Is "Stephen Moffat" really an alias for Grant Morrison?

You know, I often wonder if I'm wasting my life with comic books...and then comes something like "Blink" where I can get the plot and not go into a drooling, tic-filled fit trying to understand everything.

Really, this is one helluva ep. The Angels are fitting rivals for the gasmask zombies on the creepy scale. The Doctor barely shows up for half of the ep, yet shows off his mad skills helping our protagonist with the big picture. And as far as gimmicks go, shunting people into the past and eating their lost futures...that's straight-up Morrison. Or maybe Alan Moore. It's just so bizarre, and I like it.

Ever since the Doctor said not to blink I haven't been able to stop blinking.

Holy crow. Another ep that scared the crap out of me. Now I can add 'winged statues' to 'gas masks' on my list of things I can never look at the same again.

Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. I loved the heck out of this one. I think I watched this whole episode without blinking. Awesome, creepy and smart. Moffet should write all the eps.

I love ancient Greek art and have a decent collection of (small) copies of Greek statuary.

Now I'm afraid they're all going to kill me.

Thanks Doctor Who!

Stephen Moffat must have the most incredibly twisty mind. And the most incredible ability to breathe life into the most minor of characters. I wouldn't mind seeing Sally Sparrow again!

In part, what I found so creepy about the Weeping Angels was the way they killed you. Being trapped in time would be one of my worst nightmares. Like the Doctor said, you're losing all that potential, all the wonder and excitement of not knowing how things turn out in your lifetime.

Now if you'll excuse me, the Athena Nike I have over there in the corner...it's looking at me....

ETA:


I wondered this too, but the way it makes sense to me, imagine time being this intricately woven tapestry. When Cathy and Shipton were sent back into time, they quickly became integrated into that tapestry. They married, they had children, they appear to have lived very full lives, interacting with numerous people. To pull them out of that would cause a large part of the tapestry to unravel, like pulling a thread can unravel a sweater, creating chaos and one gigantic mess.

Random thoughts:

Too bad that the schedule in the UK had this airing in March or so. It would have made a terrific Halloween episode.

Like ‘Love and Monsters’, it seems this was the season’s breather episode for Tennant and Agyema. (sp) It’s left to Nancy Drew and her boyfriend Ned to do the heavy lifting. I have no problem with that. This was truly creepy, and a vast improvement over ‘L&M’. It actually had suspenseful writing and appealing characters. I’d love to see Sally Sparrow on her own.

Creepy statues. They goes along with SisterofMine living in the edges of mirrors. Someone on the production team has some serious issues.

It’s nice that the folks who were sent back in time against their will were able to adapt and craft fulfilling lives for themselves. But, why couldn’t the Doctor go back after he got his TARDIS back and pick them up and return them to their proper time? That didn’t make sense. Why were they doomed to live out of their own times?

Why didn’t Ned and Nancy just walk downstairs back to back, so that one of them could always view 180 degrees? Or am I being too logical?

All in all, it rocked.

It was; much of the original discussion bemoaned that the mixed response to L&M would mean that no 'Doctor-lite' story could succeed.

Those thoughts ended pretty much immediately after Blink's first broadcast.



Because they'd already interacted with the Doctor or Sally - Kathy sends her grandson with the letter, Billy meets him and gets the film that he later hides on the DVDs. Change that, and the Doctor could alter his own past with bad results...

Funny how telling you not to blink makes you try so hard yet makes it so difficult!

Excellent episode, creepy and it moves so fast it was over before I realized it. Loved the whole "can't ever be seen" part adn how even the Doctor didn't know where they came from. That adds another layer of creepy.

I love Sally Sparrow. Great name (especially with Nightingale) and smart enough to be a wonderful companion.
the whole bit with the easter eggs and talking/not talking to each other through them. Brilliant! And creepy.

Okay, who else wants to see the Doctor use that bow?

Once question. Couldn't you just close one eye at a time if your eyes began to burn?

This would have made a fantastic Twilight Zone episode.

Geek that I am, I actually thought about that and tried it for a while. It was cumbersome, but doable. It worked best if I used my fingers to close one eye while the other stayed open, otherwise the instinct to blink was almost irresistible.

