Blink: Ranking - 25

 

Blink

(Series 3, Dr 10 with Martha, 9/6/2007, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Steven Moffat, director: Hettie MacDonald)

Rank: 25

In an emoji: 👀

   'I've just been sent back but come armed with knowledge of when the Tardis is going to reappear so I can go back to my original timeline. The Weeping Angels sent me back to Coal Hill school in 1963 where I became a classmate with Susan Foreman, only she fell out with me because I didn't like John Smith and the Common Men so I missed out on the chance to travel in the Tardis and go back to my proper time, so instead I hung around till 1966 when I tried to meet him in Covent Garden, only I got delayed by the war machines, so I had to wait until the Tardis flew into Gatwick Airport but just as I was about to speak to the Dr the Tardis got kidnapped by the Daleks so I had to wait for him to be exiled to UNIT but the Brigadier wouldn't let me in without a pass so instead I got attacked by mannequins outside a shop and then I waited all the way until 1989 when I got kidnapped by giant cats on horseback outside Perivale and then in 2005 I got attacked by mannequins outside another shop and by the time I finally talked to the Dr in 2007 I thought 'ah stuff it, I might as well stay'...

‘Don’t even blink’ – the words that we only used to hear as a simple warning from our local optician has now become so synonymous with a certain story that it’s enough to send even the biggest and baddest Whovian scuttling for the sofa. ‘Blink’ is, so most fans agree, a masterpiece. I’ve yet to see a ‘best story’ poll since it was shown where this wasn’t in the top two – a remarkable feat for a fanbase as polarised as ours can be sometimes. What’s even more impressive is that it isn’t like any other Dr Who stories, it doesn’t fit being part of an arc or follow the usual rules of a Dr Who story, not least because the Dr himself and all the things we associate with him are barely in it at all and yet it also feels like one of the most Dr Whoy stories of them all, a big wide timey wimey ball of emotions and big themes about how we’re living our lives and how we experience time from the writer who, more than anyone else, treats time as a central character in this series. This is a self-contained story that pushed the ever-elastic format of DW to breaking point, but in a way that also makes perfect sense within the context of the series and which created arguably the one villain of the modern series memorable and distinctive enough to be up there with the ranks of the Daleks and Cybermen. 

 Honestly, it would be perfect if only the Doctor (and Martha) were in it more, but then without that ‘Blink’ wouldn’t exist at all. Steven Moffat was desperate to write for the third series and the production team were desperate to have him after ‘The Empty Child’ and ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ were such big hits (both winning HUGO awards for best television drama no less). Only he had a problem: Moffat was up to his eyeballs in work for the series Jekyll (a sort of brain-dead ‘Brain Of Morbius’) and didn’t have time to ‘Blink’ never mind give months of his life to writing for Who. Having initially been presented with the idea for ‘Daleks Of Manhattan/Evolution Of the Daleks’, then when he ran out of time pitching what became ‘Forest Of the Dead/Silence In the Library’ as a two-parter, eventually the deadlines made the whooshing noise they always do on a series like this and Moffat had to confess that he’d run out of time to write anything except the ‘unknown’ slot that traditionally fills up episode 10/11 of a series and which nobody ever wanted to write (because Dr Who only had time to make thirteen stories with the regular cast a year and with a Christmas Special added on top was at its limit – not part of the original plan for the comeback but Russell T wasn’t going to turn down a yearly festive special with a mega audience when it was offered to him - meaning one story or another had to be made back-to-back, either with the Doctor and companion split or barely appearing at all). Even this was pretty tight: Moffat had just weeks to get this story ready and already had the production team breathing on his shoulder asking for ideas, effects, props, budgetary requirement, the lot. It seemed an impossible brief: Russell even left Steven a jokey memo saying ‘Remember: no Doctor, no Martha, but do scare us to death. Thanks!’ Most writers would have gone under and ended up weeping themselves, but Moffat suddenly had a brainwave: a very simple static prop that everyone working on the show had seen countless times in their lives and an actual source material so that everyone knew what page he was on that everyone working on the show were probably given for Christmas about a year earlier: the 2005 Dr Who annual. 

