Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

Repetitive Stress

There's one big disadvantage to doing an eleventh hour, if you will, review of Midnight.  To put it quite simply: most everything has already been said.  There's nothing new under the bright, instantly-lethal sun.  This means that most of the points I'd most likely have made, someone else (or everyone else) already has, and I'll just end up repeating their observations.  While I generally try to litter my posts with my own voice, I'll probably end up stealing those of everyone else.  I guess I'll use this as an excuse to do a fairly short review (It could happen!) and maybe I'll manage to avoid echoing each and every point the other reviewers have already made, though I probably will.  At least I can be fairly certain of not falling into the trap of parroting French philosophers, since I'm at best vaguely aware of their existence.

Of course, if I really wanted to creep you all out, I'll start repeating all of the other reviewers before they've written their review.  I'm still working on that.

Doctor Who: Midnight

Seven passengers set sail that day for an eight hour tour...an eight hour tour:

I have to admit...the beginning of this episode had me worried.

No, not the part before the opening credits, where Donna and the Doctor have their little phone call.  That worked for me.  I'm even tempted to rattle on at length about how marvelous Donna is, even in an episode she barely appears in...but I should probably restrain myself.  My affection notwithstanding, I can save my adulation for the next episode, which, if I'm lucky, will be positively dripping with Catherine Tate.

As they settled in for their package tour, I felt sure the episode was going to be a rehash of Voyage of the Damned, complete with hamfisted satire of some easy target, cackhanded scripting from, to repeat even myself, "the inconsistent hand of Russell T. Davies", broadly-drawn caricatures, a culminating deus ex machina, and probably a liberal use of magic wands and pixie dust.  Having never seen Hitchcock's Lifeboat, the beginning of the trip had me fully expecting something more along the lines of a sci-fi version of Gilligan's Island.  The whole part where the Eurovision Song contest was layered over early twentieth-century cartoons and an "artistic installation" for a bus containing a total of seven passengers "and variations thereupon" was just annoying, and Murray Gold's intentionally-cheesy mallet-driven lounge score didn't help matters.  Title-cards telling us how far the bus has gone, the suburban family, a slide show of the Professor's holiday...little of this held any promise.  Even Dee Dee's lost moon, Jethro's foreshadowing and Sky's ex leaving her for another galaxy didn't go far to improve matters.

It's like all this repetition forms some sort of repeated meme.

Of course, the shadow of the Christmas special did fall especially hard over Midnight in the harsh exotonic sunlight.  The repetition doesn't just happen diagetically in the episode.  The Doctor, sans companion, is on a tour with a bunch of stereotypes when disaster strikes.  It even repeated the part where the hostess sacrifices herself to take down the villain, though this time without the loss of an innocent forklift.  It's like all this repetition forms some sort of repeated meme.  Of course, as someone who watched Doctor Who: Confidential mentioned way down there in one of the earlier reviews, apparently this was intentional.  While I'm repeating everything I'll just nick this bit from Stuart's fine review way down there: "it’s the same story, another group of tourists on the brink of death and indeed as he also identified in Confidential (as usual nicking everything I wanted to write here), he wanted to see what happened when humanity actually acted realistically in the face of the Doctor’s platitudes."  There.  I think that's almost recursive.

Unsurprisingly, I was pleasantly surprised; everything was all uphill from there.  When the bus finally grinds to a halt, the episode finally starts moving.

In Case of Emergency, Break Glass:

Humans sure seem to be disturbingly flighty, frail creatures.  As soon as the bus develops some plot-conveniencing engine trouble, the fear sets in.  The panic begins and in a no time at all they begin to turn on each other like a pack of hungry cannibals at a dinner party (with apologies to Raymond Scott).  The shrieking might get to be a bit much ("I don't need this.  I'm on a schedule!  This is completely unnecessary!"), but, as everyone else keeps saying, all this shouting and hair-pulling is how people actually react when faced with minor delays and life threatening circumstances, so it's no surprise that in a few short minutes they're ready to start tossing people out of airlocks.

Of course, the Doctor doesn't do himself any favours, what with trying to cover for the flim-flam and then his general arrogance and insufferable cleverness and "John Smith" and all that.  Insert point here that everyone else has made about why the Doctor needs his companions around to protect him from himself.

It's like all this repetition forms some sort of repeated meme.

When the knocking begins it sets off more tension than in Poe's "The Raven" (sorry, it's as close to French philosophy as I'm likely to get...you already got your Gilligan's Island).  Once it (whatever it is) gets inside, it doesn't take long to reach a point where the mob mentality takes over.  Once the hostess suggests throwing people out of the bus, the adults of Cane family in particular begins to salivate.  I'll leave the observations about "this way lies fascism" to Frank, since he already wrote at length on the topic.  Midnight owes a substantial debt to a thousand other enclosed-space horror movies, but Davies has managed to craft an effective slice of the genre.

Score One For Murray Gold:

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn't reiterate everyone's glowing praise of Murray Gold's score and the "special sound".  Rumour has it this is also addressed at length in the aforementioned Confidential.  While never quite reaching to the level of questionable excess so many of his past efforts have striven for, Gold's score does a fairly relentless job of ramping up the tension from about the moment everything starts to go pear-shaped.  The score and "special sound" combines very well with the mixing and sound design of Sky's vocal acrobatics to really accentuate the feeling of the alien about the whole situation.

Midnight Oil:

What really keeps a mechanism like Midnight running smoothly is the performances, and I rather think the cast acquits itself better-than-average in the episode, even if there are a few needlessly arm-flailing bug-eyed moments and a bit too much of the macho posturing from the thuggish Biff Cane ("Calling me a coward??"). 

It's like all this repetition forms some sort of repeated meme.

