In 2007, Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan) and Kathy Nightingale (Lucy Gaskell) find a message under peeling wallpaper in an abandoned house. Kathy encounters a Weeping Angel, which, when you touch it, sends you decades back in time. She ends up in 1920. Her grandson, in 2007, delivers a message to the house from 1987 about Kathy’s long life. Before leaving, Sally takes a Yale key hanging from the hand of a statue, then she visits Kathy’s brother Larry (Finlay Robinson). He works with DVDs and keeps finding Easter Eggs containing a video message of the Doctor (David Tennant) having half a conversation with the viewer. He gives Sally a list.
Four Weeping Angels follow Sally to the police station, where they have impounded a fake Police Box. The Angels take the box and send Inspector Billy Shipton (Michael Obiora) back to 1969. The Doctor has been sent back too. He asks Billy to send a message decades later, and Billy puts the Easter Egg on the DVDs. In 2007, an Older Billy phones Sally and she comes to visit him on his deathbed in the hospital. Before dying, he gives her a list which is her own DVD collection.
Sally and Larry visit the house and play the Easter Egg on a portable DVD player. In a startling scene, she has a full conversation with the Doctor on a DVD made years ago in 1969. He explains about the Weeping Angels. They are stealing the Time Energy in the TARDIS. A Weeping Angel pursues Sally and Larry to the basement where the TARDIS is located. They use the Yale key to hide inside it. Larry inserts a glowing DVD in the console, which turns out to be a control disc which returns the TARDIS to the Doctor, leaving Sally and Larry behind. The Weeping Angels had surrounded the TARDIS and when it disappears, they are left all looking at each other and can never move again.
The episode was filmed in an actual abandoned house and writer Steven Moffat called it the creepiest house he had ever seen. This was good because the Weeping Angels are pretty much the creepiest villains in Doctor Who. They only move when you can’t see them. If you blink, they move several feet closer to you, and when they reach you, they send you back in time and live off the Time Energy that releases. The scene in which the Doctor and Sally have a conversation over decades of time is creepy in its own right. Blink inspired a song of the same name by Cameleon Circuit, a so-called British Timelord Rock Band. It was the first Doctor Who story directed by a woman (Hettie Macdonald) in 22 years. This was the episode that introduced Time as a big ball of Wibbly Wobbly Timey Whimey stuff.
The DVDs were all of fake movies. Kathy has a letter delivered to a particular place at a particular time like Doc Brown does in Back to the Future II. When Larry is taking notes, he does it in Pitman. Blink was written by Steven Moffat based on his short story. It is a Doctor Lite story because David Tennant and Freema Agyeman barely appear in it, so they can do another episode at the same time, but it is generally considered the second-best Doctor Who story of all time, after the Caves of Androzani. Moffat won BAFTA awards and a Hugo for writing it. Carey Mulligan won a Constellation Award for her role as Sally Sparrow. It was nominated for a Hugo but lost to Pan’s Labyrinth.