Midnight
(Series 4, Dr 10 with Donna (briefly), 14/6/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Alice Troughton (no relation!))
Rank: 40
'Welcome to the Dr Who holiday. We are very glad to have you aboard and would ask you not to panic if a man - or woman - in eccentric clothes suddenly runs into your capsule shouting about possible invasion. In the event of an incident the exit doors are here, here and here although we recommend moving in time rather than space to a moment before the troubles started. Please keep all hand, wings, flippers and robotic limbs inside the vehicle at all times and kindly keep your tentacles to yourself. Terms and conditions do not find us liable for a) hijacking by aliens b) hypnotism of the pilot by The Master c) being pulled off course to a great white void or the Palaeolithic age d) accidental replacement by Zygon duplicates e) accidental replacement by Chameleon duplicates f) accidentally becoming embroiled in a nuclear war between two extra-terrestrial powers g) loss of fluid link leading to trip to alien cities filled with Daleks h) having the vehicle you are in gifted to Kublai Khan as a present i) being shrunk by a failure of the trans-dimensional circuits and being chased by a cat j) being sat on by a rogue Zarbi k) ending up in a fictional universe posted in the databanks as part of a plot to destroy us all l) ending up in a fictional universe where you have to make small talk to people who can only speak using words from ‘The Hungry Caterpillar’ m) stopping off in a Butlin's Holiday camp in 1959 and being gassed n) being attacked by an unseen monster made out of crystals or o) the fast-return switch getting stuck and sending you back in time to the Big Bang. Intergalactic currency can go down as well as up - your home planet may be at risk if you do not keep up payments'.
‘Midnight’ is a good example of why you can never second guess this series. What seemed from the overall publicity for series 4 as if it was going to be one of the year’s weakest stories (‘The 10th Dr goes on holiday to a planet called Midnight filled with crystals’), a cheapo story based largely in one set that solved the annual problem of not having enough time to film both leading actors for a whole story (by splitting their storylines in two and having them film more or less concurrently with ‘Turn Left’ this story’s twin) ends up becoming one of the most important and best Dr Who episodes of them all, an acknowledged modern classic. For ‘Midnight’ finds the series and its showrunner raging against the dying of the light, one last outpouring of frustration and anger about how good the universe ought to be and how painful living it can feel. On the face of it ‘Midnight’ is about a package holiday gone wrong, something The Doctor must surely be used to after all the times The Tardis has stopped working down the years. Well, that’s what comes of cheap package holidays I guess: there’s always someone messing up somewhere – only this time rather than lose his luggage the 10th Dr very nearly loses his life. This is a ‘Planet Of the Spiders’ for the modern age, where all the Doctor’s faults come back to haunt him and all his usual strengths are taken away, leaving him at the mercy of an unknown monster and a baying mob that doesn’t care for his timelord gifts and abilities. It’s the beginning of the end for the 10th Doctor, the story that begins with him at the peak of his self-confidence and bravado and optimism which ends with him as close to death as he ever comes without regenerating, his belief in the goodness of the universe shaken to the core. For the most part being the Doctor is fun, running round the universe feeling impervious and then getting on to move elsewhere, soon to be forgotten when the next joyride comes along, but ‘Midnight’ is one of those stories you imagine gives The Doctor nightmares, the day he was reminded the universe is actually quite a dark place where things can go wrong. There’s nowhere to hide in this story and even the Doctor, with all his knowledge and gadgetry and way with words, can’t do anything to stop the unknown un-named Midnight monster prowling outside or the monsters it creates out of the Dr’s fellow passengers.
Now, more than most fans,
I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this story because it had been billed
as the Doctor ‘teaming up with the people around him to face a threat’ and that
isn’t usually one of Russell’s strengths – particularly ‘Voyage Of The Damned’, by far his weakest
script (not just of Dr Who, of anything, even ‘Children’s Ward’). I just wasn’t
ready to stomach Russell’s unending optimism in the face of adversity all over
again, as people who would normally hate enough club together to be friends and
cheerily face death on the word of a mad alien stranger without even stopping
to ask ‘are you sure?’ For Russell’s always had an optimism about the universe
and people that they will always do the right thing that at its peak cheeriness
felt totally alien to a world that’s as dark as Dr Who can sometimes be. Everybody
whose written multiple episodes of Dr Who have had, at some stage, to work out
where they stand over humanity’s place in the universe. To writers like Robert
Holmes we’re primitives still learning and easily manipulated by outside
forces, to David Whittaker we’re a complex tapestry of individuals with
motivations that often clash with each other, for Malcolm Hulke we’re vermin
and a blot on the universe, to Douglas Adams we’re a weird statistical anomaly
who got lucky, to Terrance Dicks we’re an evolutionary triumph, to Steven
Moffat a fairytale he can never quite bring himself to kill off, to Chris Chibnall
a naughty child that keeps getting things wrong, to Pip and Jane Baker a race
that talks like Shakespeare that will then do something impossibly stupid. I
think Russell’s take is the most interesting though: he adores certain humans
to the point of painting them out as being even more noble and amazing and
fascinating and clever and kind than even timelords – its humanity as a whole
he can’t stand. ‘Voyage’ was what happened when a group of the best of us got
together in the middle of a disaster and did the right thing – but ‘Midnight’
is much more interesting because it’s what happens when the wrong people get
together and it all goes wrong. ‘Midnight’ is Russell going away and doing some
thinking about ‘Damned’ and why it didn’t really work (for all the fans who
loved it) and though the story starts much the same way, with the Doctor
getting to know and admire his fellow passengers, the crisis splits them apart
and sets them against each other to a sort of mob rule.
