely death established that he had used up all his Time Lord lives, and made his raison d'etre just d'etre - his own survival. Again, though, this usually failed to convince as the plots he was involved in - with a couple of exceptions - weren't anything to do with extending his life.


Dodgy motivation is a flaw that often occurs with the big sci-fi adventure genre's supervillain role, but it seems more so with the Master. Perhaps this is because he was created just to be someone else's dark reflection, so it's unlikely he's going to have much life of his own. It's odd that he was so created, as the Doctor had managed to get by without a Moriarty figure for seven years. The main reason for this was that the Doctor has the Daleks. Yes, they lacked a single figure that could appear in a confrontation scene with our hero (this would eventually be rectified with the creation of Davros later), but still - if most people had been asked before Terror of the Autons who was the Doctor's equivalent of Moriarty - the answer would have come back naming Skaro's finest. The Daleks had not appeared in the show for a while when Terror of the Autons was broadcast, of course, and the resulting creation of the Master gave the new series a third 'big bad' to shuffle in to the series finales alongside the Daleks and the Cybermen, or combinations thereof. This also means - as Steven Moffat has pointed out regarding the Daleks - these top 3 baddies, because they return for the most rematches and the Doctor always has to ultimately win, are also paradoxically the top 3 most defeated too.

In Summary:

A good introduction for the Master and Jo, but the rest is a little bit plasticky.

Praxeus

Chapter The 155th, was almost prescient as it depicts global efforts to manage the spread of a deadly... bacterium. Close but no cigar.

Plot:

Contemporary Earth; the TARDIS team have split up across the globe to investigate odd energy emissions, birds behaving strangely, and people going all crusty and exploding after coming into contact with a mystery alien pathogen. In Madagascar, the Doctor meets up with a couple of people working in a research lab, Suki and Amaru. In Peru, Ryan teams up with a travel vlogger Gabriella, who's lost her friend to the alien nastiness. Meanwhile, Graham and Yaz are in Hong Kong, and bump into Jake, the estranged husband of missing astronaut Adam Lang, who is searching for him there. Together, they break into a building and find Adam, who's been experimented on by aliens, having been infected. The Doctor collects everyone together, and - avoiding attacks by aliens or by infected birds - they use the Madagascan lab to work. Amaru gets killed by the birds, and Suki turns out to be the last of the aliens who deliberately brought the pathogen to Earth to find a cure. They chose Earth because the infection has an affinity for microplastics, and the humans and the birds have ingested loads because - see - microplastics, environment - bad - see. See, kids? Bad. Anyway, Suki succumbs to the infection and dies. The Doctor works out a cure and Jake offers to sacrifice himself using the aliens' spaceship to spray it all over Earth, but the Doctor rescues him in the nick of time and he's reconciled with Adam.

Context:

In the first full week of May, after a long while with no new Doctor Who releases, two box-sets - like buses - came along at once. The first was the coveted Season 14 Blu-ray set, Tom Baker's excellent third year. I already blogged about The Talons of Weng-Chiang after seeing it at the BFI, just before Covid-19 lockdown kicked in for the UK, but it's great to finally have the full set of discs to enjoy. Also out, perhaps not as coveted but just as welcome, was the box-set of the recent Jodie Whittaker run, new Who's series 12. This type of set doesn't get a BFI launch (but wouldn't it be good to have such a thing to celebrate Jodie Whittaker's stories, if and when we can leave our houses again?). In order to choose which story to blog about, I introduced a random factor with the roll of an eight-sided die. A roll of 1 would have meant Spyfall, which I already blogged when it was transmitted, and so would have meant that I didn't blog another tale from the series this time. But it came up 6, so a speedy revisit of Praxeus was on the cards. I watched it by myself this time (the family are separately watching a different story an episode a week at the moment). At one point, my youngest (girl of 8) came in and said "We've seen this already" and then left the room again.