 What not many fans will tell you that this original draft was even better. Of all the many spin-offs of Dr Who there’s been over the years the annuals are the one that’s least like the show itself and yet the one part and parcel of the original Dr Who experience the modern series has re-created as close to the original era as possible, as if released in a parallel universe where Dr Who always remained a ‘children’s show’ with a target age of about six while the main show gets darker and older (incidentally why was there never a ‘Sarah Jane Adventures’ annual? The format’s tailor made for one!) There was a book released every Christmas between 1964 and 1984 and there has been one every year Christmas since 2005 too, with a run of ‘Yearbooks’ (not quite the same thing, for older grumpier ‘archivist’-type fans) released in the middle between Christmas 1990 and 1994. Traditionally they were written to sell extra ‘tat’ at Christmas, mostly by writers who worked for the annual publishers World Distributors rather than DW itself and you suspect had never seen the series before getting the commission and didn’t understand it even after they had, with stories that were full of ripe dialogue set on planets filled by aliens who had walked straight of the science-fiction B movies cliches list and featuring the Drs doing things they would never do on TV and saying things they would never say, interspersed with comic strips that only had two or three photos of each Doctor’s likenesses to work from and often didn’t feature the companions at all, interrupted every few pages by ‘filler’ puzzles, a board game that always had to be different to previous years so which ended up being more complicated than ‘Only Connect’ by the 1980s and spurious ‘space facts’ that were at best debatable and at times downright wrong even at the time. Even in the modern era, when the annuals tend to be written by fans and people who actually wrote for the series, they tend to feel closer in spirit to those old annuals than the TV series and have the feel of being rushed off in a hurry to pay the bills and give their creators time to hone their craft on TV (and still come with the same filler, though this time its more likely to be about the show itself rather than time or space). 

 Fans still love them though: back in the day they were only way to re-engage with the series in between series and before the Target novelisations they were often the only link to this series people had in the days when TV programmes were ephemeral and fleeting, never to be repeated. and even today they’re a good alternative to driving your family mad by watching your favourite story over and over again and probably having it confiscated. There’s still a moment, too, once or twice per annual, when somebody cottons on to the fact that the restrictions of this format (the reduced word count, the need to work as a standalone story that doesn’t do anything major to the characters that would need to be addressed on TV, only having one or two pictures) can also be a strength (the chance to write something with hardly any editorial restrictions and no budget issues whatsoever), offering a unique writing challenge that results in Who stories quite unlike any other, a curious mix of being both more child-friendly than the series and with the ‘censor stabilisers’ of TV off (because you can go to way more places in text than you can on screen). Dr Who’s elastic format means it’s perfect for the variety of annuals in a way that, say, 80 pages of Basil Brush or Blue Peter or footballers or superheroes soon gets boring. Sprinkled alongside the most childish and silliest Dr Who stories ever written, full of fish people from Kundalinga (a story even sillier and cartoon-like than ‘The Underwater Menace’) and X-Rani and the Mutants (a story even sillier and more cartoonish than ‘Time and The Rani’), where at first the 1st Dr travelled with two grandchildren younger even than Susan and actually has the surname ‘Who’, a 2nd Dr who wears a utility belt like a super hero and shouts lines like ‘die hideous monster die!!!!’ and a 3rd Dr who acts more like James Bond with even more gadgets, are some of the bravest, most grown-up Dr Who stories of them all, with clever writers honing their craft by trying to ‘break’ the format of their favourite show (some of the 4th Dr annual stories, in particular, are amongst the most surreal scifi stories ever written: my favourite story regarding the annuals is that an artist once included a gigantic white blot at the heart of one comic panel because he meant to go back and fill it in later but forgot – only it was in such a surreal story the editor assumed it was meant to be part of the design and left it in:  it’s ‘The Body Snatcher’ from the over-sized 1977 one if you’re interested though, honestly, it could be any of the comic strips in the next four as well).). And the best story? It was this one. I might have been 23 when I got the 2006 annual for Christmas 2005 but Steven Moffat’s ‘What I Did In My Holidays By Sally Sparrow’ was a story that always stood out as being head and shoulders above the rest and perfect for the more childlike audience of the annuals and one I raved about to people even before it got turned into a TV story 18 months later. 

