From MadCap's Couch - "Doctor Who: Midnight"

"I'm going to totally jinx the hell out of this!"

Okay, I just want to start this off by saying that everything that happens in this episode is 100% the Doctor's fault. Why? Because he says the five little words that spell infinite and never ending disaster, inviting every single thing that could go wrong to go wrong.

"What could possibly go wrong?"

Like, seriously...you'd think about 900+ years of traveling around time and space would condition the Doctor to not say that, but no! No, no! He does this...and he is very, very dumb.

We begin Midnight with Donna sunbathing under fifteen feet of glass. She gets a phone call...from the Doctor, who wants her to come on a tour to see a sapphire waterfall. She wants nothing to do with it, but urges him to be careful...and he says the five words.

Dumb, Dumb Doctor.

Also, Donna not being in the episode assists greatly in this episode working. Otherwise, it wouldn't. At all.

Onboard, the Doctor meets the Hostess and uses the catchphrase "Allons-y!" with her. Remember this. It's really important later.

We have several people introduced at once to be our Happy Meals on legs for the day, all of them contained in a vehicle traveling to the sapphire waterfalls. A notable member of the cast is David Troughton, son of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton, playing Professor Hobbes. He has an assistant, Dee Dee (who wrote a paper on the lost moon of Poosh), and Val, Biff, and Jethro Cane are also in attendance. A last, and possibly most enigmatic besides the Doctor himself, is a woman named Sky. More on her later. The Hostess activates an entertainment device which plays several things that only seems to annoy the passengers.

"Hehe, I jinxed us before we started."
"What?"
"Oh, nothing!"

The Doctor discreetly deactivates it with his sonic screwdriver. Sky notices. The passengers seem relieved and, while the Hostess apologizes for the inconvenience, the Doctor suggests that everyone will have to talk to each other to pass the time.

And pass the time they do. Every few hundred kliks, we get some conversations between the characters, mostly the Doctor interacting with them and giving us a little chance to build some character for these people. It's just little scenes but, like in the movie Aliens, it's shockingly effective in making them feel more like real people. This will especially help for what's about to happen.

After Hobbes gives a lesson to the group on how much history Midnight doesn't have...the bus stops, something that isn't supposed to be able to happen. The Doctor psychic papers his way into the cockpit to speak with the driver and the mechanic, who are at a loss for an explanation. Nothing has broken down, there are no faults in the system, they've just...stopped. The Doctor gets them to open the shielding over the cockpit, showing them the glimmering splendor of the planet Midnight - a world of crystal that no one can ever touch or be burned to death by the radiation.

As they close the shield again, the mechanic swears he sees something...a shadow moving along the rocks and toward the bus.

So, just to recap...the Doctor put himself and two people at risk of burning to death by radiation because he wanted to look at shiny rocks.

Regardless, the Doctor returns to the rest of the passengers and the paranoia starts. The passengers start to be accusatory toward him and to each other. It's utter and complete chaos. The Doctor manages to restore order, getting Dee Dee to explain that the air in the bus will last them quite a while. The Doctor, too, encourages calm and insists that everything is fine...and someone knocks on the side of the bus.

. . .luckily for the Doctor, it only knocks twice.

. . .well, six times.

Hobbes insists that no one could be outside, nothing can survive on Midnight's surface. The worst comes when the knocking comes from elsewhere, and there's a clicking noise as something is very clearly trying to open the door...and something's on the roof....then at another door, where Biff knocks three times...and whatever it is answers back with three knocks.

No, no, not four. We're not there yet.

Bliiiiiiinded by the light!

In a panic, Sky moves back from the group as the knocking gets louder as she insists that "It's coming for me!" over and over again in full madness mantra...and then everyone gets thrown around as the lights go out. When they recover, following a sneaky Rose cameo on a monitor, they get some flashlights and they find Sky...sitting in a corner with her back to them. The Doctor tries to comfort her as the Hostess goes to check on the driver...and finds that the front of the bus has been torn away.

The Doctor opens a panel and finds that the driver's car has been dissolved. The driver and the mechanic are dead, dissolved by the radiation.

Jethro puts the thought into people's heads that whatever was outside might now be in the car with them. The Doctor attempts to talk to a catatonic Sky...who has taken on strangely bird-like qualities and mimicry, imitating the Doctor's head gestures and...eventually, his words. When others speak, Sky also begins to perfectly repeat their words as well.

The Doctor tries to talk through it, thinking aloud as he tries to work out what this creature is. This doesn't help the panic of the group, which exponentially gets worse and worse...until the lights come back on. All seems well...until they realize that Sky is no longer repeating the words they're saying, but is saying them at exactly the same time. The Doctor brings everyone to the back of the bus, telling them that they just have to wait out for fifty minutes for rescue...just staying away from Sky, who is still creepily staring at them.

He theorizes that the next step might be becoming them...which the Doctor in particular really, really doesn't want to see happen. Val suggests throwing her off the bus...which the Doctor insists will not happen on his watch...except Dee Dee, who earlier showed knowledge of how the buses works, tells them that there is a way.