First time round:

It was only three months ago that I saw Praxeus for the first time, and I already can't remember much about it. It was on the day of its first BBC1 broadcast in the UK, Sunday 2nd February 2020, and I'm pretty sure it will have been live or close to live, as we're still mostly watching new episodes that way. Beyond that, nothing much. This may be because it was overshadowed by the big revelations the previous week in Fugitive of the Judoon. I can remember exactly where I was when I heard Captain Jack's voice cut in before he appeared, and I had that moment or two of confused anticipation "Was that who I think it was?!" There's no moments as big in Praxeus (and that's not even the biggest surprise in the Judoon story). Later in the evening I was on twitter and saw a somewhat unkind tweet that juxtaposed pictures of the wonky looking puppet bird used in the story and the moth-eaten animatronic cat from 1980s story Survival, alongside the caption "Same energy".That sticks in my mind, but the episode itself doesn't. Poor Praxeus.

Reaction:

The first thing that hits one on watching Praxeus is how good it looks. From the very first frame, and throughout the action, the images captured by the lovely anamorphic lenses they've been using on Who stories since 2018 dazzle; every shot is widescreen and cinematic and beautiful. It also helps that there are some great locations, a lot of them shot in South Africa but chosen and no doubt dressed cleverly to seem diverse enough to represent locations all across the world. At first glance, it's essential to have this sense of scale, as this is a global story. Or is it? There's atmosphere and scale in some of the scenes - a doomed submariner washed up on the shore here, a creepy abandoned hospital there - but they don't add anything much. Underneath all the latitude hopping, this is a very linear plot: the Doctor and friends discover an illness, then find and distribute a cure. There's a brief betrayal, yes, when a character we thought was friendly turns out to have an ulterior motive; but, as the person turns to dust a few moments later, the betrayal doesn't make much of a difference either. The subplot of Jake and Adam's reconciliation is pretty thin too, and added up only takes a few minutes to play out. Gabriela has no impact on the plot at all; she could lift right out - as could, truth be told, all of the companions and guest characters - and nothing would change. Even Suki and the others from her alien race could be removed; just leaving the Doctor and the bacterium.

It is a story with a strong moral message about the pollution caused by plastic use, and that's perfectly fine. Maybe the global scale is needed for that subtext, as it is referring to a global problem? Nah, I'm not buying that either. The whole point about the plastics ingested by bird and human alike is their ubiquity, so the tale could have been based anywhere. If the hospital, lab and warehouse that each different sub-team investigates were all in the same city, it would still be the same story and the same message. Spreading it out just creates "shoe leather", i.e. moving characters from place to place to take up time. Ultimately, the story has to cross-cut between different characters and places. If it didn't, there would be no story, and without the scale, and the tonal shifts from comedy to adventure to horror, the audience would lose patience with it very quickly. Actually, maybe that's not true. If the story was distilled down to its essence, just the Doctor in a lab investigating a pathogen, racing against time to save the human race as the infected die one by one, if the action never left the confines of the lab, that kind of monomaniac focus would be thrilling, and certainly more original, than all the globe-trotting here that is a product of budget, but not necessarily imagination.

It's a shame, because the writer of this story Pete McTighe scripted one of the better stories of 2018, Kerblam! That story had loads of plot, carefully written, nicely paced and delivered, and had no superfluous characters or scenes. He also seems like a very nice guy, from his appearances in front of and behind the cameras on the classic Doctor Who Blu-ray sets, with which he's heavily involved. So, what happened? I think the cart was before the horse, here. My guess is that the brief was for a global eco-thriller, and everyone got carried away with that concept, and saying something meaningful about the world around us, but didn't remember to build a story to underpin that. The upshot is that it's a bit ho-hum, and wears thin with repeat watching. If it were a better story, people would watch it more and it would endure into the future, so the message would better resonate. It's a little self-defeating.

That's not to say there aren't pleasures.The look and feel is a big plus, as mentioned before. The comedy and adventure and horror, even though they are basically misdirection, are all done well. Bradley Walsh is having the time of his life being the joker in the pack (getting his tricorder-like tool the wrong way round, and such), but also able to turn on a sixpence to act as the heart of the TARDIS team, providing marriage counselling to Jake and Adam. There's lots of great action scenes, with cops and robbers stuff early on, alien zap gun fights, and spacecraft in trouble, burning through the atmosphere. Yaz finally gets some stuff to do, leaping into the unknown bravely at one point, then being disappointed when she hasn't discovered a new alien planet. The horror succeeds both in the creeping fear variety as characters explore eerie locales, and the gruesome body horror of the infection consuming people too. It's by no means just "for the birds", but it's also not going to be on many people's top ten list.  

