The episode is based on a previous short story written by Moffat for the 2006 Doctor Who Annual, titled "'What I Did on My Christmas Holidays' By Sally Sparrow".

In the episode, the Tenth Doctor—a time travelling alien played by David Tennant—is trapped in 1969 and tries to communicate with a young woman in 2007, Sally Sparrow (Carey Mulligan), to prevent the statue-like Weeping Angels from taking control of the TARDIS.

Sparrow and her best friend's brother, Larry Nightingale (Finlay Robertson), must unravel a set of cryptic clues sent through time by the marooned Doctor, left in DVD Easter eggs.

In 2007, Sally Sparrow, intrigued by a message written to her under peeling wallpaper about "the Weeping Angels", explores the abandoned house Wester Drumlins a second time with her friend Kathy Nightingale.

Larry explains that he has been documenting an Easter egg in seventeen different DVDs containing a video message of a man having half of a conversation with the viewer.

The man in the Easter egg, a time traveller called the Doctor, has also been sent to the past, and asks Billy to relay a message decades later.

The Doctor explains that aliens called Weeping Angels turn to stone statues when any living creature observes them.

[4] The short story is presented as a homework essay from Sally, though only 12 years old, who encounters evidence of the Doctor's presence from the past in her aunt's house while visiting.

[6] Moffat was also inspired to write the episode based on the popular children's game Statues,[7] which he always found "frightening".

[8] Murray Gold, the composer for the series, later compared the creatures to the moving ghostly topiary animals in Stephen King's 1977 horror novel The Shining.

[9] The practice began with the 2006 entry "Love & Monsters", and continued for episodes such as "Turn Left", "Midnight",[14] and "The Girl Who Waited".

[15] Moffat stated that he felt relaxed when he was writing the script for "Blink", for if it proved to be unpopular, he could blame the "Doctor-lite" structure of the episode.

[17] Russell T Davies, the series' executive producer, later noted that, due to MacDonald's work, the episode included some of "the most beautiful [visuals] we've ever had".

[8] Location shooting for scenes set at the Police Station Garage took place at the Coal Exchange and Mount Stuart Square, Cardiff Bay on 21 November 2006.

[8] To create the rigid structure of the angels' dresses, prosthetics supervisors Rob Mayor soaked fabric in fibreglass resin, which was then painted over.

[8] Although they are never shown moving on screen, all of the Weeping Angels were played by actresses Aga Blonska and Elen Thomas wearing makeup and prosthetics.

[9] Moffat initially wrote placeholder dialogue in the script for the scene where the Doctor tells Sally that he can hear her in the DVD shop, because he knew the lines that appeared would have to play "double duty later on" and be authentic and fresh both times.

The Guardian's Stephen Brook called it a "wonderfully creepy episode" that "ultimately made sense" despite "barely featur[ing] the Doctor and Martha".

[28] David Bradley of SFX awarded "Blink" five out of five stars, saying that it could have featured any of the previous Doctors and predicted that its "timelessness" would ensure that it would "[go] down as one of the finest, scariest, cleverest Who episodes ever".

[31] The Daily Telegraph named the episode one of the best of the show's entire run, noting that, while the Doctor "is somewhat on the periphery here", it "adds to the threat".

[34] In 2011, before the second half of the sixth series, The Huffington Post labelled "Blink" as one of the five essential episodes for new viewers to watch.

In 2009 SFX named the climax with the Weeping Angels advancing on Sally and Larry the scariest moment in Doctor Who's history, describing it as "a terrifying combination of scary concept and perfect direction".

[36] The Weeping Angels came in at number three in Neil Gaiman's "Top Ten New Classic Monsters" in Entertainment Weekly,[37] while TV Squad named them the third scariest television characters.

[44] The episode was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Script,[45] but lost to Pan's Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro.

[51] They also returned in "The Angels Take Manhattan" from the show's seventh series ,[52][53] featured in the mini-episode, "Good as Gold", written by children for a Blue Peter contest[54] and have made cameo appearances in the episodes "The God Complex", "The Time of the Doctor", "Hell Bent", "Revolution of the Daleks" and in the finale to the first series of the Doctor Who spin-off, Class.

As expected by Moffat and Gold,[9] this led online retailers such as ThinkGeek,[57] and Zazzle,[58] among others, to offer versions of such a product for sale.

In addition, the "wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey" line has been used to describe several of Moffat's complex time travel stories, such as "Let's Kill Hitler" and "The Big Bang".