Season 3 has been a bit of a let-down for me.

Except for 'Gridlock' and the excellent 'Human Nature/The Family of Blood' two-parter, Season 3 has been fairly disappointing. This is particularly galling because I had high hopes for season 3, what with new blood (coming in the shapely form of Freema). Season 3, I thought, would be the beginning of something wonderful.

Then came 'Mr. Smith and Jones'. Why, Russell, why?

The opening episode was dull, easily the weakest of the opening episodes for the current series. The Judoon were an awesome concept that turned on its head, and the less said about the MRI-bomb-thingy, the better. It would only become worse. The rather fetching Freema Agyeman as the Doctor's latest companion is nothing special, which I mostly blame on the writers: either she is a screaming nitwit or pining after the Doctor in not-so-obvious ways. The idea of having the relationship between the Doctor and Martha be more as a rebound/forlorn love is in concept do-able but in practice simply gets really old really fast. So far only in Paul Cornell's two-parter has there really been even a real exploration into her character and background, namely dealing with her race (and why not? After all, being a time traveller means that eventually Martha will be exploring times on Earth when difference in race was not so tolerated. Though I hope it doesn't become her defining characteristic - that too will become annoying very fast). 'Gridlock' was a grateful reprieve, and 'Human Nature/The Family of Blood' made me believe that perhaps Season 3 was not entirely doomed. But the in-between episodes left me feeling very cold and lonely in the Box of Hope. Then I saw that Stephen Moffat was writing the next episode, and my hopes rose.

They haven't been dashed.

They just exploded out of pure delight. (Possibly orgasmic; a gentleman never tells.)

'Blink' is hands-down the best episode out of the current series that doesn't have the Doctor as the main character. I'm even going as far to say the best single episode this current season. It has it all - time paradoxes, romance, the Doctor at his most entertaining, even more romance, loads and loads of humour and oh-my-god horror. Never, NEVER have I been on the edge of my seat for a TV show. Never. 'Blink' changed that. The moment that Sally (is it curious that Moffat seems to have a penchant for women named Sally? There was one in Coupling. Anyway...) enters the house and I saw the angel I thought, 'Oh my God.' And then she was walking away and its face was open and I thought, 'Oh dear Lord.' I only caught my breath when I heard the theme music, because surely she wouldn't die now! (Not unless Moffat manages to destroy the sacrosanctness of the title!...interesting idea) I was on the edge of my seat (quite literally) and thinking this is awesome.

And it continued to be awesome. When Sally's friend was alternately looking back at the angel and watching Sally talk with her as-yet-unknown descendant I was fairly near screaming 'Run away you mad woman!' Alas she did not. Though it IS happy that she had a great time, even in the past. Poor girl.

The Detective Inspector was fantastic. Oh man, I was so sorry to see him be 'Blink'-ed, because I thought, I can't get enough of this man. He's zany. Even as an old man he's worth a good long chuckle or too.

Which, I add now, is one of the greatest strengths of this episode, and Moffat in general. These characters, even the small ones, live and breathe in a way that just doesn't happen in the other episodes. They're funny and captivating and genuinely intriguing, and you are actually sorry for them to go. Can you say that about Lazlo and Tallulah, or Mr/Ms/Mrs. Generic Character that populate the Who-vian world, and who are useful as corpses (or, more likely, floating atoms) solely?

(The line 'Why does nobody ever go to the police?' is brilliant, by the way. A very effective way of both furthering the story and getting a genuinely niggling problem out of the way.)

The use of the easter egg DVD is top-notch, and genuinely inventive. The way how time, all 'wibbly wobbly' as the Doctor babbles, connects is both intriguing and frankly welcome (Wikipedia states that these are predestination paradox as well as an ontological paradox. I'll go with "big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff", thank you very much.). Come on, this is a show about TIME-TRAVEL, some stuff to do with time paradoxes and exploring time as an issue for episodes is actually interesting! Hopefully this will lead the way for future writers to do a bit more on this.