It’s easy to imagine
Russell writing this story about a space shuttle breaking down and being
attacked by monsters when sitting on a plane that had been delayed yet again,
but actually the truth was more prosaic than that. By the end of the year it
was clear that series 4 was in danger of going over budget so what he needed
for this slot was a story that only used one set, a relatively small cast and
only limited special effects. Oh and it had to be a story without much Donna,
Catherine Tate only seen at the beginning and end because she was busy making
‘Turn Left’ at the same time (a side effect of the Christmas specials meaning
the production team were producing one more story a year that they could easily
manage; rather than have an everybody-lite episode this year like ‘Love and
Monsters’ or ‘Blink’, though, it made much more sense to give the Doctor and
companion their own stories as per here). Written much quicker and in less
drafts than most of Russell’s stories (across a single weekend, with a break on
Saturday night when Russell got stuck in a scene that was going nowhere about
who to throw out the shuttle, which he realised was turning into the sociology
question about who to throw out a hot air balloon to make it lighter, a
question with no easy answers, then picked up on Sunday morning by having the
monster take over the Doctor) it’s one of his most instinctive intuitive
scripts, a rare story that isn’t setting up or solving a plot arc or trying to
make some greater comment but simply one sudden dark nightmarish thought seen
through to its logical conclusion. The idea of multiple people trapped together
in one room being picked off by an alien isn’t new to Dr Who – it was a weekly
occurrence for the second half of the 1960s in fact – but it’s a masterstroke
to make this a vehicle under siege rather than a base. Putting the Doctor in
danger with some strangers who don’t know him or his reputation, in the middle
of an unexplored planet with monsters that logically and by what we know of our
science shouldn’t exist, is perfect for drama. Not only does being in the
middle of nowhere surrounded by peril, like Humans in a shark tank, give very
obvious reasons to be scared (oh the claustrophobia!) it also cuts The Doctor
off from all his usual get-out-of-jail-free clauses: when he boasts that he’s
the cleverest person in the room he can’t back it up by knowledge because on
this planet he hasn’t got any (that’s why he wanted to explore it after all,
because it was unknown, his curiosity nearly as deadly as it was in ‘Planet Of
The Spiders’), he can’t tell the assembled people to check with the nearest
authority figure because that’s just lowly staff, a hostess as scared and out
of her depth as the rest. He can’t rely on Donna to charm the pants off
everyone and intermediate between Humans and his alien-ness because she’s back
at the hotel getting some sunrays (behind a sixteen foot plate of glass). He
naturally tries to take charge the way he always does, but he hasn’t been seen
to earn that right and in a cabin of people that might all have been infested
with a monster it just makes him look suspicious. He can’t even whisk everyone
away on The Tardis because it’s 400 klicks away, whatever mileage that might be (indeed, this
is the first story since as long ago as ‘Genesis Of The Daleks’ in 1975 not to
mention The Tardis somewhere).
This is a story that only works if the people with the Doctor don’t know of him or his reputation and take him at face value as a grinning optimistic do-gooder out of his depth, arrogantly doing things like shutting off the entertainment system and making them talk to each other without asking them because he simply assumes that what he thinks is best for everyone really is. Against passengers that are far more natural and paranoid than the Starship Titanic he looks suspicious, not heroic and even the sonic screwdriver isn’t going to get him ou of this one (although it’s a mystery why he doesn’t use his psychic paper to get him out of trouble). Also one of the great phobias of public transport is putting your faith into other people to keep you safe when you don’t know who they are or necessarily the science behind what they do, something which is tough for anyone whose used to being in charge and doing things for themselves; it’s the real cause of a lot of plane phobias (along with the fact you’re in a manmade creation up in the sky made up of nuts and bolts and a quadzillion pieces that all need to work properly) in a universe where you know man makes mistakes and it’s a long way down): giving up control and trusting someone you don’t know. For someone used to travelling in space and time and who is always the pilot and never the passenger, that in itself is a scary prospect (this story is closest to ‘The Faceless Ones’ in that regard) . Anyone whose ever been on public transport that’s broken down and felt helpless can surely identify with this story (ironically it happened to me on a bus on the way to a Dr Who exhibition at Longleat once, when I blamed being struck on the side of a motorway on a Dr Who monster and spent the time talking to fellow fans about which monster it could be).
