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BBC Blink |
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| Story No. | 198 | 
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| Production Code | Series Three Episode Ten | |
| Dates | June 9 2007 |
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With David Tennant,
Freema Agyeman Written by Steven Moffatt Directed by Hettie MacDonald Executive Producers: Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner. |
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BBC Blink |
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| Story No. | 198 |
|
| Production Code | Series Three Episode Ten | |
| Dates | June 9 2007 |
|
With David Tennant,
Freema Agyeman Written by Steven Moffatt Directed by Hettie MacDonald Executive Producers: Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner. |
| Synopsis: Sally Sparrow finds a series of messages from a man trapped in the past who she doesn't even know. But the angels are looking for her. |
A Review by Joe Ford 10/8/07
I don't mean this as a slight to David Renwick or a slight to Doctor Who but Blink reminded me wholeheartedly of an episode of One Foot in the Grave. Not because Victor Meldrew regularly came up against the awesome power of living statues and had relatives popping backwards in time or because in this episode the Doctor has all the TARDIS furniture nicked and ends up in the pub with another Time Lord who mistakes him for the ninth Doctor. No, its on a much more abstract level than that. Blink and Steven Moffat's writing in general has a number of similarities to David Renwick's which makes the pair of them two of the best writers on television ever. Blink mimics a One Foot in the Grave episode in that it is skilfully crafted, lots of weird and apparently unconnected things happen in the first twenty minutes or so and for a while you think the writer has lost the plot but seamlessly, beautifully everything connects together to make brilliant, perfect sense. It's like watching a particularly good jigsaw being assembled before you. Not just that, but One Foot in the Grave was not like any other comedy that tried to fire jokes every five seconds (like any abysmal American sitcom you can imagine), Renwick would use his plotting to gear the episode towards one of two very special, absolutely hilarious moments. The pot plant in the toilet. The hundred gnomes in the garden. Blink does that too but with chills rather than laughs. It's not a Doctor Who episode that is scary all the way through but builds its suspense slowly and carefully, hinting and suggesting horrors behind you before unleashing a truly frightening sequence in the climax. The sequence involving the Weeping Angels attacking Sparrow and Nightingale is so instantly shocking and pulse pounding my boyfriend Simon was actually hiding under a pillow and jumping out of his seat. A Doctor Who episode made him do that.
I think it is worth with this episode to mention how a chap from Eastbourne (that's me) who just five years seemed to be the only Doctor Who fan in the world and jeered at a derided for his interest is now suddenly surrounded by other Doctor Who fans. It is episodes like Blink that made that happen. Janet (Simon's mother) phoned us as soon as Blink finished to rave about how fantastic it was. Beth, a friend from work texted me to let me know she will never be looking at statues in the same way ever again. These people, who often bitterly complain that there is nothing of substance on the telly are for 45 minutes a week thrilled and delighted by Doctor Who.
Is Blink as good as Love and Monsters? Many will probably think so because it doesn't have the silliness and embarrassment of that earlier episode, swapping pure entertainment for an uneasy atmosphere of suggestion. I wouldn't say it was better, just different. Both episodes feature a fresh face in the driving seat, both Elton and Sally would make terrific companions... or even better a great double act. Both episodes made me laugh (Elton being seduced by Jackie, "You've only got 17 DVDs!"). Both episodes shocked me at how far they could push their time slots (Elton's indication to oral sex, the sweat-breaking Weeping Angels). And both episodes proved that you can write a Doctor Who episode without the Doctor being the central character. See Andrew Cartmel, this is how it should be done. The Doctor is pulling the strings here without any kind of Warlock-style perverseness.
What I like is that initially this episode appears scatterbrained and random. Scenes like Kath being transported backwards in time and Billy's inclusion feel as though they are wasting precious seconds but they are all essential to the overall story. Lawrence Miles wrote in his website that the events of this episode are what you expect of a science fiction show on television. Maybe so, but that doesn't mean to say that I have seen such events recently or that they would pull it off with such style. Particularly pleasing is how the Doctor ends up as an Easter Egg on Sally's DVD. What could have been an embarrassing idea without explanation is worked into the plot superbly. I am a sucker for examining plot construction (hey, I'm studying literature) and Blink works its terrifying central idea into a flawless piece of plotting.
