Tenth Doctor Era
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Midnight
The Doctor, stuck in a bus with a race who abandon morality and reason in favour of their own selfish desires. Oh, and a mysterious mimicking demon as well.
"Now listen, all of you, for all we know that's a brand new lifeform over there, and if it's come inside to discover us, then what's it found? This little bunch of humans. What do you amount to? Murder? 'Cause this is where you decide, you decide who you are."
— The Doctor
The one where Ten is broken. And broken. And also broken.
A "companion-lite" Psychological Horror Bottle Episode by Russell T Davies, written as a contrast to the "Doctor-lite episode" that directly follows it.
The Doctor and Donna go to an alien spa on a beautiful but uninhabitable planet called Midnight — because, all world-saving and death-avoiding aside, they really are just travellers. Donna relaxes at the hotel while the Doctor goes on a little sightseeing tour to a waterfall made entirely of sapphires.
"What Could Possibly Go Wrong?" asks the Doctor.
What indeed.
The shuttle bus takes four hours to get to the waterfall. The Doctor very quickly decides to tamper with the truly awful in-flight entertainment system and befriends all the passengers instead. There's the haughty professor, his timid but clever assistant, a bickering married couple and their moody teenager (who also plays Merlin), a bored hostess and a newly single woman by the name of Sky Silvestry, who really hates being newly single.
The fun begins an hour or so into the trip. First, it's revealed that a landslide has blocked the normal path and the shuttle bus is going to take an alternative route that has been mapped by computer but is through a zone of the planet no human being has ever set foot on before. A bit later, the shuttle bus stops for no apparent reason halfway to the destination and, because the local star doesn't emit regular sunlight but super-deadly radiation, they can't leave the bus. The Doctor bluffs his way into the cockpit to check on things, and convinces Joe (the driver) and Claude (the mechanic) to open the blinds for a moment. The three of them utterly geek out at the sight — an entire plain of sparkling diamonds. Just before the blinds close again, however, Claude notices something. Something that looked almost like a shadow. A shadow running straight towards them.
The Doctor rejoins the passengers, who are beginning to freak out about the unexplained stop. Nothing to worry about, he assures them. The shuttle's life support means they have ten years' worth of air, and the rescue craft is only an hour away. "I can guarantee you, everything's fine."
Then something proceeds to bang on the sides of the bus, mimic the passengers' attempt at contact by knocking in response to their own knocks and finally rips off the drivers' compartment. Sky freaks out, and the creature is drawn to her screams... and possesses her.
Sky, hunched on the floor, starts talking. She repeats anything anyone says. The Doctor is intrigued, if a bit scared, and tries to make contact with whatever's inside her. It's only when Sky starts talking in sync with her fellow passengers that everyone realises they're in a horror story, and the Doctor warns the passengers to stop talking, since whatever the creature is, it is learning from and evolving from listening to their words.
The Professor's assistant recites lines from Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market", which makes things a lot creepier. Also, Rose briefly shows up on a screen, screaming at the Doctor. Again. He doesn't notice.
The Doctor still tries to befriend the creature, hoping there's a good chance that it's just scared, or curious, or trying to be nice. The passengers, however, take a vote to throw Sky into the sunlight. And while the Doctor tries to talk sense into them, the creature realises that he is the cleverest person on the bus, and begins talking in sync only with him.
And now, the entire vessel is suspicious of him because of what are usually his strengths: his cleverness, his confidence, his take-charge attitude and the breadth and depth of his knowledge all mark him out as something other than human. Which he is, and that's the most dangerous thing to be in a mob of terrified humans. Nothing a sonic screwdriver could fend off.
