Revisiting Midnight – 7 Years On
Russell T Davies’ best? Guest contributor Harry O’Driscoll revisits the Series 4 episode.
Series 4 was not very good in my opinion. It seemed to be the laziest so far, the production team so confident in their own success that there was little sense of having to try. Things were too dependent on special effects and alien invasions, giving a sense of “been there, done that”. I remember at the time Midnight entered underneath everybody’s radar, slotted in between the annual superb Moffat story and the return of Rose Tyler that was probably inevitable. It was not exactly trailer material, all I remember as this was promoted as the episode where the Doctor was isolated and powerless.
That is what probably made this episode stand out so much. On a rare occasion the Doctor was not bigger than his surroundings and is stuck in the same boat as everybody else. When he attempts to assert his authority it is subverted wonderfully, “oh, like you’re so special” is a great moment. And when the Doctor decrees “There is no vote!” it suddenly sheds a new light on his character, that without everybody on his side the Doctor is actually arrogant and even out of touch with reality. There has been an undercurrent of egotism with Tennant’s Doctor and this is the moment when it comes to bite him.
All the normal traits that define the Doctor act against him in this episode. In a story all about mob mentality a maverick like the Doctor stands out in the wrong way. His attempt to rally the group round and bring out their better nature falls on deaf ears. His insistence that the group needs him when in fact he is wrong and if they’d thrown the Sky Silvestry out to begin with they would have saved the stewardesses life. When he declares that if they want to throw Sky out they’ll have to throw him out to, it never even occurs to him that they would have no problem with that.
This is a rare occasion in New Who where the Doctor is not the biggest man in the room and is actually as clueless as anything else. More so even, given that he is completely unprepared for the alien to be hostile or for the passengers to turn on him. Suddenly he seems so small. And when he says to Donna “Don’t do that, really don’t”, the words are spoken with deadly seriousness. The Doctor’s jovial catchphrase turned into something more grave, implying he’d even been traumatised by what’s happened.
The scene where the passengers start to gang up on him create a growing feeling of unease as people start to turn on the outsider. It’s all about the dangers of unconformity and the power of group think, how when people are scared they will jump to conclusions and make wild accusations without any normal thought process. And note how once the threat is gone, everybody returns to normal astonishingly quickly. Just like Children of Earth the alien is actually a bit of sideshow, the main attraction is the human’s reaction to it. How the monster makes us more monstrous in turn.
It’s a story all about how people are not as they seem. Professor Hobbs who is so dogmatic closed-minded, nearly every time he makes an observation it’s incorrect. Biff and Val who act so prepossessing at first and by the end descend into crude, vindictive monsters. Jethro appears to be a nihilist but emerges to be more insightful and thoughtful then his parents. The unnamed air stewardess who tries desperately to cling to the rules and is ultimately is the one who acts out to break away from the rest of the group and save the Doctor. These characters appear like stereotypes at the beginning, but it is impossible to predict how they will act later on. This is a story that is all about subverting people’s expectations.
It is so unconventionally structured that it creates a sense of anxiety that few others have. Watching it seven years on and that anxiety is still there as the Doctor realises too late how powerless he is. Watching it the first time round and it’s near impossible to foresee how things turn out. This is real immersive storytelling, where the narrative grips you so much that you almost feel a part of it and begin to fear for the Doctor’s life.
And it’s just 45 minutes of people inside a box, talking. Russell T Davies commentated on how hard it was to write an eight person scene, ensuring that everybody gets their own voice. Any hack can do a big imitation Hollywood blockbuster, but it takes a writer of real talent to pull off such a dialogue heavy script like this. Often Davies’ best scripts were the more talky ones, not when he’s focusing on big set pieces.
It features a monster that we know nothing about, that just sits there and drives the passengers to the brink by playing a children’s game with them. It feels oddly similar to the show’s origins where it was basically shot like a piece of theatre. Even the planet which we barely get to see looks unlike anything we’ve seen before.
For me it still stands up as one of the most vivid, potent stories that Doctor Who has ever done.