Lesley Sharp turns in a fairly stellar performance as Sky Sylvestry; sure it was a little bog-standard screaming and panicking early on, but I largely blame the script for that; once she's possessed, she's positively alien, even when she stops repeating what everyone's saying.  (An especially nice touch from the director is the use of the silhouette to frame her, which highlights the alienness very effectively). 

I liked the Professor and Dee Dee...both fine portrayals of well-written characters.  I particularly thought Dee Dee rang of potential companion material, though she was, admittedly, no Catherine Tate.  Tennant is also quite excellent in Midnight, pulling off "helpless" far better than he's managed anywhere else in the last three years of his, to quote Neil quoting someone else, being all David Tennant-y (I particularly liked his "experimentation" with Sky's voice games), and despite some script-induced caricature problems, Lindsey Coulson evokes a hell of an effective look at garden-variety suburban evil.

Rough in the Diamond/The Dark Side of the Sun:

Of course, this wouldn't be one of my reviews without me finding something about the episode to bitch about, so here I've finally found my own voice.

Okay, so maybe the entire concept of "exotonic sunlight" is all bollocksy nonsense to begin with...but not as bollocksy as the idea that someone would decide to put a resort somewhere where the sunlight vaporizes people.  Space is big, or so they tell me.  Humans have, apparently, managed to reach other galaxies.  Why, of all bizarre ideas, did they decide to put their pleasure palace in one of the few places where the sunlight is lethal.  It's like the ultimate adventure holiday.  It's almost as ridiculous as the idea that they'd upkit the whole thing and move when the Doctor tells them that something scary lurks in the light.

Also sort of grating on me: A planet with no dark.  Made of diamonds.  Incredibly bright light at all times.  And what did they choose to name it?  "Midnight."  Calling the planet Midnight seems to be either a too-cleverly ironic name for any of the planet-naming scientisty types, or perhaps a senselessly arbitrary and cynical writing decision on the part of the writer.

Sky even calls on the mob to cast the Doctor out into "the sun...and the dark!"  I saw that sunlight.  That was no dark sun.

It's like all this repetition forms some sort of repeated meme.

Interestingly, this episode chose to put the Doctor in imminent danger for his life, and I'm all for that...but somewhere in the back of my head I'm having difficulty suspending my disbelief that his life is actually at risk.  No, not just because he's the star of "Doctor Who" and for all sorts of inviolate financial and narrative reasons he's obviously not going to die.  The big problem I have is that, last I looked, he's already got a future.  All of one episode back we learn he's going to spend a great deal of time wooing Professor River Song over a period long enough to fill a thick diary...which was interesting in its own right, but sort of drains a lot of future-Who of dramatic tension.  Maybe it's one of those "time's in flux" wibbly-wobbly things.  Idunno.  Maybe it was all a terrible, regrettable mistake, like some idiot mistaking the Doctor for being "half-human"...or Torchwood.

For Services to Keeping Children Behind the Sofa

There's always been something deeply disturbing about any form of transport where you're basically putting yourself into an adequately upholstered seat under someone else's total control. They say that if man had meant to fly then he would have been given wings. Failing that then god would have not allowed man's carriage to exceed the width of an economy class seat. As a species we've been stiffed on both counts.

At least in the sky all you need worry about is other well directed air traffic and the occasional InterStasis 3000 salon twocked from a drive outside a family marsh pod, somewhere in the crab nebula, by a sentient teenage male octopoid who's just going through one of those rebellious joyriding phases. The real horror always occurs on a coach...

Every time you embark on a coach trip and tell me there isn't an over bearing sense of fear and foreboding. Not to mention overwhelming smell of BO. Because you know, you just know, that at some point during the journey you're going to have to...

...use the on board toilet.

Doctor Who: Midnight

Any number of freaky bodily possessions would be more appealing than having to wedge yourself into a wee-soaked closet that's being propelled at 70 miles per hour up some dreary motorway. The main aim is to get in and get out without making contact with any surface at all. God help you if you need to sit down. Even the odd shoe lace dancing lightly across the marshy floor is justification enough for disposal of said footwear in an industrial incinerator. Contorting yourself into a shape that enables you to achieve said ablutions whilst retaining total clothes security in such a tight space would, under normal circumstances, lead to your appointment as Paul Daniels next lovely assistant. You begin to wish you could just float above the receptacle, never making contact. A bit like you imaging how the Queen must cope during her royal toilet excursions.

Superpowers of non-contact defecation

The Queen, of course, has many roles and responsibilities, in addition to her superpowers of non-contact defecation. Her main duty is passing every single programme broadcast on the BBC as being suitable for her subjects - she's gone through more preview disks than Digital Spy. Everything from Lilly Allen's Bum Hole Hilarity through to the cerebral Andrew Davies' latest adaptation Dickensian Crack Swan Whores on Gin are given Brenda's seal of approval. Which explains why she immediately offered Rusty the gong on seeing Midnight.

Usually wears out the 0 button on his keyboard writing a single scene of dialogue.

He deserves hoisting high and carried through the streets of Cardiff on a sea of hands on the strength of Midnight alone. How this numerically exaggerated man kept things so small is a mystery. Perhaps it's a sign that he's about to go really over the top for the final three and start inventing numbers higher than a Gogol to accommodate the sheer madness of it all. There's something incredible about the fact that the man who usually wears out the 0 button on his keyboard writing a single scene of dialogue manages to keep this down to a handful of people in a single room.

And now that he's turned in quite possibly the best episode of Doctor Who ever, he's off. Why? It's a little like what happens to a relegated premier league football team as the season draws to a close. Once the pressure's off they usually start playing well and even, on occasion, beating top quality opposition in their own backyard.

And after a stunning victory like that even a three hour journey back home on the supporters club coach, with 80 odd pissed up fans and only one communal toilet between them, wouldn't feel half as terrifying as it might otherwise have done.

