THE DOCTOR WHO RATINGS GUIDE: BY FANS, FOR FANS

BBC
Midnight

Story No. 212 Repeat after me
Production Code Series Four Episode Ten
Dates June 14 2008

With David Tennant, Catherine Tate
Written by Russell T Davies Directed by Alice Troughton
Executive Producers: Russell T Davies, Julie Gardner.

Synopsis: The Doctor takes a tour bus to the surface of the crystalline planet Midnight. But is there something outside... or has it already got in?

Reviews

A Review by Harry O'Driscoll 24/10/09

Midnight is well and truly an episode like no other and it came not a minute too soon. With all due respect to RTD, season 4 has been quite boring and unimaginative, but this is a story that thinks outside the box for a change, and isn't that sort of what Doctor Who and science fiction in general is all about?

It is so good to see a story that doesn't receive merit for special effects but from plot and characterization. A wonderful of example of cabin fever and how people can change when they are scared. For once, even the Doctor is scared and when the passengers turn on him for what must be the first time he takes a reality check. He is on his own, no one to vouch for him and people instantly pick the odd one out. He is properly shaken at the end and perhaps sees humanity in a slightly different light. He has no TARDIS and is trapped with everybody turning against him and he is well and truly powerless and on his own. He can no longer command the authority he usually does amongst people and he more vulnerable than ever.

Sky Silvestry (that's what I'm calling the thing possessing her) is the first time in a long time that Doctor Who has actually scared me. For once, we see a different kind of villain that doesn't gloat, doesn't tell all its plans but just repeats, even the Doctor can't coax a proper response out of her. As it synchronizes with everyone, we see that this creature isn't passive, it is aware of what is happening. The idea that it is stealing their words gives a sense that they can't even talk without it in its own way attacking them.

All the passengers are fascinating; not necessarily on their own, but when they are panicking over the alien. When they start to lash out at each other and not just the Doctor, we see the true desperation and paranoia that they are leaping at whoever opens their mouth next. Ultimately, the hostess (whose name we will never know) is the one who stops for a second, sees what is happening and makes that ultimate sacrifice.

The only criticism that springs to mind is that it would have been good to see some more of the planet Midnight. A planet made of diamonds would have made a welcome change to the endless quarries but after such captivating drama I'm not going to complain. Midnight is appropriately and absolute diamond and is a fine example of why is enjoy watching Doctor Who.

A Shallow Midnight review and a Big Point about Doctor Who Teariness by Graham Pilato 25/11/09

I gotta say that I thought it was a 10/10 episode. I was totally gripped and amazed by the monster. The beginning was a lot of fun and incredibly engaging with its charming little tourists and the new and fun world. And the ending was lovely with the Doctor's shock and recovery. He wasn't the hero this time, you know! The hostess was. And her sudden selflessness was a shock, the only thing that seemed suddenly possibly out of character. It wasn't foreshadowed at all, but I suppose flight attendants need to be a little bit selfless to do what they do professionally... People in the hospitality industry are suspiciously too giving, perhaps many of them really do want to just make a Christ-like offering of themselves, like career teachers who give nearly their whole day to 150 or more students for 30 years, or firefighters risking their lives, or doctors practically sacrificing their twenties to huge amounts of schooling to heal... Doctors... hmm...

Anyway, I was totally gripped and loved the episode from beginning to end. The people on the bus were real enough for me. It was a lot like Hitchcock's "Lifeboat" (or the very good sci-fi version of it, "Lifepod", which I actually saw first). Not much to say here. Genius dialogue monster.

And as it's only my fifth 10/10 for the new Who series, I think that says something. I see this as the most suspenseful episode of the series so far, with perhaps the single exception of Blink. (My other 10s are: The Empty Child, Love and Monsters, Gridlock and Blink.)

Okay, let's discuss that. The hostess saves the day and the adventure is an emotional horrorshow for the Doctor. But that's okay. Let's see him ripped apart. And we love it. Why?

And come to that, what makes him so interesting to watch as an emoter? Not that I'm against it.

However, I've never been a fan of the "blubbiness" of the 10th Doctor. Aw, come on, buck up, Doctor.