Last week I thought Family of Blood was the best Dr. Who episode ever. Tonight it is in a tie for #1 with Blink. The best part is that you don't need whiz-bang special effects to make a truly creepy monster. I will never look at statues the same way again.

I watched this alone, in the dark. A very bad idea.

Fantastic episode. It reminded me a bit of Girl in the Fireplace. For Sally, minutes have passed, but for the Inspector, it's been a lifetime.

Also? I want a timey-whimey detector.

It did feel like a Twilight Zone, without the Doctor showing up at first.
Then a Back to the Future splash.

Why was it notable that he could write shorthand?

It goes ding when there's stuff!

There were some elements of the script that don't hold up under much scrutiny (like why the basement of an abandoned house has working electricity, the whole 'why not blink one eye at a time?' thing, and the fact that you probably could "kill" a statue by smashing it to bits) but at the end of the day, who cares? It's all about the atmosphere and I loved the guest actors.

I also loved that even though it was Doctor-light, the Doctor showed up pretty consistenly throughout the episode with the DVD repeats and Doctor/Martha showing up in both 1969 and at the end in the near-present day. The DVD thing was a genius way to provide lots of Doctor material without David Tennant having to spend a lot of time on the episode.

Maybe just that he doesn't strike you as the kind of person who would know shorthand?

Fantastic creepy episode. I don't scare easily, but this one totally chilled me.


Heh. I was trying that, too, finger-thing and all.

Also? Sally and the younger version of Billy Shipton had some of the best freakin' chemistry I've ever seen.

So, if the Doctor and Martha were stuck in 1969, and she was working in a shop, does that mean they were living a 'normal' life? As a faux-couple? I'm dying to know the logistics of that arrangement, given Marha and her mooning over him. If I thought my crush was virtually omnipotent, and then I had to see him every day as I drink my tea and head off to work, I might revise my opinion of him pretty quickly. How long were they stranded in 1969, anyway?

I'm overthinking things again.



Word. And they did a fantastic job of finding an older actor who really looked like the younger one.

Freakin' loved this episode. One of the best I've seen in a long time (read since Rose left). I'm not very science minded and I was able to keep up with it mostly (yeah I know it's not like quantum physics or anything). But it's an accomplishment for me.

I've been waiting until this airs Stateside to announce that I was recently on a walk just as it had gotten dark. I happened to walk by someone's garden and they had one of those little statues, all lit up by one of those spotlight things you can get for your yard. So it was lit from underneath. Scared the living crap out of me.

Martha didn't have many lines, but from what little we heard, it seems the bloom is off the rose. Gone was the starry-eyed crush. Martha had that tone of voice you sometimes hear when two of your friends who were IN LURVE get married, thinking happily ever after, and then realize that with a relationship comes off key singing in the car and dirty socks on the floor.

Hopefully I wasn't imagining that and it's the end of Martha's crush. I really want to see Martha's relationship with the Doctor progress into something more mature and platonic.

I'm thinking that the angels may have "eaten" their original timeline and they would have had nothing to return to.


(And, also, y'know...because there would have been no story if he had done that!)

I also tried the one eye at a time method, but found it tiring and I think I actually blinked my right eye once when closing my left one! Argh...they be closer!



Yikes! Marble statues are going to make me look twice for a while I think...and KEEP looking.

Well, this is the third or fourth time I've watched the episode, and there's still one scene - I know it's coming, I'm even sure of when and where - where I scream. Like a girl. And I love it. This is probably the most out and out Boo!!! type scary episode of the modern era. And one of the most fascinating simply in SF terms, a most satisfying romp with the idea of time. It's also easily one of the best written, and certainly one of the best of this season.

Still, I don't feel bad saying that I've learned to live, quite happily, with some terrible plot holes. Well, not holes, because we're not looking for realism here, merely verisimilitude, but a feeling that the writing of this, as good as I think it was, was rushed, and could have been even better if it hadn't been rushed.

