Theory:Doctor Who television discontinuity and plot holes/Blink

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This page is for discussing the ways in which Blink doesn't fit well with other DWU narratives. You can also talk about the plot holes that render its own, internal narrative confusing.

Remember, this is a forum, so civil discussion is encouraged. However, please do not sign your posts. Also, keep all posts about the same continuity error under the same bullet point. You can add a new point by typing:

* This is point one.
::This is a counter-argument to point one.
:::This is a counter-argument to the counter-argument above
* This is point two.
::Explanation of point two.
::Further discussion and query of point two.

... and so on. 

• Sally sees the Weeping Angels on the edge of the building across the one she is in. She blinks, and they have moved to the edge of the building she is in now. There a lots of cars and people around, surely one of them would have seen? And if they can jump far could they of easily got Sally when there was an angel in the garden when she was tearing the wrapping up?

To answer the first question, it was a busy street and no-one had any reason to look at the Angels, since they would have better things to do than to look at 'statues' for extended peroids of time. To answer the second question, the Angels may not have jumped, they may be able to use their wings. Thus, it may not have been able to jump at Sally and could not fly at her without hitting the celing. Also the Angel could not have jumped right at Sally while she was peeling off the wallpaper; there was some walling present with a window through which the Angel could be seen and a door through which the Angel later came; so if it jumped it may not have hit her and may instead have miscalculated the angle or hit a wall. Also, as stated in the vidoe commentary, it was advantageous for the Angel to incapacitate Sally while she was concentrating on the wallpaper, since if she suddenly turned around it would have beeen caught.

• How does the Weeping Angel get hold of the TARDIS key? If from the Doctor, why did they not use the key to get into the TARDIS straight away, having zapped him and Martha to 1969? After all, DI Shipton tells Sally Sparrow that the TARDIS was also found outside Wester Drumlins.

It is possible that by the time the Angels had retrieved the key, the TARDIS had already been taken away. Given the number of vehicles that have been found at the house, this implies that the police might check there reasonably frequently. It is also possible that even though the Weeping Angels found the key, they could not find the TARDIS. The Doctor does have a habit of hiding the TARDIS in obscure or inconspicuous locations just in case. They only locate the TARDIS after following Sally, who stole the key. It is much more likely that the Angels simply couldn't overcome the perception filter or didn't know what the TARDIS looked like until Sally led them to it.

• In theory, the Angels would be able to escape when the light bulb eventually goes out, although the light stops flickering as soon as the TARDIS departs.

It's implied in that very scene that the Angels can see perfectly well in the dark.

• How does the Doctor know exactly when Sally should duck? And who threw the rock?

The Angel in the garden threw it, and the Doctor didn't know when Sally Sparrow should duck, he just did as the notes Sally gave him indicated.

As mentioned in the audio commentary for the episode, it is advantageous for an Angel to incapacitate its victims by throwing something at them as it could then move freely.

• When Sally pulls the last scrap of wallpaper off, the words are still slightly covered up. However, when the camera next points at them, they are completely uncovered.

She was in the process of uncovering them. The second between camera shots was quite enough time for her to pull more wallpaper away.

• Sometimes they look away from the Angels many times but they don't move.

In many of these cases, this can be explained by the meta-fictional nature of the Weeping Angels. They cannot move while being observed by any living thing and this includes the audience. An example of this can be seen when Sally is upstairs with the three Angels and blocks our view of one of the Angels, which has moved when we see it again.

Though this goes by the wayside in DW: Flesh and Stone when the audience does get to see them move.

Yes, the Doctor says they move quickly. But so does a cat, after spending 20 minutes sitting motionless watching the fly on the wall before it pounces.

Plus, until the end, they often had no urgency in sending their victims back.

When Sally took the key, it was actually in their interest not to send her back so they could use her to find the TARDIS.

• At the start of the episode when the Angel knew she was there, why didn't the Angel get Sally while she was looking at the message?

It threw the rock at her, presumably to disable her so it could attack. Unfortunately for the Angel, it missed when she ducked.

• Why wasn't the rock-throwing method ever repeated by the Angel? Say, with Kathy.