It's not that being emotional is a problem at all, of course. It's perfect. It's what we need and want. But I think that a good character who makes the audience sympathize with his trying circumstances should do so with understatement as much as possible. I definitely felt the end of both the second and third seasons were "overboard". The departure of Rose was unintentional and unexpected for the Doctor, the near-confession of love and all the tears and the needing of the channeling of a supernova to make the link in Doomsday was all so dramatic, but it put me right out of caring for him. It went much farther than Doctor Who has gone before to show the Doctor as not just sympathetic (a pretty big mistake, I think, as he's supposed to be so alien and interesting and strange) but sentimental.

Ooh, and crying over the Master's death, that was not just painful for me, but weird. I don't care if it makes sense to someone talking about the last of the Time Lords and all that. The mantra of the 10th Doctor isn't "Alons-y", it's "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." (Okay, that needs some citations, perhaps, but for now suffice to say you know he's said it a LOT... so much so that when River Song said it I felt like she must have gotten it from him.) And even if he's often guilty, is it interesting or even right? It's so out of character for a guy who's a righteous domestic destroyer of Prime Ministers' careers. He feels but he reels too. I'm emotional, but I don't want to be pushed to cry for a guy who I think of as imminently capable of distancing himself for centuries now from such small-time emotions and too-human qualities.

The previous Doctors all had emotional responses before in the past, but the 10th Doctor is doing all of my crying for me. The 5th, for instance, has had underplayed moments again and again that have moved me to tears and kept his alienness intact (the ends of Earthshock, Terminus, even the last seconds of Warriors of the Deep are all really powerful... but Tegan's departure and then his own "is this death?" were all far more moving to me than just about any big teary 10th Doctor moment, save the last third of The Family of Blood.

Overplaying emotion as an actor can choke the depth right out of a scene. People say it's good acting or bad acting... It's definitely acting, and strong choices on the part of David Tennant and his directors, but I think few moments have removed me from sympathy with his Doctor as much as the overblown 2nd and 3rd season finales and their teary moments. I love epic Who stuff beyond belief, but the thing is: the Doctor is already plenty epic, he don't need no giant tears. Still, The End of the World's teary moment was awesome and the human John Smith is a totally different story.

I think The Doctor's Daughter tears have to be miles too far, though, seeing as the character who was his daughter was sketched in about as well as a stick figure that likes to run and fight bad guys. We knew her longer than he did.

The folks who say that the new series benefits from some ongoing character development and emotional lives for the Doctor and companions are right, I'm sure. The classic series had half as much emphasis on such "soapy" things, too, and surely the new series benefits from lovers of the the ongoing plots and intrigues like "When will River Song return and be so intimate with the 10th Doctor?" It's probably gonna be really good. Though, the earlier poster who said that previous Doctors were ciphers also seemed to be missing out on a lot of lovely complexities in their performances.

The 10th Doctor's big risk, like the 6th's, is big emotion. And, like the 5th, he's totally vulnerable to it, but a bit rash and a little bit fallible (and youthful). He's a big wet blanket though, compared to anything else we've ever seen before in the portrayals of the Doctor. Why always?

Essential by Mike Morris 25/6/10

One of the most surprising facts about the TV adaptation of Human Nature is that, in the initial stages, it was planned to make the serial without using any digital effects whatsoever.

In fact, the only thing that's more surprising is just how surprising a fact it is in the first place (I'm almost certain that sentence makes sense). After all, this is Human Nature we're talking about; we aren't throwing around ideas about adapting Avatar to a 3-hand theatre piece set it in a public toilet. The original novel isn't exactly bursting with complicated effects: the only really challenging sequence is when the Aubertides, sorry, Ofbloods nuke a school and turn the building into glass. That isn't in the TV version anyway, although its effective replacement - the Ofbloods zapping the village from their spaceship - is arguably the reason that the notion was abandoned in the first place.

For all that, Human Nature doesn't look anything like any other story from the new series. The only digital effects are ostentatiously snot-green, just emphasising the dustily banal look of the rest of the setting. The only Doctor Who story that comes close to this is Tooth and Claw, but Tooth and Claw's low-saturation, washed-out colours are so pronounced that they read as a deliberate stylistic choice, whereas Human Nature looks like a high-budget filmed serial from the late seventies. To sum up, it looks so ordinary that it's positively odd.

