Don't Blink (episode)


*The following article is written from an Out of Universe perspective.*

Don't Blink was the sixth story of Season 35 of Doctor Who. It was written by Steven Moffat, directed by Brian Grant and featured Michael French as the Doctor and Laurie Holden as Sammy Thompson.

Synopsis

In an abandoned house, the Weeping Angels wait. The only hope to stop them is a young woman named Sally Sparrow and her friend Larry Nightingale. The only catch: the Weeping Angels can move in the blink of an eye. To defeat the ruthless enemy — with only a half of a conversation from the Doctor as help — the one rule is this: don't turn your back, don't look away and don't blink!

Plot

In 1999, Sally Sparrow, intrigued by a message written to her under peeling wallpaper about "the Weeping Angel", explores the abandoned house Wester Drumlins with her friend Kathy Nightingale. Kathy is sent back in time to 1920 by a Weeping Angel statue. At that moment, Kathy's grandson delivers to the house a message from 1979 about the long life Kathy led. Before leaving, Sally takes a Yale key hanging from the hand of a statue. Sally visits Kathy's brother Larry at work to tell him Kathy loves him. Larry explains that he has been documenting an "Easter egg" in seventeen different VHS tapes containing a video message of a man having half of a conversation with the viewer. Larry gives Sally a list of videotapes. Four Weeping Angel statues follow Sally to the police station, where they take an impounded fake police box and send DI Billy Shipton back to 1959. The man in the Easter egg, a time traveller called the Doctor, has also been sent to the past and asks Billy to relay a message decades later. Billy puts the Easter egg on the videotapes. In 1999, a much older Billy phones Sally to visit him on his deathbed in the hospital. Before he dies, Billy instructs Sally to look at the list. The list is Sally's own VHS collection.

Sally and Larry return to the house and play the Easter egg on a portable video player. Sally discovers she can converse with the Doctor in 1959, as he possesses a copy of the complete transcript that Larry is currently compiling. The Doctor explains that aliens called Weeping Angels turn to stone statues when any living creature observes them. He fears they are seeking the vast reserves of time energy in the police box, which is his time machine the TARDIS.

A Weeping Angel pursues Sally and Larry to the basement where the TARDIS is. Sally and Larry use the Yale key to hide inside. Larry inserts a now-glowing videotape, which also functions as a control disk, in the console's video player. The ship returns to the Doctor while leaving Sally and Larry behind. The Weeping Angels standing around the TARDIS get tricked into looking at each other and are permanently frozen. A year later, Sally and Larry meet the Doctor prior to him being stuck in 1959. Sally hands the Doctor Larry's transcript and warns that he will need it.

Cast

To be added.

Crew

Created by Sydney Newman, Donald Wilson and C.E. Webber
Executive Producer - David Renwick

Memorable Quotes

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Background Information

Development

This was the first "Doctor-lite" story in BBC Wales and Paramount's Doctor Who, having come about out of a need in the production schedule for double banking.

Pre-Production

To be added.

Production

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Post-Production

To be added.

Reaction

This episode received a 7-Day Viewing Figure from BARB of 9.88m viewers. It ranked at 28th over the week.
In a 2001 interview among his departure as script editor, Steven Moffat admitted that he had only just started realising that Don't Blink was in fact "a really great episode". Because of its late submission, Don't Blink was the quickest piece of writing Moffat had ever done, having gone straight from the second draft with no notes to the script and tone meetings before going into production ten days later. The scriptwriting process took such little time to produce that Moffat claimed that Don't Blink was such a "tiniest sliver" of his writing career that he couldn't remember making it. This was largely due to him being script editor of the show at the time as well as the tight schedules in order to get the episode, and indeed the season, out on time for 1998.

Story Notes

This episode won a Hugo Award in 1999.
The plot of this episode was based upon a short story Steven Moffat wrote for the Doctor Who Annual 1997 called What I Did on My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow. The story involves Sally Sparrow (who is a child in the story as opposed to a young woman in the episode) writing her school assignment about being contacted by the Ninth Doctor through photographs and a videotape (like the episode, there is a sequence in which Sally has a conversation with the Doctor through a television) in which he gives her instructions to allow her to return the TARDIS to him (the Weeping Angels aren't present in the story; the Doctor being separated from the TARDIS was due to a "hic-cough"), knowing what to do thanks to an adult Sally (who is a beautiful spy who saves the Doctor's life) giving him the story which details the experience.
The story is ultimately an ontological paradox: the Doctor has all the information, the transcript of the conversation, the contents of the message behind the wallpaper, etc, because Sally gives him that information at the end of the story — but Sally gets that information from seeing the wall the Doctor wrote, watching the videotape the Doctor made and so on. The information never really "starts" anywhere — the Doctor knows what to say in the conversation because he's reading Larry's transcript, which Larry made thirty-eight years later by watching the conversation. The information is in an endless loop.

Continuity

To be added.

Home Video Releases

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