The Angel had the opportunity to get Kathy without throwing a rock, so a rock wasn't neccessary.

• Sally and Kathy have clearly been close friends for some time - close enough for Sally to have a key to Kathy's flat. Yet Sally's never met Kathy's brother, even though he lives with his sister?

The episode never really delves deeply into the Nightingales' back story. Many people become close friends without meeting each others' siblings.

• The second shot of the Angel in its screaming face is different than the first shot because the Angel's arms have clearly taken a different position.

That's the point. When not being watched, they can move.

But it was, Sally and Larry were both looking at it.

• How did the Doctor know Larry would be to Sally's left?

Because of the transcripts that Larry wrote out were sent back in time so the Doctor would read them. Also, this is a piece of information Sally would have certainly provided in any event as it was a key moment in the conversation.

• The Doctor appears to be familiar with the early parts of Sally and Larry's discussion about the recording, even though Larry doesn't immediately start taking notes.

The Doctor's side of the conversation was already written down, so it doesn't matter whether the other side was available or not.

Larry does shorthand, which is an extremely fast way of taking accurate notes. It's entirely possible he could have "caught up". His multi-year obsession with the "egg forum" would have helped him focus his concentration in order to do so.

• The episode does not indicate what becomes of the statues. Despite Larry's statement "they'll never move again", a power failure - or the statues being separated - would result in them reviving. It would be dangerous to leave them behind.

It's implied in that very scene that the Angels can see perfectly well in the dark. Further, it would be trivially easy for the Doctor to have left a message for UNIT that the Angels were there and needed to be attended to. Plus, they actually do return in series 5.

• The recording of the Doctor talking to Sally was scripted word for word, but when Martha interrupts him to tell Sally that she's also stuck the Doctor looked quite surprised at the interruption.

The interruption either wasn't part of the transcript, or Martha's interruption and the Doctor's surprised look were both part of the act.

• Why didn't Sally and Larry simply keep one eye open thus allowing them to keep an eye on the Angels whilst at the same time giving them the opportunity to rest the closed eye and switch eyes when needed?

They are clearly scared, and the thought of using one eye at a time probably wouldn't have occurred to them. It's also more physically challenging than it sounds, given the automatic aspect of blinking.

Interestingly, this is the first thing Amy tries. Because she's amazingly clever, or because Moffat hadn't thought of that a few years ago but has since then (or because some fan asked him in the intervening time) Anyway, watching her, you can see how difficult it is. Try it yourself.

I did love the fact that Season 5 addresses this very issue. Alternating eyes was my first thought, too, and it seemed like an oversight to not even consider it -- maybe this is Moffat's acknowledgment of that? I agree though that it's actually quite hard to pull of in practice, at least it requires enormous concentration. On the other hand, it could allow you to go indefinitely without your eyes drying out.

• With DI Billy Shipton zapped back to 1969 and dying in 2007, wouldn't it have been possible for his older and younger versions to run into each other between 1969 and 2007?

The chance of them actually meeting each other is really slim, and if they met his younger version wouldn't necessarily recognise his older self.

Of course they don't have to worry about meeting between 1969 and 2007, but Billy's year of birth — most likely in the 1980s or early 1990s — and 2007. It would have been quite easy for the "old" Billy to have avoided his younger self, because he already knew what "young Billy" had done and where his younger self had gone. Don't forget, too, that Shipton has a Caribbean accent, meaning that the possible years in which they could have met are even fewer; young Billy isn't in London for very much of his life.

• As Larry is watching the Weeping Angel, Sally runs to the front door. She runs to the right, but something is visible moving right next to the wall.

That is Sally's reflection in a mirror.

• A few chronology-related questions remain unanswered, such as exactly when the Doctor and Martha were sent back to 1969.

It was at least several years before Sally gives the Doctor her package.

• Also left unrevealed is exactly how long the Doctor and Martha spent in 1969.

It doesn't matter one jot WHEN they went to 1969 - all that matters is that they did. This is not a plot hole.

• Although there is no direct reference to this, the fact Billy talks about having gotten into video and DVD publishing strongly implies that he was the one who filmed the easter egg message.

