Doctor Who: Blink
Mar. 3rd, 2020 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrasteSo now that Season Twelve has concluded, I've decided it's time to take a trip back to other Doctors and earlier TARDIS teams with some of my favourite stories! I've been meaning to do a top twenty-five rewatch for aaaaaaages, and it seems like there's going to be quite a gap between now and Season Thirteen so it's as good a time as any.
In order to compare apples with apples (or at least apple cake with apple pie) I am only going over TV stories here, which is helping to keep the list nice and short. And also only actual Doctor Who, no other shows that share its universe. Maybe some other time I'll do a full top fifty with Children of Earth and Alien Bodies and Spare Parts and The Flood and all that other good stuff, but not right now. This also means I'm missing a few Doctors entirely, since I think all of Six's best appearances are in the spin-off material and the TV movie barely counts as a story, let alone one of my twenty-five favourites. Thirteen is also not here, because I always find it difficult to place stories among my favourites when I don't know their context within the era as a whole. There's every chance Haunting of the Villa Diodati will make this list at some point in the future, but not right now.
With all of that out of the way, and counting upwards, the first thing to make the cut is: Blink!
(This post contains no actual spoilers for The Timeless Children but I do mention my feelings about it, so if that's a thing you're avoiding be aware.)
So, yes, part of the impetus for starting this project right now is that I spent last night waking up every couple of hours with my brain going '... AND THE OTHER THING I HATED ABOUT THE TIMELESS CHILDREN WAS ...' Which says something about both how I'm sleeping at the moment and how I feel about the complex space-time event that is Doctor Who. So it was nice to get the taste of that out of my mouth and remind myself that there is loads and loads of Doctor Who that I love and always will, starting with the first appearance of the Weeping Angels.
The primary reason this is down relatively low when a lot of people would put it in the top ten is that I think it's an episode that works far, far better when you've never seen it before. It absolutely blew me away when I first saw it back in 2007, but I think that it's a story that inevitably loses something when you know where it's going. Which is not to say that it's not still brilliant, just that I'll never recapture the moment when I first got to the ending of the scariest Doctor Who story I'd ever see to that point and softly screamed at that incredibly mean closing montage.
There's a lot about it that does hold up perfectly. The guest cast are universally charming, with Carey Mulligan giving a stand-out performance as Sally Sparrow. (That alternative universe where we got Sparrow & Nightingale instead of the Ponds is probably just as good as this one, much and all as I love Amy and Rory.) All of Moffat's sparkly dialogue and love for timey-wimey plots is front and centre in the episode that first gave us the phrase 'timey-wimey.' And I still think 'it's the same rain' might be the single best line he ever wrote for the show. (It's either that or 'personally, I think that's a hell of a bird.' But we'll get to that at a point much higher up this list.) The Weeping Angels lost a little of their mystique upon subsequent appearances, but they're a clever and terrifying idea, and I love the way this episode never shows them moving because they can't move when the audience is watching them. Along with that ending montage, it's a great way of bouncing things off the fourth wall.
In some ways it's a time capsule now - not only because of what we know about how Moffat approached the show once he took over, but simply because it's been thirteen years and time moves too fast even if you don't get zapped by a Weeping Angel. Larry's reaction to Sally owning seventeen DVDs is funny for an entirely different reason in 2020.
With the benefit of hindsight, I could really have done without Martha being forced to work in a shop in 1969 to support the Doctor just a week after The Family of Blood finished and two weeks before the Master would capture her family, but that's not so much a problem with Blink as it is a really bad pattern with the way Martha is treated in the season as a whole.
Most of all, it's a great demonstration of how Doctor Who is such a great show that you don't even really need the Doctor to do it. Just some time and space and the weird, wonderful and scary things that happen when the angels have the phonebox. (It's still on lots of t-shirts. I checked.)
In order to compare apples with apples (or at least apple cake with apple pie) I am only going over TV stories here, which is helping to keep the list nice and short. And also only actual Doctor Who, no other shows that share its universe. Maybe some other time I'll do a full top fifty with Children of Earth and Alien Bodies and Spare Parts and The Flood and all that other good stuff, but not right now. This also means I'm missing a few Doctors entirely, since I think all of Six's best appearances are in the spin-off material and the TV movie barely counts as a story, let alone one of my twenty-five favourites. Thirteen is also not here, because I always find it difficult to place stories among my favourites when I don't know their context within the era as a whole. There's every chance Haunting of the Villa Diodati will make this list at some point in the future, but not right now.
With all of that out of the way, and counting upwards, the first thing to make the cut is: Blink!
(This post contains no actual spoilers for The Timeless Children but I do mention my feelings about it, so if that's a thing you're avoiding be aware.)
So, yes, part of the impetus for starting this project right now is that I spent last night waking up every couple of hours with my brain going '... AND THE OTHER THING I HATED ABOUT THE TIMELESS CHILDREN WAS ...' Which says something about both how I'm sleeping at the moment and how I feel about the complex space-time event that is Doctor Who. So it was nice to get the taste of that out of my mouth and remind myself that there is loads and loads of Doctor Who that I love and always will, starting with the first appearance of the Weeping Angels.
The primary reason this is down relatively low when a lot of people would put it in the top ten is that I think it's an episode that works far, far better when you've never seen it before. It absolutely blew me away when I first saw it back in 2007, but I think that it's a story that inevitably loses something when you know where it's going. Which is not to say that it's not still brilliant, just that I'll never recapture the moment when I first got to the ending of the scariest Doctor Who story I'd ever see to that point and softly screamed at that incredibly mean closing montage.
There's a lot about it that does hold up perfectly. The guest cast are universally charming, with Carey Mulligan giving a stand-out performance as Sally Sparrow. (That alternative universe where we got Sparrow & Nightingale instead of the Ponds is probably just as good as this one, much and all as I love Amy and Rory.) All of Moffat's sparkly dialogue and love for timey-wimey plots is front and centre in the episode that first gave us the phrase 'timey-wimey.' And I still think 'it's the same rain' might be the single best line he ever wrote for the show. (It's either that or 'personally, I think that's a hell of a bird.' But we'll get to that at a point much higher up this list.) The Weeping Angels lost a little of their mystique upon subsequent appearances, but they're a clever and terrifying idea, and I love the way this episode never shows them moving because they can't move when the audience is watching them. Along with that ending montage, it's a great way of bouncing things off the fourth wall.
In some ways it's a time capsule now - not only because of what we know about how Moffat approached the show once he took over, but simply because it's been thirteen years and time moves too fast even if you don't get zapped by a Weeping Angel. Larry's reaction to Sally owning seventeen DVDs is funny for an entirely different reason in 2020.
With the benefit of hindsight, I could really have done without Martha being forced to work in a shop in 1969 to support the Doctor just a week after The Family of Blood finished and two weeks before the Master would capture her family, but that's not so much a problem with Blink as it is a really bad pattern with the way Martha is treated in the season as a whole.
Most of all, it's a great demonstration of how Doctor Who is such a great show that you don't even really need the Doctor to do it. Just some time and space and the weird, wonderful and scary things that happen when the angels have the phonebox. (It's still on lots of t-shirts. I checked.)
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-03 03:16 pm (UTC)Hee! ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-05 09:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-07 12:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-07 10:04 am (UTC)