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| "I knew I should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque!" |
Blink concerns itself with one Sally Sparrow, who has a habit of wandering around old houses and peeling off wallpaper. As you do. When she does it in one particular house, however, the finds a message from the Doctor, telling her to beware the Weeping Angels. And to duck. She follows the second instruction, something being thrown at the wall where she was standing. When she looks back, all she sees is a stone statue of an angel outside with its hands cupped over its eyes.
As far as set ups go, it's a good one. We have an air of mystery, we know the Doctor is involved, and we know that there is something not at all right about that statue of an angel. One of Moffat's strengths as a writer is the ability to take something relatively mundane and then drown it in Nightmare Fuel. He did it with gas masks in Series 1, he does it with statues here, he'll do it with shadows in Series 4, and does it by refusing to show us what we're supposed to be afraid of in Series 8.
And it always works. Every time.
Going back to the apartment of her friend, Kathy Nightingale, Sally finds the Doctor on several television screens and meets Kathy's brother Larry...minus his pants.
The next morning, Sally and Kathy return to the house, Wester Drumlins, and look around. They check the message again, and Sally finds the angel statue still standing in the courtyard...though Sally notes it's moved closer to the house. Someone ringing the doorbell gets their attention, Sally going to investigate and finding a man looking for her. By name.
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| "Can you please just be my companion? I don't want to take Rose back." "No." |
He was told to bring her a letter on this exact date at this exact time.
If you're getting Back to the Future Part II vibes, so was I. I'm almost certain it was intentional on Moffat's part.
As Sally speaks to the man, Kathy notes that the Angel statue has moved even further and, when she looks away, it has uncovered its eyes. Further on, it seems to be approaching her. Back in the foyer, Sally asks the man who sent the letter and he tells her that it was his grandmother, a woman named Katherine Wainwright or, as he was instructed to name her, Kathy Nightingale.
Sally, naturally, thinks this is a joke. However, she cannot find Kathy and the angel statue has returned to the courtyard. As Kathy appears in a field somewhere, finding a man on a stone fence, Sally is skeptical to a fault. She looks through the letter, finding photographs of Kathy that are clearly from some time ago, and a letter dated February 13th, 1987. It seems that Kathy was transported back in time, back to 1920.
Sally rushes back upstairs, finding several of the angel statues and one holding a familiar key on a bit of string. She takes it from them, leaving and retrieving the letter on the way out (Kathy's grandson already having left in clear confusion).
It's important to bring up a very interesting quirk about the Weeping Angels, particularly in this episode. They never move whilst onscreen, at all. The trick with them, as the Doctor will put it later, is that they cannot move while they're being observed. This is true by the characters within the story, and the viewers at home, as the Angels do not move onscreen at all during the events of Blink.
Admittedly, Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone will kind of ruin that in Series 5, but cross that bridge when we come to it. In any case, that is where the episode gets its title from: if you're watching a Weeping Angel, it can't harm you. Then you turn your back, then you blink, and it's all over.
Sally reads the rest of Kathy's letter and goes to fulfill her request to visit her brother Larry and check up on him. At the video story where Larry works, there are videos of the Doctor being played as Larry is apparently part of a group that is investigating these strange messages, Easter Eggs, that pop up on DVDs - seventeen of them in particular that are otherwise completely unrelated. Larry remarks that it seems like they're hearing half a conversation.
As Larry goes to help a customer, Sally listens to the Doctor giving the now famous "wibbley-wobbley timey wimey" speech, mentioning that that really got away from him. He agrees.
Sally finds this weird and mentions its like he can hear her.
The Doctor iterates that he can.
Sally snaps at it, and Larry returns with the list of seventeen DVDs...with a look of confusion on his face at her yelling at a DVD. She takes the list and, from the audience that one of Larry's employees shouts at a television, decides to go to the Police.
After being told to wait, she notices a pair of Angels on the steeple of a church. When she blinks, and a cut later, and they're gone.
SPOOPY!!!!!
Detective Billy Shipton, who is basically Lando Calrissian if he were British and a cop, is assigned to the case. He is immediately, very obviously smitten with Sally and takes her into the police garage to see the multiple vehicles that have been found outside Wester Drumlins. The pride of the collection being a familiar big, blue box.
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| An accurate depiction of my review space in late January-early February. |
Billy then proceeds to hit on Sally and is so smooth that my aftershave is seething with jealousy. She is amused, even going so far as to giving him her number while making a Malaprop with her name. When she leaves and he looks back, however, the Angels have come to the phone box, and Billy makes the cardinal mistake of blinking.
Sally heads off but suddenly remembers the key she's carrying and heads back...only to find Billy, the Angels, and the TARDIS are all gone.
Billy ends up in 1969, met by the Doctor and Martha. They welcome him and, after the Tenth Doctor does his usual irreverent ranting, asks Billy for a bit of help to contact Sally Sparrow...but it's going to take him a long time.
Back in 2007, Sally gets a call...from Billy. She comes to a hospice, where Billy is now an old man and watching the rain. It's here we get the reveal that he got into publishing, and then video publishing when he journeyed to the past. He married, had a life, and lived long enough to meet Sally in the present so he could tell her to look at the list - the list of DVDs that Larry had given her. He says that the Doctor said she'd eventually understand it, but that he never will.
When Sally says she'll come and tell him, Billy tells her that he only has until the rain stops. The very rain that happened when he and Sally first met. She stays with him until then. Then, she phones Larry and tells him to come to Wester Drumlins with the DVDs and something to play them with.
Sally has worked out the Doctor's plan at least so far as the DVDs go - they're all DVDs she owns, the message is meant for her.
