Here’s Why Midnight is Your Most Underrated Series 4 Serial

Simon Mills is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

“Ahh, taking a big space truck with a bunch of strangers across a diamond planet called Midnight? What could possibly go wrong?”

What a great quote, and one of the many reasons why I love this story so much! Apart from all the wonderfully quotable lines, star turns from guests David Troughton, Colin Morgan, and Lesley Sharp, and the seemingly well rounded world in which the story happens – we have a well crafted ghost story with lots of chills and dubious moral choices.

So, just when we thought Russell T Davies was descending into predictability and an endless run of average stories (I was still feeling grumpy after the dire Sontaran story and The Unicorn and The Wasp), he comes up with this instant masterpiece, showing us how a base under siege story should be written. This is an exploration of how quickly humans will descend into panic and chaos and will turn on each other when the fear of the unknown takes hold.

After a pre-titles sequence with the Doctor asking Donna to take the tour with him but failing and leaving her to her sunbathing, we rejoin him on board the tour bus exchanging pleasantries with the other passengers and quickly establishing backstories of everyone on board – the arrogant Professor Hobbes, his downtrodden but probably cleverer/wiser assistant Deedee, the “ordinary folk” Biff and Val Cane and their bored son Jethro, and the wonderfully enigmatic Sky Silvestry – played to perfection by the superb Lesley Sharp.

The hostess greets everyone with a typical RTD greeting of “ladies, gentlemen, and variations thereupon” (which I will now forever use when addressing a group of people!) and the tour starts with multiple streams of onboard entertainment all blaring out at once – which isn’t that much of a stretch from how things are today with everyone watching different channels and using multiple devices all at the same time in some sort of multimedia orgiastic frenzy. The Doctor soon puts paid to this din with his magic wand… Sorry, I mean sonic screwdriver… and peace reigns as he announces that everyone will just have to TALK TO EACH OTHER! This soon turns out to be a great bonding experience as they all start getting along nicely and laughing together at their different stories, or being lectured by the Professor on his research. The Professor provides us with the important information we need about the planet having no history and nothing living on the surface. It is during the Professor’s lecture that the tour bus breaks down and comes to a stop. Uh oh! Time for the tension and panic to start building!

Whilst talking to the bus crew who tell us that a rescue bus will be there within the hour, The Doctor persuades them to open the window screens to take a look. We see a beautiful sparkly crystalline vista (which would be gorgeous if reimagined with today’s HD visuals, by the way!). One of the crew spots something moving – something dark, running – just as the screens are closing – but that’s impossible, I hear you cry! Nothing can live out there with the Xtonic radiation poisoning everything! This is what we’ve been told by different people several times already. And yet… the mechanic was adamant that he saw it. What could it be? What could this mean???

The Doctor returns to the cabin where his words about the reasons for the halt are rapidly misconstrued and the panic quickly builds until everyone is shouting and everything is being misunderstood at an incredible rate of knots. The Doctor calls for quiet (very loudly) and calm is restored when Deedee explains that they aren’t going to run out of air. It is at this point that things take a sharp turn for Chillsville as a series of knocks are heard on the outer hull of the bus. What could it be? What could this mean??? Have I asked these questions already????? Is that too many question marks? Well, these are big and scary questions!

Sky quickly becomes isolated amidst her panic when she thinks “it” is after her, maybe sent by her ex-lover to “get her”. The mysterious “it” keeps a-knocking and then the bus starts a-rocking and the lights go out while everyone screams in panic. When things settle down we briefly see a few seconds of Rose Tyler trying to communicate with the Doctor across universes in a foreshadowing of what is to come in later episodes. The hostess opens the door to the cockpit but finds that it’s no longer there and is open to the planet’s surface and radiation. The driver and mechanic would have been vaporised, the Doctor assures us.

It is only now that everyone realises that Sky has been quiet and has been huddled with her back to everyone. Jethro also notes that the noise outside has stopped and speculates that this might be because it is now inside… I’m loving this build up of fear and tension. I think this is the single best example of this type of story-telling we’ve ever seen in Doctor Who. I’ve seen pretty much every story from 1970 onwards and a fair few of the black and white episodes and can’t remember ever seeing it done better. The Hinchcliffe years were good for the gothic horror, of course, but for the pure emotional manipulation of this story, I just don’t think it can be beaten.

