I Know Everything You're Going to Say

It's 2007.  An amateur photographer has hopped a forbidding iron fence to explore a dilapidated mansion.  Behind the loose corner of one room's mildewed wallpaper she spies what looks like writing.  Tugging the old stuff off, she finds a personalized message, written for her from someone in 1969:  "Sally Sparrow," she reads, right before a rock comes flying at her head, "Duck, now!"

*

This geek-out is about a year overdue, which makes its timing impeccable.

When I was a kid - ages ago, a lifetime ago - I was a total freak for Doctor Who.  I was sure Saturday afternoons were invented so you could huddle in the glow of the PBS.  There, way back when, an actor called Tom Baker traipsed about through time and space in an eighteen-foot scarf, offered odd sweetmeats to strangers, saved the universe from big rubber nasties with nothing but a sonic screwdriver and some hammy acting.  I taped episodes with our first-gen, top-loading VCR.  I went to a convention or two.  My mother knitted me my own eighteen-foot scarf, because she loved me.

And I grew out of it.  (Not the scarf.  That, I never grew into.)  The thing about Doctor Who - and if you don't know what sort of thing Who is, I'll explain in a moment - is that it was a kid's show.  Not because it was excessively stupid, or because it talked down to its audience; had it been, and done, kids wouldn't have embraced it.  But it required the sort of forgiveness and love only children can have for a fantasy.  Budgets were low, effects were unconvincing, sets were shaky; the storytelling was antiquated, pacing was glacial, plots were creaky.  Years later, when the nostalgia bug bit, I grabbed a tape and found it barely watchable.

There were some good ideas!  But you can only apologize away so much.

So when I first read in 2005 that the BBC was reviving the franchise - the title had, save a single little-seen US tv-movie, been dormant since 1989 - I got excited, then embarrassed, then disinterested all over again.  All before ever catching an episode.

*

The new series takes turns at exciting, embarrassing, uninteresting. 

Doctor Who is about a humanoid alien - "The Doctor" - who travels the universe (Earth, mostly) with companions (Earthlings, mostly) in a little blue box having adventures and saving worlds and stuff.  It started - in 1963! - as a history lesson, You Are There for the kindergarten set.  But once the show discovered how much five-year-old viewers loved to be terrorized it embraced its horror/sf urges and became a UK institution.  The original show ran 26 years; seven different actors played The Doctor (a Time Lord, he doesn't die, he "regenerates" whenever an actor tires of the role - you know this was a young Dick Wolf's favorite program).  Each Doctor had his own peculiar personality, but no matter how cranky he'd get he was always on the side of right and good.  And no matter how hard-pressed, he always relied on brains over brawn.

The new version of the show - presently in its fourth season, and on its second Doctor (the tenth overall, including the tv movie) - is the vision of writer/producer Russell T. Davies.  Davies does some things extremely well.  A childhood follower of the original, he brings a fanboy's fervor.  He inherited a huge, temporally tangled wad of backstory and has avoided getting bogged down by that.  He comes up with some good ideas, teases others out well enough to make you think more's happening than there is.  No matter how awful his stuff gets - and it can get awful - he'll come up with something that will keep you watching.  (The first episode of the new season sort of blahs along until an OMFG cameo totally rattles you.)  He's good at handling character arcs.  Davies has a good sense of humor, his casting eye is ace.  And he's got a decent budget, so instead of goofy papier-mâché monsters, there are goofy CGI monsters.

Sometimes the bad outweighs the good.  His plotting sucks balls - there's never anything a good deus ex machina can't fix.  He's relentlessly melodramatic, there's nothing that can't be made better by being MADE BIGGER (this includes the score, which is often unbearable); his season finales are bombastic.  He pimps agendas - the creator of the original Queer is Folk, there's a lot more omnisexuality than you'd ever find on any US kids' program (other than Zoey 101, perhaps).  The two most unfortunate results of Davies' tendencies:  He's decided his Doctor is a godlike being - something that pretty much negates any drama; and he's remade the "companion" role as a romantic one - something that makes my inner five-year-old queasy, cuz girls have cooties.

But nevermind all that.  NEVERMIND.

The only behind-the-Who name you need to know is Steven Moffat, and the only episodes you need to see are the few he's written.  You should start with "Blink," because it is brilliant and self-contained and re-watchable.

Doctor Who episodes very rarely involve time travel.  Usually it's just an excuse to drop us off where we need to go, pick us up when we're done.  When you've got such an expansive amount of backstory hovering over your head, you do your best to not make your audience contemplate how many stepped-on butterflies you've left behind.  But "Blink" recalls one of the best old Who serials, the Douglas Adams-penned "City of Death," in that it creates a series of interlocked time-space events, and characters use fixed media to communicate between them.  In "City" it was a gaggle of duplicate Mona Lisas; here it's photos, letters, DVD Easter eggs, and the very episode you are watching.

Ultimately "Blink" is about you.  You have to watch it or people will die.