Connectivity: 

Both are single word title stories proximate to big revelatory episodes featuring Captain Jack, in seasons where the overarching plot involves the Master (Praxeus was broadcast a week after Fugitive of the Judoon, Blink a week before Utopia). Both stories have a love story subplot between two guest characters, and both see a few guest characters inside the TARDIS control room.

Deeper Thoughts:

"If you have a message, call Western Union." The late great Terrance Dicks used to occasionally bring up this famous quotation, often (mis?)attributed to Samuel Goldwyn, which warns off the storyteller from attempting to moralise. It's odd that Dicks was the one Doctor Who writer who quoted this frequently, as the era when he was script editor - the 5 years where Jon Pertwee played the Doctor - were probably the most preachy of Who's long history. Stories like Praxeus, which use the Doctor Who format to highlight a topical issue, are very similar in intent to a Pertwee story like The Green Death, for example. This was pointed out during arguments back and forth online this year after this story, and other 'message' stories of 2020 like Can You Hear Me?, were aired. A lot of fans moaned that all this "woke" nonsense was not what Doctor Who was supposed to about, and it should concentrate on just telling simple adventure tales like it always had. Many other fans countered that Doctor Who had never just told simple adventure tales, and it had always included socially relevant themes and subtexts. This argument has flared up intermittently for years, and will likely never end, as both sides are right.

Doctor Who is a conflicted as its fans regarding this; it has a love/hate relationship with conveying a message. The years before Dicks joined as script editor were at the other polar extreme to his era. All Pertwee's predecessor Patrick Troughton's stories are adventure stories of greater or lesser quality, but does any of them have any intentional subtext at all? What message does The Web of Fear have? What about The Tomb of the Cybermen? Does Fury from the Deep have any higher intent? This last story concentrates on offshore rigs not because of their social or ecological impacts, but because North Sea Oil had been newsworthy fairly recently when it was written, and so must have seemed a fun inspiration for the locale in which a seaweed monster might operate. Earlier than that, the Hartnell era oscillates even more wildly, as the show was finding it's feet back then. Early on in the very first series, Terry Nation contributes the first Dalek story, and it's a full-on cold war fable, with a central discussion about the merits or otherwise of pacifism. A couple of stories later, Nation is recommissioned, and delivers The Keys of Marinus, which has frozen ice warriors coming to life, seas of acid, brain creatures in jars, and nary a hint of a social conscience.

When Pertwee (and Dicks) bowed out it, the Doctor Who style swung back to adventures without subtext again, and it's gone back and forth like a metronome ever since. When it's good, the extra depth added by a real-world theme can be very rewarding. When it's done clumsily it can be excruciating, the action clunking to a halt for the star to deliver a homily with all the subtlety of a needle being wrenched off a record. Invasion of the Dinosaurs is my pick for the most egregious example. Throughout the piece there's been some clever commentary about the dangers of herd mentality, and how well-intentioned people can end up doing atrocious things. But towards the end, there's this unsubtle exchange to hammer things home to those who might not have been paying attention:

DOCTOR: It's not the the oil and the filth and the poisonous chemicals that are the real cause of pollution, Brigadier - it's simply greed.


BRIGADIER: (Looking embarrassed) Hmm... Well... (changes subject rapidly).

Praxeus is somewhere in the middle of the scale, not too bad, not too good. Elsewhere in the 2020 run, global warming and mental health were smuggled in, but other weeks it was just Cybermen dressing up as Time Lords and zapping everyone in sight. It's testament to Doctor Who's ever-evolving structure that even episodes shown after it's been going 56+ years are defying anyone, even the fans, to box it in to a simple style or approach.

In Summary:

This story didn't quite go viral.

Blink

Chapter The 154th, which is wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, and excellenty-wexcellenty.

