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It’s spooky time as the Doctor and Martha are stranded without the TARDIS in 1969 and get other people to deliver messages for them. But mainly, it’s a terror-fest as regular folk get touched by an angel and go bye-bye… the gnarliest Doctor Who in ages!

Plot Points - Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan), a young photographer, breaks into a dilapidated house on the outskirts of London, in order to take pictures of “old things.” However, there she finds a message from the Doctor written on the wall, and partially covered with wallpaper – it warns her against the existence of the Weeping Angels, statue-like creatures that are “quantum locked” – they can only exist when they are not being observed by any living thing. Sally’s best friend Kathy Nightengale (Lucy Gaskill) accompanies her on a return visit to the house, but is attacked the angels – and thrown back into the past, to 1920, where she lives out her life and eventually dies, sending Sally a letter of explanation from her deathbed. Kathy’s brother Larry (Finlay Robertson) then shows Sally a DVD Easter Egg featuring the Doctor and Martha – which seems to be speaking directly to her.

Doctor Who? – For various reasons, production on the second series of Doctor Who, needed to be streamlined, and so exec producer Russell T. Davies penned a script called “Love and Monsters” that featured only a peripheral appearance by the Doctor and Rose, allowing Tennant and Piper to devote more time to other episodes while the bulk of the story could be filmed with guest actors. Apparently it worked so well that it’s now going to be annual tradition. Hence, the Doctor and Martha barely appear in this episode, and mostly on TV screens. There is one little tidbit, however, as the Doctor says, “I’m rubbish at weddings… especially my own.” Which at least indicates that he was “married” (in whatever sense that pertains to Gallifreyan life) to Susan’s grandmother. He also tells Sally that his life is “complicated” and things don’t always happen to him in sequence.

Martha My Dear – See above. Also, Martha seems more than a little annoyed that she has to “support” the Doctor by getting a job in a shop. She also really enjoyed seeing the Apollo 11 moon landing first-hand (they went four times).

Too Cool – Well, the Weeping Angels are, of course, impossibly creepy, and instantly enter the pantheon of DW’s most memorable monsters. But one of the best moments of the entire episode – and possibly the entire season – is actually pretty subtle. Near the beginning of the episode, Sally is upstairs in the old house, among three of the stone angels. Just after she takes the key from one of them, watch the angel behind her. As she begins to move, the angel is looking at her, but as she stands, she obscures it for a moment or two, and when we can see the angel again, it is now covering its face with its hands. Very simply accomplished, since the “statues” were all actors wearing stone-faced masks and costumes, but exceptionally effective.

Weird Science/Slightly Dumb Stuff – Stories like this always present problems. Supposedly the Weeping Angels can move any time no living thing is looking at them. It’s a great hook, but if you watch the episode again, there are actually many many opportunities for the angels to “get” people – particularly Sally – when there was no one actually looking at them. [Now… an argument can be made that the angels never move when we, the audience can see them, and this certainly seems to be the case with the conclusion… but there are other times when this doesn’t quite make sense in the context of the story.] The prologue also doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny: we can probably surmise that the Doctor knows to write the message on the wall from the package of information Sally gives him at the end of the episode, but would the timing really work out so perfectly? And why does the Angel hurl a stone, something none of them do anywhere else in the episode, and which would presumably defeat the point of their draining the life-force of their victim.... if Sally’s already dead from a skull fracture, she’s not going to have much juice left to drain.

Also, why do the angels spend more than two years cooped up in the house, waiting for victims, when it’s obvious they can travel about in the “real” world (they certainly have no trouble following Sally to the police station) with relative ease? (Given that prospect, seems like all of London would be deserted by this point.) And on that subject, how exactly did the angels get the TARDIS from the police station all the way back to the creepy house on the outskirts of London? Absolutely no one “saw” four stone angels toting a huge blue box across town? Granted, it’s raining, but it’s also the middle of the day, and there’s no indication that the angels can teleport or anything of that nature.

By the time Larry starts writing down what Sally has said, a couple of minutes have elapsed, so how was he able to re-create what she said in those first moments? An extremely good memory? There was quite a bit of conversation going on, and yet the Doctor definitely has a transcript of things Sally said before Larry started writing.

And finally, this idea of the angels killing people by throwing them into the past is a little too problematic. Det. Billy Shipton says that abandoned cars have been found at the creepy house for the last two years, and several such cars are parked in the underground lot, in addition to the TARDIS. So, at the very least, 8-10 people have been thrown into the past to “live to death,” including Billy. Somebody in that group is going to end up seriously jacking with the timeline, be it developing the microchip a few decades early, sitting on the grassy knoll in 1963 and yelling “duck!” or causing an evacuation in the World Trade Center at 7:30 a.m. on 9/11/01 (wouldn’t you?). All of them simply living out a quiet life and making no attempt to change the bad things (or further their own needs) doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Classic Who – The TARDIS prop used in the new series is considerably bigger and chunkier than the one(s) used in the classic series, and writer Steven Moffat (being an old-school fan himself), seems to be having a bit of fun at the new production team’s expense when he has Billy say that the TARDIS isn’t a “real” police box because “the phone is just a dummy and the windows are the wrong size.” But wait: in Moffat’s own “The Empty Child,” the Doctor opens the little phone door and is able to peer into the interior of the TARDIS control room; plus, every interior shot we see of the TARDIS doors shows the phone mounted on the back side of the small trapdoor; presumably Billy hasn’t seen into the TARDIS interior (bigger on the inside, etc.), so how does he know the phone is a dummy?

Internal Continuity - “Blink” is based on Moffat’s own Ninth Doctor short story from the Doctor Who Annual 2006 called “What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow,” (in which Sally was a child rather than an adult) making it the fourth story to be based on previously-released material (after “Dalek,” “Rise of the Cybermen”/”The Age of Steel” and “Human Nature”/”The Family of Blood”) but the first to be based on non-“classic” Who material.

Final Answer – Ah, Steven Moffat. Twice the man has won Doctor Who a Hugo award with his cunning scripts (“The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances” and “The Girl in the Fireplace”) and “Blink” may just prove to be the hat trick. Easily the creepiest episode of the season (and possibly of nuWho’s entire run), this is horror at its most Doctor Who-ish, backed with a scientific explanation and yet still skin-crawlingly eerie. The Weeping Angels are inspired creations, and Moffat spikes the episode with his usual brilliant dialogue. But perhaps the most refreshing element of “Blink” is that we barely even notice the non-emphasis on the Doctor, and that’s thanks largely to the entirely engaging performance of Casey Mulligan as Sally Sparrow. Fresh-faced and adorable, Mulligan has remarkable presence, and not since Captain Jack swaggered onto our screens in season 1 has a guest-turn on Who so begged for a return appearance. We want more Sally Sparrow – whether we get it or not remains to be seen. So despite the rather long “Dumb Stuff” entry this week, there’s no doubt that “Blink” is stunningly effective, a minor masterpiece. 

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