Public transport turns up
a lot in Davies’ last script for the series, a natural place to put disparate
people trapped together. Russell was inspired to write the story not by a plane
journey though but by reading about other scifi works. The main idea apparently
came from The Star Trek: Next Generation episode ‘Darmok’ from 1995, in which a
Tamarian alien turns up and abducts Captain Picard; so far so normal except the
usual translator circuits can make no sense of it and his crew have to work out
how to get him back without causing accidental misunderstandings or accidental
harm. One of the more thoughtful Next Gen episodes it’s nothing like what
‘Midnight’ turned out to be but Russell read the synopsis once and thought
‘that would make a good Dr Who episode that would’ (why would he only know the
synopses and not see the story you might ask? Well, Russell was a regular
contributor to the much-missed magazine TV Zone in the 1990s, which is where I
first learned his name; alongside endless Dr Who articles they also carried a
lot of Star Trek stories and episode guides so it makes sense that Russell
would read them even without being enough of a fan to see the stories. What
reminded Russell of this, though, was the distinctly un-scifi film ‘Jeepers
Creepers II’ in which a school basketball team are trapped on their school bus
by a supernatural horror that leaves them trapped, the two ideas combining in
his mind. Russell never mentions it but it wouldn’t surprise me too if he had in
mind the classic Twilight Zone episode ‘The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street’
from 1960 which is about a similar
misunderstanding and the dangers of mob rule when a little boy thinks he’s seen
aliens and weird things happen, but everyone assumes he’s possessed and attack
him instead (the typical Twilight Zone twist is that it was an alien conducting
an experiment on humanity and seeing how easy they were to fool and
manipulate). Close to home it’s also a little like what you were meant to think
‘Edge Of Destruction’ was like for the first
episode, where The Doctor firmly says that it would be ‘impossible’ for
something to get inside the Tardis and take it over but it would explain why
everyone was acting strangely (before it turns out to be the fast-return switch
on the blink). Russell also remembered a game from childhood in which he and
his friends used to copy each other’s words, remembering how unsettling it was,
especially when one of them got fed up with the game and asked the other one to
stop it. As part of his role as showrunner he used to pitch all his ideas to
his fellow producers, but because time was tight for this one instead of simply
giving a plot breakdown Russell simply repeated everything they said for the
entire meeting, showing how creepy it was – needless to say the idea was passed
quickly so Russell would stop talking like that!
We never see the
‘Midnight’ creature, which is invisible and noises off for the most part (until
it starts knocking on the ship’s hull in a properly scary Dr Who moment; the
‘Confidential’ that week revealed it was just a stage hand with a timer and a
hammer but blimey it’s tense when you watch it). Like the Doctor we’re
fascinated: no carbon life forms can possibly exist on the planet surface
according to Professor Hobbes, while if the discussion about what metals are
around in this planet are true it has all the things Earth has but in a static immovable way, with
molecules that are too broad to bond with other metals and chemicals to create
life. But this is a new planet – why does it have to follow the same rules as
Humans? That’s just arrogance – and in a universe full of surprises thinking
you know everything is costly. I love the idea that we have an alien with a
whole new genetic structure, one based around crystals not carbon, with all the
same molecules as us, just in a very different order. One of the complaints I
sometimes have about the modern series, starting when Russell revived it and
became showrunner, is that it’s often too safe and cosy: even the worst
monsters act just like us even when they don’t look like us. More often than
not aliens have a basic humanoid shape and are clearly mammals; even when they
don’t they resemble us in some way, the noble reptilians of The Silurians or
Ice Warriors. There are no new monsters to match the imagination of Krotons in
modern Who, no Mechonoids, no Quarks, no Sils, no Monoids, no Axons, no random
balls of energy, except for ones from the past like The Daleks or fully CGI creations
that follow a pattern of either looking like bats or insects. The Ood come
closest in this regard but even they seem almost Human. By contrast the
Midnight monster breaks all the rules of our science. It shouldn’t exist at all
on a planet that would melt any carbon life to death in seconds. And like the
aliens in Star Trek it learns quickly, invading the shuttle unseen and diving
into the nearest person, Sky Silvestry. Which raises an interesting point.