You have:
a: a tremendous idea. Quantum creatures that only live when you look at them, don't exist in between, and yet somehow *are* alive, with enough continuity to *be.* And they live off potential life force. What might be, what is to be. And they get at it by throwing a living creature -you, poor victim - into the past, and drinking the potential out of the pool, or hole, of where-you-used-to-be. And once you manage to catch up to yourself, if you're only thrown a little ways back, why then you die, because there's no time left, none of your potential is there.

b: some immensely appealing characters, from the slightly dopey kid brother, to the resilient tossed-back-in-time victim, who makes a go of it, to the second victim, also appealing, cheeky, smart, and also resilient. (Those two were incredibly resilient, come to think of it. Had I gotten thrown into a world without birth control, modern feminine hygiene products, easy access to antibiotics and lack of air conditioning, not to mention the knowledge of World War II and Margaret Thatcher, I would have deliberately drunk myself to death in the nearest Hull pub to avoid the misery.) And of course, the beautifully-named Sally Sparrow; smart, brave, a little cheeky herself. All portrayed by really good actors.

c: incredibly good dialogue writing. This is breezy stuff, and most of the time it goes right up to the edge of being precious, and stops on the right side.

d: a scary plot. These things *want* the TARDIS, and they'll do anything to get it. Even kill *without* kindness.

And that's where I think a little retooling was in order, because when you start to think about that, then little cracks appear in the story, where they needn't have. Are we to presume that these creatures want the TARDIS as never-ending lunch so that they don't ever have to "eat" peoples' lives again? Then why the vampire fangs and the apparent desire to graduate from eating potential life to eating, uhm, our heroes in the flesh?

Also, the Doctor mentions that they're psycho, and hints that he doesn't want them to take the TARDIS - not only because it's his and he'd like it back, thank you very much, but because if they had it, they'd end up doing all kinds of bad things to the universe as we know it. Make the sun go out and that sort of thing. But wait. These psychos kill with kindness? Or fangs? They're nice? Or they're evil? Which is it? Can it be both? Or neither? It sits uneasily in my head. And it needn't have, not with one more rewrite.

Also, the "they're almost as old as the universe" bit only served to make me snicker a bit, even as I enjoyed the imagery. That whole birth-of-the-universe era - before time began and all that - seems to have become a bit crowded. Did the angels pal around with the Racnoss and the Beast?

And there's one other thing that keeps insisting on taking me out of the story: why the arbitrary nature of when the "look at them or else they'll move and kill your" cycle kicks in? Their movements (from the house to the police station, their ability to steal the TARDIS in the first place,) all argue that the angels can move quite freely. But when our heroes come into the picture, then the rules get a lot tighter. That kind of inconsistency within the very guidelines the story sets are what make me itchy. Again, just one more rewrite, one more set of eyes checking and saying, "yeah, fix this and it'll be an A+."

And yet, I loved it.

I started writing this at least an hour ago, and had to do something else; undoubtedly the conversation has moved on, and lots of people may have made similar comments. But that's the nature of onrushing time, I suppose.

Did I mention I loved it? And that I screamed? Like a girl?

jellybabiesrus, it was the first time that Kathy's brother turns his head away momentarily, then looks back to see the angel right in front of him. I know it's coming and the scream still erupts. Like a girl's. Good thing I'm a girl....

Which scene in particular made you scream like a girl, Kaffyr?



God, I hope you're right. That 'he doesn't love me' crap is getting annoying.



details..... ;-D

I even got praise from my horror-hating Beloved Hubby for this episode. He loved it (as did I of course....love Moffat's way with dialogue).

Don't know if I could take Sally as a companion actually. It wouldn't be fair to Larry for starters.

I got a little irritated at her when she left the poor fella there to *stare* at the angel. She was gone way too long. But all in all this was one fantastic episode! We in the US kept getting hints from our UK buddies that it was and you guys? were so not wrong.
My only complaint this season is that a week is forever! I want the next one NOW.

Since LaraAriadne started speculating, I just wanted to offer a link to Martha's blog post for this episode (and if you haven't discovered the blog yet, (a) yes, it's official BBC stuff, and (b) most of it is quite good, so enjoy!). This post is one of my favorites: besides all the obviously hilarious bits like the Doctor hunched up on the sofa eating TV dinners, I particularly love the mention of the banana -- all the more so because all the banana jokes (well, both of them) come from Steven Moffat episodes (the grove at Villengard in The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances and the banana daiquiri in The Girl in the Fireplace). Not to suggest that Moffat had anything to do with the blog... it's just me being easily amused.