He never gets a chance to convince them otherwise, because they're all savvy — just without the knowledge that the Doctor is this story's hero, making them Wrong Genre Savvy in all the worst ways. The Doctor makes one last attempt to communicate with what's inside Sky... and suddenly Sky is talking before the Doctor talks, while the Doctor is forced to repeat everything she says. The monster, now fully cognisant, pretends that Sky's completely back to normal. It's inside him, she says. It's inside him, the Doctor hears himself repeating. Cast him out into the sun, she says. Cast him out into the sun, the Doctor repeats. The group quickly devolves into a mob divided: most want to push the Doctor out of the ship, but both the professor's assistant and the hostess argue that Sky is hardly acting normal, and that the entity might have stolen the Doctor's voice instead of possessing him. They're shouted down as the men onboard grab hold of the Doctor and start dragging him toward the doors. Sky gloats, remarking, "Molto Bene! Allons-y!" The Doctor repeats this helplessly... which is when the hostess realizes that she and the professor's assistant were right, as those are things the Doctor says, not Sky. In the nick of time, she grabs Sky, throws open the nearest door, and sacrifices herself to destroy the alien and save the Time Lord.
This isn't one of those times when the Doctor just gets up and pretends he's fine. He's deeply shaken. So are the passengers: they are reeling in shock and shame, with the knowledge that they almost killed the wrong man. Val desperately tries to absolve herself, claiming she knew all along, but one look from the Doctor makes her stop.
Twenty minutes later the rescue team arrives, and the Doctor has learned a few painful lessons about mob mentality. This episode marks the beginning of a shift in the Doctor's attitude: he realises that while most Humans Are Special, some Humans Are the Real Monsters when they get scared. Even worse, the Doctor finds out that no one even knew the name of the hostess. Not even the Doctor.
The Doctor reunites with Donna, clearly shaken. Donna starts repeating him in jest — but the Doctor tells her not to do that, being absolutely serious this time, and looking like he's about to go crawl underneath a table.
Tropes:
- Abusive Parents: The overprotective variety, Val and Biff's anger stem from the fear of Jethro being harmed by the Midnight Entity. Biff nearly murders the Doctor and would have done the same to Sky because he wanted to get rid of the alien. Val shares this fear but refuses to get her hands dirty, barking orders and screaming at her husband to throw out the Doctor (who was only paralysed by the Midnight Entity after it stole his voice, but the other passengers believed Sky when she said that it moved to him). After the stewardess sacrifices herself to eject the entity, Val immediately claims that she knew Sky was lying the entire time. When they were calm, they were good parents as they respected Jethro's privacy and immediately checked if he was ok after the crash. Jethro, on the other hand, was the most rational and observant but his opinions were quickly dismissed by his frantic family, who were trying to protect him.
- Aerith and Bob: In the "Bob" category, we have Joe, Claude, Jethro, Sky, and Val. "John Smith" is also considered common to the point where it's the go-to pseudonym. In contrast, we have Biff, Dee Dee, and Winfold.
- Agent Scully: The Professor insists throughout the entire episode that nothing can survive outside due to the absurdly strong radiation, despite all the evidence to the contrary. In the end, though, he's finally forced to admit that it must be something (though not without pressure from the others).
- Alliterative Name: Sky Silvestry.
- Alone in a Crowd: The Doctor at the end, sitting in the aisle of the bus. Sky, too; she's the only other passenger travelling alone.
- And I Must Scream: From the expression on his face, the Doctor is very clearly aware of how helpless he is after the entity steals his voice, and his repetition of its words sounds shaky and terrified. It only gets worse when the other passengers start dragging him off to be killed. The most he manages to do to help himself is hook his foot around the leg of a seat, and even that doesn't help for long.
- Anti-Villain:
- The passengers were frantic and panicking about the Midnight Entity, resorting to any means necessary to keep themselves safe. Considering what it did to get on the cruiser, their fear isn't unwarranted.
- To a much lesser extent, the Midnight Entity itself; what it says through Sky implies it's been alone on Midnight for thousands of years and wants to inhabit a body at any cost.
- Arc Words: The Medusa Cascade, and a disappearing planet (well, in this instance a moon).