'You're not looking at the Angel.' 'Neither are you.' - these two predictable (and very entertaining lines) lead to some of the tensest moments in Season 3 history, nevermind series, and it's all having to do with simply staring. How absolutely fantastic is that? The Weeping Angels' change from scary-gothic-morbid to scary-they're-going-to-eat-me left me with chills. Top props to the art department, they really got these down. I was biting on my fingernails as it looked like Lawrence (or is it Laurence?) was about to bite it. This time I actually spoke to the television: 'For god's sake Sally, stop being a twit and get back to Lawrence, how long do you expect the boy, never mind a frightened boy, to stand staring at a thing of death without blinking?'

This too is a rarity. Speaking to the television, that is. Not that staring at a thing of death without blinking is a usual occurance.

I too was panicked as the Angels closed in and the light drifted on and off. It was a brilliant way to scare the living bejeezus out of the audience. And the way that the Doctor defeats them...classic! Especially since we think oh Hell, the two kids are going to bite the dust. The ending was nicely done, getting back into the whole time paradoxes and seeing some David Tennant at work (don't you just find that just even speaking he's entertaining? Ah well.) The only critique I have at all is the absolute end, the many shots of the different statues and monuments of London. Was it necessary? I mean, if it had been to a lone Weeping Angel, watching from a balcony, oh sure, that would've been a great ending and made a good, loopy sense. But this, this is ambiguous. Are they trying to say that all these statues are 'Weeping Angels', and all that keeps them from killing us all is because they're in public places? Or that these days will one day become the Weeping Angels that hunt the Doctor and Martha down? Or...you see, quite ambiguous, and I can't figure out for the life of me why. Yet it really really really doesn't matter. Because this was one helluva show and my faith in the Season, and Doctor Who, has been restored. Steven Moffat has saved the day, once again by producing another top-notch, high-quality episode. He keeps on getting better and better - 'The Doctor Dances' two-parter was good, 'The Girl in the Fireplace' is still one of my favorites, and 'Blink' has just been added onto that list as well. If the rest of the season is as good as this, then there is nothing to fear, nothing to fear at all.

(Then again, Davies wrote the next show, so perhaps we do have to fear something.)

I end this with an uber kudos to the team behind this episode. Hettie Macdonald's direction is no small part in making what may be the most classic Doctor Who episodes ever. The art department should be given medals - the angels were genuinely terrifying, and the set designs were spooky and decrepit and perfect. The actors and actresses must be accorded due honour for a fantastic performance, with Ms. Mulligan as Sally Sparrow getting a free spin in the Tardis for a job-well-done. The Doctor Who production team have outdone themselves again.

Blink is what is called by the production team as a "double banking" episode. These episodes have limited parts for the regular actors in order for the production team to crank out an extra story. One of these a year is now the norm for Doctor Who (and Torchwood it seems.) The tradition of stories told from a different perspective than the main characters is not new in science fiction television being employed by the X-Files (The Lone Gunmen, Michael McKeon's Area 51 episode) to Buffy The Vampire Slayer (Andrew's Vampyre movie...for the purposes of this review its science fiction) just to name two. The double banking procedure for the Doctor Who production now has turned the "outsider" episode in to a habit.

The success or failure of these types of stories has to begin, in my opinion, with the writing. Love and Monsters from the second series was passable. The oblique and not so oblique references to fandom in that story were entertaining enough and the main character was mildly engaging. The Torchwood episode Random Shoes was, however, a failure. How does Blink stack up to these precedents? It is not even close. The script for Blink was, as the author Stephen Moffat put it in an interview, a waste of a great theatrical movie idea it is that good. The Doctor, although rarely seen, is integral to the plot which gives Blink an edge up on other outsider stories which tend to sideline the main characters rather clumsily. There is nothing clumsy about The Doctor in this story. Here The Doctor is stuck in the past and must use his guile to get the Tardis back while defeating the dreaded weeping angel statues. The viewer is rewarded for his or her patience when The Doctor is on screen ( a little joke there......) as the easter egg DVD idea could have easily come across as just a writer's gimmick but is quite effective (and eerie) as the "window" for the outsider in to The Doctor's world.

