Don't Blink: Thoughts on Time Travel
Aug. 4th, 2011 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glitter_n_goreIf you're a fan of Doctor Who, and if you know someone who isn't but probably would be if they'd just sit down and give the series a try, chances are you've uttered the following two words: "Watch Blink."
Perhaps not all, but most followers of the good doctor are quick to recommend this one particular episode as a primer for the uninitiated. It's not the beginning of the series, or even a season opener--it occurs towards the end of Season 3 of the newer shows, the David Tennant and Freema Agyeman years. In fact, the Doctor himself is confined to less than ten minutes of total screentime altogether, and none of the characters you meet here are at all relevant to the overarching storyline.
So what exactly is so special about "Blink?"
Well, for one thing it's a great place to start off if you're unfamiliar with the universe, simply because the storyline is completely self-contained. You follow a single character, Sally Sparrow, as she discovers these entities known as the Weeping Angels, and comes into contact with the Doctor as a result of that discovery. What happens to her throughout this episode is best left unsaid if you still haven't seen it yet, but I will reiterate that it's one of the most well-known, and well-loved, episodes of the entire series. It certainly got me hooked, and I can think of at least two others who were specifically told to watch it and got hooked themselves.
It's important to note that, in a series that focuses on a time traveler as the central hero, this is probably the one episode that deals most directly with time travel and causal paradoxes. Most of the others are about alien cultures, alternate universes and distant future worlds, which is all great, but as far as time travel goes, "Blink" is really where the show is at the top if its game. An earlier episode from Season One, called "Father's Day," is another example of the dangers of what can happen if you try to change the past, but again that episode requires a certain familiarity with the series regulars to appreciate it fully.
As a fan of sci-fi in general and time travel particularly, it always fascinates me how different mythologies deal with its consequences and possibilities. In this instance, what we have is a monster that can send its victims backward in time--they don't die immediately, but their lives as they understood them no longer exist. What's interesting about this is the idea of time being one of the things that shapes a human life as a part of his or her socio-cultural surroundings. Underlining this is the idea that time is maleable and non-linear, summed up by David Tennant's Doctor in his delightfully succint and meandering way:
H. G. Wells, in his novel The Time Machine, described time as being the fourth dimension, and used that theory to build his fictional machine. In order for any object or entity to exist, he says, it must have height, bredth, depth, and must also exist for a certain length of time. A little-known movie called Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and based on the novel by Richard Matheson, builds on the subjective idea of time in a particularly brilliant way, allowing the protagonist to travel backward several decades by hypnotising himself into believing that his "present" is actually the year 1912. Even the titular heroes of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure manage to create escape routes and loopholes for themselves simply by talking about it, in an admittedly tongue-in-cheek manipulation of paradoxes. (Is their phone-booth time machine a nod to the original Doctor Who series? Who knows.)
In college I took a class in science fiction literature as an elective, and we devoted one quarter entirely to time travel. The class was structured as a case-by-case study of short stories, in addition to theoretical essays by the likes of Robert Heilein and Orson Scott Card, and the time travel section fascinated me the most--more than alien worlds and beings, more than speculations on future technology, even more than the ethics of various dystopian scenarios which, if you know me and my reading choices, might come as a surprise. One of the dangers of time travel is in creating a paradox--I remember one micro-fiction story in particular in which the main character is demonstrating the effects of a time machine he's just built, and in the process accidentally talks the entire universe out of existence. The trick with a really good time travel story, I think, is to plot it in such a way that all the pieces fit. In other words, going back in time doesn't actually change what's happened, but puts it into a different context that makes the reader--or viewer--experience it in a fresh way.
While "Blink" doesn't go into much detail about the specifics of time travel, it does have that tight story editing that allows all the pieces to fit together without too many gaps in logic. The culminating Easter Egg video that Sally watches near the finale hammers home the idea of context being essential to time travel. She has seen pieces of this video at two other points in the episode already, but it's not until she has all the information she needs to solve this riddle that any of it makes sense.
The Weeping Angels have since been brought back, in the two-parter episodes "The Time of Angels" and "Flesh and Stone" in Season Five, and the one thing on everyone's minds when they caught wind of it was whether the show could possibly live up to, much less top, "Blink." It was a staggering challenge for the creative team, and for my part I think they pulled it off beautifully--except this time, the series regulars were very much present, and there were more than a few bits of dialogue and story that folded into the larger plot of the whole season. And again, the main focus is on the monsters in the room, and not on time travel.
In all honesty, I can only guess at why "Blink" became the phenomenon it is now. I will tell you that the reason I admire it so much is quite simple: the writing. Since I have a couple stories that involve time travel, I can't help but admire the attention to detail that went into this. This is the sort of thing that inspires me to take notes, learn more, and put myself to the challenge of creating my own universe, with its own rules and paradoxes, that has the same "wow" factor when it all comes together. It's quite a challenge, I admit, but shows like this remind me that it is possible, and when done well, unforgettable.