 All the nuts and bolts and wibbly wobbly timey wimey angle of ‘Blink’ are there (with the first hints of Moffat’s unique ability to use time in Dr Who as an active participant rather than something people live through), its just that the threat isn’t yet the Weeping Angels, the doctor is still Christopher Eccleston not David Tennant, the Doctor hadn’t even met Rose yet never mind Martha, the communication between the main characters comes from a home video not a shop-bought DVD and the Sally Sparrow we follow isn’t a young adult played by future star Carey Mulligan but a twelve year old schoolgirl with braces (and yet a character who in many ways is more grown up than the Sally we get here). The main story is still much the same though: a plucky girl in the present ends up saving the Doctor in the future by undoing something he did wrong in the past. It’s a story that still asks all the big brave questions about fate and pre-destiny that all the best Who stories ask and the perfect distillation of the Dr’s extraordinary world directly hitting our ordinary one, all the more so for the fact that it disrupts a world of homework and braces and fish fingers and custard (though not in the same dish, not yet) rather than something only older people recognise. It’s the ultimate Dr Who annual story in that’s its clearly written for a younger audience, comes with its own re-set button that doesn’t impact other stories around it (though presumably this is a post-regeneration 9th Dr before he meets Rose) and it does things that you couldn’t do in the TV show, not about plot so much as the effects each of us have on each other every day and how something someone does in the past can affect people of the future who aren’t even born yet and how you can converse across distances of decades if you somehow know how the other person is going to reply. In this version the Doctor is stuck in 1985 after his Tardis ‘burps’ and shoots forward twenty years without him and he leaves Sally messages pleading for help through text left under the wallpaper in sally’s aunt’s house, in messages held up in old polaroid photos and finally through an old VHS video tape that ‘answers’ all her questions as if they’re having a conversation, just twenty years apart. The Doctor doesn’t bother asking the adults for help, only Sally, via a pre-ordained conversation she wrote down for the Dr that she passes off as a homework assignment (handed to herself as an adult in the future, when she’s working as a spy). 

 If anything the twelve year old Sally Sparrow is an even more interesting character than the adult one in the TV version (though she’s a mighty young twelve and reads more like seven or eight truly – it absolutely makes sense the Doctor would choose someone as childlike as himself though and she’s a prototype for the feistier young Amy Pond in ‘The Eleventh Hour’. Moffat’s always been good at writing for children: his childhood (particularly childhood fears) always seems closer to the surface with him than it does for most writers. This Sally’s the perfect companion for the Doctor as she’s the sort of person where the bigger and smaller pictures and the real and the vividly imaginative live side by side in her head all the time anyway, treating a universe that needs to be saved and a madman in a box as incidents in between wishing for bicycles and school bullies making up songs about her sticky-out hair and with the same belief in better tomorrows mixed with miserable todays running round in her head (Moffat finds it much easier to write for children and teens than adults – you can see it in his superlative breakthrough series ‘Press Gang’ too, where the teenager journalists are amongst the most complex ever shown on TV but the adults are all ciphers. Even the adult Sally is basically Lynda day all over again: smart and tough and a little spoiled, in some ways curiously older than her years and in other ways curiously younger, so concerned with what she’s doing that she doesn’t have time to consider other people’s feelings but still doing the right thing for others in the bigger picture because that’s how she rolls. Even her romance with Larry in this story is what would have happened if she’d ditched Spike for childhood friend and sub-editor Kenny). 