Hettie McDonald is not a name I have heard on Doctor Who before but if this episode is anything to go by she will be back to direct again. I love a director who makes subtle but powerful use of the camera. It is the complete opposite of the Graeme Harper approach (which is also brilliant) which throws as much action and drama at you and knocks you for six, slowly and insidiously drawing you into the story until you are hooked and then confronting you with some seriously scary imagery. It's nothing but suggestion. You never actually see the statues move. That is essential in making them work. I thought the combination of a female director and female protagonist and Steven Moffat writing (after The Girl in the Fireplace) this would be the most Bridget Jones Doctor Who episode ever, but nothing could be further from the truth. McDonald moves the camera slowly and eerily throughout the episode, using lighting to create a brilliantly disquieting mood.
Carey Mulligan holds the episode up very well and we can only hope that she will make a return appearance at some point. The episode treats Sally respectfully, allowing her to boggle at its more absurd SF moments and feel as if somebody is playing a cruel joke on her but quickly coming to terms with the fact that this is all horrifically real. Mulligan's scenes with Finlay Robertson are amongst this episodes best scenes, they make a very modern-day and far more ordinary and likable Mulder and Scully. From when they stick the Easter Egg DVD on in the haunted house right up to being surrounded by the Weeping Angels as the TARDIS dematerialises, I was gripped by their plight. There is something truly frightening about two normal people being in jeopardy and the Doctor not being there to save them.
Season Three is turning out very dark indeed. I am not sure if season four should be as serious because the show would lose something if it lost its sense of humour but I cannot deny that it has by far been the most successful year of the show so far and easily the most gripping. Davies, Tennant, Agyeman and the writers should be very happy with the result. Many people were wondering if the show could survive beyond Doomsday's events, let alone prosper and thrive. Doctor Who is in peak territory.
Other points of interest:
Unsettling.
Behind You by Mike Morris 26/12/07
What is it with Steven Moffatt? The man seems to be better at writing for Doctor Who than the rest of his CV comes close to suggesting. Possibly it's the steadying hand of Russell T. Davies (and one of the more annoying habits of the RTD detractors is not to give him credit for the scripts written by other writers, as if - unlike any other script editor in history - he's got nothing to do with any of them), but anyone who saw Coupling or Moffat's turgid, silly reworking of Jekyll and Hyde wouldn't imagine he's capable of producing something as sharp as Blink. This is probably his slickest Doctor Who script, and is also the one with the fewest incredibly annoying moments of glibness.
It's also frightening. Moffat has an instinct, it seems, for scary; so far he's given us the gas-mask men, the clockwork soldiers and now moving statues; not only is it three-for-three, but all of them are genuinely original. With this story, he's clearly gone all out with the scares and thrown in a haunted house for good measure. Given Moffat's natural ability to structure a story well, this is very much his natural stomping ground.
Indeed, Blink is probably the most successful story of Series 3, if not quite the one that I liked the most. It doesn't have the sweeping vision of Gridlock or the beating heart of Human Nature, but it's not really supposed to; and even in the midst of what's essentially a horror story with incongruously good structure, there's a scene of genuine emotion. In fact, when I come to think about it, there's not really a scene in Blink that you could describe as wrong or not well realised. If I had to aim a criticism at anything, it would be Sally Sparrow getting chatted up by some policeman or other, which echoes Steven Moffat's complete inability to write a female character who doesn't go all giggly when in the company of a good-looking bloke (volumes could be written about the heterosexual male wish-fulfilment that has populated Moffat's scripts), and this fantasising becomes more overt when she decides she's really interested in the geek who's horrified she's only got seventeen DVDs... but this time it's achieved with so much charm that I'm undoubtedly reaching.
I'm not sure if I've actually said it in written form, but I have previously accused Moffat of being rubbish at female characters. This is more off the back of the completely useless women who he seemed to think were representative of the wider populace in Coupling, and doesn't - if I'm honest - stand up to scrutiny; this is the bloke who's given us the vivid Madame de Pompadour, the strong and courageous Nancy, and... well if you want, you can trace it back to Linda from Press Gang, who was a beautifully argumentative and severe character long before it was fashionable to write women that way. And yet... there's still something in it. Moffatt is obviously a man (I mean 'obviously' as in 'you can tell from the way he writes' rather than 'well his name's Steven for god's sake'), and the one truly convincing woman - Nancy - that he's created for Doctor Who is someone who isn't supposed to be attractive. Madame de Pompadour, on the other hand, is the classic example of heterosexual wish-fulfilment - glamorous, confident, intelligent, brave, who'll still fall in love with the first dashing bloke who waves a sonic screwdriver at her.