When horror and science fiction mix sometimes what you do not know is another testament to a good script. If you try to explain everything more often than not the explanations are either too mundane or too exhasperating to be entertaining. The weeping angels in Blink are given just enough explanation to make you marvel at their existence while not trying to over analyze their motives for punishing/killing people by sending them back in time. The story focuses on the tension of The Doctor trying to communicate through time in what is another rightfully ambiguous set of circumstances. If we knew why he had to be so surreptitious in trying to avoid tipping off the future would we really be better off for it? Our imaginations are left to fill in the void which makes Blink even more entertaining as a story. This intentional ignorance is reinforced by a running theme in the story that sometimes you will "never know" the answers to some questions.

Writing an outsider story is a huge challenge in itself but it is only the first hurdle. Random Shoes in my opinion was further pushed off the rails of good entertainment by the director going for too much whimsy. With Blink Hettie Macdonald was not saddled by a throwaway script so she was graced with the challenge of producing a piece of art instead of a filler episode. She rose to the challenge admirably. If you try to imagine the angel statues being produced by 70's or 80's Doctor Who you realize just how far this institution has come. Since it's reinvention it really has become a form where artists excel at their work instead of the advanced sock puppet theater it really was before. The gothic horror here was, just as the script, movie quality.

The final hurdle for an outsider tale to overcome is the "new cast." After all the production ducks are in a row if the main character of the story is miscast all the superlatives I heaped on Blink above would not be enough to make the episode a success. Carey Mulligan as Salley Sparrow sealed the deal. In less than five minutes I was aware that Blink was the short end of the "double bank" habit (not really having seen much about the story before viewing I did not know before hand) but Mulligan had me hooked. The gravitas of Macdonald's direction could have been let down by a sub standard lead perforance. Mulligan was flawless, however. The only quibble I do have with Blink is a minor one. Finlay Robertson as Larry Nightengale reminded me too much of the nerd/geek patrol that pretty much killed Random Shoes. It would have been nice for Larry to be a little less cliche' especially in the final scene right before The Doctor and Martha hit the street.

Some might consider this blasphemous but I rank Blink in the top ten episodes of all time Doctor Who episodes. I may over time be inclined to put it in the top five. Despite it being an outsider story what we all know and love about The Doctor himself was present for us to revel in. The half interaction and then the full interaction of the DVD conversation seemed to exemplify the mystery that is the best part of The Doctor. David Tennant in the five or six minutes of screen time he had was brilliant. From his description of the poor hens in 1969 to the final DVD conversation it is really hard to not just smile when he is strutting his stuff. With each new face it takes a while to be convinced that the quirks and mannerisms are our precious Doctor. At some point if you are not convinced you are thoroughly put off by them (Colin Baker springs to mind.)

With Blink I have finally and irrevocably been convinced that Tennant is vying for title of "the best" Doctor while having only a limited amount of minutes do the convincing. It is hard to think of Christopher Eccleston anymore. Comparing Tennant against the sock puppet Doctors is an excercise in reviewing apples and oranges because the huge chasm in quality in production values and direction between then and now really makes it two different shows and thus for comparative purposes two different characters. I am a Tom Baker devotee but it is getting harder and harder for me to picture anyone else but Tennant as The Doctor. Thankfully I have the DVDs to show me just how good Eccleston was in the role. Maybe sometime soon I will go hunting for easter eggs and remind myself but for now The Doctor is a guy with hair gel telling a confused police detective how his temporal displacement detector has the bad side effect of exploding hens.

I have strange conceptions of what Doctor Who should be. I believe it should be about the Doctor, his companions, his adventures. This is one of the problems I had when we started getting novels back in the mid-1990's in which the Doctor was tangential to the action: they ceased being about the Doctor, or his companions, or in fact anything to do with him, but seemed instead to be diversions into universes the writer wanted to piggyback onto the one we love. There's nothing wrong with that, per se, except I refer you to my original comment.

Last year's experiment in Doctor Who sans Doctor was unique, something that tore my opinion in two: nice piece, pity about some of the execution. Apart from my widely-varying opinions on the quality of the story, there was something I decided I held in complete conviction: no more. No more stories that really don't have anything to do with the Doctor or his companions; we get 14 episodes a year, and that's not enough time to spend on other concepts. That's the realm of Torchwood or The Sarah Jane Adventures or Margaret Blaine's Adventures in Wonderland or whatever else Russell T Davies and company come up with. When I first heard that "Blink" was going to be this year's experiment in Doctor Who sans Doctor I was undoubtedly ambivalent; the only thing that kept me from expecting very little was the pen (or keyboard, this is 2007) of Steven Moffat. Moffat's first-season tour-de-force, "The Empty Child," was the highlight of that year, and last season's "The Girl in the Fireplace" was perhaps the closest Doctor Who has ever come to being lyrical poetry. But even though Mr. Moffat was behind the story, my fears of a 45-minute jaunt into the life of someone I have never met were readily apparent.