 The annual version went down well with the sort of fans like me who still remembered their inner 12-year-old as well as actual 12 year olds and it was a big deal for all of, ooh an entire Christmas morning, then at Christmas lunch-time the Doctor changes into David Tennant and everyone got excited about something else and moved on. But the thought stuck in Moffat’s head ‘well, why can’t I put this on television?’ The plot needed a bigger reason for the events to happen than just the Tardis going wrong again, however, so Moffat, now having firmly let his inner 12-year-old off the leash, remembered an event that had so greatly scared him as a child, a holiday his family had taken in Dorset and where Steven’s hotel room happened to look out on a disused graveyard with the sign ‘danger keep out – dangerous structure’. From the window it looked for all the world as if the notice was being held up by the sort of statues you only see at graveyards, weeping over the dead (so the living can get on with their lives without feeling bad) – no doubt Moffat was reading a Dr Who annual of his own at the time and spooking himself; they can do that to an impressionable mind. Similarly when Moffat grew up he lived for a time in a place named ‘West Drumlins’ (the name of the abandoned house sally finds the angels in) which gave him the same spooky feeling as an adult (and though Moffat mentions it a lot in interviews he’s never actually said where it is: the closest I can find is that there’s a region named ‘Drumlins’ in Ireland). It’s also worth adding that te writer was eleven when a gargoyle brought to life by the Devil was seen in ‘The Daemons’ in 1971, the perfect age for that to make a lasting impression too. As well as looking like a gruesome Dr Who monster the gargoyles seemed anachronistic and felt as if they’d just arrived in a portal from another time because nobody is quite sure why they’re there at all or why our ancestors had such bad taste in graveyard decoration. They’re also everywhere and you don’t need to go that far out of our house to come across something weird made of stone somewhere (most of them on top of older British buildings are there to ward off evil spirits by frightening them away in fact). How perfect, then, as a race of Dr Who monsters who don’t view the universe the way that humans do but who live across dimensions of time as well as space (itself harking back to dialogue by Susan in the very first story ‘An Unearthly Child’). They’re such a Moffat creation too: he has a hang-up about death, struggling to kill off anyone in his stories (and even more so if they actually get lines): the Weeping Angels don’t kill you but do feed off the years you would have lived by sending you back through time (‘the kindest psychopaths’ as the Doctor puts it). 

 Putting the two plot strands together was a moment of genius as they fit together so well: like the annual TV Sally is an ordinary person having an ordinary day and messing about with her friend in an old house until she discovers hidden messages telling her to ‘duck’, only the danger is more immediate here and the stakes much higher as her friend and the boy she fancies are taken back through time, the Weeping Angels ‘feeding’ off the years and ‘potential energy’ of the lives they would have had. Rather than being scary because they can kill you The Weeping Angels are terrifying because they can take away everything in your world in an instant and all the different things you might have become, the extraordinary of Dr Who not only impacting your ordinary life but swapping it for another ordinary life you shouldn’t have lived. Losing everything that makes you you and being effectively reduced to a child starting over again with having to make new friends and a new life for yourself in an era that might not even have the job you were working in, is a far greater horror for an adult than merely dying. And yet the childlike element of the annual story still remains: Moffat says he was also inspired by the children’s game ‘Statues’ (also known as ‘Grandfather’s Footsteps’ in some countries where the ‘it’ person is known as ‘the curator’ incidentally – this game really had an impact on Moffat didn’t it?! I would hate to be his psychologist…) and being scared at the way his lively, sociable friends managed to stay stock still as if they’d been possessed when playing the game as well as the ‘person’ grabbing you when they sensed you nearby. The Weeping Angels are another variant of the ‘thing that lives under the bed’ in the dark that terrifies all children at different times (albeit for different lengths – ‘Listen’ will give us that story too) and the idea that they can only be stopped by a bodily function that you don’t usually think about (blinking, what did you think I meant?) gives them a frisson of danger other monsters don’t have. The Weeping Angels also get round the perennial problem of most Dr Who monsters lumbering around not very fast because they’re a bulky costume: though still worn as costumes, cutting the footage means the angels can move faster than Usain Bolt at warp-speed when you’re not looking (and it also solves the perennial problem that a Who monster is at its scariest when it’s about to pounce in the cliffhangers, not when it’s pounced in the continuation the following week). 