This is supported by the fact that the camera is clearly being operated by someone as it pans when Martha appears, which it would not have done had it been a camera on a tripod set to film by itself.

• When the transcript is shown there is no indication of how long Sally speaks for, so the Doctor would have no idea how many seconds he should wait before speaking again.

The Doctor is a super genius; he heard Sally talking briefly when she gave him the information, and using his incredible mathematical skills he worked out how fast she would talk in certain circumstances and with a bit of luck got it spot on.

• Why does Kathy contact Sally only after her disappearance, rather than sending the message sooner to try to prevent the disappearance? The Doctor warns Billy not to contact Sally at the wrong time, but how does Kathy know?

Kathy needed someone to deliver the message: For the messenger to be younger than 75 by the time of Kathy's disappearance but older than 10 when the message was issued, Kathy would have to wait at least until 1942 to send the message. By this time she was happily married with children in her new era, and wouldn't have wanted to undo that.

• If Sally has several months - possibly a year - to put her notes together, why does the Doctor act like he is missing big parts of the story, such as what happens after Larry stops writing the transcript?

The Doctor saying those things were themselves part of the transcript. Even if Sally did include all the possible information she could, the Doctor couldn't change what he 'had' to say because any changes he makes to the events Sally wrote about and gave to him would alter the outcome and possibly result in him and Martha both remaining trapped in the past as well as risking Sally and Larry's lives.

• The Doctor says that the Weeping Angels become stone whenever they are observed by ANY living thing. This would include other living things like wild mammals and, more importantly, insects. The chance that the Angels would not be observed by ANY living thing, especially when outside within the view of a countless number of insects, with the possible exception of the basement scene, is incredibly slim. This could be used to explain those times that no one, save the audience, is looking at Angels, yet they are turned to stone.

Nearly all insects do not 'see' in the same manner we do. Many have light-sensory organs, but nothing that suggests they could accurately detect a lifeform which does not (as far as we know) emit infra-red radiation. Also, there are no other animals visible in the areas where the Angels are seen so it could be argued that there weren't any anyway.

A perhaps simpler explanation is that the Doctor is simplifying a tad. It might not be that any living creature can stop the Angels with a gaze, but any sentient living creature. It's possible The Time of Angels may reveal more details.

I think you mean "sapient" here, because things like wild animals are sentient. More importantly, I think at least wild animals, if not insects, probably do count, in order to explain some of the other times the Angels couldn't move (as mentioned elsewhere on this page). Anyway, since even physicists who believe in the "active" version of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics (observation causes collapse of the waveform) can't come up with a good definition of what counts as an "observation," I don't think you can fault Moffat too much for not solving an 80-year-old problem in the script.

• How would catching and touching Sally have helped the Angels at all? It would have sent her back in time with the key where they couldn't have gotten the key and therefore the TARDIS.

The angels can move faster then a person can blink, this means they could easily catch up to Sally, remove the key from her and send her back in time without ever being seen. It is also possible that since the Angels are described as a race of assasins, that their time travel ability is something seperate to their natural Quantum-locking ability, much like a knife or gun is not a natural part of a human.

The Angels are seen to kill people physically, without sending them back to the past, in DW: The Time of Angels and DW: Flesh and Stone.

• The Doctor said that the Angels are faster than you can believe and could kill you in the blink of an eye. So how was Larry able to get to the cellar without the Angel catching up to him?

As the doctor said, they turn to stone when any living thing sees them, and its likely that a old, abandoned, condemed house has a few living creatures in it, eather that or the angles just find it fun to scare there prey, and see no reason to hurry.

It's equally possible they were deliberately herding the couple to the basement for an easier "kill", or that they didn't want to risk zapping Sally to the past with the TARDIS key in her hand. Perhaps they wanted to ensure that the door to the TARDIS was opened before zapping.

• Martha makes a comment that she had to start working in a shop to look after the doctor, this has two problems:

• Why couldn't the Doctor get a job? His mental and physical abilities are beyond that of humans, so it doesn't make sense that he couldn't get one, especially as he is a doctor, a job that at the time (and to this day) is very much in demand.