How wrong I was. Fresh on the heels of Paul Cornell's staggering two-part epic comes this little gem of an episode, so fresh and interesting and unique in its storytelling that, for a moment, I actually forgot all about the Doctor. Which is a hard sell, considering just how omnipresent David Tennant was throughout the story -- the Doctor may not be on screen the entire time, but the episode actually stays about him, and his predicament (shared, of course, with Martha, who's really the only one who suffers a lack of screen time). They're stuck, of course, in 1969, with no way back to the TARDIS except to play one great gamble with time that has roots in, for instance, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: take advantage of the opposing cause-and-effect time travel provides by sending messages through the lives of ordinary people. It all looks like great fun, of course, until the chills start running down your spine, thanks to the Weeping Angels, truly one of the (if not the) most frightening Doctor Who aliens of all time. A masterstroke of design turns innocuous-looking stone statues into terrifying nightmares, and some brilliant direction makes scenes such as the one with Sally and Larry in the cellar of the old house the stuff of nightmares.

The episode may have fallen apart without a good actor in the center seat, and Carey Mulligan (as Sally Sparrow) lives up to the challenge -- she's intelligent, articulate, free-spirited and feisty. Sally is a character worthy of that role of companion (and it's a nice thought that, maybe some day, the Doctor comes back for her and takes her on the trip of a lifetime; he's obviously already impressed with her upon their brief meeting outside the DVD store at the end.) I also must confess that I found some great chemistry between Mulligan and Michael Obiora, who played the role of D.I. Billy Shipton, whose fate I was sure was going to be disasterous the moment she gave him her phone number. How nice it is, though, that from the mind of the man who wrote the episodes in which "Everybody lives," we get another alien race for whom their plan of attack is to let people live to death. D.I. Shipton and Sally's friend Kathy both end up happy, which for victims in a Doctor Who serial is a very nice touch.

One of the things I like most of all in Moffat's script is that everything seems to work logically; here we have a whole succession of improbabilities which, by the end, make perfect sense. The linear structure of time works against most stories like this, but that's where Doctor Who gets to play around with things -- the transcript of the DVD leading eventually to the Doctor making it in the first place, the DVD easter eggs being targeted to Sally in the first place. The only logic flaw I've managed to find is how the Doctor knew which 17 DVDs Sally -- who he just met in front of that store -- had on her shelf. (If she gave the list to him at the end, when did she write it down? In the split second between the time she noticed the Doctor and Martha getting out of the taxicab and running out of the store?) But that's really a minor quibble...

If we're forced to have a Doctor Who sans Doctxor story every year, this is the sort of story I'd like to see: the Doctor is a part of the action, even when he's off the screen, and meanwhile the story is clever and entertaining. "Blink" could have been a nightmare; instead, it only induces them... and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm sure I'm going to see those Weeping Angels somewhere between bedtime and morning.

Wonderful, exciting and absolutely creepy - another triumph.

Or 'What I Did When I Ran Out of Original Ideas, by Steven Moffatt', as he recycles chunks of the plot from his short story 'What I Did On My Christmas Holidays by Sally Sparrow' from the Doctor Who Annual 2006. Given that this comes straight after an adaptation of 'Human Nature', it does rather suggest that the writing team is scrabbling around for ideas.

Nevertheless, sarcasm aside, 'Blink' is rather good. Unusually for the Welsh revival, it actually makes time travel an integral part of the plot rather than simply using it as a means of transporting the Doctor from story to story. The internal logic of the plot works rather well, with Moffat playing with paradoxes whilst avoiding leaving any unanswered questions, although there is a feeling that this is all intended to impress casual viewers who might think it's more complicated and cleverer than it actually is. The highlight of all this is the DVD Easter Eggs scene, as the Doctor uses a copy of the transcript that Lawrence is writing to have a conversation across time, which is very well scripted. In fact, the whole script is very polished, with some good dialogue, such as Lawrence learning that what the seventeen DVDs with the Easter Eggs on have in common is the fact that they are all the DVDs that Sally owns, prompting the incredulous response, "You've only got seventeen DVDs?" The Doctor's line about having to deal with "four things? and a lizard" is also quite funny. And Billy Shipton's comment that the windows of the TARDIS are too small is an amusing nod to the fans.