- Bavarian Fire Drill: Deconstructed. The Doctor does his usual thing bluffing his way into the cabin and generally making it clear that he knows what he's doing... which leads the passengers to suspect he has something to do with the alien.
- Big Bad: The Midnight Entity which possesses Sky.
- Bittersweet Ending: This episode does not end on a happy note, as the best the Doctor can do is ensure the planet is abandoned before leaving as fast as he can with Donna. The creature is likely still out there and the Doctor remains decidedly shaken and traumatised by the ordeal. Made even worse by the fact that, even when River sacrificed herself in the preceding episode, the Doctor could still at least pretend he's fine. Here? He doesn't even bother.
- Blatant Lies: Val is amongst the people who want to throw the Doctor out, because she believes that the creature has moved into him, like had happened with Sky before. She even embraces "Sky", relieved that she appears to be cured. However, after the creature is killed and the Doctor freed, she decides to use this moment to tell him “I said it was her.” A lie so blatant even Val doesn't look like she believes it.
- Bottle Episode:
- Takes place almost entirely in a single room, with half the main duo off-screen. There is a minimum of special effects, most restricted to CGI scenery. And it's still one of the creepiest episodes ever.
- Interestingly, it failed one of the classic reasons for a bottle episode, to save money, because the whole set had to be built to meet some pretty specific needs, the scenes with repeating (with delay or in synch) took loads of extra rehearsal time and retakes, and many of the scenes had to be reshot multiple times with each individual actor speaking in turn while everyone else mimed.
- Break the Cutie: Dee Dee Blasco, the professor's assistant. When she tries to speak up about having seen that the monster is still in Sky, and that they shouldn't trust her, the professor yells at her that she's, essentially, stupid and worthless. Of course, she's proven right.
- Burn the Witch!: In this case "throw the alien out of the shuttle", but it's the same mob mentality and hysteria.
- Bury Your Gays: Played with here by gay author Russell T Davies. Sky's ex-partner was female, and the hostess notably addresses her passengers as "ladies and gentlemen and variations thereupon" (a similarly all-inclusive salutation was used in Davies' earlier script, "The Long Game", showing how ahead of his time he was). Neither of these things is Played for Laughs — it's just considered normal by everyone and never commented on. Within the context of the plot, the Doctor relates to her most and tells her he also lost someone recently. The fact that Sky dies isn't because she's not straight, but because of her fragile emotional state, her ex-wife apparently having threatened to "get" her. She is still the "target" and explicitly queer as well as this having some connection to the plot.
- Bus Full of Innocents: Darkly subverted. The "innocents", driven to paranoia and fear, end up becoming a more dangerous physical threat then the Eldritch Abomination.
- Can Only Move the Eyes: Even more extreme, the Doctor cannot even move his eyes, trapped staring straight ahead with no way to signal he's still in there.
- Chekhov's Gun: The Doctor's catchphrases. They save his life by a hair's width because the hostess recognizes them.
- Chiaroscuro: With everyone's flashlights aimed at Sky's face, it creates this effect. Even after the main lights come back on, Sky's face continues to be lit more brightly than everyone else, creating a literal halo effect around her.
- Continuity Nod:
- The Doctor says "Rose Tyler, Martha Jones, Donna Noble, TARDIS" in rapid succession.
- He mentions a friend in another universe, which could refer to either Romana and K9 or Rose.
- Death Glare: The Doctor gives a weary one to Val when she says "I said it was her" after Sky gets thrown out of the pressure cabin. Given how this comes immediately after she was shouting for Ten to be thrown out himself, it's certainly understandable.
- Death in the Clouds: Although it takes place on land, the lethality of leaving the vehicle and resulting enforced confinement meet all of the other usual specifics for this trope.
- Death World: Midnight is as beautiful as it is deadly, with no known forms of life able to live on its surface, or even in the entire local system. The "extonic" sunlight destroys any living creature within seconds — in theory.