 Mostly though you still feel the magic when Dr 10 starts talking with Sally from across several decades via a hidden ‘Easter Egg’ on her DVDs and the frisson that’s what happening is incredible, utterly bonkers – and yet, in context of a series about time travel, eminently plausible. They were already a ‘thing’ in the community before ‘Blink’ came along: Dr Who DVDS have more unlisted Easter Eggs than probably any other regular series and are perfect for the show, a great example of the hidden amongst the seen and the extraordinary living alongside the ordinary unseen before breaking through if you know how to look at them the right way. This is a show full of hidden messages about how the world ‘really’ works and feels like a parallel version of our universe that only a lucky few have ever fallen into – so what better thing for the spin-off DVDs than to give you some extra ‘clues’ not everyone sees? (at least until the DVDs ruined it by mentioning them on the back) found only by hitting the buttons of your DVD remote in a certain sequence. Seriously there’s about fifty, most forgettable but some terrific, particularly the ‘home movie’ ones too shaky to be counted as an extra in their own right: my favourites are the ‘behind the scenes’ cine-films on ‘The Keys Of Marinus’ taken by the grams operator, the audio of a trailer for ‘The Abominable Snowman’ whose video footage has been long since wiped, an audio recording of location footage for ‘The War Games’, Jon Pertwee riding a traction engine at a village fete which is arguably the best thing on the ‘Monster Of Peladon’ DVD, Tom Baker in costume is at another event in Blackpool on ‘The Ark In Space’, a – ahem – blink and you miss it outtake hidden away on ‘The Seeds Of Doom’, Tom Baker guesting in a John Cleese sketch in return for the Python’s cameo in ‘City Of Death’, location filming for ‘The Twin Dilemma’ and David Tennant reading his lines for ‘The Infinite Quest’ as if he was a pirate – there are lots of lists on the internet on how to find them all if you haven’t already; some modern DVDs even have the Dr’s one-sided conversation from this story on there as an ‘in-joke’. 

 Even so, it’s all a big risk that could have gone wrong: the idea of monsters that just stand stock still and who can’t hurt you as long as you ‘see’ them could easily have been stupid if done badly and the story might have fallen apart badly with the Doctor reduced to a few minutes of one-sided dialogue, while ‘Blink’ is a lot closer to hammer horror than science-fiction. Thankfully it doesn’t: mostly because of the characters, who are some of the most three-dimensional Moffat ever wrote and who we feel we get to know well inside forty-five minutes. With the innocence of Rose, the calmness of Martha and the curiosity of Donna the adult Sally Sparrow feels like a trial run for Amy Pond (right down to the unlikely fairytale-like surname) and might well have become a full time companion had they not gone and cast Carey Mulligan in the role shortly before her Hollywood ‘breakthrough’ role in ‘An Education’ (she remains the only actor to be nominated for an Oscar after appearing in Dr Who: it remains speculation but I’m pretty sure she was meant to be the full-time companion instead of Donna on the back of this story, only for Carey’s career to take off. She’ was everywhere and only isn’t now as she got married to Mumford of Mumford and Sons and retired to bring up a family. Which is as close to time-travelling back to 1969 as you can probably get in real life: they’re a sort of 21st century ‘Ganger’ version of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young). Much like the story in the annual you always got the feeling she was something special before she was a star: she says a lot with her eyes without even needing speech, with a Sarah Jane-like mix of incredulity and acceptance, bravery and fear, as she gets wrapped up in a world she didn’t have the first clue existed is even more convincing as a ‘real’ person than Elton in ‘Love and Monsters’ and her heartbreak as she realises she’ll never see her best friend with the even more unlikely name Kathy Nightingale or Billy, her brief fling, is as emotional as anything we see in Who despite the comparatively brief screen time (even more when Sally does see Billy one last time, as an old dying man – Louis Mahoney stole the show as the newsreader in ‘Frontier In Space’ at the start of his career and dying werewolf Leo in Who’s closest 21st century cousin series ‘Being Human’ at the end and nearly does the same here – and the comments on the weirdness of this being the same rain storm as when they met decades earlier, despite all the weather that’s been between the two moments, is chilling). I really don’t know why they didn’t bring Finlay Robertson back as Kathy’s brother Larry in a later story though as he’s never been as busy – he’s excellent as the ‘Dr Who’ style voice of knowledge about science and time travel, geeky enough to be ‘us’ watching at home, in the same way Osgood will be, a typical Whovian whose lucky/unlucky enough to live in a universe where the Dr is real rather than the star of a TV show. Even the small part of Kathy’s grandson Malcolm, played by Brian ‘Dominator’ Cant’s son Richard, is well drawn. The only thing that doesn’t ring true about any of these characters is Sally’s response to her friend’s disappearance (she’s still in shock, right?) and the fact that Billy ends up learning how to manufacture DVDs in his ‘second life’ (I mean he’s a policeman: it’s not a natural fit; if I’d ended up back in 1969 and the future depending on me learning a new technology I didn’t understand, well, let’s just say we’d be in for a lot of trouble). Still, those are the side effects of knowing these characters so well that it seems strange when they do something out of ‘character’ – generally it’s only the Doctor and companions and sometimes the villains you get to know well enough to even know what’s in ‘character’.