Sally Sparrow, on the other hand, is... well, Linda from Press Gang, albeit played in a less harsh fashion. The one thing about her that doesn't ring true is the fact that she ends up with Laurence, but I can shrug my shoulders and put that down to genre convention. Carey Mulligan isn't just preternaturally attractive, she's a very good actress whose emotions are scrawled over her face in moments of real, naked honesty. She's comfortably the best guest star of the season, whose delivery of "I'm clever, and I'm listening, and don't patronise me because people have died and I'm not happy" is a punch-the-air moment. And yet, the best moment of Blink - or rather, the one that stays with the viewer after repeated listens - is Billy's death scene. Mulligan conveys such grief over a character that she's barely met (and we've barely met, come to think about it) that the scene has real, emotional power. For all that Billy talks about his life and his past, the impression is of a life lived in rehearsal - that, as the Doctor says, the Angels really have stolen all his precious moments and left him with something indefinably hollow. "My hands... old man's hands. How did that happen?" It's a truly wonderful moment.
Moffatt can be glib, pathologically so sometimes. And yet, when he goes for vulnerability, he can do it better than most. There's something unbearably smug about all that dancing = sex stuff in his first two stories, particularly The Girl in the Fireplace, and the character of Laurence does verge on that same smugness (and there's a moment, when Sally almost-but-doesn't tell Laurence about his sister, that could have come across horrendously misjudged in the hands of a less actress). His scripts can sometimes smack of "look-at-me" cleverness, and Blink is no exception. It's incredibly smug in the way it revels in its narrative tricks. And yet... he can pull off genuinely moving moments. The finale of The Doctor Dances, for example, is lovely - and all the more impressive, in retrospect, for how well it compares to the similar scene at the end of New Earth. Blink is maybe the best example of this duality. The montage at the end is real "see, statues, aren't I clever?" stuff, and all the timey-wimey shenanigans sometimes resemble an exercise in televisual Sudoku. Moffatt gets away with it, this time, simply by virtue of the fact that it genuinely is very clever (the way that the Doctor's responses tally with Sally's remarks twice is a beautifully snug bit of storytelling) - and again, manages to have memorably joyous moments. Somehow, the Doctor's first (and, presumably, only) meeting with Sally manages to be a lovely, happy scene, and his "Good to meet you, Sally Sparrow" is terrific. At that moment, the story achieves a freewheeling atmosphere that's comparable with something like City of Death. And I don't say that lightly.
A few people have said "well, you could just wink with alternate eyes", but that's a slightly cheap criticism (besides, I've tried it and it's bloody difficult you know). Kudos should go to Hettie McDonald, who might have a name that suggests an octogenarian granny but her direction is slick, stylish and beautifully lit. It was also a wise decision for us not to see the statues moving - it's essentially a convention that draws the viewer in to the story, as they can't move when we're looking at them either. The one thing that doesn't make much sense is why an Angel (presumably) feels the need to chuck a rock at Sally, although there is the impression that they're slightly playful and sadistic assassins.
There's been a lot of talk that Moffat, rather than RTD, should be the man to take Doctor Who forward. Perhaps this is the best argument for that, since - in contrast to Rusty's increasing self-indulgence - Moffat seems to be curbing his weaknesses as time goes by. And yet I can't help but feel that his gift for structure is beginning to become an obsession with cleverness for its own sake. The other thing that I can't help but feel is that Blink is filler, albeit very good filler, and that it's been rather overrated since it's broadcast. For all that, it's a stylish and clever exercise in frightening kids which does what it sets out to do very well. It's beautifully achieved and has some really touching moments. In other words, it's everything that - say - 42 isn't, and it manages to be the best-realised story of the season. The only thing that stops me rating it higher - as highly as everyone else, anyway - is a rather small-scale feel to the story, but even that's charming in its way. Very impressive stuff.
A Review by Daniel Saunders 6/2/08
Blink was very good indeed, probably the best story of 2007 (it's hard for me to judge Human Nature, having read the novel first and so having its edge blunted a little, but I suspect it might stand up to repeated viewing better than Blink). That's partly a reflection of my low opinion of the rest of this season, but I enjoyed Blink not because it was made according to Daniel's Own Recipe for Doctor Who (although it was, by and large), but because it managed to do successfully what the other stories this year have been trying and largely failing to do.