- Deconstruction: This episode shows that the Doctor's modus operandi can make him look suspicious. In real life, a person that shows up for a trip at the last minute, doesn't tell you his real name, and this just happens to be a rare occasion for a detour and this person happens to be well-informed is all suspicious.
- Even the Doctor's more banal qualities, such as his insatiable curiosity and Motor Mouth and Deadpan Snarker tendencies, are darkly criticised throughout the episode and shown to be potentially detrimental in the wrong circumstances. The Doctor's encouragement for the passengers to start chatting to each other after purposefully shutting down the (admittedly obnoxious) entertainment systems and later goading the cabin crew to raise the blast shields just so he could have a look at the planet's surface could very well have attracted the entity to the Crusader 50 in the first place.
- Demonic Possession: Some kind of alien possesses Sky and later takes control of the Doctor's body.
- Developing Doomed Characters: We spend five or ten minutes meeting the other passengers before everything goes wahoonie-shaped.
- Dirty Coward:
- Biff is obviously trying to look manly to his family in the face of a threat. In doing so, he accuses an innocent man of doing something he didn't do on rubbish he grabbed from thin air, shouts down any rationality, and attempts to kill said man. Bravo, Mr. Manly.
- Val is even worse. She's extremely demanding on getting rid of the Doctor, but unlike her idiot husband, she doesn't even bother to take action herself and just barks for her demands.
- To add to this, she only seems to be interested in siding with the majority to save face. When everyone opposes the Doctor's ideals, she immediately chooses to side with everyone else without a thought. When she (and everyone else) is proven wrong, she immediately insists that she knew it was Sky the whole time.
- Disposable Pilot: The driver and the mechanic are Killed Offscreen by the creature shortly after things begin going to hell with the least development out of all the characters.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: It's significant that the two black characters are the ones trying to stop a mob from murdering an innocent man.
- Driven to Suicide: Word of God says that Sky planned to kill herself at the waterfall.
- Dumb Muscle: Biff is very hotheaded and isn't very smart, immediately jumping to conclusions based on a complete lack of evidence or thought.
- The Echoer: The entity does not seem to have a comprehension of human speech and repeats all words that it hears around it with perfect accuracy. After stoking madness and paranoia amongst the passengers, it starts to affect the Doctor, with him repeating its words.
- Eldritch Abomination: The thing that possesses Sky can survive on a planet where nothing is supposed to be able to survive, can't be seen, and can provoke madness.
- It also manages to somehow enter the bus without any sign of forced entry other than a dent in the metal, and is apparently able to tear off the driver's cabin as well. The Doctor infers from the severed wiring that it wasn't just torn away, it was perfectly sliced off.
- Enclosed Space: Nothing can leave the bus without being destroyed by the sun.
- Enslaved Tongue: The creature possesses Sky, to whom the Doctor tries to reason with. However, the creature's speech catches up to and then overtakes the Doctor's thoughts, taking control so he orders the others on the ship to kill him against his will.
- Evil Gloating: This is the entity's undoing. It is too proud of itself when its plan is on the verge of success.
- Evil Is Hammy: The entity in Sky's body, once it has its own voice, positively revels in the Doctor's helplessness and its own ability to easily influence the passengers.
- Evil Matriarch: "Evil" may be stretching it as everyone in the shuttle succumbs to raving paranoia by the end, but as the episode goes on, Val shows some truly horrible colours, arguably descending most into petty spitefulness as she tries to frame the Doctor negatively in every situation. Her husband Biff is definitely just as guilty, but Val feels content to bark orders at him and the others from the sidelines, all while viciously shooting down any opinion that conflicts with her own. Worse, she actually has the nerve to claim that she was actually on the Doctor's side all along.
- Extremophile Lifeforms: The unseen being is capable of surviving on a planet bathed in the X-tonic radiation of its sun, a place where no known life is capable of existing.