This is a roundabout way of saying that the default "look" of today's Doctor Who - not just Doctor Who in fact, but any adventure series - is a high-saturation, colourful gallery of fast-moving images and high-tempo editing. This seemed odd at first - one of the more noticeable fan-gripes about the Eccleston series at the time was that everything was way too pastel-pink in the future, and we'd rather more episodes in the dark with the occasional flash of electric-blue light, thanks - but we've now come to just accept it as how television looks (the technical reason for this ubiquity, I'm sure, is that computer graphics never quite manage to get depth-of-field right, and it's easier to synchronise them into a brightly-coloured background). At the time I wasn't the only person criticising the prettified production of The Unquiet Dead, but after The Idiot's Lantern, The Shakespeare Code, The Unicorn and the Wasp and The Fires of Pompeii all adopted the same tourist-gallery look, the objections seem pointless. Oh well, I suppose I'll have to focus on the godawful script instead.

To sum the above up; technical innovation can become so much an accepted part of vocabulary, that it takes quite a leap of imagination just to ignore it. One of the more noticeable things about the Eccleston season's scripts is that their scope is far more limited visually than anything that came after; the writers were still viewing Doctor Who scripts according to their old structure, uncertain what the new series could do, with the result that only RTD-scripted stories broke away from the "one basic setting" template, and even then not by much (The Unquiet Dead is mostly set in a house; Dalek in a bunker; Father's Day in a church). Two years later, we had Gridlock, which had visuals way beyond anything the first series ever attempted; but we also had The Lazarus Experiment, which shows how Technical Innovation can lead to a situation where "the Doctor is chased around by a computer-thing!" is seen as a viable basis for a drama. The classic series would never have done anything so banal, because the classic series knew it couldn't build a storyline around a bloke in a costume alone.

At this point, hopefully, the link to Midnight is obvious.

Midnight's brief, self-imposed by the editor (albeit I'm sure that ploughing money into the series finale was an ulterior motive) is a one-set story (aside for the non-essential prologue and epilogue). As a result, it's the sort of story that could have been made during the Troughton era without undue difficulty; even the shots of Midnight's surface are seen through screens, easily achieved by a matte painting back in black-and-white times. Truth be told, Midnight could be a stageplay. It doesn't just look odd within current Doctor Who framework, it looks odd when compared to contemporary television as a whole. It's also the most effective story in Series 4, and one of the best pieces of British television of the year. Not that it's perfect, in fact it has a fair few problems; however, it's fascinating precisely because it could have been made fifty years ago. Its most comfortable bedfellow in Doctor Who lore is The Edge of Destruction, for heaven's sake, and even that was considered unusual at the time.

In many ways, it highlights the flashes-n-bangs fallacy that had gripped Doctor Who at that stage, and still hasn't fully released its grip; odd, give that it was Russell T. Davies who wrote the thing in the first place. One of the most notable things about Midnight is that the trailer for it at the end of The Forest of the Dead was noticeably rubbish; but how do you make a trailer for a story like that anyway? Its most gripping moments are a creepy-looking actress repeating everybody else's dialogue, which isn't trailer material. This contrasts with, say, The Fires of Pompeii, which is largely crippled by the inclusion of disaster-movie elements that belong to another story altogether; tellingly, these parts of the story seem to be written with the trailer in mind.

The central beauty of the story comes from its sheer, stripped-back invention. One of the least-noted facets of Russell T. Davies as a writer is how fascinated he is by the process of production, and has written a number of stories where the narrative is based around anticipated production techniques; witness the way that the cars in Gridlock are essentially survival pods in an inimical motorway, and the production splits the CGI / physical sets neatly between the two. In Midnight, it's a shuttle on a world that only exists as CGI. Ergo, we never see what's outside, and we never find out what the monster is. The story has shipped some criticism for its refusal to give us a reveal on the monster, but this is probably the thing I like about it most; I can think of half-a-dozen perfectly serviceable SF explanations for what is outside, but none of them would have added to the story's obvious metaphor of the unseen creature as the thump-thump of paranoia.

The characters are terrific. Say what you like about Davies, but one thing he understands is the looseness of character; the people in this are fluid and without a core essence, a fundamentally decent bunch who react to threat in all sorts of different ways. The middle-England couple are the most likeable of the group until their lives are threatened, after which the real adversary of the story ends up being Jethro's mum (with dad as the bullied stooge). They aren't villains, though; they both recognise the horror of what they were prepared to do, once the moment has passed.

(Two asides; first of all, the line "You mean, like an immigrant?" is a rather shallow, sloganeering way of signalling the Hey-She-Ain't-So-Nice, and is the story's only real error. Second of all, this is one of those episodes where the perverse power of a woman over men is beautifully achieved.)

