Doctor Who: 9 Things You Never Knew The Ninth Doctor Did
8. He Met Sally Sparrow
WHAT: Sally Sparrow. The name synonymous with Blink and the Weeping Angels. The main character in one of the most 'timey-wimey' episodes to date, having found messages below her wallpaper warning her not to blink. She followed the Doctor's instructions, 'communicating' with the Tenth Doctor in her future and the past, who is using the script of her current conversation to talk through the television. Wibbly-wobbly, indeed. Blink still remains one of Steven Moffat's best episodes with the horrifying enemies, the suspenseful music and storyline and the time displacement and paradoxes that have since been a staple of Moffat's writing. However, it would have been a much better episode had Moffat not stolen his own idea to write it. The Ninth Doctor had met a much younger Sally Sparrow, in a similar timey-wimey story, back in the 2006 Doctor Who Annual. HOW: Continuity errors aside, 12 year old Sally Sparrow accidentally peeled away the wallpaper in her room with a plea for help from the Ninth Doctor and proof of veracity by asking her to think of a number, of which was carved into a tree. Sally then tracked down a videotape of the Ninth Doctor who asked for her help, not to fight off Weeping Angels or any scary aliens, but because his TARDIS 'hiccupped' and left him 20 years in the past. The Doctor can communicate with Sally because hes reading the story shes going to write for her Christmas homework and asked her to hit the fast return switch on the TARDIS to send it back to him. On screen, the TARDIS materialises and her future self emerges from it, her mission successful. The story ends with Sally writing up the story and planning to go find the TARDIS, happy that, in the future, she becomes a beautiful female spy that saves the Doctor from sword-fighting Sontarans and gives him this homework. SO: While the story isn't up to Moffat's usual standards of confusing paradoxes and explosions, having clearly been written for kids, it is interesting to see the origins of Blink and the genesis of that story, and also the cojones of Moffat in thinking that no one would notice. This story is also predicated upon so many tenuous plot devices. Why did the Ninth Doctor have to prove the message's veracity by asking Sally to guess a number? Doesn't Sally's seeing herself on TV mean that she is now under no urgency to return the TARDIS? And how does one resolve the story within the Doctor Who canon? Is it the same Sally Sparrow? Does this violate the Laws of Time? How did the TARDIS 'hiccup' and jump forward 20 years? Nevertheless, the Doctor has met companions before and after their official meeting - Jamie, the Brigadier, Rose Tyler - and Charley Pollard turned that around by meeting the Doctor before he met her. If this is the same Sally Sparrow, retcon notwithstanding, this continues that trend. Despite the wibbly-wobbly quality of the story, it still makes more sense than that time Einstein turned into an Ood.