The Doctor tries to talk the group down...trying to insist that the humans are better than that...and reality ensues, everyone agreeing that throwing Sky off is the best plan.

David Tennant and Lesley Sharp have a great back and forth.
It's terrifying and entertaining as Hell to watch.

The group sees through the Doctor's excuses and deflections...and here we see the brilliance of this episode: Russell T. Davies is taking all the tropes that make up Doctor Who and subverting them all. And, unlike a certain roundhead midget who shall remain nameless (but we'll call him "Jian Rohnson" for fun), this one actually works. Every thing that the Doctor usually has to save the day, all the tropes and tricks that have carried the show from 1963 onward into (as of this episode) 2008...fail utterly and completely.

The group picks him apart and, at the apex of all of this...Sky stops talking. And they notice. Or, rather, they notice...she's stopped speaking the words of everyone except for the Doctor. The Doctor tries to talk her down...and makes the mistake of continuing to talk in spite of what he told the others...and suddenly, Sky is speaking and the Doctor is repeating. They notice.

We see the humans are complete assholes as none of them realize the Doctor has some kind of paralytic influence - practically begging with his eyes for someone to do something. "Sky" talks and the Doctor's repeating becomes slower and further behind her...and she asks to be taken away from the Doctor, Hobbes obliging her...and the tension mounting as the Doctor kneels over, still paralyzed. Dee Dee thinks something is up, but Hobbes shoots her down. Jethro seems to agree with the group, but clearly has some reservations.

While the Doctor is paralyzed, the humans debate over what to do...arguing over what exactly happened, Dee Dee leading the charge on trying to save the Doctor, knowing that something isn't right. Sky plays on this, however and Biff grabs the Doctor with the intention of throwing him out. The tension mounts to insane heights as Biff and Hobbes try to drag the Doctor out...and "Sky" makes the fatal mistake of saying a single word.

"Allons-y!"

The Hostess grabs her, opening the door...and both she and Sky are pulled out to burn in the radiation. The Doctor collapses, mobility restored, and the humans take the moment to recover...looking devastated over what they almost did and the shock of the incredibly violent deaths that just occurred.

Also, Val tries to insist the whole time that she knew that "Sky" wasn't really Sky and that the Doctor was right. She wins the Biggest Asshole of the Episode Award, which is a fucking achievement in this piece given that the insidious talking fear monster was here and nearly replaced the Doctor.

The Doctor: The Oncoming Storm, the Destroyer of Worlds...utterly helpless.
It's absolutely terrifying.

Twenty minutes after this, the rescue vehicle arrives. The Doctor asks the others what the name of the Hostess was...and none of them can answer, further driving home that the woman sacrificed her life to save them, and they didn't even know her name. This, as those of you who have seen Journey's End will know, is something the Doctor definitely won't forget and that will haunt him for quite a while to come.

Back at the Leisure Palace, where this all started, the Doctor reunites with Donna. The Doctor doesn't know what it was  or if it's still out there...and he resolves to tell the people on Midnight to pack up and leave, just in case. Donna jokes that she couldn't imagine the Doctor without a voice, to which he jokingly replies "Molto bene!".

When Donna repeats him...the Doctor tells her to not.

It's still there...

I don't think I need to say it, but just in case I haven't made it clear - Midnight is an absolute masterpiece of Doctor Who. It takes what we know about Doctor Who and turns it on its head in a way that works insanely well, its tone is one of the darkest we've seen on the show entire, and it's all capped up with the fact that we don't even know if the main antagonist is really dead.

After all, it got sent back into the radiation it came from.

Watching those few short snippets of the people on the bus getting to know one another followed by watching Doctor Who get deconstructed to Hell and back, and all within a confined space and in about forty minutes is just so damn good. Lesley Sharp's performance as the Entity is chilling as hell, particularly when she starts to speak and the Doctor starts repeating. My heart races. I even know what's going to happen when I watch it and I still feel the extreme tension. It's just that good!

The fact that it's a Russell T. Davies episode baffles me. He had this in him and we had to suffer through farting aliens, the Gamestation plot, Bad Wolf, NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEW Earth, Martha's entire run being ruined by Rose fucking Tyler, and a super camp version of the Master (not to mention him yo-yoing drama like he's got a nervous twitch)…and he had this.

He had this in him the whole time.

I'm actually legitimately pissed at you, Russell. You have talent, but you gave us three years of garbage followed by...this. And he's about to pull it off again in Turn Left, the episode right after this. He had these two amazing stories in him...and he's still gonna give us The End of Time in just a few short episodes.

Ugh...

The fact that we never find out what the "Midnight Entity" (as it's called colloquially by the fanbase) really only heightens things for me, though I have read some very good speculation on just what it might have been. Of course, given the nature of Doctor Who, we aren't going to get an answer in the future or at least not for a few decades until some writer decides to pull it out as an obscure piece of the lore.

Next time, we trade a companion-lite episode for a Doctor-lite episode as Donna Noble must...Turn Left!

. . .it makes sense in context. Be there for it!