- Face-Revealing Turn: Subverted with Sky. She has her back turned after being possessed and when she finally turns around, she looks like normal. Except, there's this odd look on her face.
- The Farmer and the Viper: The Doctor was adamant that the passengers should leave Sky alone until the rescue comes but he's not only rejected by the other passengers for being an outsider, the Midnight Entity steals his voice and nearly throws him under (and almost literally out of) the bus to survive.
- There's also the point that even once he knows the Midnight Entity has murdered two people, he still tries to reason with it, and suggests it doesn't need to steal life or form or consciousness if it wants it.
- Fighting from the Inside: Presumably the reason the Doctor pauses and stumbles over words when the alien is making him repeat things, and certainly the reason he manages to hook his foot around the leg of one of the seats.
- Foreshadowing:
- The professor and Jethro's parents both show off jerkass qualities early on that become a major problem once everything goes to hell.
- At some point while Biff is recounting a story to the Doctor, his son Jethro rolls his eyes and echos the line in the presumably oft-retold story in perfect synchronisation with his father, an extremely uncomfortable preview of what’s to come.
- Dee Dee mentions the lost moon of Poosh.
- When the Doctor knocks on the door, and the creature knocks back, count the number of knocks. Even the closed-captioning calls attention to this one.
- For the Evulz: Although the Doctor tries to treat the entity with the compassion and respect deserving of a newly discovered lifeform, the creature responds by killing the pilots, driving the passengers to madness, stealing the Doctor's voice before trying to murder him, and why it does any of this is never explained.
- Go Through Me: "If you try to throw her out that door, you'll have to get past me first!" So they do.
- Hard Truth Aesop: The episode examines group fear and paranoia in the face of danger.
- Considering how the Doctor and Sky become possessed and persecuted, the lesson is "Don't do anything to isolate yourself from a group of frightened individuals, hide in the background and find better excuses for your actions so you don't draw attention to yourself." The reason Jethro turned against the Doctor was because of the Doctor's excitement, which was a massive contrast to the terrified passengers.
- Russell T Davis also said in Doctor Who Confidential that the Stewardess was right the entire time and the Midnight Entity needed to be ejected from the ship for the good of everyone else. While the lesson appears to be "Kill anyone different from you since they can be a threat", the better lesson is "Examine a person by their previous actions before passing judgement". While the Doctor was adamant that the Entity should be helped, the stewardess was right to point out that it still killed the pilot and mechanic to get in the ship. If it killed before, then it will kill again.
- He Had a Name: Variation. No one knew the hostess' name when the Doctor asked at the end.
- Heroes Gone Fishing: The episode starts out like this (we get the impression that they've come to the planet Midnight specifically to have a relaxing holiday) with Donna having a nice day in a spa sort of place while the Doctor decides to go on a fun day trip. Of course, the episode quickly descends into horror. But it was nice while it lasted.
- Heroic BSoD: After narrowly being saved from death at the hands of the panicked and hysterical passengers, the Doctor just sits alone, only speaking to ask if anyone knew the hostess' name.
- Heroic Sacrifice: The hostess pulls the possessed Sky out of the airlock.
- Humans Are Bastards: Everyone on this bus is, to varying degrees, selfish, impatient, cowardly, murderous and crazy psychopaths. It can be argued that the Tenth Doctor is never quite the same after this experience. This is emphasized with the contrast of how perfectly normal they all were before things started going wrong.
- I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: The planet Midnight. "What could possibly go wrong?"
- Insane Troll Logic: One of the things the passengers latch onto to justify their fear of the Doctor is that he was talking to Sky before everything went to hell, therefore, they might be in on it together. Forgotten by everyone is the fact that the Doctor was talking to everyone on the bus, simply being social. Justified, as by this point, most of the people on the bus are well past the point of paranoia, and the Doctor's attempts at defusing the situation just makes matters worse.
- Invisible Monsters: The creature that possesses Sky is never seen. A few shadows are seen from the cockpit, but not by the viewers, and that's all.