Perhaps not all, but most followers of the good doctor are quick to recommend this one particular episode as a primer for the uninitiated. It's not the beginning of the series, or even a season opener--it occurs towards the end of Season 3 of the newer shows, the David Tennant and Freema Agyeman years. In fact, the Doctor himself is confined to less than ten minutes of total screentime altogether, and none of the characters you meet here are at all relevant to the overarching storyline.
So what exactly is so special about "Blink?"
Well, for one thing it's a great place to start off if you're unfamiliar with the universe, simply because the storyline is completely self-contained. You follow a single character, Sally Sparrow, as she discovers these entities known as the Weeping Angels, and comes into contact with the Doctor as a result of that discovery. What happens to her throughout this episode is best left unsaid if you still haven't seen it yet, but I will reiterate that it's one of the most well-known, and well-loved, episodes of the entire series. It certainly got me hooked, and I can think of at least two others who were specifically told to watch it and got hooked themselves.
It's important to note that, in a series that focuses on a time traveler as the central hero, this is probably the one episode that deals most directly with time travel and causal paradoxes. Most of the others are about alien cultures, alternate universes and distant future worlds, which is all great, but as far as time travel goes, "Blink" is really where the show is at the top if its game. An earlier episode from Season One, called "Father's Day," is another example of the dangers of what can happen if you try to change the past, but again that episode requires a certain familiarity with the series regulars to appreciate it fully.
As a fan of sci-fi in general and time travel particularly, it always fascinates me how different mythologies deal with its consequences and possibilities. In this instance, what we have is a monster that can send its victims backward in time--they don't die immediately, but their lives as they understood them no longer exist. What's interesting about this is the idea of time being one of the things that shapes a human life as a part of his or her socio-cultural surroundings. Underlining this is the idea that time is maleable and non-linear, summed up by David Tennant's Doctor in his delightfully succint and meandering way:
H. G. Wells, in his novel The Time Machine, described time as being the fourth dimension, and used that theory to build his fictional machine. In order for any object or entity to exist, he says, it must have height, bredth, depth, and must also exist for a certain length of time. A little-known movie called Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve and based on the novel by Richard Matheson, builds on the subjective idea of time in a particularly brilliant way, allowing the protagonist to travel backward several decades by hypnotising himself into believing that his "present" is actually the year 1912. Even the titular heroes of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure manage to create escape routes and loopholes for themselves simply by talking about it, in an admittedly tongue-in-cheek manipulation of paradoxes. (Is their phone-booth time machine a nod to the original Doctor Who series? Who knows.)
In college I took a class in science fiction literature as an elective, and we devoted one quarter entirely to time travel. The class was structured as a case-by-case study of short stories, in addition to theoretical essays by the likes of Robert Heilein and Orson Scott Card, and the time travel section fascinated me the most--more than alien worlds and beings, more than speculations on future technology, even more than the ethics of various dystopian scenarios which, if you know me and my reading choices, might come as a surprise. One of the dangers of time travel is in creating a paradox--I remember one micro-fiction story in particular in which the main character is demonstrating the effects of a time machine he's just built, and in the process accidentally talks the entire universe out of existence. The trick with a really good time travel story, I think, is to plot it in such a way that all the pieces fit. In other words, going back in time doesn't actually change what's happened, but puts it into a different context that makes the reader--or viewer--experience it in a fresh way.
While "Blink" doesn't go into much detail about the specifics of time travel, it does have that tight story editing that allows all the pieces to fit together without too many gaps in logic. The culminating Easter Egg video that Sally watches near the finale hammers home the idea of context being essential to time travel. She has seen pieces of this video at two other points in the episode already, but it's not until she has all the information she needs to solve this riddle that any of it makes sense.
The Weeping Angels have since been brought back, in the two-parter episodes "The Time of Angels" and "Flesh and Stone" in Season Five, and the one thing on everyone's minds when they caught wind of it was whether the show could possibly live up to, much less top, "Blink." It was a staggering challenge for the creative team, and for my part I think they pulled it off beautifully--except this time, the series regulars were very much present, and there were more than a few bits of dialogue and story that folded into the larger plot of the whole season. And again, the main focus is on the monsters in the room, and not on time travel.
In all honesty, I can only guess at why "Blink" became the phenomenon it is now. I will tell you that the reason I admire it so much is quite simple: the writing. Since I have a couple stories that involve time travel, I can't help but admire the attention to detail that went into this. This is the sort of thing that inspires me to take notes, learn more, and put myself to the challenge of creating my own universe, with its own rules and paradoxes, that has the same "wow" factor when it all comes together. It's quite a challenge, I admit, but shows like this remind me that it is possible, and when done well, unforgettable.
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no subject
Date: 2011-08-04 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-08-05 03:16 am (UTC)For the newer ones, I like Seasons 2 and 5 the best--and any of the episodes written by Stephen Moffat are fantastic. They tend to be weirder and darker, which I love.