it goes "ding" when there's stuff

It's a plot, that's what it is. As if my fangirly obsession with the Doctor wasn't acute enough, the season is joyously mutating from fun-but-fluffy into a bunch of episodes which are knocking the spots out of the ball park, or raising the bar on their stride, or something. The two-parter with "Human Nature" and "Family of Blood" was poignant, gripping and beautifully cast and acted, although I have reservations with some of its ideological wossnames in terms of how it was adapted from the book. (Which is fun, and here as an e-book, along with a bunch of others).

"Blink", which I watched last night, was even better, a downright terrifying and tightly-plotted bundle of geeky TV joy about which I shall proceed to swoon at length, mostly because it's a quiet morning for curriculum advice and boingboing is offering insufficient distraction.

• Steven Moffat, scriptwriter, appears to be the hingepin of the plot. He's guilty not only of "Blink", but of "The Empty Child" and "The Doctor Dances", which are my favourite season 1 episodes, and "The Girl in the Fireplace", which is my favourite in Season 2. I'm sensing a theme here. He's a writer's writer, someone who actually plots: his plotlines tend to be intricate, slightly challenging, tightly woven, and thus liable to deeply groove the ploons of my narrativistic little heart, which is repeatedly broken by the wan, drifty stabs made at story by Hollywood.
• He's also big with the dark edge, the tragic poignancy and the nicely-written and valiant female hero. His people are real, quirky and not necessarily doomed to the happy ending towards which the "family" format tends to incline. (Also, I have to say, Carey Mulligan, the actress playing the valiant heroine, was pretty darned cool and comes across as intelligent as well as cute.)
• He does time travel beautifully: he has a real sense of the paradox and underlying elegance in messing around with causal logic. "Girl in the Fireplace" was similar to "Blink" in that sense: both of them require the viewer to actually concentrate to follow the jumping around, and both take a heartfelt delight in getting to grips with the nature of time. Who needs more of this. Too often the Tardis is a convenient McGuffin with interstellar legs.
• I do go for random laterality, like Sally's Freudian slip or the Doctor's speech about hens or the little vignette at the end. I may be happy evermore in simply inventing backstory to the Doctor and Martha heading off into the depths of London in a hell of a hurry with a quiver full of arrows and what appeared to be a cheap fibreglass bow.
• OMG scared shitless! I am fully aware that I'm a creepy-movie wimp, she says with dignity, but I watched a fair chunk of "Blink" from the other side of my study, and occasional segments while pacing up and down the corridor outside, twitching. The Monster Du Jour is simple, dead easy to do in special effects, and very deeply terrifying, creepy and threatening. The bloody things were always inherently horrible, but I shall never look at them in the same way again, as the writer completely intended and joyously brandishes with the closing montage. Bastard. In a good way.

In fact, the only problem I have with this episode is that the closing few of the season (and, btw, woe! why are they so short?) may be a complete anticlimax. Bugger.