Russell never said this in the script because he didn’t want to scare children
with talk of suicide in a family show, but in interviews afterwards he said
that Sky was deeply depressed and on her way to the Crystal waterfall on
Midnight to commit suicide after a failed love affair that’s left her paranoid
and unable to trust (the one she mentions in passing to The Doctor when they
get talking). We see the effects of the monster as it learns speech fast,
picking up everyone’s language in the cabin and repeating it back at them,
before getting the upper hand by reading their thoughts and speaking their
words before they do. Could it be that it picks up the feeling of paranoia and
fright of Sky, rather than it being its natural state? (Note the way Dee Dee
quotes the Christina Rossetti poem ‘Goblin Market’, all about fear of the unknown).
Some fans feel cheated by the fact we don’t get to see the monster but I find
it poetic because of that, because the
real monster is ‘us’ and the way humans throughout our history Humans have
always been scared of somebody that isn’t like ‘us’, whether it be for race,
colour, appearance, gender, nationality or religion (and hey, at least there is
a monster, unlike when Steven Moffat tries to have a go at something similar in
the inferior re-make ‘Listen’). Like ‘Voyage’ all the people we meet seem
nice when The Doctor is chatting to them, a little obsessive or egotistical
maybe but no different to any group of people you meet on the bus and certainly
no different to the similarly varied crew of ‘Voyage’. It’s when they get
scared they act badly, turning on each other in desperation to stay alive and
it’s that which is so scary because there’s no stopping paranoia when it gets
out of hand. That’s what keeps Russell up at night about the Human race even
though he seems to like most people one-on-one, the way we turn into gangs and start
picking on someone to make us feel better. Which, whether by coincidence or
design, is exactly where Dr Who started in ‘An Unearthly Child’, a story that
starts with two schoolteachers suspicious of their alien pupil while her
grandfather is suspicious of them and ends up with them in the middle of a
bunch of cavemen suspicious of each other.
Anyway, Russell’s written
enough monsters in his time – for now he’s much more interested in how the
humans respond to it and ‘Midnight’ also makes good use of his unique ability
to create real-seeming three-dimensional people who seem as if they’ve lived
entire worlds before the story started in a bare few lines (there may have been
better writers on Dr Who down the years but none have Russell’s gifts for human
observation). The kindly old Professor Hobbes, brilliantly played by Patrick
Troughton’s son David stepping in at the last minute after another Porridge’s
Sam Kelly broke his leg a few days before filming, is a delight: he’s a Doctor
surrogate who thinks he knows everything and refuses to be told otherwise even
when it’s obvious its wrong, another driver not used to being a passenger.
Troughton Junior finally gets a proper role in the modern series after starting
his career as a footsoldier in his dad’s farewell story and being promoted to
King of Peladon in the 1970s and doing lots of work for Big Finish: indeed he
got the panicked message two days before the ‘Midnight’ read-through while in
the middle of recording the deeply bonkers 5th Doctor story ‘Cuddlesome’
(killer Furbies!) He’s the sort of dotty old professor the old series loves:
he’s a little pedantic sure, a little egocentric, but he’s basically a good egg
whose worst crime is being overly enthusiastic about a subject that bores the
pants off everyone else. His long suffering assistant Dee Dee is sweet, young
and inexperienced and desperate to make her own mark in the world so she stands
on his toes just a little, just enough to remind him that she has a brain too. Her
downfall is her need to please, to get the attention of people around her and
not be laughed at, so even though she shares The Doctor’s doubts at first she
quickly goes with the herd. There’s a sweet nuclear family as well: the mum
Val’s a little grumpy, the dad Biff the sort of naive ignorant rightwinger who
probably voted for Brexit because he believed what the politicians said in the
press about it but he doesn’t hate anybody really, the son Jethro a bit surly
and quick to do what his parents tell him to, but they’re basically OK people
you see every day wherever you go (the last brilliantly played by Colin Morgan
in one of his first TV jobs, his very first being in none other than Catherine
Tate’s show so it must have seemed odd not getting to work with her in this;
you can see why he became a star in the BBC’s ‘other’ brilliant family series
of the 2000s as the title character of ‘Merlin’ soon after this). There’s the
hostess that nobody notices and who nobody learns the name of because she’s
‘staff’; nobody pays attention to her early emergency warnings because they
think they know it all (just like public transport in real life! I love
Russell’s jokes about making space travel just like ordinary travel, with gags
about how the airline food is all the same flavour and how complimentary foods
might have peanut allergies. Like ‘peanuts’ for instance, another great example
of the ordinary hitting the extraordinary head on). Then there’s Sky, Lesley Sharp in one of the
most memorable Dr Who guest appearances of them all, in one of Russell’s few
parts directly written for an actress after starring in Russell’s
‘breakthrough’ series ‘Bob and Rose’ and nagging him for a job ever since (she’s
Russell’s ‘original’ Rose before Billie Piper in fact!) She’s a bit sombre, a
bit solemn, a bit withdrawn, but that’s OK because the Doctor is sometimes too
– and he thinks he knows just how to cheer her up, apparently oblivious as to
how he’s getting on her nerves because he’s met her type before, she’ll thaw
out. But then the shuttle stops with what is euphemistically called a
‘technical fault’.