Plot:

In 2007, Sally Sparrow breaks in to a spooky house, Wester Drumlins, to take photographs. There are lots of statues around the grounds, which seem to have been sculpted with their hands covering their eyes as if they are weeping. Also, they're moving. In one room, Sally finds a message written to her underneath the peeling wallpaper, signed by the Doctor and dated 1969. She returns to the house with her friend Cathy Nightingale, who goes missing, zapped into the 1920s by one of the statues (they're really Weeping Angels, you see). Cathy's grandson turns up at the door instantly with a letter from his now dead Nan explaining everything. Sally has to go and see Cathy's brother Larry to excuse Cathy's disappearance. Larry works at a DVD shop, and is obsessed with a mystery Easter egg found on 17 seemingly unconnected DVDs, which feature a skinny bloke in a tight suit speaking one side of a conversation. Larry gives her the list of 17 DVDs, in case she's interested (she isn't). 

Sally decides to go to the police, and meets Billy Shipton, a detective investigating Wester Drumlins. Many vehicles have been left abandoned over the years at Wester Drumlins, as if something had happened to all their drivers, and they have even found an old police box there too.  Billy flirts a little with Sally, and she gives him her number, but once she's left the angels get him and zap him back to 1969. Here, Billy meets the Doctor and Martha, who are stranded in that time zone, trying to get the TARDIS back. The Doctor gives Billy a message for Sally Sparrow, but also tells him it will be a while before he can deliver it. Back in 2007, Sally gets a call from Billy, and finds that he is now an old man in hospital. He explains about the Doctor, and that he will deliver the Doctor's message to her, but then is destined to die. The message is "Look at the list". Sally stays with Billy until he passes away, then looks at the DVD list and realises that it is a list of her entire DVD collection - the mystery Easter egg message is intended for her. She goes to meet Larry at Wester Drumlins; he brings a portable DVD player.

As they watch the DVD Easter Egg in the house, the onscreen Doctor appears somehow to be replying to Sally. He explains that the angels now have the police box, his disguised time and space machine, and are after the key, which she picked up from the house earlier. She needs to help him, but the angels are dangerous and can move and zap you back in time if unobserved, so she mustn't even blink when one's around. Curious as to how he can be conversing with her from so long ago, the Doctor tells her to look to her left. When she does, she sees Larry writing down a transcript which the Doctor has a copy of in 1969. Soon the Doctor explains that there is nothing left of the transcript, which means this must be the moment the angels attack, and so they do. Following the Doctor's instructions, they go into the TARDIS - narrowly managing to outrun four angels, who surround the box on each side - and put the DVD into a slot on the console. This causes an emergency dematerialisation, leaving Sally and Larry behind. Luckily, the four angels are now trapped, made of stone, each looking into the eyes of its partner angel opposite, quantum-locked for eternity.

A year later, Larry and Sally are running a shop together. Larry clearly wants more than a professional relationship, and maybe Sally does too, but there's something in the way: Sally is obsessing on how the events of a year ago could have come about. She's documented everything  - the transcript, the list, etc. - and keeps it all in a file, but can't make it make sense. Then, one day, the Doctor and Martha rush past the shop, in the midst of some other adventure; Sally greets them, but neither has heard of Sally Sparrow or angels or DVDs or any of it. Sally realises that the events are still in their future, and gives the Doctor the file, telling him that sometime soon he's going to be stranded in 1969 and to make sure he has the file on him when he does. The time travellers leave, and satisfied that the mystery has been solved, Sally reaches out and holds Larry's hand.  All is happy... except for the statues, statues everywhere, all around, on many buildings, and many streets. Could they be angels? Don't blink!

Context:

When this one came up, I knew it would be a crowd-pleaser, so persuaded the whole family (Better Half, and three children, boys of 13 and 10, girl of 7) to gather round to watch from the DVD version on the New Series 3 box set. Not only is this generally thought to be one of the very best stories in Doctor Who's history - even more of an accolade considering it's got hardly any of the Doctor in it - but the children have never seen it. Only the eldest one of them was alive when it first was shown, of course, and he was less than a year old; but, when I showed the children all of the new series episodes to date relatively recently, this was one of a handful considered too scary for them then. Time has moved on, though, and they are all old enough now. Mind you: the jump-scare moment where a character isn't looking, and then turns to see an angel appear right in their face, bearing teeth, caused both the youngest child, and the Better Half, to scream loud enough to wake the dead. The consternation of the aftermath of that was such that the next few lines of dialogue were obscured, so I had to rewind the DVD. The scene played again, and they both screamed just as loud the second time!