The Pool is Abstract!

Doctor Who: Midnight

Come back, Russel! All is forgiven!

Okay, I'm exaggerating. I was never a huge Davies detractor. Nor am I any less excited for the Moffat Era of Doctor Who. But I do admit that seeing Davies' name in the credits of an upcoming episode has never given me the same thrill as seeing a name like Paul Cornell or Steven Moffat. And quite rightly, too: their scripts have always been stellar while Russell's scripts have usually been merely very very good at best and sort of shit at worst. I was certainly worried about this week's episode. Nothing in the trailer appeared that interesting to me, but that rarely means anything at all. If this episode's trailer had been at all accurate to what we were getting, then I'd have been right.

But this episode was brilliant.

Of course, the entire premise of the episode is terribly ironic, when considered in contrast with series three. "No weapons, just words," Martha patiently explained to the Master like a kindergarten teacher talking to a student in last year's finale. It was foreshadowed by Shakespeare's powerful use of words in The Shakespeare Code and made literal when Martha laughed off the incurably lame video-game-plot of a weapon (A gun powered by four chemicals sounds suspiciously like some kind of lame sci-fi perversion of a Legend of Zelda plot) and used a single word to bring down the Master, "Doctor." Okay, that was kind of lame too. But you get the point.

Words are Worthless (Take that, Wordsworth!)

Here we get the opposite. Words are worthless (Take that, Wordsworth! Which reminds me, that's another famous person the Doctor needs to meet). As General Staal told us in The Sontaran Stratagem, "words are the weapons of womenfolk." But they're often the only weapon the Dcotor has, as we see this week especially once he has no companion to help with crowd control and there's nothing around the the Sonic Screwdriver can help him with. His weapon is his ability to communicate, but ultimately that's useless to him.

A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Frank compared Silence in the Library to The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, which he explained then as "a vast library contains all of the secrets of the universe." True, and an apt comparison. I'm sure it was a conscious reference on Moffat's part as well. But I can't help but feel that an even stronger comparison can be used in reference to this episode. The Library of Babel didn't just contain all of the secrets of the universe. Rather, it contained every possible permutation of alphabetical characters that could fit in one of its books. So, obviously, it contained the secrets, and in every language, but it also contained volumes upon volumes of meaningless streams of characters, such as "axaxaxas mlo" (which, technically, isn't meaningless but is actually a rather funny inside joke if you've closely read Borges' other stories, but that's beside the point).

The point is this: sure, the Library of Babel holds the secrets of the universe, and your horoscope for the next three decades, and the complete text of the Harry Potter Encyclopedia that J.K. Rowling hasn't even started yet. It has all of those things, but despite the fact that the words are all there, they lose their power because they're entirely divorced from any sort of intent. Borges plays further with this idea in Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote and I swear to God that I am done talking about Borges. As you have possibly guessed, what I'm driving at is something that's actually fairly simple: why this particular sort of mockery hurts the Doctor so much. His ability to reason through the problem and then speak about his conclusion is his usual tactic and is here his only tool. But what good is his reasoning if the end product (ie, his voice) can just as easily be pronounced by an entity that didn't arrive at it by reasoning? By repeating his words she robs them of their meaning, and that's truly scary: words without meaning are nothing more than the frantic calls of "Hey, who turned out the lights" coming out of Proper Dave's spacesuit in Moffat's two-parter. It was extremely creepy there and it's even creepier now that the Doctor's the victim. Perhaps the most terrifying thing at all is the thin, thin line between the copier and the copied.

This is the first episode where Catherine Tate failed to wow me. And that's only because she was hardly in it.

Yes, it was terrifying, in an intelligent sort of way. David Tennat's performance was simply brilliant and after the range of varied and nuanced performances he's given this season I'm afraid there's nowhere to go but down for him. I sincerely hope that I am wrong. This is the first episode where Catherine Tate failed to wow me. And that's only because she was hardly in it. And the guest cast was absolutely perfect, everyone from the faux-Doctor played by David Troughton to the tragically inadequate Jethro. His turning against the Doctor hurt most of all. Murray Gold's score was brilliant. Probably not his most memorable tunes, but that's not what it's about. It's about how the music services the episode and Murray does so wonderfully. As Doctor Who Confidential won't let us forget, the sound mixing in this episode is fantastic and the episode owes a lot of its excellence to the sound. And it's a good thing that the sound people are so competent, because the visuals in this episode aren't as important a component as they usually are. It's the script, the acting, and the sound that make this episode, and they're all wonderful.

In fact there was only one thing that upset me about this episode. And that thing goes by the name of Rose Tyler. Did anyone really need that little reminder that Rose was coming back? It was annoying in The Poison Sky and it was even worse here. Surely we didn't need a cameo to remind us of her imminent return. Isn't that what the trailer is for? Can't we wait another half hour for that, and enjoy this episode without Rose intruding on it? As a relatively new face to this blog I've never really had a chance to make clear how I feel about Rose. And I suppose I'll get to that next week, but I have to say this: I don't hate Rose, but I do hate the shadow she's cast across the program since her departure. The occasional mention would be all right, but she's been mentioned by name, alluded to, or shown in more than half of the stories since her departure and all I want is for it to end. Bringing her back is a good way to do this, so I can grit my teeth through this week knowing that her return is imminent and perhaps the Doctor can put his Rose issues to rest at last.

Vote: Midnight

Here are the results for the ninth blog poll, for Midnight:

• 89%: Superb - First Class
• 11%: Not Good - Cattle Class

The eleventh Doctor Who poll, for Turn Left, will be online later tonight following the broadcast of the episode.