 It could still have collapsed and unravelled so easily had ‘Blink’ gone the easy route, had it all ‘been a dream’, had Sally gone back to her old life, or had the Dr arrived at the last minute to put things right, but no – the ending is as clever as everything else, the Tardis (spoilers) ‘fooling’ the angels by making them look in a circle so that they stop each other in a massive blank stare. This was the bit that delayed Moffat the most (because how do you defeat a perfect monster without the Doctor actually being there?): there’s a story that Mark Gatiss rang him up to ask how the story was going and was sad to see his friend tearing his hair out and all but having a nervous breakdown with a deadline looming so he kindly offered to read the script he had. Mark picked up on the fact Steven had specified having four weeping angels at the end and this gave Moffat the brainwave that they were four corners of a square all looking at each other when the Tardis de-materialises. It feels like the morally ‘right’ ending told in a Medusa-like folk tale from the mists of time, a cautionary story of being turned to stone if you become too complacent, like the rest of ‘Blink’, impossible technology that sounds like a legend solved by impossible technology that sounds like a myth. 

More than anything else this story stands out because it features the shaky parallel world storytelling from the annual thrown into a Dr Who story so that this one feels more unusual, more quirky, more special than even this series generally does, as if it’s playing by different rules. As fond as people are of the many Weeping Angel sequels, for me they never have quite the same impact because they are approached like ‘other’ Dr Who stories, where the Angels are another monster to be defeated by something clever with gadgets. This story is a fable, an old folk tale overheard and passed on in whispers, not a big action TV show that follows a formula – that’s also why, for all his hard work as a showrunner, Moffat was never quite able to recapture its feel for a whole series (though ‘The Eleventh Hour’ comes closest). ‘Blink’ is a story about more than just another base under siege or about companions or the Dr in peril – it’s a story about ‘our’ world, not ‘their’ world, where the extraordinary is just out of reach of our eyesight our whole lives as, unknown to us, The Weeping Angels remain trapped and ‘quantum locked’ because humanity has been staring at them for so long we’ve forgotten how weird it is that these odd little gargoyles are there (I mean, I can’t explain why they’re there – and the ‘real’ reason, that they’re ‘fake’ demons believed to keep ‘real’ demons away from holy locations by scaring them off, sounds like a Dr Who plot anyway). Much as I can see why such a popular monster was brought back, it’s also the sort of story they can only really do successfully once and future angel appearances are toothless by comparison. The other reason ‘Blink’ ‘works’ as well as it does is because it shows a world where we could be in a Dr Who story any second, that all it takes is finding a scribbled note behind some old wallpaper or pressing the button on a DVD and we could be having adventures of our very own. Most of all though ‘Blink’ works because it’s a clever story that moves the frequent background discussion of fate and pre-destiny in Dr Who to the forefront, asking big questions of the audience about what their life might look like if they had to start over again in a different time. 

