10.41: Midnight

In which the Doctor gets into trouble on the planet of the Daily Mail readers.

Broadcast: June 2008

Watched: October 2021

“Ladies, gentlemen and variations thereupon...”

Like a Beckett play: clearly it means *something*, but there’s a lot of room for debate about exactly what beyond paranoia and the mob.

There’s a lot of build up before we even get to the monster bit: that doesn’t arrive until almost halfway through the episode. First we’ve got all the set up, the cacophony of different media clashing, the Doctor acting as the one guy you really, really don’t want to meet on a plane.

Once the monster does arrive, it isn’t just the repetition that’s sinister, it’s Lesley Sharp’s frozen smile. The thing that makes the “but don’t we all, deep down, have the capacity to be a Daily Mail reader?” bit so effective is the sense of shifting loyalties, the way who is clever and who is thoughtful and who is just reactionary constantly shifts (good example: the argument about what people saw, where you can see them construct their memories in real time). 

Anyway, the whole thing is brilliant and unnerving, but not actually fun. It obviously made a huge impact in 2008, but I wonder if much of its power was in the shock of the new? It can never quite hit the way it did that first time. Brilliantly performed and directed, though.

Other things:

• “Midnight” is a good name for an episode about the darkness in the human soul or some such. This coming straight after Moffat’s “nobody is really evil and nobody actually dies” is a reminder that it’s RTD who’s the real pessimist of the two of them.

• I love the idea the Doctor and Donna have just taken a holiday. I feel like resorts gone wrong is an entire genre of Doctor Who? Paradise Towers, Delta, Orphan 55, no doubt loads of non TV ones... 

• Invisible/unknowable monsters also feels like a genre, though the only other one I can think of is Listen.

• The line about Sky Silvestri’s girlfriend needing another galaxy reminds me of the friend of mine whose girlfriend was so terrifying that, when he dumped her, he moved to Shanghai.

• The hostess is the first to suggest throwing her out, but then ultimately sacrifices herself. [She’s played by Rakie Ayola, who was recently asked how she’d respond to the suggestion that her new TV show The Pact showed “a woke version of a Welsh family”. Her response is a powerful and dignified dissection of what exactly the word “woke” means, and why people shouldn’t use it. She’s brilliant.]

• “Like an immigrant?” says Mrs Cane. Subtext, text.

• The bit where Sky gets ahead of the Doctor is still really terrifying. So is Tennant frozen and shaking.

• The bit at the end when Donna wordlessly just hugs the Doctor is heartbreaking. This feels like the only healthy friendship that RTD ever wrote for the Doctor.

• Nobody is called Biff.