Knocking on heaven’s door

Doctor Who: Midnight

There used to be a lot of talk during the fag-end of the JNT era that they were looking to bracket the stories, pigeonholing them into easy-to-pitch categories.

So you got your traditional tales, your big action story such as Remembrance or Battlefield, and your quirky stories - Delta, Happiness Patrol, Ghost Light.

Midnight falls firmly into this category, which in the new Who has become the final story before we run at the season climax proper.  In the past we’ve had an alien on the loo in Cardiff, Fan-ageddon, and DVD easter eggs as drama.  Now we get Who as one-act play.

for the first time since Utopia, Russell T Davies stops fannying about and justifies that OBE 

And we also get the point where, for the first time since Utopia, Russell T Davies stops fannying about and justifies that OBE, with perhaps one of his best scripts since pulling the show from the deep-freeze in 2005.

There was a real sense of stripping the Doctor down here.  Almost, in fact, as if someone was gearing up for a franchise reboot.  Everything the hero usually relied on was removed or otherwise neutered.  The most notable aspect, of course, was his voice, as the Doctor was left a literal echo of himself, seemingly reduced to parroting Sky while shivering in terror. 

Even his wit was gone by the end, as his usual jokey chastisement for his companions about their speech became a serious, chilling warning.

It was as if this was a wrapping-up of the show, in a way.  The phrase about always being darkest before the dawn seemed made for Midnight.  More than ever, we saw how vulnerable the Doctor can be - indeed, it almost feels like a running theme this year, as it was with Eccleston.

Given the nature of a story like Midnight, which was effectively a one-act, single set piece of psychological theatre, it helps when you’ve two genuinely international class performers to carry the bulk of the script.

Tennant’s credentials are beyond question - indeed, I hope someone sits Jonathan Miller down with a copy of Midnight - while RTD repertory company member Lesley Sharpe was chilling as Skye.  Coupled to that was a supporting cast which, distracting though they were for being lookalikes, added to the quality of the performance.

late substitute David Troughton looked and sounded so much like his Dad it was disturbing 

Although they were drawn in the broadest brushstrokes possible - Lindsay Coulson’s Daily Mail-on-legs being the worst example - it worked in the same way that lifeboat movies are about putting stock characters together and seeing how they interact.

I wasn’t kidding about the lookalikes.  Daniel Ryan, as Biff, was a slimmer Ricky Gervais, while late substitute David Troughton looked and sounded so much like his Dad it was disturbing.  Seriously - watch the scene where he’s delivering the lecture on Midnight’s surface with your eyes shut, and it could be Pat doing some technobabble.

What was wonderful was that this was an episode that didn’t look for easy answers.  Indeed, at times, it didn’t look for answers at all.  As viewers we were as clueless and impotent as the holidaymakers, but we could at least take comfort from the presence of the Doctor as our familiar identification point.

If anything that made the Doctor’s loss of control and Sky’s subsumption of his speech more chilling.  Even we, as viewers, were being left without the one defining identification point we can rely on.

That said, I don’t think Midnight was anywhere near the perfect episode that it’s been hailed as elsewhere - although for once, it wasn’t Rusty’s script that was the problem, it was the implementation.

bright and flat, and lit as a homage to The Happiness Patrol

I’m not sure what it was, but something about the set failed for me.  Remaking Lord of the Flies in a single room should be an exercise in terrifying claustrophobia, but for some reason the tour vehicle felt just that little too large and spacious.  Even as the survivors huddled and plotted at the back of the bus, they seemed to have enough room to mill about. 

The lighting, too, didn’t help.  It was bright and flat, and seemed lit as a homage to The Happiness Patrol.  We had moments of startling shadow and torchlight which, although masking the dimensions of the set, also masked the limitations.  Once the lights were back up, that tension was gone.

What did work was the sound.  Just as well, given how much they banged on about the sound mix during Confidental.  In fact, my regular viewing partner Jamie and I were left howling with laughter at the proclamation from the sound mixer than there’s as many as 40 channels of sound in your average Doctor Who episode.   Maybe so mate, but you can’t hear 35 of them for Murray’s music.

Here, though, it worked.  And it had to, given how much of this episode was about dialogue and performance.  The knocking on the side of the vehicle was reminiscent of the sound of Hell breaking through from Evil Dead 2 (incidentally, given how many other pointless cameos we’ve had in Who these last few years, when do we get a Bruce Campbell appearance?), while the mix on the dialogue was perfect, adding to the creepiness of Skye’s repetitive behaviour.   

And Gold’s score was spot-on this time - neither too intrusive or too over the top, building tension and hitting its peak at just the right time.  Well done those sound mixers.  You deserved your screentime on Confidential this week.  Hurrah.

Midnight is one of the rare occasions in the new series where the show gets away with it despite production flaws.  So often the hoary, ropey cracks running through nu-Who have been papered over by gorgeous production values and a feeling that we’re watching, if not actually experiencing, something special and unique on British TV.

Instead here we got a show that felt special and unique in spite of its production, thanks to writing and acting that most shows could only dream of.  As a palate cleanser for the final course of Doctor Who 2008, it worked a treat.

You Crazy Diamond

Doctor Who: Midnight

You've got to hand it to Russell. On the very same day it's announced that he's been awarded an OBE for services to camp and frothy nonsense, and only a couple of weeks after informing us that he's decided to up-sticks and leave (so we can all shout "hooray!" as we start picking holes in his successor's efforts), he only goes and produces the best episode of Doctor Who ever. How very dare he!

The first thing that struck me as the credits rolled - after I stopped pinching myself that is - was that every child in the country must be driving their parents nuts. I certainly did my wife's head in for a couple of hours. Who needs contrived catchphrases when you can simply repeat everything that's said to you! We've all done it. We've all had it done to us. We all recognise its power. Midnight's effect on the playground zeitgeist alone should immediately elevate this episode to classic status; detentions probably went through the roof on Monday.