'Blink' also benefits from some genuinely creepy moments, mostly involving the Weeping Angels, especially during the final encounter in the house, as Sally and Lawrence blink and suddenly find a snarling statue reaching out for them, and end up in a cellar with the lights flickering out. Director Hettie Macdonald does a great job and keeps the story moving along at a cracking pace, with some fantastic shots of the statues appearing in various locations around the city, and wrings every drop of menace out of them that she possibly can. When the nature of the Weeping Angels is first explained by the Doctor in 1969, it sounds worryingly like the sort of one-line infodump used to explain away ill-conceived monsters that Russell T. Davies is prone to, but they turn out to be much better devised than that, with their "quantum locked" nature proving quite satisfying. Although the Doctor's claim that you can't kill a stone does rather raise the question of what effect twatting one of them with a sledge-hammer would have. The means of their defeat, as the Doctor uses the TARDIS to trick them into looking at each other, is also quite neat. Hilariously, the very last scene has bugger all to do with anything else and seems designed *purely* to make kids afraid of statues, which is the sort of thing that even Hinchcliffe and Holmes stopped short of.

With the Doctor and Martha largely absent, it falls to Sally Sparrow to take the lead, and Moffat writes her quite well, although worryingly Kathy is permanently removed from her and Lawrence's lives and it doesn't seem to unduly upset either of them, making her little more than a throwaway plot device. However, on the whole she works very well, largely because of Carey Mulligan's excellent performance. Incidentally, much as I quite enjoyed 'Love & Monsters', she also works considerably better than Elton because she comes across as a real person, rather than a comedic socially-awkward half-wit who sticks his cock in paving slabs. Larry also works rather well because although he's clearly a stereotypical internet-obsessed nerd, he's very much like people I actually know, whereas the cretinous Doctor Who Fan pastiches of 'Love & Monsters' where not. Billy Shipton is also well scripted, albeit not especially well acted in either incarnation (of the two, the younger version fares slightly better due to the Michael Obiora's charisma).

Martha does nothing worth mentioning here, but the Doctor's presence is felt throughout and the fact that he outwits the Weeping Angels from afar is very welcome. Incidentally, trapped in 1969, the Doctor, who wouldn't age, could just hang around until 2007 and sort everything out himself, rescuing Billy and Kathy when he'd got the TARDIS back, so the fact that he goes to such elaborate lengths here suggests that he values Martha's life over everyone else here. Because he meets Sally after she's helped defeat the Weeping Angels but before he has actually encountered them, he just about gets away with this, since he's working to a predetermined plan that has, in effect, sprung up out of time itself due to the inherent paradox at the heart of the scenario, but it still makes him look like a massive sod.

Overall, 'Blink' again demonstrates Moffat's abilities as a Doctor Who script-writer and is a well-made and generally pleasing filler episode. I'm not entirely convinced that a slightly-Doctorless episode every year is wise (and it's a good job that we didn't get one during the Eccleston months), but here it works almost as a reprieve before the season starts to build to its finale, as the next episode trailer shows Jack making his return?

"Don't blink. Don't even blink. Blink and you're dead. They are fast. Faster than you could believe. Don't turn your back, don't look away, and don't blink. Good luck!"

Rather than have another stab at it himself, this year Russell T. Davies has delegated the season's most difficult episode - the now customary 'Doctor-lite' episode - to one of his best writers. Perhaps it was just the luck of the draw, or maybe Davies realised that an exceptionally talented writer like Steven Moffat could make something out of nothing in the same way that Davies himself did with "Love & Monsters" last year.