First time round:

I have very strong memories of my first encounter with this storyline. This was "'What I Did on My Christmas Holidays' By Sally Sparrow", Steven Moffat's story in the 2006 Doctor Who annual. After the success of the relaunched show in 2005, Panini, the Doctor Who Magazine publishers, decided to relaunch this other old favourite, a festive volume of illustrated stories, articles, quizzes and comic strips. It was a nicely put together volume with contributions from most of the writers of the 2005 run. In a burst of fan enthusiasm at the return of the show, I was buying every piece of related merch at the time. This soon ceased as so much was coming out that I couldn't keep up with it ll, but at this stage it was mostly just books and one remote-control Dalek. I remember liking a lot of the stories in the annual, but Moffat's stood out as being very entertaining indeed. The story was then reworked as Blink a couple of years after. Blink introduces lots more stuff (there's no Angels in the annual story, for example) but the central conceit that forms Blink's intriguing time-warped structure is there in the original story, and the story has one final formal innovation that the TV story does not have. As such, I recommend seeking it out and reading it (it's only a couple of pages long) if you haven't before.


I don't remember watching Blink on TV for the first time at all. I know that it was on the day of its first BBC1 broadcast in June 2007, probably live as it went out. I know that I thought it was very good; though, with no offence meant to any other era of Doctor Who, that was pretty much guaranteed during this period, and at the time Blink didn't stand out so much from episodes around it such as Human Nature and Utopia which were of equal quality in my book. But I don't have any clear memories of the moments of sitting down to watch it, or who I was with (I assume the Better Half, but we also might have had people round, can't remember). 2007 was a good while ago now (more on that below). 

Reaction:

Some stories have heart; some have brains. Some stories have intricate structures with twists and turns of the plot. Some stories have great moments, where characters reveal their values and feelings, and interact with one another in satisfying ways. Some stories have scares, and some have laughs.  Good stories have a lot of these elements, cleverly put together as a coherent whole. It's rare for any story, let alone any Doctor Who story, to excel in all the categories; Blink does, and that's probably why it's so well regarded. Moffat was on a hell of a roll with his regular story contribution in each series of Doctor Who. Blink was his third of three yearly contributions up to that point, and was third to win a Hugo award, and the second to be nominated for a Nebula award for the screenplay. It makes it difficult to review. Without just gushing "All of it!", I'll try to answer the question of what exactly makes Blink so special, but also the question of why, despite this, it's not my favourite. Of the four stories Moffat contributed in the Russell T Davies showrunner period, I'd put Blink joint last with The Girl in the Fireplace; my favourite is the Library story, and there will always something very special about Moffat's debut Empty Child two-parter. It's a close run thing, and all four stories are stronger than a hell of a lot of Doctor Who, throughout its life. I also accept that Blink is probably a better script and production than the three others, but it is not my number one.

The first aspect of Blink that makes it stand out from the crowd is the intricate structure, the key element reused from the annual short story it was based upon. In his previous non-Who work, Moffat was already enthusiastic about and well versed in innovative story shapes, making use of flashbacks and flash-forwards. Here is where he realises that in a show about a time traveller, there's even more scope to do something clever. In other words, this is where Moffat first gets timey-wimey (and also the first time that the phrase "timey-wimey" is coined in the series). There was some zapping about in time and cleverness in Moffat's previous script, but The Girl in the Fireplace's final twist is prosaic in comparison to Blink's pay off. The "answers first, questions later" Sci-fi Tarantino structure provides the energy to propel the narrative forward while keeping up the mystery, as one is not sure exactly how the events unfolding can possibly be happening (unless of course, one has read the short story beforehand).