- Although truly eagle-eyed viewers (as in, ones who slow down the footage to .25x) can actually spot a slithering shadow in the diamond city for a fraction of a second. However, the shadow is so indistinct and moves so fast that it might as well be invisible.
- Ironic Echo: "Don't. Don't do that," is one for previous episodes.
- Jerkass Has a Point:
- The hostess is the first one to recognise just how dangerous the possessed Sky could really be, and to insist that they throw it out of the craft; as Russell T Davies points out in the Confidential, she's proven absolutely right and that's really the only thing they could have done.
- While Jethro is introduced as a moody teen who's embarrassed to be around his parents, he bounces back and forth between taking it seriously and responding with humour. Jethro is among the most observant and rational of the passengers; he's the first to notice Sky's condition, how the monster has stopped knocking on the walls when the bus is attacked, how the Doctor's fascination with the entity is more worrying than comforting, and that Sky has stopped repeating the passengers. He doesn't cave in to peer pressure and he's the last passenger to turn on the Doctor, he just noticed an oddity and came to his own conclusion.
- Jerkass:
- The father, most of all. He suddenly, and angrily, insists the Doctor was there to lead them into a trap with zero evidence, threatens the professor's assistant when she says otherwise, and keeps bellowing to prove his non-existent masculinity.
- It turns out the only reason why the professor allows the student to help him is because he needs someone to carry around his stuff — in reality, he considers her "average, at best". There's an element of sexism and/or classism in his treatment of her as well; several times, when Dee Dee tries to talk to the Doctor, the professor just tells her "Don't bother the man".
- The mother tries to save her hide by insisting she was with the Doctor the whole time after the entity is thrown out the airlock. The Doctor just angrily stares at her.
- The Doctor himself. He disables the entertainment system without asking everyone else and also takes it upon himself to take charge, without being asked. That said, his near fate here is disproportionate retribution.
- Just a Kid: Jethro's mother dismisses him as "just a boy" when his opinion differs from her own. It's ironic, because she had just sought out his opinion and didn't dismiss him when he agreed with her. It's especially ridiculous because he looks like he's at least seventeen (not to mention Colin Morgan was 22 when this was made, although he had yet to look his age).
- Kick the Dog: The Professor gets one when he angrily tells Dee Dee that she's "average at best". Then it turns out she's right.
- Knew It All Along: A non-humourous example at the end, when Val — one of the most vocal in insisting that the entity had left Sky — weakly claims, "I said it was her." The Doctor (who was probably conscious the entire time) just shoots her down with a look.
- Know-Nothing Know-It-All: The professor, who repeatedly insists that nothing is capable of living on the surface of Midnight, despite blatant evidence to the contrary. He also shouts down Dee Dee, demeaning her as "average, at best" when she's at least as knowledgeable as he is, and a good deal wiser. Val and Biff latch on to him as an expert largely because of his title, because he's agreeing with them, and because he's not the Doctor.
- Ladies and Germs: "Ladies and gentlemen, and variations thereupon..."
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The whole spiel by the passengers on how suspicious the Doctor is.
- Like Father, Unlike Son: At the start, it shows that Biff is a very social, bombastic and cheerful man in contrast to his gothic, moody son Jethro. However, as the episode progresses with everyone backed into a corner, Biff becomes very aggressive, careless and quick to action whether Jethro is more reasonable and intelligent than his father, only taking action due to peer pressure and being unsure himself.
- Madness Mantra: A brief one that shows how horribly rattled the Doctor really was.The Doctor: It's gone. It's gone. It's gone, it's gone, it's gone. It's gone, it's gone, it's gone...
- Meaningful Background Event: Rose appears briefly on a TV screen behind the Doctor.
- Meaningful Name: Prof. Hobbes, named after Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher who believed that "man is a wolf to man". It turns out he was right.
- Mind Rape:
- The thing absolutely broke Sky in order to steal her body.