It's such a simple and chilling idea that I'm not ashamed to throw the word 'genius' around. I'm even tempted to mention Satre, Pinter, Miller, Ibsen and Straczynski at this point but book-learning is frowned upon in these parts and I don't want to find myself being ejected into space. Let's just say that as a single piece of drama Midnight is up there with the very best of them. And as Battlestar Galactica hurtles inexorably towards a graveyard of dead sharks, Doctor Who has never been more exciting, inventive or moving. Not to mention cheap.

Then again, if you had problems with people standing around in rooms talking during Silence in the Library, you must have been tearing your hair out this week.

RTD only goes and produces the best episode of Doctor Who ever. How very dare he!

Amazingly, I've actually heard people complain that the alien isn't adequately explained. That there are far too many threads left hanging. That the costumes aren't sci-fi-y enough (oh f**k off). I've even seen people whining on about how the monster doesn't have a bloody name. That last one was from Character Options, I think.

Are these people mad?! I was dreading the technobabble explanation that I was certain was coming, right up until the moment when the theme music kicked it. I actually shouted "YES!" at my telly when we didn't see Tennant sucking in a great lungful of air before exhaling via a stifled burp, "it was probably a psionic energy field magnified by the crystalline structure of the blah blah blah". Not only that, we didn't get a whacky revelation about Sky's ex-girlfriend or the Professor's research into the planet; we didn't even get a scene where the son stands up to his fascistic mother and saves the day at the last, crucial moment. We didn't get diddly shit. And it was fantastic.

I loved the absence of any easy answers. I applaud the fact that it wasn't made entirely clear how the alien did what it did, why it did it, or even when it did it; that's what makes it alien. And this is exactly why Midnight is such a terrifying and fascinating ordeal. Yes, an ordeal - I was utterly exhausted by the end of it.

Just how relentlessly dark is this episode? I initially believed that the alien was using some kind of telepathic mind control to influence the passengers but it quickly became apparant that Russell was shining a light on the darker side of human nature - at 7pm no less!  The way in which the Doctor's qualities are turned against him - his curiosity, his compassion, even his smugness ("I'm clever!") - is probably the bravest thing I've seen in this programme so far, while the unavoidable and uncomfortable truth that the passengers were right all along - they should have flushed it out the airlock when they had the chance - is so grim and pessimistic they should have set up a help line.

And then there's the sheer craft on display. The incredible sound design (for the very first time you can really call it "special"), the flawless direction by Alice Troughton, the evocative score (Murray is mostly watching Lost) are all very impressive. But what really sells Midnight is quality of the acting and, thankfully, there isn't a weak link in the chain. Everyone on that bus was perfectly cast and note perfect - they had to be: this was the RADA workshop from hell! Lesley Sharpe was simply incredible, Lindsay Coulson put the Vashta Nerada in the shade for pure malevolence, and who didn't close their eyes just so they could imagine that the 2nd Doctor had strolled into the action. I know I did.

It's the RADA workshop from hell!

David Tennant has never been better. It's a powerhouse performance that illustrates perfectly exactly how good he can be when he isn't arsing about like an idiot and showing off. This wasn't David Tennant being all David Tennant-y for a change - this was something special. The moment when the Doctor is dragged to his death - by his precious humans no less - and he repeats their Daily Mail sloganeering back at them is easily the most horrific and disturbing thing I've seen on British television since I was twelve years old. Just look at helpless terror in Tennant's eyes. God, he's good.

But the greatest compliment I can pay to Midnight is that it's only 20 minutes long. When the passengers started to drag the Doctor towards his doom I was convinced that we were only half-way through the action and we'd soon descend into the usual last-minute jaw-jutting and head-slapping before Sky would be saved (naturally) and evil would be defeated at the hands of our indefatigable hero. I had become so engrossed in the drama that I'd lost all track of time. When the hostess sacrificed herself (the least obvious but most appropriate candidate for redemption) I was left reeling at the sheer audacity of it all.

In fact, the only thing that didn't ring true for me was the Doctor's contention that he could somehow convince the authorities to shut down the entire planet. He couldn't convince five tourists to stay calm on a bus so how's he going to fare when it comes to a overturning an entire economy?

But Midnight is so damn good I might even watch Doctor Who Confidential this week. If there was ever an episode that deserves some hearty backslapping and Collinson's liberal use of the word "clever" it's this one.

Knock, Knock... Who's There?

Doctor Who: Midnight

As the Government heaves a sigh of relief over its narrow victory in the vote over the 42 day detention ruling for terrorist suspects, I keep wondering where this is leading us all? The manipulation of public fear, by such disaster capitalists, to erode civil liberties is one that taps into our very primal reactions to 'otherness'. The strangers who deplore our foreign policies and the strangers who migrate to our borders are, deep down, tokens of our own fractured human psyche. There is a single moment in Midnight that tells you all you need to know. When Val Crane spits out venomously 'Immigrant' at the Doctor then we know that as a human being, and like most of us, she's reacting to the strangeness of the 'other'. Here she's attacking the Doctor who can't tell them his real name and is far too clever for his own good, and dealing with her xenophobia with one of two choices. Either you try and understand and accommodate this experience of strangeness or otherness or you repudiate it by projecting it exclusively onto outsiders, in this case the possessed Sky Sylvestry and the seemingly arrogant and alien Doctor. By having Val utter that one word, Russell T Davies encapsulates the arid mind-set of millions of Daily Mail readers.

Eventually, even those who might be considered liberal humanist in their outlook descend into monstrousness.