As for the episode itself, I absolutely love this one. I don't know if this goes under Kaffyr's A or C, but the conversation via DVD is amazing. We hear enough of it early on to be as intrigued as Larry and as spooked as Sally, and once we get the whole thing, we get some of the best lines in the episode. "Look to your left!"

Kaffyr, can I ask where in the episode you scream? Since I'm alone this evening (and I had the recorder set), I almost didn't watch it tonight! But of course I'm glad I did -- I turned all the lights on, made dinner, only yelped a little bit as the angels came closer...and closer...

ETA disregard the query...you beat me to it. :)

I bloody loved this episode. I was totally creeped out by the weeping angels. Now, I thought the gas mask children were scary... this was a whole new level. On par with getting creeped out watching old Doctor Who eps as a kid. I mean, I'm just seriously creeped out. Holy crap. More like this, please!

And I agree with Billy Shipton--Sally Sparrow is hot. Gorgeous girl. Wouldn't mind another Sally Sparrow episode. :)

I do love at the end the way the doctor isn't surprised when a total stranger calls him by name. He's just so used to it all that he accepts what she says and goes off on his present adventure. He did seem interested in Sally. Maybe because she was smart enough to understand what was going on.

Or maybe because she was blond. ;)

Kaffyr, I didn't think the angels were going to litterally eat Sally and Larry. They just look really scary just before they zap you away.

I also thought the "watch them so they can't move" was always there. Just because they were at the police station doesn't mean that dictate wasn't in affect. Even in a crowd things can go unnoticed. Like big, blue boxes.

I thought one of the most interesting things about this ep was that the angels were played by actors in costume.

My biggest pet peeve on this one is when Sally leaves poor Larry to stare at the angel on his own.

A bunch of us in the UK pace thread decided that we had to have "The Angels Have the Phonebox" T-shirts like Larry does (and I do!)

Also, hee to Larry's disbelief at Sally owning only 17 DVDs.

"Don't patronize me. I'm very clever, and people have died, and I'm not happy."
People should say this to the Doctor more often.

Not a breather, exactly. The idea behind these "Doctor Lite" eps. is that it gives them an opportunity on the shooting schedule to be filming two episodes at once. While DT and Agyema are off shooting "42" or Lazarus Experiment or whatnot, Sally & her Doofus geek boyfriend are being chased by statues. Apparently they do this so that they can clear some more time on the schedule to shoot the Christmas Special as well. What I don't quite understand about this is why American shows routinely shoot 22 or 24 hour long episodes per shooting season, while British shows apparently have to resort to these extreme measures to squeeze out more than 13 episodes per year.




And that was sitting at home relaxed in your comfy chair. Try it in a stressful, life-or-death situation like in the episode and you'd probably screw it up inside a minute.



Are you ready for this? Those weren't statues, they were actors, dressed in thick robes, heavy body paint, and masks, holding perfectly still. I didn't believe it either, but the Doctor Who Confidential for this episode was getting such good buzz in the UK thread that I looked around & found it on YouTube (I'm sure it's gone by now), and sure enough, they had the footage of all the actors (actually some kind of mime performers) getting all dressed & made up in their angel costumes and preparing to shoot their scenes. I'm not sure, but I think the very first look we get of them when they look like ordinary "weeping angel" statues might actually be statues, but everything else is real people holding still.

I wouldn't quite put this up there with HN/FOB, but this was a damm good episode. It had a little of everything. It was really creepy I'm-gonna-have-nightmares-tonight scary, it's full of sci-fi time paradox cause & effect wackiness, really touching, wistful stories of people trapped in the past that we don't even really see, the Doctor at his most enigmatically goofy with his "Timey-Wimey detector" that "goes 'ding' when there's stuff", and all wraped up in a great big mystery story written on a Möbius strip.

It's weird how there's *so much* of this story that takes place offstage and unexplained, not only the Doctor & Martha's entire story but Kathy Nightengale's entire long life from 1920 on, which seems to have been a rather charming love story perhaps even echoing a bit the life that John & Joan Smith never got to have together. Then there's the cop who's zapped back to 1969, apparently carrying a torch for this girl he'd just met for years before finally meeting her again on his deathbed during the same rainstorm as when he last saw her; we missed the whole exciting tale of his rise through the world of publishing (well, all right, maybe we did get the best parts of his story).

