I do have one thing to ask but it’s not about “Blink”, though. Why do the Dalek have to go around announcing what they are doing all the time. I love the show but come on. That make the dalek a little annoying to listen to.
“Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate! Exterminate!”

“What is “IIRC”? ”

If I Recall Correctly.

However, if you wish to get picky about internet idiom, then maybe you should capitalize your commenting name, hmm? It is, after all, a proper noun.

People in glass houses and all that…

“Germinate!”

Almost as good as “I shoot evil in the face!”.

thought you and your readers would be interested in this… A web comic I read, Sluggy Freelance, has a little something breaking from the norm for today, March 3, 2008. It is Who related. Go to http://www.sluggy.com to see.

Todd

You are welcome to leave your opinions here, but as I have noted in the past, the commenting rules here are very simple.

What is “IIRC”? Is this thumb-typing code from cell phone users who aren’t willing to spend one second to type out whole words on their computer keyboards? You typed lots of whole words in your message. Why couldn’t you bring yourself to type out whatever “IIRC” is supposed to mean?

Please. We communicate with language. Grunting and slamming rocks together is not the same thing as typing words.

Good catch! You’re absolutely right. The metal robot-head without living skin covering it should not have made it through the time-portal.

Here, the only time the angels are dangerous is when you can’t see them. If you can see them, then they are harmless. If not, then they’ll get you.

P.S. If my theory above is correct it would also explain why, given that the angels can apparently dispatch people anywhere in time, they send the doctor back only as far as the 1960s, and then send more people back to the exact same time and place from where/when they can help him.

But I agree that “Blink” is one of the best Doctor Who episodes evah — and I’ve been watching since Tom Baker was the Doctor!

@AIEEE: the reason that the angels can’t just take the TARDIS is that it’s been established that the TARDIS won’t go anywhere without certain security checks, such as the presence of the Doctor (or another Time Lord). That’s why the plot of Blink! needs the elaborate scheme to put the security disk in the hands of someone to activate its return to the doctor.

So I suspect that the angels *did* intentionally give Sally the key as part of a plan to get her to open and activate the TARDIS for them.

I agree that Sally should have become a companion. She’s be dynamite. I hope we’ll see her again.

You are wrong. Here are the heterophenomenological facts (sorry, just like that word):

At some point, the angels have the key, and Sally is in the house. That’s it–all we know. But there’s absolutely no reason to believe they have the TARDIS, were anywhere near it, or even knew at any point before this where it was. The Doctor and Martha travel all of the time, the Doctor usually keeps the key (because Martha isn’t a blond obviously), but they do not always stand 10 feet from the TARDIS. This is entirely consistent with them happening upon the doctor, and taking an opportunity of an extremely long lifetime by ganking his key and sending him and Martha back in time, to look for the TARDIS on their own (not a terrible strategy, and even a better one than waiting for them to get to the TARDIS, since they aren’t always mobile and could even lose whatever opportunity they had to take the key).

As far as the timeline goes, people here have it pretty much correct. Angels have the key, but haven’t yet been able to use it with the TARDIS. TARDIS is in an unknown location at this point (could very well be at the police station, without requiring huge contortion). Sally grabs the key. Angels try to get the key back, so follow Sally. Sally goes to the police station, meets up with detective. Detective macks on Sally in the basement, where by sheer luck the TARDIS is. Sally leaves, with the key. Angels zap detective back in time, and take the TARDIS away from the station to keep guard over it (at the home base) until they can re-acquire the key. Sally goes back to the house to sort things out. Angels try to get the key.

Now, there are inconsistencies in Blink, mind you. The biggest one I see is that the speed of the angels’ movements change drastically as convenient for the plot. But the rest of the story generally plays out so well that suspending belief for this isn’t so difficult (i.e., it’s not a “the planets line up” moment in Pitch Black, which destroys the entire movie).

Yeah, I’ll catch up, but more as a matter of cultural literacy (I have nothing to say at the water cooler anymore!) than out of any real interest.

Maybe it’s my inherent anglophilia, or maybe the really crappy essay by Damon Lindelof I just read zapped me with a judge-the-artist-not-the-art ideology (which I try to avoid but am increasingly succumbing to), but American TV just doesn’t do it for me anymore. The Brits just seem to know how to do it.

But really, I think it’s the X-Files effect. Not so much the fact that I’m tired of the story line stringing me along (look, I’m getting older here, my patience is waning!), so much as it is that the mysticism is starting to weigh on me. X-Files lost credibility when the storylines lost the ability to apply scientific rationale to events and went headlong into the conspiracy and the mystical aspects of the stories without sufficient skepticism. OK, I know, the science wasn’t even remotely accurate, but I accepted it because it was at least a rationale, and it presented a healthy skepticism for the supernatural. But it eventually jumped into the deep end and I tuned out.

Lost never really had that skepticism (particularly with respect to Locke, who ironically was and still is my favorite character), but it intrigued me nonetheless. Unfortunately, the mysticism has been weighing on me and it’s just becoming another show that is too drawn up in its own intrigue to really satisfy me anymore. It’s become the Andy Kauffman of sci-fi drama.

But I’ll keep checking it out, hoping that it will end the way I’d like to see it end. (Hint: I wanted the X-Files to end Beautiful Mind-style.)

Did you catch this week’s Lost episode –
“The Constant” ? It very much reminded me
of “Blink” and “Human Nature”. Since the
current season of Lost is only 8 episodes, they
seem to really be moving things along.
You might want to check it out again.

You absolutely hit the nail on the head.

And it occurs to me that the same thing can be said of the characters on Lost, albiet to a lesser degree.

Funny thing, since I’ve “rediscovered” Doctor Who, I couldn’t care less about Lost anymore, which was the only show on television I used to watch.

I ask only because the Torchwood crew are so maddeningly inconsistent, it’s more like each week it’s a different person interpreting the character (which, because of rotating writers, it is, I suppose). But occassionally it’s inconsistent within a single episode, and there I begin to frown. By way of example, “Reset” includes Captain Jack being quite willing to torture a human being by threatening to unleash a maddened Weevil on him, but is aghast at the thought that someone might be using one of the self-same Weevils to produce some things that are actually useful to humanity as a whole.

Meanwhile, Gwen has apparently always concealed a deep love for Jack (she concealed it pretty sodding well through an entire season), Owen can’t decide whether he’s still messed up over losing Diane in Season 1 and so flips between his pre-Diane and post-Diane personalities, and Toshiko is obviously the writers’ favourite chew toy because the moment anything nice appears to be about to happen to her, the universe dumps ten thousand pounds of extra-strength hurt onto her shoulders (lovers lost to tragic circumstances or due to being evil aliens: four so far, by my count). Ianto… is just sort of there, really. Sometimes he’s tormented over his semi-cybered squeeze, sometimes he’s not, but he typically has so little to do in each episode that he’s a bare notch above the Pterodactyl, and then only because an actor’s a lot cheaper than a CGI effect.

That being said, I would nominate “Sleeper” as being a damn fine episode – the best Torchwood so far, easily, and much better than some Who (Aliens of London, Love And Monsters) – and can’t deny that the concept has a lot of promise. But as a whole it’s still inconsistent to the point of being schizophrenic.

Anywhoo, it was an extremely cool episode. I loved that the Doctor and Martha were running thru the streets at the end carrying a bow and arrow, without any explanation whatsoever, as if that’s totally a routine experience for both of them, which of course it was.

Fantastic!

p.s Phil, if you don’t watch the series on DVD, you are indeed missing some important scenes!