 From its earliest days (well, sixth story ‘The Aztecs’ to be precise) the Doctor talked a lot about how history was set in stone and couldn’t be changed ‘not one line’ – that you could observe events in the past (sometimes even the present and future) but you couldn’t play a part in changing them because they are part of an ongoing tapestry of experiences that need to be played out in order, with every event having ripples and ramifications because we live in a universe where what we do maters because we all impact each other so much. A few of the more ‘Buddhist’ stories in the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Dr eras ask similar questions about cause and effect too: there’s the idea that life is a learning process, that we’re meant to face certain challenges and come across certain people in our life to shape us from the Dr on down (that’s one of the reasons this series became so big again in ‘lockdown’ when communities were cut off from one another). ‘Blink’ is a story where time is set in stone alongside the baddies: the characters are clearly meant to end up where they’re meant to end up, with Kathy for instance meeting her husband the minute she steps back into the past. The events in this story too are set in stone: they have to be so the Dr doesn’t wander off script, a conversation in ‘real time’ across totally different eras linked only by the notes Larry hastily scribbles down (good job the Dr wasn’t relying on my shorthand, something I was notoriously bad at, or he’d have said something like ‘Don’t even Blonk, Blonk and you’re bread!’) David Tennant’s one-way conversation must have been one of his hardest scenes to shoot, even with someone reading Sally’s lines off-screen, but he handles it perfectly: his urgency leaps out of the screen and he makes the most of one of only four scenes he’s in (though Freema Agyeman almost steals the show with her put-upon companion working in a shop to make ends meet until the Doctor can work out how to get them home again). 

 It all harks back to the questions posed in the original version of this story published in the annual – the feeling, at 12 years old, that nothing has been written in stone at all yet and anything in your life is possible, that the person you’re meant to be with and the dream career that makes you you could be hiding round any corner before real life gets in the way and you end up compromising to pay the bills and learn to stop believing in magic. The Weeping Angels are, in a sense, a re-set button that can take you back if not exactly to childhood then the chance to begin again, as a whole new person, surrounded by whole new people, doing a whole new career – and yes as we’ve said that’s terrifying, but the other side of the coin is that it’s also liberating. This is, ultimately a happy story: the Doctor and Martha get home, while Kathy and Billy lead nice happy lives that are arguably happier than if they’d stayed in their old ones. A lot of Dr Who is about putting the magic back into ordinary life so that you can awaken your inner child again and realise just how impossible it is to be floating on a rock hanging in an infinite cosmos, the inevitable result of lots of conjoined bits of DNA from across multiple generations. That’s why having the Dr appear talking to our episode representatives through their television is so perfect: everyone has a part to play in this universe and while its Sally’s today it could be ours tomorrow. ‘Blink’ is, of all the many examples of Dr Who making the ordinary and extraordinary come together in one big explosion, one of the cleverest and one of the best. 

 I can totally see why for so many fans ‘Blink’ is the greatest DW story ever made. Is it mine though? Well, a few things don’t quite fly. There’s a lot of faffing about in the middle moving the pieces in the right order so that Sally and Larry only end up walking in on the Weeping Angels properly 40-odd minutes into the plot just in time for the resolution. As cute and perfect in many ways as the idea of DVD Easter eggs are, it really is most unlikely that Billy would have got the means to add them to all the DVDs that Sally owns (not to mention the fact that she only has 17 DVDs; the vast majority of people reading this own more of course I would have thought and that’s just the scifi ones, but even if you’re not interested in owning collections, even in 2007, then you were unlikely to even have that many, its a weird number to stop at. It would have been more fitting in this Douglas Adamsy story if they’d made the number ‘42’). Plus the Doctor’s cryptic message ‘look at the list’ is less use than say, ‘Oi, you know that copy of ‘The Time Travellers’ Wife’ film you got for Christmas? Well, in addition to the plot seeming suddenly quite familiar to you now you might want to press left, right then menu screen then left again: there’s a message for you). The idea that Sally and Larry both haven’t met before (their best friend/brother didn’t introduce them to each other?!) and end up together at the end is just too unlikely and too neat: even for such a fairytale story they clearly wind each other up no end in ‘real’ life and its sad that, following their brush with greatness, they end up running a secondhand DVD shop as a couple rather than, say, meeting up with Jo Grant and travelling the Amazon saving people. It helps if you don’t spend too long thinking about the weird evolutionary processes that resulted in a creature that’s powerful enough to feed off time but not so powerful it can’t over-ride people staring at it too. Some of the pacing is all over the place as well: Kathy disappears from the story far too abruptly, with most of what we learn about her coming in the form of the letter she sends right when she disappears (how much better if we’d got to know her properly before she disappeared and had it some random stranger who disappeared in the opening minutes?), while other scenes last an eternity, especially the padding in the middle. To me, personally, being sent to 1969 isn’t the punishment the story seems to think it is either but the single best thing that could ever happen to me (not least because I could see the missing episodes of ‘The Invasion’ and ‘The Space Pirates’). As cleverly as the plot parks David Tennant off to the side you still feel a Doctor-shaped hole in the middle of this story where he should be, especially compared to the way Eccleston shines out of the annual short story front and centre. We really needed more of this episode’s all too brief shots of ‘snarky Martha’, sniping at the Dr the way Peri once did, and she’s much more likeable than the love-lorn version from other stories. For every four scenes that are brilliant (one bit that nobody else seems to pick up on: I love the bit of the DVD player foreshadowing the plot by ‘blinking’, because even technology can’t pause for very long so how can a mere human? Plus Billy’s line ‘don’t look at me!’ when he’s old, just like the Angels) there’s maybe another one that doesn’t quite come off. 