This is the episode where I really started feeling for Martha. At first I was kind of annoyed in the earlier episodes at her shmoopy crush (although not as annoyed as some), but in retrospect and upon seeing those eps. again I'm a lot more sympathetic at the way she's getting jerked around by The Doctor and his little "Well, maybe one more trip, but don't get too comfortable because I might just decide at any moment to drop you at home and just go flying off forever" games and the other mind games he (consciously or not) plays with her. Then he finally gives her a key and makes her a fully accredited companion, and what happens next? she gets stuck for three months in 1913 as her maid, constantly oppressed because of her race, sex and supposed class while waiting hand & foot on a shadow of the Doctor who is totally oblivious to her, then she gets stuck for something like four more months in 1969, where she has to *get a job in a shop* and take care of him while he probably sits around the flat all day eating chips and watching The Avengers** on the Telly, while somewhere, in an alternate Universe, shop girl turned full-time-savior-of-Earth Rose mysteriously finds herself giggling for reasons she doesn't quite understand.

**Actually, The Avengers sounds a little too cool. I would have named the late 60's version of an East Enders type of soap opera show, but The Avengers & The Prisoner are the only two British shows of that era I'm familiar with.

If I have a problem with this episode it's its placement at this point in the season. It's nice to have yet another grand slam home run episode right after the amazing HN/FOB, but it doesn't make for a very balanced season when there were so many weak eps. earlier on. Given the nature of these "Doctor Lite" episodes there's no telling when it was actually filmed, but if it was ready in time I would have tweaked the schedule to have it air earlier, around the time of Gridlock & the Daleks Do Manhattan fiasco when the season could have really used a shot in the arm. It's true that back then Martha was still on a learning curve just getting to know the Doctor, but even that doesn't really matter since this ep. seems to take place at some completely undetermined point in Martha & the Doctor's personal timeline anyway. Most of the story follows Sally Sparrow in the "present", which we could have followed along with as the "pressent" of that point in the season which was happening "while" Martha & the Doctor were having their little joyrides in Gridlock, if that makes any sense (and no, it doesn't), while the little glimpses of the Doctor & Martha that we get in the ep would have been like little previews or teasers of their "future" selves after they'd gotten to know each other better (which they kind of seem to be even with the ep. airing now).

Oh, and here's a nice little brain teaser for you: who wrote the Doctor's half of his DVD conversation with Sally Sparrow? He's reading from a script that Sally handed him. We see Sally spontaniously react and provide her half of the conversation, which What's-his-name dutifully transcribes (and btw, I assume the oddity of his knowing shorthand is probably that today *anyone* under 40 knowing shorthand is rather remarkable since it's just about a lost art, and back when it was widely known it was mostly learned by women who back then were expected to be the ones to become secretaries and thus have a need for it), but the Doctor's half of the conversation is what he'd previously transcribed from the DVD, but when the Doctor films his half of the DVD conversation, he's just reading the transcript that Sally gave him. So where did the words that he's reading actually come from? I guess the idea that time, rather being "a strict progression from cause to effect", is really a "big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey...., stuff" could kind of have something to do with it, but since the Doctor is just reading those words from a script we don't know if that even makes any more sense to him than it does to us.

I actually thought this was a point in the episode's favor that the angels were ambiguous. It's not like anyone - not even another one of its own kind - could have a proper conversation with a weeping angel and ask it if it's deliberately being evil or if it's just doing what it has to do to survive thanks to its bizarre physiology. Not to mention that it's a recurring motif of the show that being alone for prolonged periods of time tends to make you crazy (see Nine regarding the Daleks in PotW, and Donna regarding the Doctor's lack of companionship in Runaway Bride, for example), so you could argue that the Doctor was just making an educated guess regarding their state of mind in describing them as "psychos". As for being nice, well, the two "victims" we saw still made out okay for themselves, didn't they?

It might make a little more sense if you notice (fanwank?) that they broke the fourth wall quite a bit in this episode, in that there were a whole lot of scenes where we the audience see the angels in statue form even though there are clearly no characters around to observe them, or at least none looking in their direction. Maybe the angels moved faster earlier in the show because the story wasn't focusing on them as much as on Sally and her friends; but once the main plot kicked into high gear then they were getting a lot more scrutiny.

