Seriously, what is it with the Blink Love Affair?

Like every good Doctor Who Fan, I bought the Doctor Who Annual 2006, adorned with one-time hero Christopher Eccleston looking like he doesn’t want to be in the photo session very much longer and True Star of the Show Billie Piper looking like she’s in an audition for Top Shop’s next model.  (What a very odd pair of actors to put together.)

Unlike every good Doctor Who Fan, I actually read the Doctor Who Annual 2006 including the short story: What I Did on My Summer Holidays by Sally Sparrow. Seemingly however, I was the only person in the universe who, when Blink aired in 2007 thought all the way through the show, “I’ve already bought this once.” I didn’t see what a well-scripted piece of television it could have been because I was too busy thinking about being ripped off.

One could argue that Steven Moffat has been selling us the same Doctor Who story since Silence in the Library – or even before that, his story from the Virgin Decalogs Continuity Errors, set in a library and involving time travel. But that would be cruel. (And I am a keen advocate of Mr Moffat, who I think gets bashed far too much!)

But seriously. Blink? Blink? Blink? It came second only to The Day of the Doctor in the massive DWM poll in 2014. What is so special about it? Moffat on his own has written far greater, more expansive, more intelligent and more interesting scripts. Look no further than The Eleventh Hour, The Pandorica Opens, The Big Bang, A Christmas Carol, Day of the Moon, Asylum of the Daleks, The Snowmen, The Name, Night, Day and Time of the Doctor. I love much of his Capaldi work too but to mention that with reference to the DWM poll would be disingenuous as at that moment in time, they had yet to be made. (For the record though, Dark Water/Death in Heaven is a 10/10 knock-out classic for my money) All the listed stories above though are surely more ambitious and spectacular than Blink. Even Blink’s sequel The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone has more energy, narrative drive and tension and it’s never mentioned in the same breath. Moffat himself suggested he didn’t quite know why people loved Blink so much, it being the Cheap One Without the Doctor In It.

I wonder if the fan love affair is not actually with Blink but rather the weeping angels? Every returning foe inevitably incurs diminishing returns and the recurrence of the angels becomes less and less frightening, despite their undeniable impact. Perhaps it’s that first appearance, and in particular the scene at Blink’s climax in which Larry’s eyes fill the screen in abject terror, which lingers in the memory. By The Time of Angels, the lonely assassins have become old news, less to get excited about, despite the fact that they are used more imaginatively and arguably in more frightening and insidious ways.

Of course, there is much about Blink that is terrific: the dialogue for a kick-off. “Not sure but really, really hoping: pants?” There’s the glorious, beautiful and sad scene with Billy Shipton in the hospital bed. The inherent cleverness of the DVD extra that talks to Sally not once but twice in different scenes using the same dialogue (although I’ve never heard of a DVD player whose pause function keeps “slipping”). The last ten minutes in Wester Drumlin are extraordinarily tense. But still, there lingers the awful feeling that Blink is a little bit slight, that it is so small and insignificant. When I’m mentally listing stories from Season 3 – which of course, I do regularly – I often forget it’s there, sandwiched as it is between the Human Nature two-parter and the epic, world-shattering, three-part finale, which surely stand as better examples of Doctor Who?

What Blink lacks are characters we can truly invest in. I know that Sally and Larry and Kathy and Billy are only around for 40 minutes so they always feel like they’re standing in for the Doctor and Martha. We come to resent them a little bit. When Kathy is transported to Hull, we’re supposed to care. Sally cries as she reads the letter from Kathy but there’s no investment there from the audience. We’ve only known Kathy for a few minutes and frankly, she was a bit annoying. This is no fault of Steven Moffat’s. It’s foreknowledge. It’s knowing what Doctor Who usually serves up. Because Sally isn’t going to suddenly become a recurring character and we’re not going to bump into Larry again, their story feels isolated, and although it’s shamelessly romantic, it’s also unbelievable. Larry hasn’t got anything about him. He’s cowardly, geeky and like his sister, a bit annoying. Sally is a walking archetype: confident, cheeky, almost superhuman and all men fall at her feet. We do get a hint of hidden depths in her “[Sad is] happy for deep people” but any exploration of Sally’s character is on a hiding to nowhere in such a short runtime. That the two oddballs get together at the end is, in the spirit of Doctor Who, uplifting but also a bit saccharine and the moment when the couple hold hands doesn’t really land. The weeping angels in the end are far more memorable and affecting than the Sparrow and Nightingale romance, yet they get surprisingly little screen time in comparison.

To me, Blink is a perfectly efficient story. As a Doctor-lite adventure, it works. It does its job. But it’s by no means a masterpiece. Even the plot, which purports to be clever, doesn’t really work. How does the Doctor use a few photographs to put together the clues for Sally? How does he know that Billy will go into DVD manufacturing? How does he know which house the weeping angels are hiding in? And why are they hiding there anyway? Are we left to assume that Sally wrote the whole story down in that plastic wallet she hands him while he’s chasing a lizard?

Yes, the weeping angels make an impact: they are a tremendous Doctor Who villain, brilliantly conceived and perfectly shot. But this is Sally Sparrow’s story and that isn’t how Blink is remembered. It’s The One With The Weeping Angels. Not The One With Sally Sparrow. And that ultimately is it’s failing. It’s ace card – the angels – are not used as well as they would be in future adventures. Because Steven Moffat really loves time travel. That’s what the story is really about: time travel. It’s a story about plot and the plot doesn’t quite hold together. Of course, it has its set pieces but in terms of the whole of Doctor Who, Blink is a bit average. Its characters are weak and its emotionally flat. What fans really love is to be scared and Blink’s heightening to classic status is surely due to those few terrifying minutes with Larry and the angel. And most annoyingly of all, to escape the angel, in the end, he simply walks off into the next room fairly safely.

Despite its successes, I can never get away from the fact that I’d already experienced the story in the Annual and that one had a better leading lady. Not only is Blink slight, it’s rehashed slight. Like any fan, I can enjoy it for what it is. But I can’t convince myself it’s the best. As Moffat himself said, “The Doctor’s not even in it.” Maybe if Moffat had used a little girl rather than Superwoman Sally Sparrow, it might be more effective? Ironically, a couple of years later, he’d have the best of both worlds in Amelia and Amy Pond, the little girl and the Superwoman being one and the same person and for the next seven years, he’d give us more and more rehashes of the same time travel plot. I jest of course. If Blink is an average episode of Doctor Who then we are looking at an extraordinary series indeed, and in Steven Moffat a great, great writer.

JH