You could say “Blink” is the obvious or perhaps even boring choice for today’s post but I don’t care. It’s a popular and often favourite episode for a reason and that reason is because it’s amazing!

There’d been another Doctor Who episode in the previous series where the Doctor wasn’t actually in it much but that wasn’t particularly good, but “Blink” showed how clever that concept can be. Because as a viewer you’re watching the Doctor arrive somewhere and solve a problem and save people, but what about the people they couldn’t save or if they never arrived at all?

That’s what you have in “Blink”. Sally Sparrow – which is a great character name – is just a normal young woman who gets pulled into a mystery. She’s someone who is not connected to the Doctor, doesn’t expect there to be weird or spooky things around her, so seeing how everything unfolds when it looks like the Doctor isn’t around to save her is really interesting. Plus, Sally is played by two-time Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan. Honestly, Doctor Who in general is full of up-and-coming British talent but series three is chock full of them! That’s the series where Andrew Garfield makes an appearance too.

“Blink” introduces what has probably become an iconic Doctor Who monster now with the Weeping Angels. Surely if you asked people to name Doctor Who creatures they’d say Daleks, Cybermen and then Weeping Angels? Anyway. While the mythology of these creatures has expanded over the series, in “Blink” they were a completely new and deadly threat. They are stone statues only when you’re looking at them, if you blink or turn away, they can move fast and a single touch from them will send you back in time to live out your days as they feed on what would’ve been your present day life force.

When I was at university in one of my Film/TV modules the whole class watched a couple of Doctor Who episodes in this big dark theatre. The first was “An Unearthly Child”, the first ever episode of Doctor Who, and the second was “Blink”. I’d seen it before when it originally aired, but watching it in the dark, with 50+ people on a big screen was such a fun and different experience. People screamed at some of the jump scares and it was such a good atmosphere.

“Blink” is just such a good episode. It’s scary and creepy, it has great characters, the conversations between Sally and the Doctor on a laptop screen are excellent, it has proper tension and threat but there’s still moments of humour and proper touching moments too. It also has one of my favourite explanations of time in any media ever: “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… time-y wimey… stuff.” My mum and I now use the phrase “timey wimey” to describe any media that features time travel or multiverses or anything like that. I love it when words and phrases from media become a part of your every day lexicon.