When I first saw this, the first thing I thought was, "Well, I guess I'll be avoiding gothic cathedrals from now on."
Then, a little while back, I went to Albuquerque, and right in downtown, in front of the Hyatt Regency hotel, there's a bunch of bronze statues with totally blank eyes. They're really creepy, and I was basically like, "Jesus H. Christ, don't blink, don't look away, don't turn your back!" Of course, the people I was with thought I was out of my damn mind.
Anyway, I think that for the shit that the Doctor put Sally and Larry through, they were entitled to actually take that trip in the TARDIS, rather than just have it disappear around them. But that's just my personal opinion.
The show's on a roll, and thank God, too. Too bad it's going to degrade back to dreck by the end of the last episode.

Flaregun, I'm not sure that I understand your confusion regarding the transcript. (Although I agreed with your analysis of the "shorthand shock".)

Here's how I saw events unfold (and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!): In the "present" or technically, a year after the events of "Blink" took place, Sally sees the Doctor outside of her shop and gives him the file containing all the information she has on the events of "Blink". This includes the complete transcript of her conversation with the Doctor on the DVDs (and presumably the list of the 17 DVDs she owns!). She tells him to keep it with him for when he gets stuck in 1969. (Loved his look of "Really? 1969? Huh.") So he knows exactly how the conversation will go and exactly what he has to say. In fact, didn't he tell her that he already knows what she is going to say and that is why he is able to respond to it? At least up until the point where Larry gets too freaked out by the Angels to continue transcribing. The file would also detail the writing on the wall*, so he would know to make a trip there in 1969 and write it down before it gets covered by wallpaper. As well as details like having the cop-turned-DVD publisher plan on putting the Easter Eggs on the DVD. So really as Sally says, it was all her, all along.

*Loved, loved, loved the whole "No really! Duck!" vibe on the wall.

I really felt bad for Larry being left to stare at the angels all alone. Couldn't they have taken turns staring and finding a way out?

I thoughtsome of the closeups of the angels looked really human-like!!

Definitely a classic.

ETA -- BTW, what was thrown at her that she had to duck in the first place? And who threw it? Wouldn't the angels just attack her when her back was turned? Hmmm...

ITA with the "totally creepy / scary" angels. A few points I was pondering:

Would mirrors work to freeze the angels? I was sure, with all the shots of the front door through the mirror, that holding one up to the angel would freeze it - as they cannot look at each other, could they look at themselves. Obviously, that would ruin the ultimate "plan" of having them freeze two by two around the TARDIS, but I'd try it.

I'd also have run from the house if I pulled down the wallpaper and saw my name. And thinking of the rock, did the angel actually throw it? Why? It could have just touched her, but instead it threw the rock. That part still doesn't make sense in the plot. Unless something vital was cut, or I missed something.

Is it just people? I'd have taken a cat everywhere with me if I knew I couldn't blink. Toss some treats on its feet, and I've got two cats that would never stop staring at it. Then, I could get my business done clearly.

Why did the angels stay at that house? Were enough victims jumping the fence to satisfy them? Why didn't they attack the TARDIS when they had the key instead of waiting for Sally to steal it from them? Minor quibbles, I think, but I face fear with cold plot logic. This episode scared me - so I'm after the plot holes. :)

All in all, I enjoyed it. I liked that the two people we saw get lost in time still got to live lives they seemed to enjoy. Or at least found someone to share it with. Dead, but after a long and strange jump to another time and a full existence anyway.

So, I wonder how many times the Doctor has been married? Since he is rubbish (?) at weddings, especially his own.

Nothing was cut, if I'm remembering it correctly.

Maybe it's a case of being "invited in", so to speak? You have to notice the angel first (and then ignore it afterwards) in order to be threatened by it?

My thought was that it was the Doctor himself who through the rock in the first place, to get her attention so she would turn and see the statue, thus setting the whole chain of events into motion. Just some speculation on my part!

Albino Girl, I think the question of the transcript is that you can follow that loop round and round until your eyes cross. If the Doctor gets it from Sally, and Sally and Larry get it from the DVD, and the DVD is made by Billy Shipton with help from the Doctor, who got it from Sally.... then it starts to look like no one ever actually made up the Doctor's half of the conversation. Which is part of what makes it so nifty!

