Doctor Who: 3x10 "Blink"
Jun. 10th, 2007 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kerravonsenOkay, that was good. I can see why people compared it to "Love And Monsters", but, yes, it was better than that.
Why was it better?
1. A better monster.
The weeping angels are so creepy-cool! A million times better than the Absorbalof. Both beautiful and scary, the mundane made terrifying (that ending bit with the montage of the statues was reminiscent of the creepy ending of the Sapphire & Steel episode about the photographs).
2. The time-travel paradoxness of it.
I loved all the bits, from the message behind the wallpaper, the mysterious letter, DVD conversation, and of course the backwards-forwards of her giving him the the transcript and the photos. It's interesting that New Who seems to be a lot happier to play with the paradoxicalness of time travel than Old Who. Maybe because they expect their audience to be more familiar with the concept?
3. Sally Sparrow powns Elton.
She saves the Doctor! When he needs it! Because she's plucky and intelligent! She gets the guy, and it isn't that disturbing relationship that Elton had with Ursula.
Mind you, "Love and Monsters"... I still really like the very last line in it.
But, back to "Blink" things I liked:
The "Scooby-Doo" reference about the old house. The old creepy house itself.
"Why don't you go to the police? Nobody ever goes to the police!"
The policeman, Billy Shipton.
"I have until the rain stops." And that she stayed with him.
The bow and arrows that the Doctor and Martha had in the end bit. (Look, I think bow-and-arrows are cool, okay?)
A few questions:
How come the weeping angels were attacking people around the old house anyway? For the last two years, it seems. Or was it like this... If T is the time at the start of the episode, we have this:
T minus 2 years: The TARDIS arrives at the old house, and the Doctor and Martha are zapped back into 1969 (or perhaps earlier). The Doctor has the info file on him. We know that there was more there than just the transcript, there were the photos of Catherine, and probably other things.
So I guess the Doctor gets in contact with Catherine (who is still alive in 1969) and tells her to write the letter.
T: Catherine Nightingale is zapped back to 1920
T: Billy Shipton is zapped back to 1969. In 1969, the Doctor finds him immediately, and gives him the message about the list of DVDs. (Sally must be a good reporter, to have written it all down so clearly and thoroughly).
T: Sally and Larry get to the TARDIS and it leaves, going to 1969 (as programmed by the Doctor).
T plus one year: Sally sees the Doctor and Martha, which is earlier in their own personal timelines than the events of T-2. She gives the Doctor the folder of information, and tells him when he'll need it.
No, but that still doesn't explain why the weeping angels were hanging around that house in particular.
And the other thing I don't understand is, how did the angels get the TARDIS key? Sally took the key from the hand of one of the angels, so they definitely had it, it wasn't one of those "messages to Sally Sparrow" like the other things.
Interesting thought:
If the weeping angels zap you back in time so that you live out your natural lifespan, how come Catherine Nightingale was zapped back to 1920, and died before the present day, but Billy Shipton was zapped back to 1969 and died in the present day?
And why did they zap the Doctor and Martha back to 1969? Does that mean that they both only have 36-odd years left to live? Why were they zapped together anyway?
Now I have to try to catch up on Torchwood before next week. (!)
Why was it better?
1. A better monster.
The weeping angels are so creepy-cool! A million times better than the Absorbalof. Both beautiful and scary, the mundane made terrifying (that ending bit with the montage of the statues was reminiscent of the creepy ending of the Sapphire & Steel episode about the photographs).
2. The time-travel paradoxness of it.
I loved all the bits, from the message behind the wallpaper, the mysterious letter, DVD conversation, and of course the backwards-forwards of her giving him the the transcript and the photos. It's interesting that New Who seems to be a lot happier to play with the paradoxicalness of time travel than Old Who. Maybe because they expect their audience to be more familiar with the concept?
3. Sally Sparrow powns Elton.
She saves the Doctor! When he needs it! Because she's plucky and intelligent! She gets the guy, and it isn't that disturbing relationship that Elton had with Ursula.
Mind you, "Love and Monsters"... I still really like the very last line in it.
But, back to "Blink" things I liked:
The "Scooby-Doo" reference about the old house. The old creepy house itself.
"Why don't you go to the police? Nobody ever goes to the police!"
The policeman, Billy Shipton.
"I have until the rain stops." And that she stayed with him.
The bow and arrows that the Doctor and Martha had in the end bit. (Look, I think bow-and-arrows are cool, okay?)
A few questions:
How come the weeping angels were attacking people around the old house anyway? For the last two years, it seems. Or was it like this... If T is the time at the start of the episode, we have this:
T minus 2 years: The TARDIS arrives at the old house, and the Doctor and Martha are zapped back into 1969 (or perhaps earlier). The Doctor has the info file on him. We know that there was more there than just the transcript, there were the photos of Catherine, and probably other things.
So I guess the Doctor gets in contact with Catherine (who is still alive in 1969) and tells her to write the letter.
T: Catherine Nightingale is zapped back to 1920
T: Billy Shipton is zapped back to 1969. In 1969, the Doctor finds him immediately, and gives him the message about the list of DVDs. (Sally must be a good reporter, to have written it all down so clearly and thoroughly).
T: Sally and Larry get to the TARDIS and it leaves, going to 1969 (as programmed by the Doctor).
T plus one year: Sally sees the Doctor and Martha, which is earlier in their own personal timelines than the events of T-2. She gives the Doctor the folder of information, and tells him when he'll need it.
No, but that still doesn't explain why the weeping angels were hanging around that house in particular.