Not to worry: it’s not as
if the Tardis is that reliable either and that always takes the Doctor to where
he needs to go; plenty of time for him to get to know his fellow passengers. Only
when the alien comes a calling everyone gets scared and their worst traits come
out: that nice if dotty Professor gets stubborn and angry, his assistant
argumentative and suspicious, Sky downright weird, while the seemingly happy
nuclear family end up going nuclear on each other. Suddenly these people who
seemed to have such a secure life, full of a life with mere human problems to
worry about, have been smacked in the face with their own mortality when they
weren’t expecting it and they’re petrified. Usually our timelord hero is
exactly what you need in a situation like this and would just sweep everyone
off their feet and take command, but this story brings out the 10th Dr’s worst
traits too: he assumes he’s the smartest person in the room without backing up
why, takes charge without listening to people or making allowances for their
fear and continues to hang on to the air of mystery that surrounds him even
after it does no good (these aren’t humans of the 21st century after all – even
if they don’t know timelords he could simply reveal how well-travelled he is
and whip out his psychic paper to show his passport stamps or something, but no
he likes everyone being slightly in awe of him this particular Doctor). Nobody
knows that he’s defeated every monster going and saved the universe anonymously
more times than they can count the way we do– in this story you’re only as good
as your last invasion and in this one the Dr’s stuffed because even he hasn’t
got a clue what’s going on and this is a rare planet he’s never visited before. To
them it’s all just words. For all they know he’s making it up. For all they
know he is the monster, The Hostess admitting that he didn’t book under a real
name and at the last minute (while the others have been waiting for ‘months’).
The 10th Doctor is usually good at being a people person but he’s no
match for a baying mob out for blood and all his usual techniques don’t work.
I’ve often wondered what would happen in real life if, say, a tall man with
curly hair and a floppy scarf suddenly started taking charge on my bus or train
and what I and other people would do if I was told there was an emergency by a
stranger; it’s all too well moaning about incidental characters who don’t
listen to the Doctor in the context of the series (where it gets repetitive)
but in real life? I fear I would be just like the others (although there’s a
part of me that would also I suspect act like Vicki and give the monster a cute
pet name shortly before it eats me).
By the time the monster
breaks into the shuttle, via a power cut, and takes over Sky The Doctor’s
already lost: everyone is terrified and thinks killing Sky is the only way out
of their predicament. The Doctor’s pleas that he can still save everyone falls
on increasingly deaf ears. I mean, to believe the Dr would mean to trust him
and you can’t afford to trust a stranger when your life hangs in the balance,
especially one whose being this smug. It’s his worst nightmare: The Doctor
believes in free will and free speech and has toppled civilisations to maintain
it, but the downside of that is that you can’t control or manipulate people
into doing good either and he’s helpless as things get out of hand, something
going wrong every time he’s trying to regain everyone’s trust. Without even
speaking any words of its own the monster shouts the Doctor down, using Sky’s
voice to repeat everything the passengers say making them even more scared like
the most evil game of ‘Simon says’ ever (and the Dr’s protestations that he can
fix everything when an alien is speaking at the same time he is make him sound
even more daft and alien). It’s a masterpiece of human observation as these
ordinary with-it people unravel fast but believably and that most disconcerting
of playground games, repeating everything someone else is saying without them
being able to make it stop, becomes the single scariest thing seen in the
series since our last Dalek. For this is an alien threat that takes away the
Dr’s greatest weapon: his voice, first by his attempts to make everyone stay
quiet so the alien won’t learn their language and use it against them, and then
as the alien (spoilers) takes over him and makes him repeat everything behind
the possessed Sky. Usually the Doctor can talk himself out of anything – but
then this monster even steals his words and turning them against him so that
without his delivery they sound hollow and impossible. No wonder the humans
want to throw him out too in their panic, assuming the monster has moved from
Sky’s body into his and it takes the air hostess’ quick thinking to save
everyone by grabbing Sky and flinging them both out the airlock (shades of the
similarly unknown and unthanked Katarina in ‘The Dalek’s Masterplan’ there),
with the added final guilty comment that nobody even knew her name but she
saved them all anyway because it was the right thing to do when everyone else
did the wrong thing. It’s a near thing and one the Doctor very nearly
didn’t survive and he knows it; by the time he makes it back to be with Donna
again at the end of the episode all that jokey banter of the start is gone and
this once infallible Doctor’s never quite the same again for the rest of his
run. One of the saddest sequences in all of Who is seeing Donna do her usual
thing when her friends is upset and tease him, speaking his words back at him,
only to stop straight away when he looks close to tears and begs her ‘don’t do
that’. usually The Doctor is invincible barring the events that lead to one or
other of his regenerations but here in this moment, he’s had a shock: all that
trust he had in people to do the right thing, all that trust he had in himself
to get himself out of trouble, and it was all a lie.