As it's tough with a plot like this to figure out what constitutes a spoiler, it's probably best you go do your duty before reading on.  Either rent it (it's on disc four) or go to the squirrelly Internet hidey-hole of your choosing and stream the thing.  We'll meet back here in forty-five minutes.

*

Done?  Right, then.

"You've met my brother Larry, haven't you?  Well, you're about to."

Sally Sparrow spends 90% of the episode assembling predestined information; it's a tribute to Moffat's precise, scrambled plotting that things rarely feel expository, a tribute to his control that it's never confusing.  His heroine is both a watcher - she's a photographer, which is important, because she freezes time as a hobby - and a doer, but she's disoriented because her own life is unbroken and linear while the lives of those with whom she's sharing the story are... wibbly-wobbly.  Just after her twentysomething best friend walks into the next room, Sally's handed a forty-year-old letter from her.  A cute young detective takes her phone number and promises to call her; he does, minutes later, from his nursing home bed.  A conversation can take thirty-eight years, a lifelong romance can last as long as a cloudburst.

Also, there seem to be statues following her.

The Doctor is barely in "Blink."  His three scenes - two live, one Memorex - will show new viewers what makes the show bearable on its off-weeks:  David Tennant brings tons of enthusiasm to the role.  He can seem a bit daft, but only because his mind's run off on its own and his mouth has to follow  after.  Or vice-versa.  He talks so quickly that he's constantly self-correcting, but he's capable and knowledgeable and never condescending.  Chances are he's just the sort of person with whom you'd want to roam the galaxy.  And if not - one parody show called him "Jarvis Cocker in outer space," as if that's a bad thing - then there are only small doses here.

Since Davies has established that the Doctor knows everything and can fix anything, it's important for Moffat to keep him out of the way.  The Doctor is trapped in 1969 without his time machine; the episode is a quest to get the information he'd normally rattle off offhandedly.

Ultimately, Sally will learn most of what she needs to know by watching television.

(That footage doesn't appear this way in the episode.  In the world of "Blink," it exists as an Easter egg on seventeen specific DVDs; the Who producers apparently went on to include it as an Easter egg on the show's DVD.)

Moffat's monsters carry a genius conceit.  The Weeping Angels are "quantum-locked;" they turn to stone whenever someone looks at them, turn back when you look away.  They cannot harm, or be harmed, as long as they are being watched.  Exalting the power of the viewer is an appreciative move by any tv show, especially one with an over-involved cult fanbase.  Empowering them takes "Blink" to an entirely different level.

The plot might have some dismissible hiccups (If these things move so fast, what's with the rock?  Didn't it get dark awfully soon?  Also, the angels' method seems to leave a sort of energy imbalance.  Whatever.) and the episode gets (necessarily, probably)  too frantic at the end.  But there seems to be a major, major discrepancy in a show full of shots like these...

...shots where characters are alone in a room and not looking at the angels, but the angels are still stone.

Well, they're still stone because you're looking at them.

That's never explicitly stated .  But even when all the characters have their backs turned, the camera never catches the angels (played by people in costume, not actual statues) in motion.  Once, one changes position quickly, but only when Sally's blocked our view; we never see the movement.  At the end of the episode, when the story's resolved, there are a series of shots of random statues, and the Doctor's warning ("Blink and you're dead... Don't look away and don't blink.") is replayed, presumably for us.  It's as close as the ep gets to doing the old kids' matinee audience participation plea:  "If we all hold hands and yell really loud..."

(In addition to your viewing experience and Sally's conversation with the Easter egg, the plot is also affected when a video store clerk yells at the movie he's watching.  "Go to the police, you stupid woman!  Why does nobody ever just go to the police?"  Sally, overhearing this, goes to the police.)

You'll also want to watch because Carey Mulligan, who plays Sparrow, has STAR scrawled all over her glowing mug.  She's got huge doe eyes, a wide, expressive mouth, and a brain.  Or, at least, enough talent to make you think she's got a brain.  (According to her imdb page, she's in a new Jim Sheridan flick with Natalie Portman, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Tobey Maguire.)

I haven't seen any non-Who stuff I've loved from Moffat.  He created the original UK version of Coupling (a show then-derided as a British Friends, its narrative tinkering suggests it was more a precedent for How I Met Your Mother) and was responsible for the recent schizo update Jekyll (which, during its promising early episodes, had its titular doctor keeping track of his hairier half via video and tapes and such).

But all of his work on this series is worth your time; both his other Who episodes won Hugo awards.  In "The Girl in the Fireplace" (disc two), an automated spaceship in the far future rummages through the life of Madame de Pompadour looking for spare parts.  The two-parter "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances" (disc three) might be better than "Blink," if more straightforward; the focus is on a creepy alien infection running wild during the London Blitz, but the story ultimately belongs to a young uneducated woman who looks after homeless orphans and harbors a secret.  That's the one that got me geeked out anew.

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It was gonna be pop-rocky fun, but this week's femme-fronted redo of the muxtape got touched by anguish along the way.   

tags: doctor who  steven moffat  muxtape  blink  carey mulligan  

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