All too often we choose to use our paranoia about outsiders to make sense of our confused emotions, resorting to schizoid states where we will follow a pack mentality and seek to follow an individual, around whom a leadership consensus might form, and also identify scapegoats whom we can blame when disaster strikes. The cleverness of Midnight is that it flips this troubled state back and forth between the ensemble of characters like a barometer traveling between right and left wing views. Eventually, even those who might be considered liberal humanist in their outlook descend into monstrousness. The consensus forming pack leader is, to begin with, the well meaning Doctor but this status terrifyingly unravels as we see the 'other' that possesses Sky, and the effects of this, reverse our perceptions of the rational and liberal inquisitiveness of the Doctor. In the eyes of his fellow passengers, he's seen as the arrogant, clever alien and he is rapidly demoted from leader to scapegoat in 45 minutes of screen time. I like the way that Davies shows us a mirror image of the Doctor where those that don't know him at all would probably react with suspicion and fear especially when there is no companion to mediate on his behalf. This also is an interesting position for the Doctor to be seen in - he switches between the role of a monster and a god as a result of the unconscious fears projected onto him by the passengers.

Even the social structures around education, gender and age are used by each of the passengers to perpetuate their own values and the relative worthlessness of those not in positions of power.

The passengers are also an interesting social structure in and of themselves. They, as Jean-Francois Lyotard might say, define their culture, imposing their own order and hierarchy within that culture. However, as we see in the course of the drama, the ownership of power in that hierarchy constantly switches and becomes oppressive, exclusive and incomplete. Even the social structures around education, gender and age are used by each of the passengers to perpetuate their own values and the relative worthlessness of those not in positions of power. This constitutive otherness is deferred upon the Doctor and Sky. Sky, once possessed, can only mimic everyone's speech patterns but only truly learns how to manipulate by possessing the Doctor's intelligence and to play on the fears of the other passengers to eliminate him. Davies trawls through the grand narratives of humanity and what he finds isn't pleasant at all. This ugliness is in complete contrast to his more optimistic view of humans in the series and it is even such a revelation to the Doctor that it quite obviously leaves him with a very bitter taste in his mouth. What's exciting here is that the Doctor fails to deal with the ambient fear on board the bus. It's the same fear that saturates day-to-day living and in monstrous form is the entity that possesses Sky. The Doctor is fascinated by the monstrous simply because he needs to, as a function within the series itself, name that which is difficult to apprehend and to domesticate and disempower the threat.

Kudos should also go to Lindsey Coulson as Val Crane who managed to summarise with great accuracy the most repellent qualities of the human condition.

It's a tautly written and performed episode, reminding me much of Jean Paul Satre's No Exit, the source of that very apt quote, 'Hell is other people' , The Crucible, and also of The Twilight Zone's The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street. Davies is assisted by some phenomenally good directing from Alice Troughton and some stunning editing by Phllip Kloss which combines precisely coordinated long takes with very brisk visual punctuations - short visual impressions, quick close ups - that feel very Hitchcockian. This was also, by far, Tennant's most emotionally interesting performance of the series and he took the Doctor from cheery ebullience to desperation with great dexterity. His utter helplessness as he realised he wasn't able to contain the paranoia and was dragged by the other passengers towards the airlock was disturbing and powerful. Lesley Sharp pretty much matched him and was stunning as Sky Sylvestry, glowing with a fierce intensity and mesmerisingly subtle as she depicted the entity slowly turning the tables on the Doctor and stoking the fears within the passengers pack mentality. Kudos should also go to Lindsey Coulson as Val Crane who managed to summarise with great accuracy the most repellent qualities of the human condition. David Troughton's Professor Hobbs was an essay in bloated, hand-wringing academia and he uncannily sounded like his father in some scenes. The coda for the ensemble of characters is terribly bleak as they don't seek reconciliation or attempt to apologise for their actions. That their fear might have led to murder is left unsaid by any of them, even the Doctor. The absence of Donna is also a profound admission that the Doctor needs a companion to temper his arrogance and his hollow victory here may well have taken a different course if she had been around. But what we see of Donna is a supreme exercise in deftly summing up the character in the few scenes in which she was present.

It's an episode that breaks a number of boundaries. It makes the human monstrous rather than a prosthetic or CGI creation, it questions the Doctor's modus operandi more succinctly than ever before and suggests that the way we idiosyncratically use language can actually define who we truly are. It also shows that tightly scripted, purely character driven drama can still work its magic on television. Sublime.

Death on the Buses

The Doctor Who News Page reports that unofficial overnight figures show that Midnight got 7.3 million viewers (a 37.8% share) and won its timeslot against more Euro ball kicking antics (which was watched by 3.4 million).

Pi-eyed

Doctor Who:  Midnight

When I mentioned to my parents that Russell T Davies had been handed an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, my Dad (who hasn’t seen an episode since School Reunion) said “Was it for services to Doctor Who?”  To which I replied “Yes, because he resurrected the Macra.”  I really did, cause I’m that funny.  But if the reason had been that specific (the honour was actually for drama in general) it wouldn’t have been too surprising.  I’ve said it before, and I'll repeat myself.  Though we’re all looking forward to seeing where Steven Moffat takes the Doctor next (with apologies  to Neil then Damon then Neil and Damon and John) if it wasn’t for Russell this weblog might not have existed either.  The man brought our favourite show back to television, didn’t totally fuck it up, made it a success and gave us something to write about and for that he deserves all the awards he gets.

All of which accepted, you really don’t ever know what you’re going to get when the man scripts an episode.  Looking back through previous reviews, I’ve generally been very positive about his work, though even I have to admit that sometimes I wished he’d reign his ambition in just a little bit, drop the mythology and tell a bloody good story.  Because every classic bit of writing we’ve seen from him has either been the character based fun of Love & Monsters or the grand adventure told in confined space.    Arguably (and controversially) his best episode in the first season, Boom Town, actually had the Doctor battling an alien over a dinner table!  I’d throw Tooth & Claw onto this list, which basically takes place in a couple of rooms and a corridor, Gridlock, which is one room pretending to be a bunch of others and now we have Midnight which trumps the lot.

