BLINK
Back when the return of Doctor
Who was first announced, one of the great controversies of fan debate was
whether or not the show should try to be ‘fan-pleasing’. The argument being
that, on the one hand, the show should prioritize ‘casual viewers’, children in
particular, and that getting bogged down in its own mythology had been one of
the reasons why audiences had fallen out of love with it during the 1980s. On
the other hand, Doctor Who wouldn’t
be Doctor Who if it didn’t
occasionally bring back old monsters, if the TARDIS wasn’t a Police Box, if the
Doctor wasn’t a Time Lord; that pleasing the fans needn’t preclude appealing to
a wider audience, because on the whole, fans tend to enjoy exactly the same
things about the show as everyone else.
Which is why Blink,
one of the series most acclaimed episodes, also happens to be the one which
does the most to please the fans. This isn’t a coincidence.
What do Doctor Who
fans want? I think, at heart, we all want the same thing. We want to be swept
out of our normal lives and into the universe of Doctor Who. That’s the most fundamental fan wish-fulfilment fantasy
there is. That’s what we’ve spent long afternoons during Geography lessons
dreaming about; that one day we might see a certain familiar Police Box at the
end of the road.
It’s why there are so many Doctor Who stories written about young boys and girls getting
caught up in one of the Doctor’s adventures. It’s the basis of What I Did On My Christmas Holidays By
Sally Sparrow, the story that inspired Blink
which first appeared in the 2006 Doctor
Who Annual. And yet, despite its obvious potential, it’s an idea that had
never really been explored in the TV series; before Blink, Rose and Love &
Monsters were about as close as it had got.
All female fans watching want to be Sally Sparrow. She’s
intelligent, artistic, confident and extremely pretty. She talks in witty
one-liners that would give CJ out of The
West Wing a run for her money. She doesn’t scream, she doesn’t twist her
ankle, and wherever she goes, men fall hopelessly in love with her.
For the male fans, there’s Larry Nightingale. The geek’s
geek. He spends his time either on the internet or watching DVDs a little bit
too intently. He looks remarkably like Shaggy from Scooby Doo. He’s not good with girls, frequently embarrassing
himself, and whilst he’s quite intelligent, he has devoted far too much of his
brain to pointless film and television trivia. Yet at the end of the story he
has Sally Sparrow for a girlfriend.
That’s one way in which Blink
is ‘fan-pleasing’. It’s a story that hinges on fan obsessions – conspiracy
theories, DVD easter eggs - where Larry’s nerdiness proves invaluable in
revealing the truth. It makes us feel proud to be nerds like him. It almost
makes being a science-fiction anorak seem romantic.
Another key part of this episode’s appeal is that although
the Doctor is largely absent, the story is all about him - about asking the
question “Doctor Who?” What little we
see of him is strange and unsettling; a sinister face on a flickering
television screen, a name scrawled on a wall, or mentioned in passing by Billy
Shipton on his death bed. It’s building on the idea of the Doctor as a shadowy,
mythic figure lurking in the background of history, as introduced in the scenes
with Clive in Rose and Elton in Love & Monsters. The Doctor is made
to seem mysterious again, and there’s nothing fans enjoy more than the Doctor
being mysterious. That’s what made us first fall in love with the character,
after all. It’s something most of these poll-topping stories have in common –
they all seek to re-emphasize the mystery of the character in some way, making
him seem more enigmatic, more extraordinary, more fascinating than before.
Another fan-pleasing element of this story is its use of
time. For a show about time travel, Doctor
Who has rarely used time travel itself as a plot point (time travel usually
being simply a device used to move from one story to the next). There’s Mawdryn Undead, The Space Museum, Day Of The
Daleks and that bit in Battlefield where a future Doctor leaves
a note for his former self, but that’s about it for shenanigans in the fourth
dimension.
Yet the possibilities of time travel have always been a
source of fascination to fans, having been thoroughly explored in the spin-off
books, audios and short stories – not least Steven Moffat’s first Doctor Who story, Continuity Errors, in which the Doctor changes someone’s past in
order to persuade them to allow him to borrow a library book, or his second
story, The Curse Of Fatal Death,
where the Doctor and the Master both travel ever further back in time to bribe
the castle architect.
But Blink takes
the idea of ‘timey-wimey’ storytelling to the next level, as the whole plot is
effectively the slow reveal of an ontological paradox (i.e. the idea that you
could send a note back through time telling yourself to send the same note back
through time). It’s like watching a well-oiled jigsaw fall into place like a
badly-chosen mixed metaphor... sorry, that sentence got away from me. It’s a
Howdunnit, where the puzzle is in trying to figure out how all the chains of
cause-and-effect fit together; a puzzle which can only be completed with a
satisfying ‘thunk’ as we’re presented with the final piece of the jigsaw – Sally
handing the Doctor the instructions on what the Doctor should say to her – at
which point suddenly the big picture becomes clear.
It’s extremely well-done, with the sort of ingenuity that
particularly appeals to those types who like things to Make Sense and who tend
to notice when they don’t. The audience feel that their intelligence is being
flattered (in the same way that we are made to feel clever with the ‘quantum
locked’ explanation of observation affecting the Weeping Angels – it doesn’t
actually make sense but because we’ve been made to feel clever we don’t mind).
It’s a great feeling, the same rush you get from having solved a crossword or
understood a tricky piece of maths.
But on top of that, the story uses time travel on an
emotional level, using it to create explore ideas about nostalgia, of lost
opportunities; most potently in the scene where Billy Shipton muses on having
grown old (in what, for us and Sally Sparrow, has been the Blink of an eye) – “Look at my hands. They’re old man’s hands. How
did that happen?” As Sally observes, there’s something inexorably sad about old
things (“It’s happy for deep people”) – an observation which comes back to
haunt her as her friend Kathy becomes an image in a sepia photograph. Most
heartbreaking of all is the beautiful, poetic moment when Sally observes that “It’s
the same rain” – a life foreshortened in the time taken for a raindrop to
stumble and slither down a window pane.
(That said, there’s also something very fan-pleasing about
the notion of being transported back in time. It’s another wish-fulfilment
fantasy; to suddenly find yourself transported back to the early 1960s, with
nothing to do except win money betting on future events which you could then
use to bribe BBC staff to give you access to the original videotapes of Fury From The Deep. If Weeping Angels
really did exist, Doctor Who fans
would be forming a queue outside Wester Drumlins clutching portable DVD
recorders and autograph books.)
There’s one other way in which Blink is fan-pleasing; it’s scary. As scary for grown-ups as it is
for children. Fans like nothing better than when Doctor Who frightens them and Blink
is about as scary as Doctor Who can
get; playing on the primal fear of things shifting out of sight (and the
playground game ‘Grandmother’s footsteps’) and the horror movie staple that
someone is in the room behind you right now as you’re reading this article in DWM. Like a horror movie, the viewer’s
eye is spent constantly scanning the background of each shot in anticipation of
a glimpse of the monster – only to be ‘rewarded’ as one Weeping Angel covers
its eyes as Sally picks up the TARDIS key. It’s a terrifying moment; of course,
it’s all in the script, but you have to give credit to Hettie Macdonald for her
perfectly-judged direction and Murray Gold for his music, especially his
unnerving scratchy-violins Weeping Angels theme.
So that’s why it’s a fan favourite; because it’s an episode
doing all the things that fans like. It also has far too many fantastic,
oh-so-quotable jokes, and has hardly any special effects (because if there’s
one thing Doctor Who fans don’t like,
it’s When Special Effects Go Bad.)
And on top of all that, there’s even an in-joke about the
TARDIS windows being the wrong shape.