I was -- scratch that, am also fascinated by the angels and their played-by-real-actors status. While it must have been tough to stand so still, I have to confess that I'm relieved that they aren't dressed styrofoam statues that will be haunting some dusty corner of a BBC Wales proproom for years to come...

Add me to the list of people who loved this episode. I also wanted to know what The Doctor and Martha were going to do with the bow and arrows. When Sally left Larry behind to keep staring at the statues I was trying really hard not to blink, but failed miserably - I would have been toast.


That was great - even though the wallpaper came off suspiciously easy. Unless the paper was torn off, the message was written, and then put up (in which case it still wouldn't have come off so neatly the first time it was torn down).

And John Simm next week! Yay!

Edited because the spoiler button and bold button are not the same thing. Sorry!

I thought this was great. My favorite part was that no one was stupid. Kathy worked out a way to get a note to Sally. Sally paid attention to it right away. She went to the cops. She and the brother worked together. Loved it.

I, too, was wondering about using mirrors.



Did they ever!

Actually, it's exactly like quantum physics - specifically, quantum indeterminacy, the concept that no quantum action is decided until an observer, well, observes, and collapses the quantum wave function. As long as you're not looking at them, their position and composition is indeterminate, and they can move toward you. When you look at them, you collapse their wave function, as it were, and they become mere stone again.

And based on that closing montage, I'm never looking at any statuary the same way again. I always did get a creepy feeling about Michelangelo's David...

I really think this was my favourite episode of the season. Of course, I made the mistake of watching it for the first time alone with the lights off, not expecting it to actually be scary. Then I embarassed myself screaming several times and begging someone to come sit with me so I could watch the rest of the episode without expiring from terror.

I just feel sad that I won't be able to watch this episode with my son for a few years.

I completely agree with Flaregun too. First Martha gets stuck as a maid, and then she ends up working to support the Doctor while he sits around watching television. Why the hell couldn't he get a job and contribute? I just don't think building his timey-whimey detector that goes 'ding' is a good enough excuse for being a deadbeat living off of his companion.

Yes. He knows exactly what to say, because it's all written down for him and he's just reading his lines. Unlike Sally, who's spontaneously reacting to the film of his half of the conversation, he can't see her and isn't reacting to her, he just has a transcript on his autocue* and is reciting his lines aloud. Larry transcribed it, from the film of him reading it, but he's just reading the words that Larry transcribed of him reading, etc, etc. But who actually thought up the words and *wrote* his part? (and all of you who are waiting to reply "Steven Moffat" can put your hands down, thank you.)

*autocue; so, is that a 1969 and/or British version of a teleprompter?



I'm not saying there aren't plenty of logical plot holes in this episode (no story about time loops & paradoxes can stand up to scrutiny), but I think a lot of these type of questions can get a pass because of what I mentioned earlier: there is so much of this story that we're just not told, we only see a thin little slice of the larger picture, through the eyes of what appear to be peripheral (yet vital) characters, not unlike Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, or more accurately, reading R&G Are Dead without having ever read Hamlet.

We don't know the situation that led to The Doctor & Martha getting zapped back to 1969 or how the angels managed to get their hands on the key, but I think we can presume that however that went down, they were somehow seen by some other entity imediately afterward and so couldn't use the key on the TARDIS, quite possibly they were seen by seen by Police that were already on the scene for some reason, as the Police evidently were able to have the TARDIS hauled away as evidence, and possibly remained on the scene in force examining the area so that the angels couldn't move to follow and see where the TARDIS had been taken to.

BTW, the policeman tells Sally that the TARDIS isn't a real Police Box because "the phone's just a dummy and the windows are the wrong size". Apparently the later is an inside joke referring back to the initial reaction of some online Doctor Who fanatics to the first early pre-production publicity photos of the TARDIS from RTD's revived Doctor Who series. apparently some of them were up in arms because they thought the windows on the new TARDIS were a little too big, they didn't match the windows on earlier TARDISes/actual Police Boxes.

Thanks for mentioning this. That's really amazing. I'm not sure if I should tell the kid this- it might freak her out even more. She was in my lap half-way through the episode!

This has definitely been my favorite episode so far this season. I was looking forward to it from the commercials and it did not disappoint. Loved Sally Sparrow, Kathy, the brother and the hot cop Billy. Laughed at him calling Sally "hot girl" 'cos I was just admiring him!