The first thing that's obvious about this story is the complicated nature of the plot. This is especially obvious compared with the extremely linear nature of most of the other stories this year (this happens, then this happens, then something surprising happens and everyone dies or lives happily ever after). Such linear storytelling isn't necessarily a bad thing; after all, the most basic stories have such narrative formats: myths, legends, fairy tales, folk stories and the like. However, it is partly a function of oral storytelling, where the storyteller has only his memory to help him tell a coherent story. As a result, such stories are simplistic and lacking in surprise; what power they do have comes from saying something profound about the human condition. This is less satisfactory when a writer has the ability to plan, draft and redraft to tell a more complicated story, doubly so when the audience can also return to the story to deepen their understanding, as they can in an era of DVDs and almost instant BBC3 repeats. To have such a complicated story told after so many simple "chase" narratives such as Smith and Jones and The Lazarus Experiment is a long-overdue acknowledgement that while an adrenaline rush can be fun, viewers would like some intellectual stimulation too.
Not only is the audience expected to follow a more complicated story than usual, they are also supposed to follow a more original one. This year's scripts have seen a level of recycling that puts the Green Party to shame, with Daleks in Manhattan in particular being an unwelcome return to the "greatest hits" remixes of the Saward era. Blink opts for a more experimental approach. Doctor Who has never quite done a story like this before. Indeed, there are two innovations here, the "haunted house" genre (Doctor Who has done odd "haunted house" moments within other stories, but only episode four of The Chase is a consistent attempt at the genre) and the out-of-sequence time-travel story.
As well as being crediting the audience with the ability to follow complicated, innovative stories, Moffat assumes they can pick up on nuances of characterization. Throughout, he exhibits a laudable tendency to show rather than tell, again at odds with many of his Doctor Who colleagues. Sally's attraction to Billy is made perfectly clear by her Freudian slip when giving her name and her embarrassed reaction to it. The entire Sally-Billy almost-relationship is set up and played out in the space of about ten minutes, yet with its skilful, subtle, economical writing it is far more believable and poignant than the Doctor-Rose and Doctor-Martha relationships. The absence of the clunky "I like him, but I don't know what he thinks of me" style of dialogue that has dominated storylines of thwarted attraction over the past few years adds to the believability and hence emotional power of the scene. Does it matter if the ten-year-olds miss the detail of this particular strand of the plot?
The strength of characterization extends to the Doctor himself. As with Human Nature, but unlike every other tenth Doctor story, the Doctor seems a powerful force at the heart of the story, not despite, but because of, his almost-total absence. This is a Doctor so powerful he can influence events from almost forty years in the past, and for once he doesn't even need to shout or wave his sonic screwdriver. The Oncoming Storm has finally stopped being The Passing Drizzle. I admit I'm not at all keen on the Doctor-as-lonely-god for a number of reasons, but if we absolutely must go down that route, then this is the way to do it.
There's one final difference between Blink and the rest of this year's output which few people seem to have noticed yet. Fandom has been very critical of the scientific inaccuracies in recent stories, yet the scientific bizarreness here has seemed to pass largely without comment. There's a good reason for this, and it comes down to great writing again. Viewers are not stupid, and they know they need to suspend their disbelief. What they do demand, even if unconsciously, is internal narrative coherence. Blink establishes its rules fairly early on, even though they are not confirmed for quite a long time. Having done this, it sticks rigidly to them. There are no extra plot devices to get the heroes out of trouble. More to the point, the eventual explanation for this fantastic series of events is kept as near to pure fantasy as possible and not grafted onto real science. As a result, the viewers get a coherent series of signals about how to approach the story; very different from spouting a load of nonsense technobabble, confusing solar flares, gamma radiation and lightning and adding a hefty dollop of magic.
I hesitate to call this a truly great story. As a "puzzle" story, I don't know how well it will withstand repeated viewing. Once you know which tabs go in which slots, there is not much left. The story seems at points to want to say something about the brief nature of life (blink and you'll miss it?) and the need to seize the day whatever happens, but that theme is never quite developed. Still, it is impossible not to like a story which ends with a montage sequence of apparently mundane objects, purely to leave millions of children terrified.