 No matter. ‘Blink’ is still a brilliant piece of work, a fantastic concept and a terrific script that got very lucky indeed n the way it was put over on screen, without any of the usual Dr Who ‘mistakes’ – it would have fallen apart badly without this cast making us believe in them so readily or had the Weeping Angels been another of those costumes that just looked like an actor in a suit. Thankfully everything went right. Even the location discovery was a bit of fortuitous luck (i.e. magic): Fields House, in Newport, was derelict and falling into disrepair when the film crews turned up. I was the perfect find: Moffat himself called it ‘the creepiest house I’ve ever been in’ and in many ways its become his lucky talisman (‘The Snowmen’ and ‘Knock Knock’ were also filmed here). The shoot did wonders for the property too: it was turned into an Airbnb house not long after filming, charging money to Whovians, before being sold in 2020, the papers making a lot about it’s Who links. ‘Blink’ ended up being a well made experiment touched with all of Dr Who’s concept and production strengths but still one that felt fresh and fundamentally was unlike anything Dr Who had ever tried. Yes the years have diluted its impact slightly – not least because of all the Weeping Angel stories and time-travelling shenanigans that follow once Moffat takes over as showrunner but it still feels and unique and special, magical in all the best ways. Most of all ‘Blink’ is also so very Dr Who in all the concepts it holds dear that only a Dr Who fan could ever have written it (twice!) Don’t even blink? Heck, this is one of those stories I didn’t want to miss a second of and I still don’t even sixteen-odd years on even while I know it backwards . 

 POSITIVES + One of the big reasons the story took off is its much repeated catchphrase, one that was mentioned once in the original script but it took Russell T Davies – never one to shy away from such things – to see what a perfect repeatable catchphrase it made and it duly became the talk of playgrounds across the land. ‘Don’t even blink!’ is a terrific idea: monsters you can shoot with weapons are boring but ones you can control by simple human movement that you can’t hold off forever, is chilling. I’m someone who blinks a lot. I lost every staring contest around when I was original Sally Sparrow’s age and my eyes aren’t much better now (I blame it on all the Dr Who I’ve watched) so the idea that my life could depend on something I’m not very good at and would somehow be my fault is a lot more terrifying than a creature I was never going to outwit in a month of Saturday tea-times. 

 NEGATIVES - Thank goodness another line didn’t take off as a catchphrase. Sad really isn’t ‘happy for deep people’. That’s just nonsense best left to memes and fridge magnets and not up to Moffat’s usual high standards of writing. It also sounds like the ‘wrong’ sort of thing for ‘our’ Sally to say: as much as she’s walking round an empty house she doesn’t dress, act or think like the goth or depressive those words would imply. 

BEST QUOTE: Billy ‘I often thought about looking for you before tonight, but apparently it would have torn a hole in the fabric of space and tie and destroyed two-thirds of the universe. Also…I’d lost my hair’. 

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