Doctor Who 3.10: Blink

[selenay]

First comment has to be: Weeping Angels might possibly be the best Doctor Who villains ever! They certainly managed to thoroughly unnerve me far more than anything has since Sil in the Sixth Doctor adventures.

The elements that made them so effective, I think, were also the elements that made them unlikely villains. I mean, what's so terrifying about a bunch of statues? For half the episode, they looked like fairly typical weeping angel statues that you see in the gardens of stately homes. Nothing frightening about them. They got a little more worrying when you started noticing them moving from place to place, but still only mildly unnerving.

It was that moment when Larry turned around and the Angel was right there with sharp teeth and looking murderous. That, I'm not ashamed to admit, made me jump and sent shivers down my skin. After that, the Angels became menacing and frightening, giving the episode a sense of tension and real danger.

The idea of assassins who "killed you through living" was also brilliant. I'm amazed no one has thought up something like them before in Doctor Who. Of course, this episode was Steven Moffat's so it was always guaranteed to be good. He lived up to his reputation from previous episodes with flair.

As a largely Doctor-free episode, I thought this one worked a little better than last year's. I did enjoy Love and Monsters and loved Elton, but this episode felt both more scary because the Doctor wasn't there to save the day and at the same time had the Doctor running throughout it.

Sally Sparrow was a fabulous character. They didn't really establish what she does when she's not fighting assassins, but that wasn't really necessary. She was bright, funny and enjoyed a good mystery. We quite quickly came to care about her and I loved that she was able to accept what was happening so quickly. Perhaps she's always wanted something unusual to happen, day-dreamed about adventures when she was a child, and now that it's all happening to her she's ready to go with it. She didn't panic, except for that moment when the TARDIS disappeared around her and I think anyone would at that point :-)

Part of me was half-expecting the Doctor to turn up immediately after the TARDIS de-materialised, but I thought it was a stronger ending to show that the Doctor really only passed through Sally's life very briefly. It showed how the Doctor seems to those on the outside, affecting their entire lives yet only being a small blip in his.

I have a feeling that the Weeping Angels are, in some ways, going to be rather like the Autons for some. They are something we see all day, every day and never think twice about. Statues are everywhere in our lives and we never see them move. Sometimes you think you see out of the corner of your eye, but when you really look their as motionless and dead as you'd expect.

That, I think, is a large part of what made the Weeping Angels so brilliant as a concept. You can never see them moving, there's no way to protect yourself from them. The Doctor's way of defeating them at the end didn't involve killing them: it used their own protection mechanism against them. A day later and I'm still getting shivers from remembering those final moments when the light was flickering and the Angels were getting closer, and closer, and closer...

I'm starting to develop a bit of a theory about this year's Doctor Who. I'm keeping myself well away from all spoilers, so if you know something please don't spoil me in comments. However, there seems to be a theme developing beyond the odd appearances of Mr. Saxon. The Weeping Angels are the third race we've seen this year that date back to the dawn of time. The Raknosss in The Runaway Bride and the witches from The Shakespeare Code also date from the dawn of time and seem to be infinitely worse - more powerful and more malevolent - than any of the current races. Are we seeing a pattern here that might get some pay-off later? Is there something out there that's releasing those creatures for imprisonment? Is something directing them to a place where the Doctor is? The Weeping Angels are assassins. They send the Doctor and Martha back to 1969 so were they sent to kill him as well as being after the energy from the TARDIS?

Part of me is excited to see how all this pans out. Another part of me is starting to get a little sad that we've only got three episodes left of this season :-( It's a tough life being a Doctor Who fan ;-)

All together, this was a fabulous episode that deserves to be up there with Steven Moffat's other episodes as true classics of new series. It had pacing, plot, terrifying villains, great characters and excellent writing. Getting an episode this good immediately after Human Nature/Family of Blood makes me feel that we're incredibly lucky this season. Hopefully the remaining episodes will stand up jut as well!


Something that came up in the Confidential interests me. How many people on my f-list (or indeed coming to read this from elsewhere) would have become involved with fandom if they hadn't had Doctor Who? DW was my first big TV love, my first fandom. I've had more active involvement with Buffy and Stargate fandoms over the years because they were what was on TV when I started to get involved with the fan communities. But it was Doctor Who that started firing my imagination and making me fall in love with this whole genre. That in turn has hugely influenced what I write and, in some ways, my continuing to write at all. I discovered fanfiction at a time when I wasn't writing much and it gave me an outlet for stories that I hadn't known how to write before. Now I'm moving back into original writing more, but I can attribute that directly to the passion for creating and writing that fanfiction inspired. In turn, that's led me to be more involved with fandom in general and get out there to meet other fans at conventions and events.

If I one day get a book published, it will be largely due to fanfiction re-awakening my love of writing and it's possible that none of this would have happened if I'd not been a little Doctor Who fan watching Peter Davison battling Daleks and Cybermen as a kid.