- What the thing did to the Doctor. The terrified, utterly broken look on his face will probably stay with you for a while.
- Missed Him by That Much: Rose appears on the television screen mere moments after the Doctor looks away from it.
- Mouthful of Pi: The Doctor rattles off the square root of pi to thirty decimal placesnote while investigating Sky's condition. The passengers find this almost as weird as her being possessed.
- Mr. Smith: When the passengers insist on the Doctor telling them his name, he gives them his usual alias of "John Smith", which only makes them more suspicious of him. It's subverted in that his official name really is John Smith, leaving one to wonder how the passengers reacted when help arrived and they found this out.
- Mundane Dogmatic: More than most Doctor Who episodes, "Midnight" leans into this aesthetic. Aside from the extra-terrestrial setting itself and some references to aliens and other galaxies, nothing about the episode feels like it's from the distant future. All of the human characters look, act, and dress exactly like anyone from 21st century Earth. The shuttle might as well be an ordinary tourbus. The familiarity of seeing normal-looking people trapped in a mundane setting undoubtedly helps to sell the story's core themes and messages.
- Mundanger: Thanks to a little "push" from the entity, a tiny group of perfectly normal people come within a hair's breadth of killing the Doctor.
- My God, What Have I Done?: The passengers seem to realise how monstrous they became in the face of the unknown after the entity has been defeated; as the rescue arrives, every one of them has a shaken, deeply ashamed expression.
- Never Trust a Trailer: The "Next time..." preview for this at the end of the previous episode took the "Two people are dead!" "Don't make it a third!" dialogue exchange (between the hostess and the Doctor, respectively) out of context, making it seem like an Implied Death Threat.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: If the Doctor hadn't been there, and hadn't been so convinced he could get the creature to release Sky, the other passengers would have thrown Sky overboard long before the crisis point and the Hostess wouldn't have died.
- Nightmare Fetishist: The Doctor is (initially) fascinated by the creature — it backfires and alienates everyone else. "You do have a certain... glee." More disturbingly is that after his ordeal, the insatiably and insanely curious Doctor shows zero interest whatsoever in finding out just what the hell the entity was. He just wants to get the hell out of there and for the planet to be evacuated and abandoned forever. To put this in perspective, this same Doctor was still intrigued by the mystery behind the Beast's origins after his encounter with it, and even said that continuing to search for answers to questions such as these was part of what drove him to travel. The Midnight entity so disturbed him he does not even want to think about it again.
- No Name Given:
- Played for Drama with the hostess. Her lack of given name is made all the more poignant given her final heroism. Even in the credits she is just called "Hostess".
- The creature is only known to the fandom as "The Midnight Entity/Creature".
- Non-Protagonist Resolver: The Doctor spends the crisis at a loss to understand the creature, slowly earning the suspicions of the other passengers, and then, totally at the mercy of the entity and a gang of paranoid humans who are now convinced that killing him is the only way to fix things. The entity is only defeated when the Hostess drags it and herself to their doom, saving the Doctor in the process.
- Not Helping Your Case: Don't want to make the scared passengers even more suspicious of you, Doctor? Then don't refer to them as "humans" in a poorly-worded sentence in a fashion that excludes you from that group, no matter how technically accurate it is.
- Nothing Is Scarier: This is the first enemy in the show's TV history that is never identified. Not only that, but what makes it so much worse is that we don't even know if the creature is capable of spreading paranoia or if it was just human nature. We also have no idea if it's trapped on Midnight or if it can manifest in other places. The way that the creature describes itself, speaking of being from the "dark and the cold", is eerily similar to creatures like Death and Abaddon from Torchwood, not to mention the Beast.
- Number of the Beast: Jethro jokingly tells the creature "six-six-six" so it will repeat the number back to him as though it were a demonic force.
