Live-blogging Doctor Who, Season Three: "Blink"

I’ve not been looking forward to live-blogging this episode. I admit it. It’s not that I dislike it: I don’t. I adore it. And that’s part of it: I’d really rather just like to watch it. But my other concern is that this will be very, very difficult to live-blog. It’s so visual, for a start.

Still, we’ll give it a go, shall we?

In the meantime, have I mentioned how irritated I am by this Triple J programme? There’s just such a surfeit of smugness. Sigh: it’s difficult being too old for Triple J television.

The storm seems to have passed over—and what a lovely, lovely storm it was, except for that one lightning strike, which was a little too close for comfort—but we’re still surrounded by lightning and thunder. If one can be surrounded by thunder. Or, for that matter, lightning.

Wow, the ABC has many, many adverts now.

We open on a wrought-iron gate over which a very, very pretty girl is climbing, ignoring the “Danger: Keep Out” signs.

She’s heading into a deserted house, to take photographs. I’m typing slowly, because I have to keep glancing at the screen.

She pulls some wallpaper off the wall, to reveal the messages “Beware the weeping angels,” “Duck,” “No, really,” and “Sally Sparrow, duck now.”

She ducks, and a rock comes in through the window.

When she looks out, she sees a stone angel, with its hands over its eyes. Heading back to the wall, she pulls off more paper, to see the final message: “Love from the Doctor, 1969.”

Credits.

Sally Sparrow, walking up the stairs calling for Kathy, sees the Doctor on the television, telling her never to turn her back, to look away. He says they’re faster, faster than she can imagine. And whatever she does, not to blink.

As we pan back, we see the Doctor’s on more than one screen.

Sally calls her friend Kathy, to reveal that she is in Kathy’s kitchen, making coffee. Kathy says Sally’s about to meet her (Kathy’s) brother, who pops up to say he’s not sure, but he really hopes he’s wearing pants.

Sally says no.

The next morning, Sally (Sparrow) and Kathy (Nightingale)—who, as Kathy points out, sound like girl investigators (“A bit ITV,” says Sally)—break back into the deserted house.

Sally, looking at the weeping angel, says it’s closer to the house than it was last night.

Just then, someone knocks on the door. Kathy says she’ll stay back, just in case it’s a burglar. (“A burglar who rings the doorbell?” Sally asks.)

But it’s not a burglar; it’s a man in a suit who has been charged to deliver a letter to Sally at this place and this time.

Kathy hears a noise, and heads out. She glances at the angel, and when she turns her back, we see that the angel has moved its hands away from its face.

Kathy steps back into the house, and, behind her, we see the angel has moved closer.

Sally proves her identity to the man in the suit, and behind Kathy, we see the angel, now in the hallway, with its hand outstretched.

The man in the suit says he has a letter for Sally, from Kathy. Sally turns away to ask Kathy if this is a joke—but Kathy is gone, and the angel is back in the garden.

Indeed, Kathy isn’t in London any more. She’s in Hull. In 1920. This man in the suit is her grandson, who has been charged by her with delivering the letter. Kathy died twenty years ago.

Sally leafs through the letter and the accompanying photos, and tells the man that this is sick. She runs upstairs, calling for Kathy, and if she’s not frightened to see the hallway full of angel statues—who move their hands away from their faces when Sally turns her back, and move them back up when she turns back—we are.

She sees a statue holding a key, and grasps it—when she hears the man in the suit leaving, she runs downstairs, narrowly avoiding the out-stretched hand of an angel. As Sally leaves the house, we see the angels watching her from the windows.

Sally sits in a cafe and reads Kathy’s letter, then stops by Kathy’s grave—noting in passing “You told him you were eighteen? You lying cow!”—and walks off, watched by one of the stone angels.

Sally heads off to tell Laurence, Kathy’s brother, what happened to her. She heads into the back room of the video store where he works, and there’s the Doctor on the screen again, seemingly speaking directly to her.

She tells Laurence—who has remembered where he last met Sally, and covered himself—that Kathy has had to go away for work, and that she loves him. Laurence is slightly freaked out by this.

The Doctor starts talking again (his pause button slips, apparently) and Sally asks what he is: Laurence says he’s an Easter egg, a hidden feature on seventeen unconnected DVDs. Laurence says he and the guys are trying to work out what it means.

SALLY: When you say you and the guys, you mean the Internet, don’t you?
LAURENCE: How did you know?

Then the Doctor starts responding to Sally. The first time could be coincidental, but when she says “It’s as though you can hear me” and he says, “Well, I can hear you,” that’s not so coincidental.

As Sally leaves the video store, the clerk is shouting at the screen he’s watching, telling the heroine to go to the police. “Why does no one ever go to the police?” he asks.

So Sally goes to the police, where she sees the angels on the building opposite. Slowly, slowly, she blinks—and they disappear. She says to herself that she’s going mad, but when the camera pulls back, we see the angels are outside the police station.