Whilst he has more lines than he did in "Love & Monsters", in this episode the Doctor exists for the most part as a mysterious, off-screen character. Moffat handles him much in the same way that many of the writers of the novels -- particularly the New Adventures -- did back in the 1990s. I quickly got sick these of 'Doctor-lite' adventures in print, but every once in a while I have to admit that it works spectacularly. It reaffirms that mystery. Gives the audience a new perspective. And, if I was cynical, I'd say that it also allowed the production team to film two episodes at once so that they might squeeze "The Runaway Bride" into their hectic schedule?

And so this week the burden of driving the plot forward lies elsewhere. Just like with Elton in "Love & Monsters" and invisible Eugene in Torchwood's "Random Shoes", this episode is carried by the non-regular character of Sally Sparrow, wonderfully portrayed by this week's leading lady, Carey Mulligan.

KATHRYN: What's good about sad?
SALLY: It's happy for deep people.

As "Blink" lives or dies by Sally Sparrow, it is fortunate that she is a compelling and endearing character. She is instantly likeable; clever, funny, and with a very dry sense of humour -- she evens laughs at herself quite a bit. She's sort of a twenty-first century Benny Summerfield.

I thought that the episode was very slow to start. The pre-title sequence was distinctly bland and so, at least up until Kathy's was 'zapped' back in time, the episode didn't really hook me. However, when Kathy did arrive in Hull, 1920, I had to laugh out loud. Not only is it the butt of the old Blackadder joke, but it's also the 'top of the crap map' city? where I went to University and where I just happen to work. It's the Hull Daily Mail, mind, not 'the Hull Times'. You'd think they'd have done their homework?

"Because life is short and you are hot".

Once it got going though, I really enjoyed the episode. Moffat's characters are all so funny and real; I especially liked the smooth young cop, D.I. Billy Shipton. Once he had been 'zapped' back to 1969 we were finally treated to some exposition, courtesy of the Doctor and Martha.

"The only psychopaths in the universe to kill you nicely. No mess; no fuss; just zap you into the past and make you live to death."

The Doctor gives Billy a message to deliver to Sally; a message that it will take him 38 years to deliver. The hospital scene where the old, dying Billy finally gives that message to Sally is beautifully written, and really quite melancholy. On the whole, "Blink" may be much more upbeat that Moffat's peerless offering last year, but it still has its "Girl In The Fireplace" moments.

Moffat has also really tapped into something with his DVD Easter Eggs -- what a concept! It's one of those fantastic ideas that seem so obvious once they've been done -- the Doctor as a DVD Easter Egg! It's contemporary and cool and children will love it. More than that though, it creates one of those seldom-used, head-scratching time travel plots that Doctor Who just does not do enough. We have one half of a conversation recorded in 1969 and eventually published on just seventeen DVDs as an easter egg. The other half of the conversation is then transcribed in 2007. This transcription is then delivered to the Doctor in 2008 so that when he gets trapped in 1969 he can record his half and thus complete the circle? or should I say complete the 'wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey ball'?

"They are quantum locked. They don't exist when they are being observed. The moment they are seen by any other living creature they freeze into rock. No choice; it is a fact of their biology. In the sight of any other living thing they literally turn to stone. And you can't kill a stone. Of course, a stone can't kill you either, but then you turn your head away. Then you blink. And oh yes it can."

There is one devastating moment when on the DVD, the Doctor says that the transcript has run out. The Weeping Angels are coming. From thereon in the fear factor goes through the roof. Larry Nightingale is another brilliant character, but amusing as he may be throughout (with all his nerdish quips like "I've got that on a T-Shirt" etc.), he's even more entertaining when, if you'll pardon my French, he's shitting himself. It's those wide-eyes. He's desperately trying not to blink. But that's the instinct isn't it? Cover the eyes. But he can't, or he's dead.

You can't hide behind the sofa because that is when they'll get you. Genius.

I thought that the most frightening sequence was outside the TARDIS in the basement. When one of the Angels (somehow) does something to the light and it begins to flicker, the Angels begin to move in short bursts. Hettie MacDonald -- the first woman to direct an episode since 1985 -- has shot and edited this part beautifully; it is absolutely chilling. The statues move almost like a piece of animation. A quick series of grotesque freezes. It's horrible. But thankfully, even in his absence the Doctor saves the day. He allows Sally and Larry into the TARDIS which then dematerialises around them. Of course, those pesky Angels were outside it, shaking it about. What they didn't see coming was that once it had dematerialised, they'd all be looking square at each other. Checkmate.

