khaosworks | "What could possibly go wrong?"

Oh, Russell, it was almost perfect. You had me until almost the end, and then you just had to piss me off by slipping up. And the sad thing is that it could have been different.

(as an aside, yeah, I've seen the picture for the season finale villain, both the blurry and high-res shots... no, I'm not saying who it is or linking to the picture. Easy enough to Google for...)

Spoilers for Midnight...

In many ways, this reminds me of the Virgin Books' Doctor Who New Adventures era of Doctor Who, when all we had to go on were the novels and short stories. This was the time when a group of young up and coming writers decided to update Who, make it more adult, draw a broader canvas than what was possible on television. No, seriously, that's what the blurb on the back of every New Adventure said. And it wasn't to everyone's taste, certainly, much like RTD's revival isn't. But it produced as many cracking stories as it did dud ones, and I have to say that my conception of what the series is capable of was shaped very much by what I read during those years. That the New Adventures tone echoes through the new series is no real surprise, considering a number of NA writers have written for the television show now, and Davies himself wrote an NA back in the day.

Midnight is one of those stories that isn't traditional Doctor Who, but shows the flexibility of the format. You can see Davies' 2000 AD influences coming through in the idea of a caravan ride through a deadly wasteland à la the Cursed Earth and sunlight that can kill you. You can even see him taking a page out of P.J. Hammond in the Sapphire & Steel-ish possession motif. But it still works. In fact, the last line before the opening credits: "Taking a big space truck with a bunch of strangers across a diamond planet called Midnight? What could possibly go wrong?" could have come more or less comfortably from Tom Baker's lips.

I believe that this was a quick write-up by Davies to replace a script by Tom McRae, and so the basic premise is more reminiscent of a short story from one of the Virgin Decalogs or a Brief Encounter from Doctor Who Magazine, where the Doctor is a mysterious stranger and the action revolves more around the other characters. And that can work well, actually (cf. TNG's "Lower Decks", BSG's "Final Cut" and B5's "A View From The Gallery"). Alice Troughton did an amazing job, and the claustrophobic setting both heightens the paranoia and performances. Midnight gets genuinely scary, and that's something I never expected Davies to manage to carry off. All this, and his usual trademark naturalistic dialogue as well.

But. And this is a big but (is my but big?).

We have, for the third time this series, someone else sacrificing themselves for the Doctor to save the day. Setting aside the conceit that the Doctor, as the hero, should be actually doing the heroic stuff (a common complaint about Eccleston, and I can't say it's an invalid one), the sheer repetitiveness of the plot device cannot have escaped people's notices at the tone meeting. I mean come on. Davies could have gone another way easily, and it could have actually have showed up how clever the Doctor was, and is consistent with the telepathic powers you've seen in the Doctor.

You know what I'm getting at, don't you? You see it? The Doctor's voice, stolen by the entity, then managing to turn the tables, to seize control of the entity itself and then thwart it or make hurl itself to its own destruction? Could have happened.

Really, Russell. The acting was great, the dialogue was great, even the bottle nature of the show worked, and then you had to go fuck it up. It's not that it destroyed the episode, but it's annoying because it's such an unnecessary and thus frustrating flaw.

Loved the story otherwise, but such a shame about the ending.