She meets a terribly sweet policeman called Billy Shipton, who says he can’t talk to her right now because he has a thing—until he looks up and actually sees her.

Billy asks Sally to have a drink, and she asks if he’s on duty, but he says he clocked off before he took her to show her the cars that have been found at the deserted house. Well, many cars and one TARDIS.

She asks why he did that, and he says, “Because life is short and you are hot.”

She agrees, after some banter, to give him her phone number, and when he asks her name, says “Sally Shipton. Sparrow! Sparrow!”

He says he’ll call her, and she says he’d better, all the while blushing and saying “Don’t look at me!”

Billy says “I’ll call you, gorgeous girl!” but when he turns around, there are four stone angels surrounding the TARDIS.

Slowly, slowly, Billy blinks.

Outside the police station, Sally realises that Billy told her nothing would open the TARDIS, but she has this mysterious key. She heads back into the parking garage, but Billy is gone.

Because he’s in 1969, while the Doctor and Martha explain that, well, firstly he’s in 1969, but it’s all right, he’s going to really enjoy the moon landing, and, secondly, that the angels are psychopaths who zap you into the past and let you live to death while, in the present, they feed off your potentiality.

The Doctor says he needs Billy to take a message to Sally, and he’s sorry, but it’s going to take Billy a long time.

Back in 2007, Sally gets a phone call from Billy—who is in a nursing home.

BILLY: It was raining when we met.
SALLY: It’s the same rain.

The Doctor’s message is that Sally needs to look at the list, the list of DVDs. And Billy explains that he didn’t stay a policeman: he got into publishing, then video publishing, and then DVDs. It was he who put the Easter eggs on.

He tells Sally that the Doctor told him Sally would understand one day, but that he, Billy, never would. Sally says she’ll come and tell him all about it, but Billy says no: they have only this one meeting, the night he dies.

BILLY: Ah. Life is long, and you are hot.

Sally says she’ll stay with him, and he says he has until the rain stops.

Later, Sally stands at the window in the sunlight, and looks at the list—and she realises something. She rings Laurence, and tells him that she knows what the seventeen DVDs have in common: they’re all the DVDs she owns. She tells Laurence to bring a portable DVD player to the deserted house.

And that’s when she realises that all the random things that the Doctor is saying are actually a conversation he’s having with her from thirty-eight years in the past.

He can’t hear her, he says, but he knows what she’s going to say, because Laurence is writing Sally’s answers into his transcripts of the Doctor’s words.

The angels have the phone box! That’s Laurence’s favourite bit. You and many other geeks on the Internet, Laurence: we checked about thirty seconds after this episode ended, and there were about forty T-shirts with that on.

The Doctor explains that the weeping angels are quantum locked: they don’t exist when they’re being observed. That’s why they cover their eyes: they can’t risk seeing each other. But once you blink or look away, you’re dead.

And then the Doctor points out that the transcript ends, and he knows the angels are coming for her. But she has to get the TARDIS to him. And the DVD ends.

Laurence says he’ll rewind it, but Sally realises that neither of them are looking at the statue—which is looming over them as soon as they look at it.

Laurence stands and stares at the statue as Sally frantically tries to open doors, but he blinks—and the statue is right there when he opens them.

The doors are locked, and they flee downstairs, looking for a delivery hatch, though Laurence has to take his eyes off the statue to follow her. The other three angels are downstairs, standing around the TARDIS. Sally keeps her eyes on them as she heads towards the TARDIS. But Laurence’s angel follows them and starts the lights blinking.

This scene is amazing and almost impossible to live-blog. But as Sally frantically tries to open the doors, the lights blink on and off, showing the angels ever closer and in more menacing positions each time.

The DVD that Laurence carries is a time key, though, valid for one journey: as the angels frantically rock the TARDIS, it dematerialises—right away from Sally and Laurence, who scream and cower in a circle of angels.

But the angels are looking at each other, from where each was standing on one side of the TARDIS. They’ll never move again.

Sally and Laurence are in the shop, and Laurence asks if she can’t let it go, as she rifles through a folder of material to do with the angels. She says she can’t, because there are unanswered questions, such as how the Doctor got the transcript.

But as Sally looks up, she sees the Doctor and Martha, with bows and arrows over their shoulders, leaping out of a taxi. She accosts the Doctor, but he doesn’t know who she is. She realises that she is the one who gave him the transcript in the first place: she does so, telling him he’ll need it when he’s stuck in 1969.

He’s not quite sure what’s happening, but he’s charming.

DOCTOR: Gotta dash. Things happening. Well, four things. Well, four things, and a lizard.

Laurence arrives and boggles, but the Doctor leaves to deal with his swarm, and Sally, putting her arm around Laurence, walks back with him into Sparrow and Nightingale: Antiquarian Books and Rare DVD’s [their apostrophe].

And we flash through various statues on various roofs, as the Doctor exhorts us not to blink.

Man, after the first time I watched that episode, I nearly had a panic attack every time I had to walk past a public building. Bless you, Steven Moffat!