I wished he’d reign his ambition in just a little bit

As close as Nu-Who can get to theatre without anyone bursting into song, Davies somehow managed to craft what’s probably been the tensest and most economic forty-minutes the new programme has been use a single cabin, a dozen cast members.  He said himself it was a reaction to Voyage of the Damned, to an extent it’s the same story, another group of tourists on the brink of death and indeed as he also identified in Confidential (as usual nicking everything I wanted to write here), he wanted to see what happened when humanity actually acted realistically in the face of the Doctor’s platitudes.  Having been on coach trips and in train carriages when something goes wrong, I can tell you that the way this lot turned on each other was absolutely realistic, even if I don’t actually remember anyone wanted to randomly chuck someone through the doors (presumably because they’d only really sustain a few bruises from the road or railway tracks).

In point of fact, Moonlight was the total opposite of Damned, even down to the sacrificial hostess not being resurrected at the climax and we didn’t even find out her name.  Were that space spectacular offered empty pyrotechnics and pointedly black and white  two dimensional characterisation, this had the impressive verbal sparring and shades of grey; no one actually evil, just trying to survive even if it meant letting a bit of their judgment and humanity seep away.  No beslippered monarch to wave the timelord on here; instead he’s rooted the ground, helpless, requiring someone else again to make the supreme sacrifice and save everyone.  Which is becoming a trend by the way – the Doctor hasn’t properly saved the day once yet this season – think about it – most of the time he’s been mopping up afterwards.

the Doctor hasn’t properly saved the day once yet this season

Yes, there really is something far more exciting about unknown thumping sounds hitting the hull of a ship rather than three CGI missiles, prosthetics are all well and good for creating a scary alien but naught in comparison to well respected actress presenting crazy eye syndrome and an intense way about her, and nothing creepier in having your words repeated back to you either afterwards or in sync.  Never mind the staring contest from the sketch show Big Train – synchronous recitation would be just the thing for us less sporty types who took the Bridge option during Games lessons at school, the textual difficulty increasing with each round.  Though both David Tennant and Lesley Sharp are clearly in which a chance for Silver medal at least having demonstrated the ability to repeat pi to dozens of places.

Tennant was on top form here, offering yet another iteration of his performance.  Desperation.  We can now add to the list of reasons the Doctor needs a companion, she’s the honey trap or convincer.  Like the improbably sexy Jess in The Real Hustle, Rose and even Donna are all there to persuades the norms that her friend is brilliant and will save the day.  Martha spent a whole year walking around a planet telling people that.  We’ve seen loss and loneliness from Tennant before, but we’ve never seen it mixed with panic and genuine despair.  As desperation set in, the character realised that nothing he could say would convince anyone and Tennant sold that perfectly.  Oh you’re clever.  Yes, and?  Arrogant bastard.  Out you go.  Intelligent stuff.

the improbably sexy Jess in The Real Hustle

But this was a great little cast.  Including the emo posterboy, most of them seemed selected because of their normality rather than, again unlike Damned, their distinctiveness.  Even last minute replacement David Troughton had the look of a university professor who’d been at the job for years, much of them full of bluster and academic subterfuge.  But all of the voices were controlled, a genuine chemistry building across the episode, though clearly Sharp’s was the most difficult and so compelling.  At some point I’d wondered if she’d be the interesting choice for a companion and it’s a shame that she’s been blown through an airlock door.  Though the death one characters hardly kept actresses out of the running before.

None of which is to say we didn’t miss Catherine Tate’s presence, though the prologue and coda which seemed to distill the character Donna to her essence worked well, especially as part of the opening which chucked out a bunch of comedy before going bad, right down to the ironic into-titles cliffhanger.  She’s back next episode though in what looks like, in mythology terms yang to Midnight’s ying.  Not that the arcish threads of the series weren't worked incongruously in  here somewhere, what with the lipservice given to the Medusa Cascade, the Doctor’s inability to repeat his own real name, the recap on who Who’s companions have been and one of them shouting without much luck through a computer screen.  The surprise of Rose’s appearance was perhaps purposefully spoiled by the cast list in Radio Times but it still made me giddy.  One week to go…

Next Week:  Squees are flying out like endless rain into a paper cup, they slither while they pass, they slip away across the whoniverse …

Midnight Shakes the Memory

Doctor Who: Midnight

At one point, many years ago, I was such a fan of Peter Davison's portrayal of the Doctor that I became taken with the idea that the best kind of Doctor Who episode would involve the Doctor strolling around with his hands in his pockets, generally soaking up the atmosphere and chatting to anyone who took his fancy.  I've always loved it when the Doctor takes a bit of time out from the adventuring, and just decides to do a bit of mingling instead.  Even when he visits the hospital in The Hand of Fear.  Looking back there was a lot of aimless strolling going on during Davison's reign.  Black Orchid is one long mingle, and although it's been a while since I've seen it I'm sure that the first episode of Enlightenment consisted solely of the Doctor walking around a ship with his hands in his pockets occasionally peering into some rooms.  But there's not been a lot of that in recent years.  The pace of modern television militates against ambling, idling, chatting and mooching which I'm not saying is always a bad thing.  Instead it tends to favour running, shouting, snappy one-liners and hysterical action accompanied by deafening music – which I'm saying is frequently a bad thing.  Russell T Davies OBE (good on him – I'd pay money to see it presented as he must be three times the size of Brenda) has the power to vary things and a lot of people (probably me amongst them) wish he'd chanced his arm more often. After Midnight, a really excellent and arresting piece of work, I find myself looking back over the last three-and-a-half series and thinking about how different things might have been if he'd tried experimental pieces like this more often.

