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.