I suppose that if finding the notion that a species that can’t look at other members of its species without freezing each other in place ridiculous is nit-picking, then yes, I guess I’m going to nitpick.
“Sad is happy for deep people”. God, what a stupid thing to say. But it was a good line; told us something about the character; and by the end of the episode, we could see that she’d grown.
The nature of time in “Doctor Who” has always been whatever was required to make a given episode work. In this one, I enjoyed the paradoxes, with the Doctor reading half of a conversation from a transcript made of that very conversation.
And the statues made my girlfriend jump, so it was an effective episode.
Obviously, the “quantum-locked” statue people were a ridiculous idea, but the Doctor lives in a ridiculous multiverse.
Eh? That’s not right. He’d been flung back into the past before his older self called Sally’s number. He died after the point he’d been flung back.
He knew he was going to die when the rain ended, because Sally knew that when she’d written the whole thing up and given it to the Doctor.
Well, the first step is admitting it. 
Of course it was ridiculous. Much of Dr. Who is ridiculous. Was this any more ridiculous than most of the “monsters”? Sit back and enjoy the ride. I get the bonus of watching each episode with my kids. My son looks forward to the shows more than I do. It is great.
BTW: Both of my kids (7 & 10) liked this show a lot, neither found it all that scary. The werewolf episode and the great WWII two parter last year had both of them scared and my son hiding his eyes.
Jim
Flash Gordon immediately follows Dr. Who on Fridays nights. Was the term “from the sublime to the ridiculous” ever better exemplified?
I haven’t watched Flash yet, we usually watch Doctor Who off DVR. I take it Flash is not very good?
Yes. A species that can’t look at other members of its species without involuntarily turning them to stone is far more ridiculous than any other Doctor Who monster I can think of.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked the characters of Sally and Billy quite a lot and would love to see them again. Just like I would like to see that guy with the paving stone girlfriend again from last season’s Doctor-lite episode. I’m just saddened and annoyed that such good characters were stuck in the middle of such a dopey story.
I particularly enjoyed the time travel aspect of this episode. The Letter from the Past, from Back to the Future, Inventing a Modern Device, from The Voyage Home, but particularly how it all comes together at the end.
Silly me I figured they would just hang mirrors over their ears so they were right in front of their eyes permanently.
then of course you hang them by the neck, tie down the hands and feet and drop a bag over their heads.
definitely not very scary, at least it didnt freak me out. but I did think it was a cool concept.
It’s not very good in the sense of being very, very bad. And the particular episode that aired this Friday was INCREDIBLY bad, even by the standards of this very, very bad series. It’s been described as “legendary bad,” the sort of badness people note with awe for decades afterward.
In conjunction with “Blink” which I understand to have been a topnotch story with some strong characterization, it’s, well, quite a decline between 8:59 and 9:01 on Friday night on the SciFi Channel.
Here’s a link if you wanna know how bad it was. Over on the SciFi Channel message boards they seem to be working themselves up to pitchforks and torches turf over this one.
Same here. Sally Sparrow and the incredibly cute actress who plays her could easily support their own series.
I loved the plot, combining the pathos of Billy’s death, the scary monsters and the Doctor Who ‘liteness’.
(Apparently they need one lite episode per series to allow for the Xmas special.)
I agree the monster concept was soppy. Mind you, if you’d seen the early monsters from decades ago, which were usually a man in a rubber suit, you wouldn’t feel so bad.
The statues were played by actors! :eek:
Now this is the big question (and I’ve watched the episode 3 times):
Who threw the rock?!
It wasn’t a rock. It was the birth of a quantum-locked angel baby.
Dr. Who traveled to 2007 and did it after he recovered the Tardis. :rolleyes:
Just another vote for excellent episode! I really love love a well done time-paradox theme.
The Doctor threw the rock? He left a note to warn her that he was gonna chuck a rock at the back of her head? “Oh yeah, DUCK!” And he wrote it in 1969 before going back to the present to hurl it?
I can’t wait for the “Four things and a lizard” one.
Martha made him do it. :rolleyes:
Regarding the final solution
[spoiler]You are all assuming the angels see in the same part of the spectrum as humans, but the story made it pretty clear that they didn’t. The angels kept freezing in synch with the lights because they freeze when they are watched and the watchers were human. The humans couldn’t see in the dark, and so the angels weren’t watched when the lights went off. When it went dark they moved towards the humans directly, making it quite clear they themselves can see quite clearly in the dark. So whether the lights go off makes no difference at all. They can see perfectly in the dark and can thus see each other.
Next point is that they had all clasped hands when they were frozen looking at each other. They can’t be moved out of their current orientation without destroying the ‘statuary’ and nobody would do that and even if they did it woudl probably kill them. So they are locked for all time, [/spoiler]
Now whether the concept of the creature itself is silly I leave up to the indivdiual, but the plot itself was perfectly internally consistent if not clearly enough spelled out for the whole audience.
I’m no fan of these new Dr Whos, but I have to say “Blink” is about good as the best of the Classic Who. Maybe not “Weng-Chiang” or “Daemons” good, but good enough to convince a crusty cynic to buy a few DVDs.
That’s something I would have never thought about Moffat. I thought his “Coupling” was brilliant (as was this episode of “Doctor Who”), and found his three female characters on that show to be very believable.
Has anyone else noticed the abundance of interracial couples on this show? Mickey and Rose, Martha’s father and girlfriend, and then Billy and his wife Sally. Is this a prevalent in the UK as this show would make it appear?
I think anyone could have been a companion in this episode.
Another vote for brilliant episode. Between this, Jeckel, and The Empty Child, Stephan Moffett is responsible for more sleepless nights than my kids.