makes me pine for those episodes he might have written but now never will

I know not every episode can be like Midnight – that would make for an intense experience, Davies's dismissal, and probably result in demotion to BBC2 after the Darts coverage, but the fact it exists and that Davies wrote it so well makes me pine for those episodes he might have written but now never will.  So many of his previous episodes carried the baggage of story arcs, involved a threat to the entire known universe, and generally climax a season in a manner that suggests that the various components of the storyline had been randomly picked out of a tombola at the Rampton summer fete.  The lower-key, slightly off-message (aka “good”) scripts were left to the lucky and talented buggers like Moffat, Cornell and Shearman.  On the evidence of Midnight, Moffat should make it a condition of his new “King of Who” contract to force Davies to write one script per season on anything he likes as long as it doesn't involve the Time War, the end of the planet, galaxy, universe, anti-universe, time vortex, and isn't set in the year 8 squillion billion.  Admittedly he's done something unusual before with Gridlock which was certainly a one-off, but Midnight knocked it into a cocked hat.  Stick the companion on a sunbed/delta wave augmenter – how old-school is that!   Ten minutes or so of the Doctor mooching and chatting, and doing what he used to claim to enjoy: mixing with humans.  That in itself marked out Midnight as unusual, but it was what came next that made it special.

The scene had the inexorable momentum of a nightmare and was wonderfully written

Previous filler episodes have always been a bit transparent.  Even Julie Gardner disliked The Long Game, and only a mother could look upon Boom Town with any fondness.  What those stories needed was a good strong helping of a paranoid thought-experiment reminiscent of The Prisoner.  One of the greatest episodes of that series was Once Upon a Time which was written by a booze-fuelled Patrick McGoohan in about 24 hours roughly the kind of time it took Davies to write Midnight.  It largely featured McGoohan and Leo McKern shouting nursery rhymes and phrases like “six of one” at each other for about fifty minutes.  But that was a long time ago.  In Midnight Davies had a good 30 minutes of so of characters shouting hysterically with every line coming not just straight back at them, but with them and finally ahead of them. Imagine the pitch for that - "everyone will shout hysterically while it's all repeated. For ages." It then moved on to a classic confrontation scene with the Doctor surrounded by a kangaroo court of humans who just would not accept his authority.  The scene had the inexorable momentum of a nightmare and was wonderfully written.  Every time the Doctor tried to close it down, another inconvenient human piped up and contradicted him, and even though they were being manipulated by the thing – which was what?, who cares, let's carry on – all of their objections to the Doctor were based in truth.  The Doctor was enjoying the danger, he does think he's special, and his cleverness is double-edged.  For once, the blasé, some would say smug Tenth Doctor was in real trouble, and at long last some peril was on the agenda.

From the insouciant passenger, to the leader bathed in flop-sweat because the led wouldn't follow

Praise too for David Tennant's performance which followed Davies's mad and wonderful script wherever it took him.  From the insouciant passenger, to the leader bathed in flop-sweat because the led wouldn't follow, and ultimately to the paralysed animal being dragged to the abattoir – he was terrific. The rest of the cast was great, and although Lesley Sharp was typically brilliant as the inexplicable monster, I especially liked Lindsay Coulson simply because few people can do a “hang 'em, burn 'em” characters quite like her. There's something about the way she contorts her face with  hatred, and her screams of “Just do it” as the Doctor was dragged towards the airlock by the angry mob started to tip the whole thing towards the hysteria of The Crucible.  And her character wasn't done then, since Davies rounded things off beautifully with her deeply bleak excuse “I said it was her”.  For an episode that began with the Doctor happy to mooch around with the humans, it all ended, despite alien manipulation, with humans showing the worst kind of mob mentality while the only good person was fried to a frazzle.  And when the Doctor ended the episode with a simple “Don't” for once you felt he really meant it. This Doctor looked really scarred.

my reaction at the time was to blow a raspberry, shout “bollocks” and slam-dunk the magazine into the wheelie-bin

Probably a couple of years ago, maybe after the second series had finished, there were a few voices, both within fandom and outwith, that raised concerns that the series was too formulaic, and there wasn't a whole lot of variety between episodes despite the usual cant that Doctor Who is “the most flexible format of all” and some kind of ultimate blank canvas. Around this time I seem to remember that there was an article in Doctor Who Magazine that took about seven pages to convey the message that although the “classic” series may have shifted between wildly varying adventures occasionally, but that modern television couldn't do that anymore because the audience wouldn't like it. An example used was Warriors' Gate following hot on the heels of State of Decay and preceding The Keeper of Traken.  Those of us who rather liked the moment on a Saturday when after five minutes we'd think “What the fuck is this” were told firmly by DWM that that kind of nonsense was in the past.  I'm probably horribly misrepresenting the article, but my reaction at the time was to blow a raspberry, shout “bollocks” and slam-dunk the magazine into the wheelie-bin.  I nearly put my back out, but my aching back has been salved because Midnight has demonstrated that this doesn't have to be the case at all.  OK, Davies has seen Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, and clearly Voyage of the Damned didn't rid him of his disaster movie cravings, but this story was just what Doctor Who should be.  It was mysterious, it experimented with dialogue in a way that just wouldn't happen on any other family show, it'll have the kids repeating what their parents say, it remained resolutely unexplained, and it showed a moment of sacrifice amidst the darkest of shadows that on the grand, story-arc, Time War level meant nothing, but in dramatic terms meant much, much more. And on BBC1 at 7.10pm just a smidgeon of the old days of television drama was back in the living room.  Something unexpected.

I liked it.