An Hour of Who a Day: 03/23/15

March 23: "Midnight"

As you've no doubt realized (if you've been following along with this blog), one of the things that has given Doctor Who such longevity is its versatility, its ability to be just about any sort of story you want it to be. That's why the show can be a surreal children's nightmare, then a comedy Western, and then a contemporary thriller -- and that's just three consecutive stories from season 3.

Part of the way Doctor Who is so versatile is by taking other genres of stories and then inserting the Doctor, to see what happens. Invariably, the presence of the Doctor serves to distort the story, to send it off in a new direction by virtue of his being there. Take a story like Pyramids of Mars, which should be a story about an ancient Egyptian god returning to unleash his vengeance upon the planet -- except the Doctor turns up and starts asking questions about Sutekh's origins and intentions. Or Vengeance on Varos, which is a nasty violent dystopian tale of the sort popular in the early/mid '80s -- but then the Doctor arrives, gets most everyone except the villains on his side, and turns the whole thing into a critique of the genre. The point is that the presence of the Doctor distorts stories -- he gets people on his side via his personality and confidence and sends stories off in a new direction as a result.

Why bring this up? Because "Midnight" is the one story where this doesn't happen.

You can see it almost start to happen; it starts out as a tense "possession" thriller, but because the Doctor is there things can go in a different direction. He has experience with this sort of thing, after all. He almost calms everyone down, but then the hostess advocates throwing the possessed Sky out of the broken-down shuttle and things start to spiral out of control. Instead of the Doctor being listened to as the voice of reason, the others turn on him in their hysteria, demanding an accounting of him that he's unable to satisfactorily give. Instead of distorting the story, he's subsumed by it, unable to affect the changes he normally would; he's now a victim like everyone else.

This would be a terrifying move even if "Midnight" weren't so well directed, but director Alice Troughton (no relation) does an outstanding job of laying the tension on thick, with odd angles and cuts and lighting choices all combining to create a genuinely scary experience. We also get a superb cast, including David Troughton (Patrick Troughton's son, last seen on the show in The Curse of Peladon) as Professor Hobbes, Colin Morgan (soon to be the main character on Merlin) as Jethro, and Lesley Sharp (from a number of earlier RTD productions) as Sky. This is a very strong cast, but it might be Lesley Sharp who stands out the most as the possessed Sky. Russell T Davies takes the simple childhood annoyance of repeating what someone says and turns it into something scary, and Lesley Sharp absolutely delivers in her performance -- even David Tennant can't quite match it when it's his turn to play possessed, and he's hardly a slouch in this.

The end result is an episode that gets tenser and more claustrophobic until it approaches breaking point, and the Doctor is powerless to do anything about it. No one on the shuttle is a bad person -- the scenes at the beginnings show that these are all "normal" people -- but when they're thrust into this situation their worst nature comes out and they're unable to rise above it. Once again we see that humanity's worst enemy is itself, and it's only the actions of the hostess (who no one knew the name of) that stops the others from murdering an innocent man and inadvertently letting this strange creature go free. "Midnight" is a powerful, extremely well-crafted story -- even if the points it raises makes it one of the most depressing stories the series has ever done -- and one of the best stories the show has ever done.