And the rest? Jethro declares "I'm not killing anyone" and acts as though on a plane of teenage superiority throughout, but doesn't intercede when the Doctor is about to be murdered. Didi - nice, pleasant, oh-so-submissive Didi - unapologetically wants to throw Sky off the ship; then, once we've written her off as having gone to the other side, she's the only voice to insist that the Doctor hasn't been possessed. Meanwhile the professor, a decent old sort who we might expect to be the one who discovers inner strength, actually collapses into being obtuse, pompous, and a downright useless windbag; a double-bluff, because he turns out to be exactly the character that the others assumed him to be at the beginning.

The unnamed stewardess commits an act of bravery that has been dismissed as out of character, but this misses the point that we never see her character. She hides behind a professional persona, looks terrified when the Doctor tries to get past her offical hospitality mode, tries desperately to adhere to procedure when it's obviously collapsed, and is then the person who figures it out and solves the problem. Essentially, if the story was told from her point of view, it would be a valedictory tale of a woman crippled by a lack of self-confidence, finally discovering the strength to trust her own judgement and being proved right.

That's the point of Midnight, really. It's a story about seven people having their own distinct crises under the same conditions. We only ever see glimpses of their stories, which is what makes it so satisfying. Whereas most characters in SF drama consist of two layers - one surface, one "true" character underneath - Midnight's crew are as volatile as real people can be. They start out as stereotypes, but those stereotypes rapidly crumble.

The Doctor goes through the mill in this one, perhaps more so than any other story. Tennant is superb here; it's a story that criticises the Doctor's entire manner, that of the smart-arsed man who makes cryptic quips to his companions to show how clever he is. It's probably the side of Tennant's Doctor I liked least - he almost never has a conversation with people, he just drops wisecracks at them - and to see this exposed so mercilessly is gloriously satisfying. Had he bothered at any stage to explain what he was doing, he wouldn't have ended up with a crew prepared to throw him out of the ship. Even in extremis - and when the passengers first start threatening to murder him, it's clear that the Doctor is very very frightened indeed - he doesn't bring himself to treat the humans as equal. Even, say, handing over his sonic screwdriver and explaining how it worked might have done the trick, but it doesn't seem to even occur to him as a course of action.

Sky Silvestry's possessed form is one of the most unsettling creatures to appear in the new series. This is largely down to a spectacular performance and perfect casting, but the dialogue is beautifully off-kilter too. The repeating is creepy; the synchronisation is worse. The Doctor's slow, careful conversation with the creature is almost hypnotic, barely sounding like human speech at all ("Whatever you want, whether it's voice or warmth or form, you don't have to steal it") so much as a litany, or intonation. The moment when Sky surpasses the Doctor, when she usurps his voice just as he's trying to broker a deal, is really terrifying. From that moment on, the sight of Tennant dumbly muttering alien dialogue ("He's waited so long... in the dark... and the cold... and the diamonds...") is a tour de force, a man paralysed, seeing his own destruction and locked in his own body.

Russell T. Davies wrote the three subsequent episodes this season, and wrote or co-wrote the four subsequent specials, but I can't help but think of this as his final burst of creativity. It sets itself clear boundaries, based on production requirements and by doing so it ends up closer to old-fashioned Doctor Who than anything before or since. After all, old-style Doctor Who was also about working within tight boundaries and writing based on methods of production. That the story chose this route, as opposed to just having it imposed by powers from above, is what makes it push the format of minimalism more than any classic Who story came close to achieving. If you want to understand the differences between new and old Doctor Who, this contains everything you want.

All of which makes it sounds like one for a student of Who rather than the viewer. Wrong; it's a wonderful slice of entertainment. After the redemptive success of Turn Left, the remainder of Davies' stories mixed sentimentality with patchily entertaining action (or in some cases sheer uselessness; Planet of the Dead, I'm looking in your direction). The stories after Turn Left - of which more anon - made me think of a man who has already made all the arguments to prove his point, and is reduced to shouting the same thing louder and louder. Midnight is altogether different; it's lean, fresh, dynamic, the work of a man who wants to innovate and challenge his audience. To do so, he does the one shocking thing he has left and embraces minimalism; he tells a story in a featureless box. The result is a clarity of purpose, a drive and economy and verve, that we wouldn't see again. Midnight is one of the strangest and most beautiful "little" stories of all time.