That plot on its own would be an intellectual puzzle box, and that would be enough to please a lot of Who's hardcore fan audience; but, Blink also plays to another of Moffat's strengths - comedy. And not just any kind of comedy, but a quirky romantic comedy, very in keeping with the style of Coupling, which he'd been working on for the years leading up to the relaunch of Doctor Who. The dialogue is zingers and quips all the way through, which could get a bit wearing if you don't like that sort of thing, I suppose; but the characters are so lovable, you'd have to have a heart that's quantum-locked as stone to feel that way. When Larry met Sally, the 'meet cute' as it's known, he is wandering around a house he doesn't expect to meet an attractive stranger in (to be fair, Sally has effectively broken into her friend's place). He freezes, but daren't look down at his state of undress, so just gestures towards his nether regions, and the following exchange takes place:

LARRY: Okay. Not sure, but really, really hoping - pants?
SALLY: No.

If that ain't cute, then I don't know what is. And that's just one of many, many wonderful lines. So, it's a romance and a comedy as well as a horror story.

The angels bring the horror. They arrive fully formed as an instant top-drawer monster, perfect for Doctor Who. They are arresting visually, having been inspired by the writer seeing a creepy statue in a graveyard. They are original conceptually, harvesting your potential time energy by zapping you back in time (this wasn't quite sinister enough to sustain them beyond a one-shot, though, so when they return in an early Matt Smith 2-parter, they were able to break your neck if they felt like it too). And they key in to an element of childhood, like many of Moffat's meanies. The angels that creep up on you when you're not looking, and freeze when you turn towards them combine elements of any number of children's games -  Grandma's Footsteps, What's The Time Mr. Wolf?, Statues, and probably others. 

It has a magnificent central performance from Carey Mulligan as Sally. Obviously, it had to be someone fairly special as they are doing the heavy lifting that's normally done by the star turn. Mulligan was not as experienced an actor as Marc Warren, who filled the same gap in the previous year's 'Doctor lite' episode Love and Monsters, but she was a big star a few years away from exploding, and Doctor Who fans lucked out getting her for the role at this particular point in her career. She's given some great material, running the gamut of emotions - the whole thing feels like a set of A-grade audition pieces. Obviously lots of reacting in fear and wonder at otherworldly events, but there's also the lighter moments like the slip of giving her name as "Sally Shipton" after flirting with Billy, and the half-bashful, half-assertive way she exits the scene. And the sad, wonderful, haunted moment where she tells the older Billy that the rain falling outside his hospital window is the "same rain" that was falling when she first met him.

On top of everything else that's quality about Blink, it's so fan literate, it was bound to please a lot of people; centering a key point of the plot on DVD Easter eggs, though it seem a bit dated now, spoke to the details of life for many of those watching at the time. There's lots of in-jokes, Banto's "go to the police" line, as he talks at the film he's watching in the shop, while simultaneously speaking directly to Sally, and to the audience with a meta wink, Billy commenting that the police box's windows are the wrong size (referencing a fan internet gripe about the TARDIS prop used from 2005), "The angels have the phone box, that's my favourite - I've got it on a T-shirt". Then there's Murray Gold's score, and the horror film ending. Even the trailer at the end (for Utopia) is fantastic. The list could go on. Who could fail to think this was the best? Well, me, obviously, and Moffat himself perhaps. He only grudgingly accepts that this is his best story.

In this month's Doctor Who Magazine, previous new series showrunners Russell T Davies and Moffat interview each other (Who's equivalent of Hitchcock / Truffaut but not as poncey and very entertaining); Moffat is asked by his predecessor what his best script is, and answers "I suppose it has to be Blink, doesn't it?", later adding "I don't like it being Blink because the Doctor's hardly in it". This is true. Blink proves Doctor Who can be excellent Doctor Who even if it lacks much of the Doctor. The show's flexible format, which any fan will tell you is one its strengths, is most tested and proved by these 'Doctor lite' episodes. However good it is, though, it follows that I won't be as invested watching it as I would be if the protagonists were characters I've known much better and for longer. 

Connectivity: 

Both Blink and The Savages feature a race of beings that extracts their energy (for the Weeping Angels it's temporal energy) from another race of beings.