The statue montage at the end though, gave me some glee. It was like "hah, statues, your eyes have been uncovered, no longer are you any danger to us"

Oh, MAN, this episode rocked so much.

So scary, and great writing! I didn't notice any plotholes, and those that have been pointed out are the type that I can cheerfully ignore. :-)

I'm really, really glad I saw this *after* visiting Paris. All those cathedrals... ::shudder::

Sally Sparrow was cool. I mean, once she finally took the freakin' letter from whatshisname, she was awesome. I'm really glad she decided to be something more to Larry, in the end. They'll make a cute couple.

I, too, want a shirt with "The Angels Have the Police Box". No one here would get it, but it would still be rad.

I loved this episode. I love getting so scared by one of my favorite shows, which is weird, because in general I don't actively seek out shows/movies that freak me out. But yeah, this is definitely the creepiest episode since "The Empty Child" for me. And I love that even though the Doctor and Martha weren't in it, it was still so GOOD, as many have said.

Oh, yeah. Definitely. I really liked Billy Shipton, and I'm glad he had a full life. And Sally was very cool.

Yeah, I really hope that's true. The blog entry seems to support that, or at least not contradict that.

When were bananas mentioned? I must have missed that, but that's awesome that Moffat keeps that up. Hee!

WanderFree, I wondered about mirrors, too. I mean, what Sally and Larry (and of course the Doctor) ended up doing worked, of course, but would mirrors work?
I think they didn't know where the TARDIS was - didn't Sally say something about them following her to the police station?

Oh, and yeah, that ending montage of statues? That's just mean. ;)

I loved that it managed to be both scary and light at the same time. It made for a nice change of pace. As much as I loved the previous two episodes, and as creepy as the Family of Blood were, they were almost too substantial. It was nice following them up with a little one-off episode that was both tightly written and forgettable--I don't think we're going to be going on for pages and pages about what this means in the bigger arc, or the religious symbolism, or the godlike properties of any of the characters. But it was great fun while it lasted!

Flaregun - you make an excellent point. Several, actually. :) As I stated, it's a sudden and very explicable fear of statues that causes me to prod at this one. Seriously - I keep looking in my closet to be sure there are no new vampire fanged angel statues moving towards me. And I live in a statueless house.

In my universe, these quantum freeze beings are a brand new type of being. Never run across them before, so I'm very curious about their "rules". I'd still try the mirror and the cat.

I'd love to see Blink fleshed out as a novel. Find out why Sally was able to visit the house several times without consequence, and even stand in the room only looking at one while the others stayed put, but others were time travelled on their first blink. See where the car owners were sent and how they managed. How the TARDIS key was taken from the Doctor. And lastly, who threw that rock? I've seen some suggestions that it was the Doctor, some that it was a wandering vandal - I personally assumed it was the angel. That one's going to bug me.

I'm rewatching the episode right now on SciFi, having read the comments since the first US airing ended 4 hours ago, and I have to agree this is one of the best of the series.

It occurred to me that it was cheaper to hire actors or mimes to play the statues than it would have been had the props department had to make real statutes for every different posture they were in during the episode. Just another example of how "less is more" when its done right, as it is in "Blink."

Gas masks, mirrors, scarecrows, and now statues. I'm not going to be able to step out of the damn house, DW. Jesus. This episode is amazingly well cast--Sally, Larry, Billy, and Kathy were all really great. (Both the younger and the older Billy--the casting department is really outdoing themselves in casting older versions of actors--last week and this week.)



It's a pretty brilliant way of keeping the Doctor as a constant presence throughout the episode--his absence wasn't as felt as it was in Love and Monsters, I think. I really love the way the first time she talks with it in the shop, it seems like he's talking to her, and it's one conversation, but then in the house, it's another conversation entirely--the "real one", the one he's reading off the auto-cue. It's wonderfully done.

I wish the TARDIS didn't have to leave Larry and Sally there though. I know he knows that it leaves them there, and the angels are going to look at each other, and everything has to happen that way, but it sucks that they have to be so scared and basically think that they're going to die, and they don't get to meet him then, even though they save the world. Timey-wimey stuff gives me a headache.