The 10th Doctor you see
is the one regeneration (perhaps along with the 4th and – ironically
given his short lifespan – the 6th) you sense thought he would last
forever, being too brilliant to get into trouble where he would ever need to
regenerate, who had reached the peak of his timelordiness. Yet time and tide
and regenerations wait for no timelord, with ‘Midnight’ a cosmic lesson in humility
from the universe. Some fans, especially those who’ve joined the series after
his stories were first on, dislike David Tennant’s Doctor because of that
inbuilt smugness, that belief that he’s the smartest person in the rom. But for
me that’s his strength: he’s not haunted by his own failures like the 9th
Doctor, his ego is skyhigh after meeting Rose and saving the universe from
Daleks. You can see immediately, from the moment he wakes up in ‘The Christmas
Invasion’ that there’s an ego to this Doctor. But that’s not a mistake in the
writing, it’s meant to be there. No one is infallible and nobody is more
fallible than people who think they’re infallible and can never make mistakes.
The entire run of the 10th Doctor is about him causing his own
downfall, of coming to terms with the fact that he’s a control freak in a
series that believes in free will and that even with the best of intentions he
doesn’t always get things right for everybody, especially the people close to
him. It’s also a neat inversion of what Russell’s been drip-feeding us all these years: that
community is good, that we can all be saved by our angst if we travel and
eventually meet our own ‘Rose’, that the world can be saved by positive shared thinking
(which is basically the ending to ‘The Sound Of Drums/Last Of The Timelords’). Maybe
that’s true here too as The Doctor is on his own. I love the extension of the
idea from ‘The Runaway Bride’ that The Doctor needs someone to ‘stop him’. When
Russell brought the series back everyone, including the BBC high-ups, asked him
why there had to be a companion at all. The writerly reason is that there
someone to have a sub-plot, having adventures and picking up knowledge the lead
can’t. But as Russell knows its more than that: The Doctor on his own is too
distant, too alien. He needs to have someone to share the universe with because
he’s not good at being alone, especially when he doesn’t have anyone as a
go-between to interpret what he says. ‘Midnight’ is like ‘The Deadly Assassin’ in that regard, a
story written to show why The Doctor needs somebody, only even better (because
it didn’t prove to anyone, including Tom Baker, why he couldn’t so every story
on his own).
I’ve wondered too if, to return
to my review for ‘The End Of Time’, this isn’t Russell T putting more words in
the Doctor’s mouth than people realise. This is the last script Russell wrote
for series 4 and quite possibly the first he wrote after his partner Andrew
Smith fell ill. The revelation came like a bolt out of the blue, just as
Russell was feeling invincible and his beloved show, so vulnerable across his
late twenties to his early forties, at last seemed secure. ‘Midnight’ is
Russell realising that while he’s not wrong about the brilliance and goodness
of individual Humans the universe is still a scary place where bad things
happen suddenly without warning. Russell is torn. This is the moment of his
greatest triumph: he can’t possibly bring himself to quit his dream job he’s
worked so hard for just yet, a job he thought he was going to be in forever and
never leave (why would he? He’s waited for it all his life). He lives and
breathes and eats this show and a small part of him believes that the show
can’t possibly survive without him, that all these worlds would topple and
collapse without him overseeing them: he’s tied directly into it as surely as
if he was The Master in The Land of Fiction with wires sticking out of his
head. Russell has so many worlds in his head, so many sentences pouring out of
him, that he can’t possibly quit, not when he has so much to give and when he’s
worked hard for this moment all his life. And yet he also knows that’s pure
arrogance. His loved one needs him at home. Real life is tugging at his sleeve,
demanding his attention, he can’t keep hiding from it in imaginary worlds
anymore. All his brilliant words, which solve everything all the time in his
work, mean nothing at home when they can’t do anything to save his husband.