Deeper Thoughts:

First time around - Slight Return (a personal story). I hope you'll forgive me a little indulgence; it might be the current Covid-19 lockdown that's making me reflect on the past, or it may just be that Doctor Who makes me nostalgic. Watching the same TV show religiously from the age of nine years old can confer a somewhat false continuity on one's memories. As I looked back and imagined the first time I watched Blink, failing to remember anything material, I pictured myself very much as I watch Doctor Who now, sitting in my current living room, drinking wine and enjoying 45 minutes of adventure. A lot of this does hold true (the wine for example), but the living room is different: we moved later in 2007 to our current house, so Blink was one of the last few Doctor Who stories watched live in that old place. The person watching is very different too, though he may not realise it. What I needed to get a full picture of my past, I realised, was something I know I didn't keep at the time. Like all people with a predilection for the written word, I have kept a diary for periods of my life, but I don't have the stamina to keep one going for too long. Hence, there are faithful contemporary accounts of various three month periods scattered through my past, but unless I'm lucky enough to want to refer back to those specific periods, they're not much use.

Only, there is an account of that time, after all, I realised: I kept a blog in 2007. The blog you are reading now grew out of my previous one, which I started in the year Blink was broadcast. I had been writing screenplays seriously from 2001 onwards, always while keeping a full-time day job. Before that in the 1990s I had been writing and occasionally performing poetry, and trying and failing to write plays. It took me a long time to realise that this might be because I didn't particularly like and hardly ever watched plays. But I loved films and TV, so as the century turned, I took a few screenwriting courses, read a lot of scripts, and joined writers' groups. By 2006, I had written a lot of scripts, made quite a few very low budget shorts on mini-DV, more to teach myself how to write them better than anything else, and had acquired production money to make a short with a proper budget and equipment. The Better Half and I had a young child, and it felt like this was the last time I was going to be able to do such a thing, so I took a three-month career break to concentrate on writing. From March to May 2007, the period of time during which the majority of that year's Doctor Who stories were broadcast, I attended a lot of meetings, and entered a lot of competitions. I didn't, you understand, think that I would "make it" or  "break through" in that short time; the idea was just to get a critical mass rolling that I could keep going when I had to return to the 9 to 5 on the side.

It worked too, in that I achieved what I set out to do: I made stuff and attracted interest, and befriended a solid network such that I could keep going with essentially two full time jobs for another three years. After that, when my second child was young, I started to have less and less time for writing. A lot of pressure had been put on The Better Half during those years, and she was doing almost 100% of the parenting, so bit by bit I stopped working on writing projects, and started making time for other things. It was a shame not to have a bit more success (most of what I got paid for never got made, most of what I made never got seen), but it was a good adventure to have, and I don't regret a thing (well, no more than I regret everything I do anyway, in general!). Over a decade has passed since I pretty much stopped, so when I looked at the blog posts around June 2007, I was shocked that I was essentially reading about a different person. I was still writing up various events I'd attended over the previous couple of weeks, had been at meetings with producers and directors about three different projects, I was preparing for a screenwriting festival, where I had a screenplay in their market, and had pitched another project for competition, was also preparing for a weekend writing course on soap story-lining, and was getting comments on the posts congratulating me on being a shortlist winner for the Euroscript Screen Story Competition of that year (which I don't even remember having entered).

I was in my mid-thirties and being shielded from the realities of parenting (this is why The Better Half is called The Better Half, I owe her so much), and I'm looking back as a man in his late 40s with three kids. So, part of it is amazement at the energy I appear to have, but also it's that we are all a product of what is going on around us, and all that writing, all that meeting with other creative and determined people, was very different - no better, no worse, but different - from what I'm doing now. So, no wonder the person at the centre of it seems like a different person - that's exactly who it was. Because of the long shadow of Aristotle's three unities of Poetics, when we're watching a drama, the jarring changes that we are happy to accept #in people in real life (even after shorter periods than the 13 years I'm looking at here) are unacceptable. It's that false continuity again. Do we believe that the funny, go-getter Sally Sparrow of the beginning of Blink could have turned in just a year to the jaded Sally Sparrow of the story's final moments, refusing to engage with the romance that's right in front of her? Maybe. Just about. But it pushes credulity, even though we know  - now more than ever - that lives and events can turn on a sixpence in a matter of weeks. Looking back at old entries of this blog, from just a couple of months ago, I find a person who was able to travel to London and see shows and meet in pubs with friends. I don't recognise that fellow much at the moment either.

In Summary:

Blink - you don't want to miss it.