10. Blink
Each season, so they say, we are treated to a ‘Doctor-less’ off-beat episode. Last year we had the horrendous ‘Love & Monsters,’ this year we get a story about time travel logic called ‘Blink.’
The gorgeous Carey Mulligan (of the recent obligatory Jane Austen film ‘Pride and Prejudice’) stars as Sally Sparrow in this story as a kind of adventurer looking into a haunted house. Turns out the house was apparently waiting for her as it contains messages directed to her underneath the faded wallpaper. Spooked by this, she calls in her good friend Kathy Nightingale to investigate. Their fun-loving attitude in the face of danger quickly changes when Sally is distracted by a visitor and Kathy is inexplicable transported to Hull in 1920.
Added to the absurdity of all this is the visitor at the front door, Kathy’s son who swore to deliver a package to Sally on the exact moment she was whisked away in time.
The whole episode is like this… a brilliant opportunity to take the concept of time travel and actually do something with it, a trick that Doctor Who uses in surprisingly rare instances.
Not sure what else to do, Sally delivers a message to Kathy’s brother Larry that Kathy is safe and that she loves him. This does little to allay Larry’s suspicions.
While visiting the DVD shop where he works, she finds that he is watching DVD footage of the Doctor… apparently talking to her when the track is unfrozen. Larry assures her that it’s completely a mysterious fluke found of a select set of random DVDs.
Sally is now very anxiously looking for answers connected to the old haunted house and ends up meeting a very charming Detective Inspector Billy Shipton who shows her his strange collection of artifacts connected to the house, including the Doctor’s Time Machine, the TARDIS. Billy ends up getting zapped into 1969 where he meets an almost annoyed Doctor who is stranded in time.
The next time Sally and Billy meet, the Detective Inspector is on his death bed delivering a message to Sally, the DVDs are not random, they are the only DVDs she owns.
Sally finally assembles all the pieces of the puzzle by watching the DVD Doctor footage recorded in 1969 (with some genuinely hilarious moments from Larry in the script ‘the Angels took the Blue Box! I love that one, I have a T-Shirt that says that!‘), unlocking a bizarre mystery involving creatures called Weeping Angels that turn to stone on sight. Their only hope is to catch their prey unawares. They then zap the victim backwards in time and feed off of the residual time energy. Larry and Sally trick the creatures into looking into each others eyes and save the day.
The epilogue features Sally and Larry co-running the DVD shop (which now sells rare books as well). In a brilliant move, Sally intercepts the Doctor and Martha who are in the middle of some other never explained adventure and passes on the vital collection of notes she’s made which allow the Doctor to enact his brilliant escape plan in 1969.
If only every ‘offbeat’ episode could feature Sally Sparrow, I’d be a happy man.
The plot has a few logistical holes… such as what was Sally doing in the house in the first place, but it’s such a clever episode that I let it go. A top notch tale with lots of intelligence and genuine horror… I almost forgot what program I was watching… again.
11. Utopia
This is the one people will be talking about for a while. That’s a shame because in effect it can be summarized in a single sentence, ‘The Master returns!’
Ofcourse… given that the character has not been since since 1989 (unless you count the Fox TV movie which most fans, the current series producer included, don’t even believe is actually a recognized Doctor Who story), that simple statement is not actually going to matter much.
Oh well. Um… the rest of the episode involve Captain Jack (a character last seen two years ago in Doctor Who unless you caught him in Torchwood), the end of time, a race of mutated humans called Futurekind which sound more exciting than they are and a big big rocket too big and expensive to be seen in the actual episode.
Sir Derek Jacobi delivers one of the most accomplished and ultimately chilling performances of the series as Professor Yana, a mysterious well-meaning scientist using technology the Doctor can only pretend to understand.
It’s not until all of the characters are distracted with the launching of the rocket that Martha notices the Professor’s pocket watch, which is identical to the one the Doctor used in Human Nature to turn human.
When she tries to explain this to the Doctor, all Hell breaks loose and he realizes who Yana is. While the Time War (first mentioned two years ago) eliminated all of the Time Lords except for the Doctor… one of those Time Lords sought a brilliant escape using the same idea the Doctor hit upon earlier in the season. He became human until a key moment.
As soon as Yana opens the pocket watch, my grin (absent most of this year while watching Doctor Who) nearly split my face in half.
With the Doctor’s most fiendish villain back in the game, he is completely terrified.
Introduced in Jon Pertwee’s second season as the Doctor in 1971, The Master is the one villain who showed how powerful he is by simply playing with the Doctor. His cunning plans have involved working with the Nestene Consciousness to invade the Earth (Terror of the Autons), developing an intergalactic war between the Earth and Draconian Empires (Frontier in Space) and developing an intricate city out of pure imagination to trap the newly regenerated Doctor (Castrovalva).
A scheming and plotting mincer, the Master has long been the ying to the Doctor’s yang, the absolute dark mirror to our hero’s intentions. Played now by six different actors (though Roger Delgado and Anthony Ainley are most directly associated with the character). The sound bites of Ainley and Delgado as voices in Jacobi’s head was an amazing idea that played out well.
I particularly liked the little laugh he gave when checking the star chart, ‘Utopia?… pfah!’ indicating that it was all a ruse to destroy the human race for all? Probably.
I must say, given how glib and unbeatable Tennant’s Doctor has been (I mean, he waltzes all around the Daleks and Cybermen at this point, completely unimpressed by them), it was nice to see him well and truly at a loss. His TARDIS hijacked by a now regenerated Master, the Doctor Jack and Martha wait for a horde of man-eating savages to tear through the doors and attack them.
Martha’s ‘I know that voice’ is another nail in the coffin given that we now know that the Master has traveled back into the past beyond the beginning of season three to begin his political campaign as Prime Minister hopeful, Mister Saxon (Master No. Six).
I never thought the end-credit sting could make me so anxious to see the next part.
Check out the cool stuff at the Daily P.O.P. Shop, including the Dr Who section!
