The Top 10 Modern Doctor Who Episodes

[h2]1. Blink[/h2]

Written by Steven Moffat

“What did you come here for anyway?”

“I love old things. They make me feel sad.”

“What’s good about sad?”

“It’s happy for deep people.”

43 minutes.

Just 43 minutes.

It always amazes me, whenever I revisit my all-time favorite Doctor Who episode, to realize that while “Blink” is an absolutely extraordinary achievement in every way imaginable, it still exists within the standard temporal confines given to any other episode. We have looked at a lot of fantastic Steven Moffat episodes on this countdown, and the thing that makes him a great writer – especially for Doctor Who – also happens to be his greatest weakness: He is so absurdly overstuffed with imagination that even his best hours can be a tad bit rough around the edges, with an only semi-realized concept or mildly unpolished element here or there, and as his tenure with the show goes on, those messy qualities have only become more and more apparent (I’m looking at you, “The Wedding of River Song”).

But in the scant 43 minutes that comprise the entirety of “Blink,” Moffat packs about as many ideas as he ever has into a single episode, and somehow, miraculously, everything works in perfect, total, harmony. Perhaps the pressure to write a “Doctor-lite” episode, working with a drastically smaller budget and intense limitations on how much he could use David Tennant, reigned in some of Moffat’s more runaway creative instincts (and certainly, Moffat takes to the format much better than Russell T. Davies did in the show’s first “Doctor-lite” episode, the unendurably awful “Love and Monsters,” which still easily stands as the worst episode in the revived show’s history).

Whatever the reason, “Blink” is a truly flawless episode, stuffed to the brim with a wonderful one-off protagonist in Sally Sparrow(*), a great supporting cast, endlessly atmospheric production design, a terrific original score (Murray Gold only recycles previous Who compositions in the last scene), and in the Weeping Angels, the single most terrifying and intriguing new villains in the history of modern Who. It all works in service of a plot that is as elegant as it is dense, packed with a series of increasingly awe-inspiring time travel manipulations that are exactly as mind-boggling as they need to be, without ever encroaching on ‘confusing’ territory. The pacing is perfect, every single beat – be it scary, funny, romantic, sad, exciting, or a combination of all five – lands with maximum impact, and by the time the end credits roll around, it feels as if this single episode has become a world unto itself. That 43 short minutes can play host to this incredibly detailed level of world-building and characterization is the episode’s single most impressive time manipulation.

(*) The stupendous Carey Mulligan, who both I and the majority of the world were first introduced to here, is so compelling and charismatic in “Blink” that I still bemoan we got a Torchwood and Sarah Jane spinoff but not a “Sally Sparrow Casefiles” TV series, in which the character goes around privately investigating strange, inexplicable occurrences. I would watch the hell out of that.

And yes, I know this is more or less the most predictable choice for the number one slot possible. Everybody loves “Blink.” Classic Doctor Who fans love “Blink.” Revived series fans love “Blink.” People who don’t watch Doctor Who love “Blink.” And yes, in the time since its transmission, parts of this episode have been repurposed in ways that are downright annoying. The “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey” one-liner has been re-stated far too many times, in both the fan community and in the show itself, to the point of losing all meaning. The Weeping Angels, who remained scary in their fantastic second appearance in Series 5, felt pretty well played out by the time we got to “The Angels Take Manhattan” in Series 7. And anytime something is as broadly, universally, and incessantly celebrated as “Blink” is, the slightest bit of resentment inevitably starts to set in.

But the thing is, none of that matters when I actually sit down and watch the episode. When I watch “Blink,” I feel as if I am stepping into a time capsule, to that month back in 2009 when I first marathoned my way through all four existing seasons of revived Who, arriving at “Blink” with no preconceived notions whatsoever and finding myself absolutely blown away. Countless re-watches later, and the episode still hits me as hard as it did back then. Every ‘scary’ beat with the Angels continues to frighten or unsettle me. Each musical cue still sends chills down my spine. All of Tennant’s absurd, out-of-context asides – “Wibbly Wobbly” included, but especially the “four things and a lizard” bit in the last scene – make me cackle like a madman, and when Sally meets Officer Shipton as an old man, the scene is so expertly, eloquently pitched that I still find myself tearing up at least a little bit. Every clever bit of plotting, and each gloriously creative use of time travel, still manages to rewire the back of my brain. And absolutely everything Sally Sparrow says and does just makes me smitten with her all over again, every last time I return to the episode.

“Blink” is, simply put, as good as it gets, not only the pinnacle of modern Doctor Who, but one of the new millennium’s single best hours of television to date.

Other Episodes Considered: Father’s Day, The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways, The Christmas Invasion, Smith and Jones, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, Midnight, The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End, Planet of the Dead, The Waters of Mars, A Good Man Goes to War, Let’s Kill Hitler, The God Complex, The Bells of Saint John, The Rings of Akhaten, Nightmare in Silver.