Sally Sparrow meets him twice on the same day: Once when he’s a virile, flirtatious young hunk, and a little bit later as an aged, dying man in a hospital. The only way he will return to 2007 is by living his life day to day until he gets there. Particularly moving is the story of Billy Shipton (Michael Obiora), a DI who’s instantly transported from the present to 1969. I looooved it.”Īside from being great sci-fi and great horror, there’s also the tenderness of the story and the characters are quite intricate given how much is going on in these 45 minutes. Peet Gelderblom, who also worships at the altar of Moffat, wrote to me in an e-mail after seeing “Blink”: “He’s taken the least convincing scare element of Stephen King’s The Shining-the hedge animals that move while you’re not blinking-and made it work, simply by supplying the right context and backstory. He’s scarred children for life with this piece. Oh how I hate to toss around words like “genius”, but how else do you describe what Moffat achieves here with inanimate objects? Even after the episode concludes, Moffat plays with the viewer by repeating the Doctor’s advice for dealing with the angels against a montage of other statues.
It also achieves the unthinkable in the form of the Weeping Angels-a race of alien beings who must surely rank amongst the scariest the show has ever presented, and yet we never once see them move. It’s, as the Doctor put it, “a big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey…stuff”. The episode is as simple as it is complex.
#ANGELS HAVE THE PHONEBOX T SHIRT SERIES#
Before long, Sally Sparrow finds herself embroiled in what must be the strangest series of events in her life, and all of them seem to lead back to an even stranger man who appears only as an easter egg on a series of otherwise unrelated DVDs. The only other thing in the room is a creepy, angelic statue. Luckily she does, as if she hadn’t she’d have been knocked out cold by a rock flung by seemingly nobody. It’s from someone called “The Doctor” and it insists that she duck. She discovers a message hidden behind some crumbling wallpaper. She’s got this Nancy Drew thing going on, but I suppose any young woman investigating a spooky old house would. The episode begins with a young lady by the name of Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan). If I engage in any more hyperbole I might as well get married to it. Maybe “Blink” is actually the greatest episode of an unknown sci-fi/horror anthology series and it just happens to be on loan to Doctor Who. Remove the Doctor from the proceedings, insert a time traveler with any other name, and this could just as easily have been an installment of some other show. “Blink” is the clearest example of this yet. He doesn’t seem like a man who sits down to write a Doctor Who story as much as someone who sits down to write a story that would be good regardless of whether or not it’s Doctor Who. What continues to stymie me about Moffat’s work is his ability to see Doctor Who in a way that is entirely his own.
“The Empty Child” two-parter and “The Girl in the Fireplace” have been the high points of the first two seasons, so it’s no surprise that “Blink” is another masterpiece. Steven Moffat’s scripts for Doctor Who have come to be the stories against which all others end up being measured (which is probably very unfair to the other writers). If “Blink” is the greatest installment of Who, then what does that say about the show, given that the Doctor is in it for it all of six or seven minutes? Like the previous two-parter, much of “Blink’s” strength comes from its uniqueness (although that’s probably the only thing it has in common with “Human Nature”). If I were going to introduce someone to Doctor Who for the first time, it would be tempting to show them “Blink”-and yet it would be unfair to do that because they might think the series is something other than what it is. But it’s even more probable that “Blink” is such a fine piece of sci-fi/horror that it deserves to stand on its own, outside the larger canon of the series. Is it possible that “Blink” is the greatest Doctor Who episode ever created? Maybe.
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