She and Larry return to the house and Larry fires up the Easter Egg. Sally "speaks" to the Doctor, who gives her the information about the Weeping Angels and what to do about the situation, and allows Larry to fill in the other half of the transcript he's made of all of the Doctor's seemingly random phrases.
No, for the record, the Doctor can't actually hear them. Given that this is Doctor Who, it was a definite possibility. However, the transcript ends without Sally's questions all answered. The Angels have the phone box, which could be a very, very bad thing for the universe. The Doctor doesn't tell her how to send the TARDIS back, but he advises her of the best way to deal with the Weeping Angels.
Don't turn your back.
Don't look away.
And don't blink.
The Angels are indeed there, and Sally has Larry look at the statue while she looks for the other three. They are also locked in, and Sally gets the idea to use the key to get into the TARDIS if they can find it. While not blinking, they manage to get into the cellar, where they do indeed find the TARDIS...with three of the Angels in attendance. They struggle to get the doors open, barely managing to do so and getting in as we get to see the Weeping Angels' ability to shut out the lights. Through flashes of light, we see the Angels taking poses...but never moving onscreen.
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| "...a crummy ad? SON OF A BITCH!" |
In the TARDIS, the DVD activates a hologram of the Doctor that instructs them to put the disc into the console. Larry does so in spite of the TARDIS shaking from the Angels attacking it (which shouldn't happen, given the interior is in separate dimensions from the exterior, but nevermind) and the TARDIS beings to dematerialize...for some reason not taking Sally and Larry along for the trip. However, the Angels have been stuck now looking at one another...observed by another being, they will never move again.
...why the Doctor couldn't have had Larry and Sally brought along and had the same effect, the episode skillfully avoids mentioning.
At some point after this, Sally has gathered together all of the information on the Weeping Angels. Larry encourages her to let it all go, but Sally questions how the Doctor could have gotten all the information. Larry tells her that, sometimes, you never find out. Larry does some relationship teasing before heading out for milk, and Sally notices the Doctor and Martha leaving a cab in pursuit of...something.
She rushes out, talking to him and realizing that the incident with the Angels hasn't happened for him yet. Sally gives him the information packet. Larry comes up, shocked, and Sally takes his hand, bidding the Doctor goodbye. Martha and the Doctor go off to later get trapped in 1969, and we see the name of the shop - "Sparrow and Nightingale"...and then we come to the end.
A gargoyle looming over the shop looks down menacingly, the Doctor's warning about not blinking coming to us over footage of various humanoid statues, all of which stare with cold, lifeless eyes and you may just feel the sudden, uncontrollable urge...to not blink...
I think I don't really need to state the obvious here: Blink is one of the best episodes of Doctor Who ever made, old or new, and it does so with almost none of the usual elements of the series. The Doctor is barely in it, nor is the companion or the TARDIS. Steven Moffat's story is entirely crafted around a character that we have never met before and very likely never will again, and it works perfectly. With everything wrapped up in a nice little bow, it's basically a perfect script and taking the concept of completely motionless statues holding a sinister secret the moment you look away is pretty damn frightening.
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| "Peekaboo! I'm spoopy!" |
But a good script isn't enough to carry an episode. With mediocre direction or effects, it would have been disastrous. The Weeping Angels are apparently not actual statues, but all extras wearing make up and prosthetics, and they look absolutely fantastic. If that concept had been tried at any earlier time in Doctor Who's history, it might have been bad or even unintentionally hilarious. They work because they stick to the concept - if you see them, they cannot move. This means, too, that they also can't move when you the viewer are seeing them. It really drives that final montage of all the different statues home, and ups the scare factor to 11.
Carey Mulligan and Finlay Robertson give fantastic performances as Sally and Larry, respectively. The entire cast is pretty good on the whole. Even the Doctor and Martha, for the few bits they are in the episode, do well - although David and Freema are absolute pros, so it's hardly surprising. Sally and Larry in particular, though, have a good chemistry between the two of them. It's kind of a good and bad thing that, as of February of 2020 (when I took notes for and did my first draft of this review) that we've never seen the pair of them again on Doctor Who.
Bad because I really enjoyed them, and Carey Mulligan was apparently considered to be a companion to the Doctor after the departure of Freema as a regular (she said no, however). Good, because, frankly...Blink is their story, and I think that that's enough. Sally and Larry had their encounters with the Weeping Angels and them walking hand in hand back into their shop is symbolic of them no longer needing to worry about the Doctor or his maddening world anymore. It's rather poetic.
Of course, a couple in a relationship on the TARDIS isn't something we've seen since Ian and Barbara left way back in 1965 (yes, I ship them, what of it?). Give it a couple of Series for the idea to knock around in your heads.
As for Blink, though, it's absolutely perfect. All of the elements for a perfect horror story coalesce into something just so utterly beautiful. It's a high watermark for the show as a whole, and a showcasing of what Moffat can do at his best. This, unfortunately, takes us fully back in to the territory of Russell T. Davies. It's finale time! Only, this time, it's in three parts.
Remember when I said waaaaaaaaaay back in my The Parting of the Ways review that Russell would do something even more ridiculous than his "stuff every Dalek ever into one room and then get rid of them in the most nonsensical way possible" shtick he pulled in Series 1, 2, and 4? Remember how I mentioned throughout this series that Martha's faith in the Doctor has come up more than once in what is a very poor attempt by Russell at a theme?
Well, we're going to have to deal with that. Luckily, the dumbest of it won't be happening for two episodes yet and the next one, Utopia is fairly solid. Next time, we'll be reintroduced to my favorite male companion of the Russell T. Davies era and introduced to an old foe from the Classic show...and shockingly, it isn't the Daleks!
No, it's not the Zarbi. Why would you even think that?
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| Ashes! Ashes! We all! Can't! Move! |
Welcome to the end of the universe!
Doctor Who is the property of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
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