The thought of having a regular job has been shown to unnerve the Doctor in the past, so since he already had the notes from Sally and so a means to get the TARDIS back he must have decided to focus on that. Also it would attract suspicion if people found out exactly how smart the Doctor really was.

Did the Doctor have his psychic paper? If not he may have found it difficult getting work without ID, though supplying ID was not a legal requirement in 1969 for obtaining work in the UK as it is now. Martha of course may have had trouble explaining her ID... what with the dates or colour pictures(yes colour pictures existed in 1969 but not on ID of any kind that I can think of).

• You can't get that much money working in a shop, yet when you see them and they meet up with Billy, they look immaculate. You see where I'm going.

The pay you get from working in a shop would be enough to get by on, and to keep your clothes clean.

You do realise that lots of people work in shops, pay mortgages, raise children? Shopworkers are not unkempt and grubby when not at work.

• It is highly likely that the easter egg was filmed in 1969 but there were no DVDs in 1969 and video publishing was probably not widely used either.

The Doctor was able to manufacture a Betamax tape recorder during the Queens coronation ceremony - 50 years before the real technology was developed, using nothing but spare parts in an electronics store. There is nothing stopping the Doctor from building a camera and a basic film reel to store his recording on for later use when real motion cameras were invented. He could then have given it to Billy Shipton would could then have transferred the data onto the 17 DVDs.

Why would he have had to build a camera? Movie cameras did exist in the 1960s. That's how movies were made. Besides which, if it weren't possible to transfer old movies to DVDs, we wouldn't have any DVDs of old movies.

• When the Doctor reads the transcript, Sally turns around and sees the shadow of three Weeping Angels moving. But if she is observing part of them they shouldn't be moving.

The Angels are only affected by being directly observed, as described by the doctor, observing their shadow is merely seeing the obstruction of light as they pass across a light source and is not a tangible part of the actual creature, so they are unaffected.

But observing them is merely seeing the reflection of light as they pass across a light source that's behind you instead of on the other side. That's how vision works--it's all just photons hitting eyeballs. However, maybe there is a difference between photons (seeing them) and an unexpected absence of photons (seeing their shadow). This may sound silly, but it's actually something that real physicists argue about--see, for example, the various eraser experiments, or the quantum bomb detector (although most physicists who argue about this do so to argue that the Copenhagen Interpretation is nonsense, which would mean "quantum locking" is nonsense).

That's a very cute point. Search for "can shadows move faster than the speed of light" for more on this. Basically, shadows do not contain information, and while shadows can indeed move faster than the speed of light, you cannot use them to transmit information at that speed. In that sense, it makes perfect sense in the fiction of this episode that observing shadows does not count. (Never mind the details of "quantum locking" and the measurement problem of quantum mechanics and all that -- it's fiction and entertainment, and it works crazy well.) Hack59 01:24, April 27, 2010 (UTC)

• When Larry turns around when he's staring at the angel, he turns back again and the angel is right in front of him but in the next shot it is about 6 inches away and it's hands were pointing at him.

This is a borderline production error, but there's nothing about the way the scene is cut that suggests he couldn't have moved back.

• When Sally takes the key in the attic and looks at it, a shadow is seen coming towards her on her hair

It is the angel she took the key from.

• They [the characters] look away from the angels many times but they [the angels] don't move. Someone or thing is watching them. Some have proposed, semi-jokingly, that they are reacting to the camera and the viewer observing them.

This is an excellent (and very elegant) example of the self-referentiality device (widely used in many television shows, movies and books), by which the audience becomes part of the action. The episode deliberately breaks the "fourth wall" between the action and the audience. As a television criticism junkie, I am endlessly tickled by the beauty of this device and the subtlety with which it's used here. Come weigh in on the subject on my blog, at http://bit.ly/4W6rxA!

Except Doctor Who never explicitly acknowledges the fourth wall, and really it's not the kind of show where it fits.

Never? Have you forgotten DW: Attack of the Graaske? Anyway, whether it is intentionally breaking the fourth wall or not, it does serve to make the monsters as creepy to the viewer as they are to the characters in the story, which was probably the true intention. This effect is only discarded when it is necessary that the Angels move in order to scare the viewer, in DW: Flesh and Stone.