And the other thing I don't understand is, how did the angels get the TARDIS key? Sally took the key from the hand of one of the angels, so they definitely had it, it wasn't one of those "messages to Sally Sparrow" like the other things.
Interesting thought:
If the weeping angels zap you back in time so that you live out your natural lifespan, how come Catherine Nightingale was zapped back to 1920, and died before the present day, but Billy Shipton was zapped back to 1969 and died in the present day?
And why did they zap the Doctor and Martha back to 1969? Does that mean that they both only have 36-odd years left to live? Why were they zapped together anyway?
Now I have to try to catch up on Torchwood before next week. (!)
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no subject
Date: 2007-06-10 10:07 am (UTC)I gathered that the weeping angels zap you back in time so that they can eat the potential future life you don't get to live out. I don't think that precludes the person living beyond that time. What's more worrying is Billy Shipton overlapping with himself; it would have been hard to resist going to see himself.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-10 10:17 am (UTC)Presumably the Doctor would have warned him that seeing himself would wipe out 95% of the universe instead of the 2/3 of the universe if he'd seen Sally... 8-P
no subject
Date: 2007-06-10 10:43 am (UTC)The doctor said to Billy Shipton something like "the same angel that sent you back must have sent us back". I took that to mean that the amount of time you got sent in the past depended on which angel did the sending.
And yes, those angels were the perfect monsters. I actually had nightmares about them last night...
no subject
Date: 2007-06-10 07:56 pm (UTC)I assumed that they were attractec by the TARDIs. Perhaps it gave off some energy tht they could feed on.
That worried me as well.
no subject
Date: 2007-06-10 09:49 pm (UTC)Exactly! They perfectly embodied my argument that the perfect alien/monster depends on a brilliant idea, rather than prosthetics or CGI. I think I mentioned Medusa, and the Angels are the anti-Medusa: not "don't look at her, or you'll turn to stone", but "don't stop looking at her, or she'll stop being stone". If the plot hadn't required the Angels' gaze to be fatal to each other, I would have hypothesised that we are the Angels' Gorgons, the monsters who can petrify them.
Though it's interesting that both Medusa and the Angels derive power from our action/inaction; Medusa can't turn us to stone by looking at us, only by being looked at, and the Angels have no life at all until we look away.
It's possible that the Doctor did leave the key somewhere for Sally to find, and that an Angel had [just?] found it before being seen. Or that they had snatched it from him as they sent him back to 1969, and were carrying it about until they found the Tardis. They might even have dangled it in front of Sally in the hope that it might somehow lead her to the Tardis (while they followed her)?
no subject
Date: 2007-06-10 10:34 pm (UTC)Or, indeed the way they're introduced. I can't help thinking of the clockwork androids in "The Girl in the Fireplace" -- it wasn't that clockwork androids would be particularly scary as such, but there was "why is the clock smashed?" and "don't move, don't look under the bed"
I would have hypothesised that we are the Angels' Gorgons, the monsters who can petrify them.
Oooh, nice.
They might even have dangled it in front of Sally in the hope that it might somehow lead her to the Tardis (while they followed her)?
Now, that even makes sense...
no subject
Date: 2007-06-10 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-10 11:54 pm (UTC)But he didn't. The "authorized disc" was one of the 17 DVDs that had the Easter Egg on it. Presumably the TARDIS trip program was another "easter egg"...
no subject
Date: 2007-06-11 12:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-06-11 01:26 am (UTC)Then he gave the recording, the program and the list of DVDs to Billy, so that he could put them onto the 17 DVDs when DVDs were invented.
The Doctor was relying on quite a few people to remain true to their word, wasn't he?
no subject
Date: 2007-06-11 07:44 am (UTC)blink
Date: 2007-06-11 04:04 am (UTC)Those angels have got to be one of the scariest monsters yet! I'm glad I saw it in daytime.
One week till torchwood. yay!
no subject
Date: 2007-06-11 04:18 pm (UTC)"But the truth is, Blink is so much stranger than Love and Monsters. It's so much darker. And so much madder. And so much better."
no subject
Date: 2007-06-11 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 01:58 am (UTC)Wow. And wow again. That was excellent and creepy and all-around creeptastic.
The weeping angels were all kinds of scary, and the end made me wonder it the writer was scared of statuary when he was a kid.
They were a great example of the less-is-more theory of creepy. Seeing them in one position one minute, then another position the next is incredibly effective (rather like scarecrows tipping their heads at the same time).
It never really occurred to me to ask why the angels were hanging around the house . . . I guess because they blended in so well. Big creepy house that would have that kind of statuary, that a lot of people apparently like investigating . . .
I'll definitely have to watch it again to catch the pieces that slipped by me, but I loved the time loopy, wibbly wobbly stuff . . . timelines folding back on themselves. I guess my main question about that would be how is it, or why is it, that The Doctor knew something was going to fly at the spot where Sally's head was. But the message under the wallpaper was great, so I'm willing to let it go.
The ep actually had me on the edge of my seat at one point. Excellent, excellent ep. What a great ride!
no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 02:19 am (UTC)why is it, that The Doctor knew something was going to fly at the spot where Sally's head was
It was part of the stuff in the folder that Sally gave him at the end. If I recall correctly, she originally went into the house taking photographs ("Sad is happy for deep people"), so I expect she took a photograph of the message on the wall.
The Wikipedia entry points out that the knowledge that the Doctor has in the episode is an ontological paradox (cool, I learn something new) -- that is, he only knows it because he's been told it by Sally, who only knows it because the Doctor sent her messages, which he sent her because she gave him the information to send.
(Times like these I wish I had