Tom Salinsky

The Doctor: People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly… timey-wimey… stuff.

Sally: Started well, that sentence.

The Doctor: It got away from me, yeah.

Blink has got a lot to answer for. On balance I’m thoroughly glad it exists, since on its own it’s absolutely marvellous. But in terms of its legacy, it may very well have done more harm than good.

Remember, one of the factors in the creation of Blink was it that was to be that season’s Doctor-light story. With David Tennant and Freema Agyeman filming another episode at the same time, Steven Moffat’s script had to put something else in the place of the quirky hero most were tuning in to see. Blink succeeds in part because the Doctor’s presence is felt throughout, but also because the mind-bending paradoxes fulfil our desire for something otherworldly and strange and so make up for the Doctor’s absence.

Steven Moffat’s insight was that Doctor Who is a series about a time traveller which very rarely tells stories which are about time travel. The TARDIS is frequently used only to deliver the leads to where and when the adventure is taking place. But this was not accidental. 26 years of episodes produced with hardly any time-travel adventures was not coincidence, lack of ambition (time travel paradoxes are very cheap to film), or inattention. It was because most time-travel stories are self-limiting. Time travel turns out to be more of a curse than a blessing, or the use of paradoxes eventually undoes the causality of the story, which is why they are very often mere narrative window dressing. We don’t watch Terminator 2 because it uses time travel to “undo” the first movie. We watch Terminator 2 for the epic life-and-death struggle, the then (heck, now) eye-popping special effects and the thrilling stunt work.

Similarly, Blink doesn’t succeed because of the time travel paradoxes. They are neat solutions to seemingly impossible problems, and they create the mystery which Sally Sparrow is unravelling, but we watch for star-of-tomorrow Carey Mulligan’s luminous performance and the pathos of poor Billy Shipton’s inevitable death. Note also, that the final solution to the threat of the angels has nothing whatever to do with time-travel – it exploits a hitherto unnoticed feature of their biology: they can quantum-lock each other by mistake.

But continuing to write more and more stories in which time paradoxes form the core of the plot, or worse are the means to resolve it, leads to diminishing returns. It leads to stories whose climaxes are not thrilling-escapes-from-death, or brilliant last-minute improvisatons, or moments of emotional catharsis, but instead are unrewardingly clever, like the solution to a crossword puzzle, giving a brief flash of insight but nothing more. And as writers work harder and harder to out-do each other and stay ahead of the audience, the danger becomes greater and greater that climaxes start to tip over into Bill and Ted or The Curse of Fatal Death absurdity.

So I don’t mind the Doctor breaking the fourth wall to give us a little lecture at the top of the episode, it’s fun and so is his penchant for the electric guitar. Maybe it wasn’t strictly needed, except to pad out the running time, but I don’t object in principle. It’s just that what he was saying was a little laboured. You don’t have to have studied science-fiction in depth from H G Wells to the present day to have seen a bootstrap paradox before. You just need to have seen one episode of Doctor Who with Steven Moffat’s name on it somewhere and you’ll probably be fully up-to-speed. So it’s the foregrounding of this element which undoes this episode for me more than anything else.

As I noted last week, the idea of travelling back in time to see how the events of part one were set in motion is one I found very fresh and invigorating, and early signs were good. Although I could probably have done without O’Donnell’s fan-squee over the Doctor’s previous (and future) Earth-bound exploits. We don’t want to return to the days of Eric Saward where the Doctor and the Time Lords were pretty much intergalactic celebrities, do we?

O’Donnell is written like that partly to give her death some added pathos, but it doesn’t really work. She’s too thin of a character, both in the writing and in the playing, and the directing is very weak here, with the camera playing the part of the Fisher King and swooping grimly near her while she just stands and feebly goggles at it, before being discovered dead but apparently uninjured.

The Doctor’s second trip in the TARDIS is also strangely redundant – another narrative loop, like his trip in Davros’s wheelchair, which again suggests that there wasn’t quite enough material to sustain 90 minutes of television. Back on the base, Clara et al are trying to work out what the ghost Doctor is saying – when the ghost O’Donnell turns up. This is very strange. Prentis, who was alive when the Doctor arrived, is seen floating around the Drum right from the start. O’Donnell’s ghost only appears at the Drum after the Doctor witnesses her dead. No explanation for this is ever given.

The Fisher King (strange name) is also rather a blank of a villain. Steven Moffat somewhat pompously opined in the new issue of Doctor Who Magazine that writing a straight-up-and-down Bad Guy is not “proper” writing, but the Fisher King just wants others to die and himself to live, plus a bit of gloating on the side. He cuts an imposing figure and Peter Serafinowicz does a good job on the voice, but he’s a bit ho-hum.

When the solution finally arrives, it’s a bit of a flurry of other-shoes-dropping. The Doctor uses the missing power cell to shatter the dam, flooding the valley. Was that really the only way to deal with the threat of the Fisher King? It’s uncharacteristically brutal, especially given his refusal to even try and save O’Donnell or any of the rest, and the risk of collateral damage seems very high. For reasons which aren’t particularly clear, the Doctor stuffs Bennett in the TARDIS and he takes the trip back to the Drum via the stasis chamber. Finally, the Doctor’s ghost is revealed as a hologram, similar to the illusion of Clara used to mislead the ghosts in part one. That all just about makes sense as far as it goes, and the speed of the execution is thrilling enough, but there’s no catharsis of any kind, not even when that wet and weedy romance between Lunn and Cass finally sparks up.

So, it’s another disappointing denouement I’m afraid. I think three stars is appropriate. Capaldi does very good work, as ever, and Paul Kaye is fun. But I think that drags down the two parter’s overall score to three-and-a-half. A tremendous build-up and a limp finish is so much worse than an early stumble and an amazing climax.

PS: Sorry this was so late, I will try and get a review of tonight’s episode up by tomorrow evening at the latest.