Back to the story, we see Sky turn around and her wide-eyed stare immediately tells us that something is wrong. Lesley Sharp is marvelous as the possessed Sky and we then embark on, what I think, is probably one of the hardest scenes to perform – repeating word for word what someone else is saying while they are still saying it. This is where the story starts to become elevated above every other story in this series. The sheer alienness of what Sky is doing coupled with the Doctor’s obvious delight at encountering “something new”. Again, after a few minutes of this, Jethro shows his keen observational skills by pointing out that Sky is now saying things AT THE SAME TIME as the people she is copying. How can she do this?

“Shamble bobble dibble dooble!”

The hostess is first to voice what most of the passengers are thinking… Throw Sky outside to die! The others take up the idea and start calling for her death. The Doctor tries to talk them out of it by pointing out that this is murder. Plain and simple. Fear has taken its toll and turned them all into potential killers, except for the surprisingly rational Jethro who continues to prove himself a lot more mature and level headed than his parents. Sadly, though, Jethro also points out that the Doctor is loving this which starts to turn everyone against him and the decision seems to be rapidly made to throw him out as well, just to be on the safe side because they don’t trust him!

This is a very real pressure cooker situation. Throw everyone in a pot, turn up the fear and see how quickly they turn on each other or gang up on someone they see as the cause of their fear. So many parallels here in real life – just look at the current state of fear so many are living in due to recent terrorist acts and the overwhelming tide of fear that turns to anger and hatred of the Muslim community that are seen as the perpetrators rather than just fellow humans who are also victims.

Sky/the creature then changes tack and only speaks in unison with the Doctor, making the others even more suspicious of him and the possibility they are working together. The Doctor keeps trying to figure out what the creature wants; maybe it wants his voice because he is the only one who can help… but the eyes tell a different story, they say in unison. And then the seemingly impossible happens and the creature speaks first – seeming to take control and forcing the Doctor to repeat her words.

Sky/the creature is now pretending to be recovered and the others believe her, except for Deedee. Even the keenly observant Jethro is taken in.

The hostess, however, wants to listen to Deedee. Deedee explains the process of repeating, then synchronising and then taking over and draining the victim, just as they have seen and just as the Doctor said would happen, but is unsuccessful in convincing them. However, the more the creature drains the Doctor, the more of his “voice” she takes and the more she sounds like him… and eventually gives the game away by saying “Molto bene!” and “Allons-y!” – both phrases that the hostess recognise as the Doctor’s.

And then here we are, we’ve arrived at another self-sacrifice moment (see my other recent article about “Father’s Day” – it seems I have a taste for stories with self-sacrifice!) where the hostess grabs Sky/the creature and pulls her along out of the airlock to save everyone else. What an incredibly brave thing to do.

Ask yourself, could you do the same thing? Would you kill yourself in order to save other people’s lives? Hopefully, we’ll never have to find the answer out for ourselves…

The obvious question from this story is most definitely, “what the hell was this thing?” and I, for one, am glad that we never find out and we never even see it. A classic case of the monster that ISN’T seen being much more scary than the one we do see. This is the stuff of our nightmares from when we were children – the monster under the bed, or in the closet, the unseen thing that terrorises you with the briefest of glimpses or hints of movement from the corner of your eye.

This is fear at its most primal which is what invokes the primal response in our protagonists – fight or flight. They can’t flee, so the only option is to blindly lash out at what they see as the threat. At first, this is the possessed Sky, but then it’s what they think is the possessed Doctor but we suspect that he was just being controlled and being used as a patsy to take the fall, to be thrown out of the bus to die so the possessed Sky can be free to return to the city and do whatever it is that psychic shadow beasts do in those environments – presumably feed on the minds of the innocent.

What chaos may have been wrought on Midnight or even much wider in the universe if the hostess hadn’t made the ultimate sacrifice to save her charges? We’ll never know, but we can imagine…

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