Russell’s time on this show is up and he knows it., but he really doesn’t want
to go. Russell needs to do what he’s always telling his characters in this
series to do which is live life to the full with the people you live because
life is short, which is the main reason why we get a smaller workload and a
year of specials in 2010 (because Russell can’t bring himself to just up and
leave everything behind in one go and, anyway, a juggernaut the size of modern
Who just couldn’t stop suddenly overnight). This episode feels in places like
an intelligent, empathetic man trying to look out for the universe’s cues and
work out what to do for the best when he just isn’t sure, writing through guilt
at having spent too much time at the office playing with words that sound
suddenly fake in his ears and wondering if its divine retribution of some sort
for becoming too involved in his work and too smug over how well it was going
without noticing the signs of what was happening under his nose (it is, after
all, a story where words are the villain as much as the monster is and where
his words nearly kill his Doctor doppelganger and representative., nearly dying
literally through becoming repetition – and Russell used the 10th Dr as his
mouthpiece more than most Who writers).
Whatever the inspiration,
the result is one of the triumphs of 21st century new-Who. Russell’s script is
sharp and intense, without a single word wasted (if this really was written in
a single draft in a single weekend, then he really ought to write more close to
the deadlines like this, it makes his writer purer – and tougher). The acting is sublime even for this show’s
golden age (casting director Andy Pryor is one of the Russell era’s unsung
heroes, nailing practically every casting decisions...Kylie being Russell’s
idea), the idea brilliantly imaginative and not like any other script the show
had ever seen, but extending the theme of unintended consequences from even the
kindest and bravest of actions that was becoming key to Russell’s writing since
the show’s comeback. The first time you watch it you have no ideas what’s going
on or how far they’re going to go; on re-watchings you notice how cleverly the
script mirrors what’s about to happen, the little niggles between the family members
and between the university colleagues that are about to grow into full-blown
rows, the Doctor’s comment that ‘nothing can possibly be here with us, I
promise’ right before the first bang and the hostess talking when nobody is
paying her any attention at all and the wrongness of her words when talking
about the emergency exit ‘if something goes wrong – you first’. I especially
love the line, at the programme’s end when everything has been sorted and the
right person has been ejected, when Val does what every mob does when they’ve
been shown the error of her ways. ‘I said it was her’ she says to The Doctor,
trying to ingratiate herself with him and change history, lying through her
teeth without taking responsibility for near-murder, still the worst of
humanity.
Interestingly most people
making this episode were a bit nervous of it: this is new ground for Dr Who,
being basically a stage play about being trapped in a lift with strangers moved
to a space shuttle, the characters held in one place for one long scene without
any cuts in time, flashbacks or B-plots. But in its way its more Dr Who than
any of the scripts they were flying around with quite happily confused why they
didn’t quite work (it’s a much more natural Dr Who script than, say, ‘Fear Her’
or ‘Love and Monsters’ whose bad reception seemed to take everyone by surprise).
It would be nothing if it was a good script made badly though and everyone
pulls the stop out for this one. Though a mixture of experienced and novice
actors everyone plays their part in this story and everyone nails every line,
their descent from with-it know-it-all adults to scared children totally
believable. What’s more everyone copes with the unusual circumstances very well
indeed: this story is almost like a stageplay (indeed, it’s been turned into a
stage play on three separate occasions, with the only tweaks the fact that The
Doctor is a nameless traveller, the scenes with Donna dropped and Russell’s
increasingly questionable music taste changed! The only time this has ever
happened with modern Who: the Doctorless ‘Mission To The Unknown’ is the only
other example in all of Who) and is basically one very long scene, with
cutaways only for the beginning and end and the brief moment in the driver’s
cabin. Director Alice Troughton (no relation to Patrick or David) takes the
sensible decision to film the story in scene order (the first time Dr Who has
done this since ‘The Ark In Space’ in 1975,
itself the first time since the 1960s) which enables the characters to nail the
gradual descent into paranoia. It was a
very tough, time consuming process though, especially for the two leads.
