As we've seen, later episodes in a series can garner low expectations and there has sometimes been a sense of a series holding back, gathering resources for a finale. With its single set and claustrophobic atmosphere, Midnight gave the impression that it might be a cheap, inconsequential story after all. But that original transmission was electrifying.
One of the key moments in my love of Doctor Who was a BBC Two run of repeated stories called 'The Five Faces of Doctor Who' that began in November 1981. I had never seen any of the previous Doctors before and I was enthralled by the murky black and white images and the spooky music of the Hartnell and Troughton episodes. These days, neither 100,000BC (or whatever we are calling it these days) or The Krotons are perhaps as suspenseful as they seemed to me at five years old. But at that early stage the idea became fixed in my mind that a crucial element of a 'proper' Doctor Who story should be an oppressive sense of mystery, and to this day I am delighted by any story that makes me gasp "What the hell is going on?" as I watch it. Moffat's scripts aside, it's not a terribly common feature in the RTD era of the show. But Midnight delivers it in spades and that's why it's brilliant.
We never see the 'thing'. There might not even be a 'thing'. If there is an outside influence and this all doesn't just rise up out of Sky Silvestry's mind, we never learn what it is, and it is never given a name. The voice games and repetition may suggest playground pursuits, but their execution here, thanks to some hard work from the cast and the sound engineers, is unearthly, almost unbearable. The unexplained, unknowable nature of the threat makes Midnight scarier and more interesting than any prosthetic or CGI alien design could have done. Christopher disagrees: when Sky becomes possessed but sits with her back to the passengers, he expected her to turn around to reveal a visual shock, a skull-face or something; but for me the joy of that moment is that Lesley Sharp's face has been transformed, albeit subtly, and the Sky that we briefly knew has gone. In fact, Chris didn't really appreciate the mysteriousness at all, and docked a point because we never got to find out what had been going on. But I think that just reinforces my point: we don't like not knowing and that makes this story scarier.
You might think that the scariest thing in Midnight is not, however, the unknown but the all too familiar humans: RTD delivers a beautifully observed display of all the ugly impulses, the pettiness and the brutality that we are capable of when we give in to fear - the Daily Mail factor, perhaps. The other passengers are terrifying: deluding themselves and being deluded, angrily turning on one another and resorting to extremes of violence and murder to try and save their skins. But even this scenario can't avoid the standard loophole of morality in Doctor Who - in order to save the Doctor, somebody has to kill, and sacrifice themselves in the process. In this instance it's the unnamed hostess and I don't think it is a coincidence that she was the first to suggest the idea of throwing somebody out the airlock, back when things started getting unpleasant. At the time the Doctor shouted her down, condemning her for her base instincts, but once again a story needs somebody to murder so that the Doctor can survive. Perhaps it is just a convention of story-telling, but it does sometimes feel like these endings undermine the Doctor's principles, and make him look naive. As a result, stories like The Empty Child and Silence in the Library feel all the more significant because they show the Doctor defeating violence itself (and death too), rather than just villainy.
I'm not trying to pick on Midnight by raising that point here - the deaths of Sky and the Hostess make the story work, especially with the Doctor incapacitated and in danger himself, and it is this state in which he finds himself that is the other great thing about this episode.
We're used to the Doctor being in command, earning the respect of those around him and issuing orders. We know he's clever, we know he's experienced - these are both reasons why we like him so much. Here all this is turned on its head and his arrogance (which we have seen previously, although it has almost always been played for laughs before) becomes a weakness, just as his intelligence and his eloquence begin to work against him. It hasn't been done before (the closest would be Power of the Daleks or Snakedance, where he is derided as a prophet of doom) and the effect is genuinely unsettling, helped by another brilliant performance by David Tennant.
There's another, more traditional, character flaw of his on display too. When he saunters into the cockpit of the stalled bus, the Doctor begs the crew to open the shutters for just an instant so he can see the landscape of the planet, as yet unobserved by human eyes. His curiosity has always been getting him into trouble, but is it actually the catalyst here too? There's nothing to suggest that the bus hasn't just developed a mechanical fault - what if it was the Doctor's insistence that the shutters be opened that caused the thing to turn its attention on Crusader 50?
NEXT TIME...
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