The story goes that once upon a time, Tom Baker declared that he didn’t really need a companion; a cabbage on his shoulder asking him “What’s that, Doctor?” would be quite sufficient.

While the show did try this in the seventies with ‘The Deadly Assassin’, the lack of companion was quickly filled by an unlikely bunch of old Time Lords. In ‘Midnight’, the role never quite gets filled, and our hero almost dies for it. Traditionally speaking, I’ve always assumed the Doctor needed companions for, well, companionship. It turns out, they’re pretty handy just for keeping him alive, too.

A while back, I read an interesting piece from Jonathan Blum on how fans were riled by the Doctor being short with UNIT in ‘The Sontaran Stratagem’. It’s worth reading, but in short his theory goes like this; when you’re a child, you cheer when the Doctor treating stuffy grown ups and authority figures with disdain. When you grow up, get a job, get yourself some politics, and find yourself in a position of authority, it occurs to you that if the Doctor wandered into your life, he wouldn’t like you any more than he liked Random Grumpy Official #2. ‘Midnight’ looks at things from the other side of the fence. If you were a normal person in a horrible situation, would you really like the Doctor? Or would he just be an annoying, arrogant git who tends to get people killed?

Let’s back up a bit. The Doctor takes a trip over a crystal planet. As should be clear to him by now, any innocent holiday he tries to take is bound to result in horrible deaths for all nearby. In this case, the transport breaks down, and a mysterious force tries to get inside before they can get moving again. Will everyone survive? Will the looming threat be genuinely scary? Will the Doctor meet a convenient cabbage?

‘Midnight’s central protagonist is an interesting concept. It’s also based on what might well be the Most Irritating Thing Ever. I assume everyone, at some point, had a brother or sister or friend who would endlessly repeat what you said, just to shit you.¹ This week’s monster is that annoying little creep. It makes for dramatically uncomfortable television; yes, Sky, you are more truly terrifying than any number of squat potato-headed clones, but you also call to mind several of the more horrid moments from my own personal dawn of time.

The assorted cast do a decent job of being perhaps the most annoyingly normal people ever featured in Doctor Who. As things get worse, each of them — no matter how much potential or kindness they seemed to show — starts to crack, and blame the arrogant outsider. Russell T Davies has said he wrote ‘Midnight’ as a response to his own ‘Voyage of the Damned’, simply to ask: would people really band together heroically in a disastrous situation? ‘Midnight’ suggests the other side of the coin, but not unequivocally. As a result of this, the story is one of the more thought-provoking scripts this year.

The other thing that ‘Midnight’ explores, as I mentioned before, is whether random people would trust the Doctor. He’s alone this time, and there’s no young, trustworthy cutie hanging about and acting like he’s marvellous. As Davies points out in Confidential, despite his general affability, not one of them quite becomes friends with him before things go to hell, and once they do, none of them find his “I’m so clever, I’ll solve this, I do this all the time” routine particularly convincing. Is this just because of the malignant influence of Sky’s possessor? Or is his companion supposed to be there not just to connect with the audience, but to the people he meets?²

To take a slight detour; I watched Speed again the other day and started to notice the people on the bus displaying tendencies towards ‘Midnight’ style behaviour. But they trusted Sandra Bullock, and Sandra Bullock trusted Keanu the Outsider. So they trusted Keanu. Even when one of them got exploded. What this all means, I’m not sure, but it doesn’t explain why Sandra Bullock keeps doing such crappy movies. Ahem. What were we talking about? Oh yes.

Between being set almost entirely in one room, and involving an almost entirely verbal threat, ‘Midnight’ feels very much like Doctor Who: The Stage Play. It’s a fascinating exploration of the Doctor’s interaction with people, and of paranoia in general, but it’s also the Doctor stuck in one place with a bunch of really irritating people for 45 minutes. As they say; your mileage may vary.

1. To be honest, I probably dealt said awfulness more than receiving it. ↩
2. Or, were they just a bunch of tools who would have turned on him in any case? ↩

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008. It concerns such pressing issues as Doctor Who, tv. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.