Effectively each section was recorded three times, with the general noise, then
with a camera locked on Sky and then a camera locked on The Doctor (the last
two reading from a teleprompter so they wouldn’t have to remember, say, the
first thirty numbers of pi), the audio being split up on post-production. In
the scene where the two say each other’s words they had to count and breathe in
at the exact same moment, before nailing the section where they swap over and
Sky starts talking first (which is near impossible to do without messing up or
laughing or both: it’s worth trying if you have very bored and indulgent
friends sometime). Sky is bang on, Lesley Sharp’s intense stare alone making
her one of the scariest things seen in the series and hinting at a darker alien
undercurrent even before she’s possessed. David Tennant too is never ever better
than here and even sells making the words ‘Shamble, bobble, dibble dobble’ some
of the scariest to come out of his mouth, while his vacant-eyes stare when
possessed and speaking lines a fraction of a second behind is positively
haunting. Quite brilliant then: what seems like it was going to be a minor money-saving
episode before the series arc finale becomes a major one, setting up the Doctor’s
regeneration a mere seven stories down the line, not because of the events it
sets up (sadly we never see the planet Midnight again; I’m dying to see a
creature made out of crystal I the modern bigger budget series after the botch
job that was Eldrad in ‘Hand Of Fear’) but
because of what it does to the mindset of this previously invincible Doctor,
who from now on to the end will be in a sulk, caught in a war against fate and
destiny. Full credit too to the post-production team who had to put the story
together: the final product is a superb mixture of sound effects, chatter and multi-layered
dialogue that gets the mixture just right, being never confusing or chaotic (or
at any rate only at the parts where it’s supposed to be!)
There are only a handful
of minor problems: Donna doesn’t seem the sort of person to enjoy a boring time
by the pool when there’s a new world to explore and is a little bit clumsily
written out (it would be far more apt if she’d become irritated by the Doctor’s
endless bounciness and needed a breather from him and he’d gone on a trip in a
huff), the scene with the pilot and co-pilot is unnecessary and breaks up the
one-note tension for no real reason and in contrast to the passengers they’re
both mighty quick to trust this stranger whose talked his way into the cabin
during a crisis (oddly the Dr doesn’t mourn them much either when he realises
they must have both died), while this is a remarkably laugh-free story, even in
the early scenes where it didn’t need to be (you’d think there’d be lots more gags
at the expense of travelling on public transport (a gag about how you get
charged extra for luggage even though the rack is dimensionally transcendental or
how you wait decades for a bus and then three come along at once). It’s never
clearly sold to us that this is a trip to see a waterfall that happens every
day but, due to an accident with some rocks, is taking a new route; by rights
the fact that this happening on a new unexplored planet ought to prick the
Doctor’s ears up long before it does. And why is he so interested in a crystal
waterfall anyway? Not really his style. Perhaps he’s only going because he’s
heard it has a really good gift shop? By the very nature of this story there’s
no extra clever layer running underneath either: this is a survival story, not
an allegory, not a metaphor, not a chance to make a comment on the lives of the
people at home watching this, while for once the people learning something from
it isn’t the audience at home but the hero.
For all that it’s still
utterly brilliant, a largely unique bit of scifi (give or take the soruces
above anyway; all showrunners/producers stand on the shoulders of those that
came before them to one extent or another but none more than the three fans
calling the shots in the 21st centuries and yet there’s nothing even remotely
like this story in the 20th century incarnation of Dr Who) and a story that’s
gripping, scary and emotional, right up there with the very best. It’s like a
school trip: all those possibilities, all those wonder of the universe to see, and
what happens? You end up trapped on the school bus with a bunch of bullies. It’s
incredibly scary, perhaps the scariest modern Who story after ‘Waters Of Mars’,
even though its nothing more than actors and a stagehand with a hammer. It’s a
story that asks big questions not only of the characters but the audience at
home: what would you do in such a situation? I like to think I’d do the right
thing, but you know maybe I wouldn’t? Maybe all of us wouldn’t? Some Dr Who
stories are fun, but this one is intense and once the shuttle stops the tension
doesn’t let up again till the end The
personal clock might have been ticking towards Midnight for Russell’s time on
the show but he was just reaching a high peak even for him – how brilliant,
then, that in the present day we get to have him back to see a little more
about where he might have gone next.
POSITIVES + The Mill’s
special effects team have always been a lot more comfortable creating worlds
than they are monsters (especially when moving)
and this story suggests that Russell might have finally twigged that in
his near-last hurrah. ‘Midnight’ the planet looks gorgeous and totally unlike
any other we’ve seen in the series before, made out of crystals rather than carbon.
The shots where the sunlight shines down on the planet, hitting it just so like
a Hollywood blockbuster, looks every bit as ‘real’ as anything in the space
shuttle as if you could walk into it, despite only existing on a computer. The
only sad thing as that we don’t get to see more of the planet once the lights
go out (the script’s written to hide it, presumably to save on expense, but it
wouldn’t have cost that much more to have a static shot of the planet and if
anything an invisible monster attacking you from a planetscape that looked like
paradise would have been scarier still).
Previous ‘Silence In The Library/Forest Of The
Dead’ next ‘Turn Left’
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