"Blink" ends flawlessly -- the closing montage of all those statues and gargoyles juxtaposed with the Doctor's "don't blink" speech will doubtless leave a generation of children with a deep-rooted fear of statues, gargoyles and grotesques. And if we're honest, probably quite a few adults too?

All told, "Blink" was never going to be a monumental episode like "The Empty Child" or my personal favourite, "The Girl In The Fireplace". You just can't have an episode with that sort of weight without your regular cast. However, given the choice between a 'Doctor-lite' episode of this kind of quality or a Stargate-style clip show, I know which I'd choose every time. The fact that this episode was far better than "The Lazarus Experiment" and "42" - both of which had a full cast, big-name guest stars and a bucketload of C.GI. -- says it all really. With "Blink", Moffat has written an episode that will undoubtedly chill Britain on a warm summer's night.

It's really annoying. A few years ago I had a dream in which a time traveller from the future has a love affair with a young criminal, and repeatedly rescues her from arrest by using details of her exact whereabouts found in her diary he picked up years after the event at a jumble sale (seriously!). I always thought this would make a great short film, but never got around to writing it. Seems I never will now.

The neat paradoxes of time travel make for satisfying storytelling (see Back To The Future, which this episodes references with the letter), yet are oddly underused in a show about time travel. It's strange that there are only a small handful of adventures whose plot revolves around the notion of time travel. Off the top of my head Day Of The Daleks, Timelash, Mawdryn Undead, Father's Day... I'm sure there are one or two others. Though I don't think any have done it quite so satisfyingly as here.

If you don't think about it too hard, it all ties up beautifully; though of course with most of these things, there are gaping plot holes if you give it more than a moment's consideration: for example, how did the Doctor know the exact timing of his conversation with Sally, not to mention some of the incidental details, considering he only had written evidence? How come the Doctor has the TARDIS set up in advance with a device which reads DVDs and gives the bearer a one-way ticket, complete with handy hologram? That said, the actual pre-recorded conversation was done very well, and the messages encoded into DVD easter eggs was quite a Philip K Dick moment, as was the alluded-to cult following that the messages has accrued.

As with last year's Love And Monsters, there was an underlying sense of tragedy behind the frightening haunted house romp, a real feeling of loss; and like last year, the Doctor was stamped all over the proceedings, like Orson Welles in The Third Man, despite his limited screen time. This time around, however, the Love And Monsters trademark silliness was largely absent, making Blink the more memorable and succesful of the two "Doctor Lite" episodes to date.

The weeping angels gave the episode the feel of the childrens drama serials the BBC were so good at during the late '70s and 1980s: The Enchanted Castle, Moondial, The Legend Of Green Knowe, etc. The fast pace and glossy 2007 production values took a fair bit of the edge off the spookiness, and I can't help wondering how much more creepy it would have been done in the slower-moving and more sombre early '80s style. It would probably have scared the bejeezus out of me.

So, other than a (probably) unavoidable modern glossiness and (probably) unavoidable plot holes, were there any down sides? Well, only the usual really. Most of the characterisation felt very standard-issue RTD, and Murray Gold's score undid a lot of the atmosphere by veering into Keff McCulloch territory with those ghastly 'orchestra hits' towards the start - whoever thought they were an attractive or effective noise? And the whole Sparrow and Nightingale thing? This was presumably a dig at low-rent ITV detective drama Rosemary and Thyme, hence the reference to ITV in the dialogue... but if so, why bother including such naffness in the episode in the first place? And anyway, Sally Sparrow (presumably a reference to similar '90s time travel sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart and its protagonist Gary Sparrow) is such an obviously made-up name that it proved tremendously distracting.

These are just small grumbles, though. Blink was yet another Steven Moffat masterclass in how to do 45 minutes of Doctor Who, tantalsingly drip-feeding the viewer information, avoiding the otherwise obligatory last act runaround, and getting the whole thing wrapped up under time (leaving the editors a minute or so at the end to play around with some pictures of statues they had lying around) without it ever feeling rushed. Along with The Shakespeare Code and Human Nature, the third absolutely top notch episode this season. More please.