Doctor Who - 03x10 Blink

10. July 2013

Blink is one of my very favourite episodes! It’s not a typical Doctor Who episode, simply because the Doctor doesn’t play the leading part ‘cause he’s stuck in 1969. The star of this episode is Sally Sparrow, played by Carey Mulligan. The episode has a few scary moments in it and I really love that!

Sally Sparrow is a young photographer who explores an old house in London. She finds a message on the wall which calls her by name. By now we already see that it’s going to be a great scary episode!

The message warns her about the Weeping Angels. It also says “Sally Sparrow duck, now”. At the first moment I thought of the animal duck! If I were Sally, the stone (or whatever it was) would have hit me.

After that Sally visits her friend Kathy to talk about that and meets her brother. And we see the Doctor for the first time in this episode, but only on a TV screen. He’s saying things like “Don’t blink. Blink and you’re dead”. That really creates tension, ‘cause at this moment we don’t know a thing about what’s going on. Why did the Doctor write the message on the wall and how does he know Sally’s name, why is he on the TV screen, and of course, where is he? There are so many questions after not even 10 minutes! And it’s getting more exciting!

The next day, Sally and Kathy visit the house again, “Sparrow & Nightingale” the girl investigators. A friend and I also had an investigative agency. We solved some difficult cases like “Who killed the hedgehog on the street?”. Yeah, we were great!

So, back in the house, Sally notices that the angel statue moved closer but thinks she’s just mistaken. Then the doorbell rings and Sally goes to open the door, while Kathy stays back. We see the Weeping Angel moves closer towards her. Then the guy on the front door tells Sally that he got an old letter from Kathy for her. Of course she thinks that’s impossible and looks after Kathy, but she’s already gone. The Weeping Angel sent her back to the year 1920. But all in all it’s not that bad, I think. Ok, it must be hard to, suddenly locate yourself in the past, knowing that you’ll never see your friends and your family again, but she’s still alive! Ok, and she knows she still got a world war ahead, that’s not so nice. But she finds a husband starts a family and is happy. It’s very cute that her husband is the guy she meets right after she was send back. She doesn’t even want to talk to him and runs away, but he follows her.

I find it very scary to see the Weeping Angels move without Sally noticing them. Really, like in a horror movie, when you want to warn the people!

Then, Sally goes to tell Kathy’s Brother Larry what happened to his sister. She finds him in the back of the DVD shop where he works, watching the videos of the Doctor again. But she just tells him that Kathy’s away for a while, ‘cause, who would believe the truth?

Larry tells Sally about the “Easter Eggs” he found on 17 different DVDs and gives her a list. And it comes to the great wibbly wobbly timey wimey quote!

She goes to the police station to report that there are strange things going on in the house.

At this moment we already (almost) got what the Weeping Angels are doing. But we’re watching Doctor Who, we expect monsters and time travel, Sally still doesn’t understand. She thinks she’s going mad when the Angels disappear in front of her.

She meets young police officer Billy, who shows her some old, left cars he found outside the house. They also found the Tardis at the house. So, we’re still wondering what happened to the Doctor. After Sally left, a group of Weeping Angels appear. We see Billy blinks and know what will happen to him. Sally returns because she remembers she found a key in the old house, which could fit to the Police Box, but there’s no sign of Billy or the Tardis. He was send to the year 1969, where he meets the Doctor and Martha. The Doctor finally explains why the Weeping Angels are sending people back in time.

Sally gets a call from Billy and is asked to go to the hospital, where she meets the old version of Billy. He lived there all along beside his younger self, he also wanted to contact Sally before that day, but wasn’t allowed (it could destroy the universe). The Doctor told him the day he will die. Nobody wants to know when they die! How terrible! I think it was ok for Billy ‘cause he knew he would be an old man then. Sally stays with him for a while, so he doesn’t die alone. That’s very nice.

She calls Larry to the house, because she found out that she is what the 17 DVDs have in common. And now they’re in the old, scary house full of Weeping Angels, in the middle of the night … That’s a real horror movie atmosphere! Sally starts to talk to the video of the Doctor, like a real conversation. And it’s so cool that Larry got a T-shirt with “The Angels have the Phone box” on it. He’s totally obsessed with these Easter Eggs, and no one will even understand that line! He’s just some kind of geek. Very cool.

When the Doctor explains that the Angels only move when nobody’s looking at them, it’s getting scarier, because now they know what they’re surrounded by. Oh my god, I was horrified when the Angel suddenly was in front of them! With this evil face. And they’re locked in and there are three more Angels in the house!

They find the Tardis in the basement, surrounded by Angels. It gets really scary when the light starts to flicker, and they enter the Tardis in the very last moment. It’s so enthralling! And so, they send it back to the Doctor, the Weeping Angels are defeated by looking at each other, and everything’s fine!

In the end, we see both of them one year later. They’re running the DVD shop together. Sally sees the Doctor and Martha outside and gives him the transcript and all the other information. Sally and Larry aren’t together at this time, but after they’ve solved the last mystery (how the Doctor got the transcript) she takes his hand and they return to the shop. A cute little love story! That was great!

It's very paradox, isn't it? You know, they wrote down the conversation and handed it to the Doctor, but they could only write it down because they heard him saying it, but he said it because they wrote it down and so on. Very complicated! All that timey wimey stuff…

Did you see that? Now that I’m rewatching, I recognized it, Sally kept a photo of a Weeping Angel. In “The Time of Angels” the Doctor says that the image of a Weeping Angel IS a Weeping Angel. So, oh my god…