- Obviously Evil: The entity, once it's able to speak for itself, gloats over the Doctor's helplessness with a horribly smug expression and tone of voice, happily egging everyone else on to throw the Doctor to his death. Unfortunately, the other passengers are too fixated on their paranoia regarding the Doctor to notice, with only the hostess and Dee Dee realising that something is amiss.
- Oh, Crap!: The alien, after realising it has exposed itself to the hostess.
- One-Word Title: "Midnight".
- Only Sane Man: The hostess is this at first, as she's the only person who realizes that the strange alien might be dangerous. Later, Dee Dee joins her in this role, as they're the ones who sense that the Doctor might be being used as a patsy by the alien and notice that Sky, despite claiming to be fine, is acting decidedly malicious and evil. Jethro also qualifies, until peer pressure takes him over — then again, he is a teenager.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: One of the few times we see the Doctor at a total loss as to what he's up against. He's unable to explain the entity's uncanny ability to mirror their speech, other than the vague notion that "the more we talk, the more she learns", and for all his knowledge and cunning has no recourse other than herding everyone to the back of the shuttle.
- Out-of-Genre Experience: The whole beginning of the episode seemed to play like a Hollywood romcom.
- Patrick Stewart Speech: Deconstructed when the Doctor is trying to keep the other passengers from throwing a possessed woman out into the planet's deadly sunlight; for once, he's drastically misjudged his audience and his ability to influence them.The Doctor: For all we know that's a brand-new lifeform over there, and if it's come inside to discover us then what's it found? This little bunch of humans. What do you amount to? Murder? 'Cause this is where you decide, you decide who you are. Could you actually murder her? Any of you? Really? Or are you better than that?
[pause]
The Hostess: I'd do it.
Mr. Cane: So would I.
Mrs. Cane: And me.
Dee Dee: I think we should. - Perky Goth: Jethro wears leather cuffs and black nail polish, but, while a typically moody and rebellious teenager, is quite a nice fellow, especially compared to his parents. He's notably the least vocal about the idea of killing Sky and is visibly uneasy about the other passengers turning on the Doctor, although he's too fearful to do anything about it (again, typical of a teenager; peer pressure is a problem for a reason, and Jethro's own father is the one trying to drag the Doctor to his doom).
- Psychic Link: It's created forcefully between the creature and the Doctor. Judging by the expression on the Doctor's face as he's forced to repeat after Sky, it's not an enjoyable experience. His screams take on a terrified pitch when Sky is being thrown out the airlock, after which the link seems to break.
- Psychological Horror: Even though the entity halts the shuttle, tears the cockpit away, bangs on the side, somehow enters without breaching the walls, and rips up the seats, the really scary part is just Sky flawlessly repeating what everyone says and managing to synchronise with them — that coupled with humans being humans. The premise takes the simple irritating tendency of children to mimic others and turns it into a case of Nothing Is Scarier: because the entity produces no speech of its own until the climax, it's hard to know what it's thinking or what it wants, or attempt to reason with it.
- Psychotic Smirk: The creature pulls it off when its plan is working perfectly.
- The Public Domain Channel: The entertainment screens on the shuttle bus only show old black-and-white Earth cartoons, and music videos from The '70s. Unlike most examples of the trope, the characters are aware that they're old, and aren't especially entertained.
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: According to Russell T Davies, the hostess was right in her suggestion to throw Sky out as soon as possible. It was the only thing they could have done, awful as it is. While she does a pretty good job keeping calm while explaining her pragmatic Cold Equation reasoning, the rest of the passengers are mostly scared out of their wits and grasp hold of the idea out of panic rather than reason.
- Running Gagged: The usual humour of "No... no, don't do that." is thoroughly murdered.
- Saying Too Much: The entity really should have just stopped flaunting the fact that it had the Doctor's voice. If it did, it would have succeeded. Even when everyone was too thick to notice Sky's sudden smugness, eventually the hostess figured it out when she heard "Allons~y"...
- Screen Shake: When the creature rips off the cockpit of the bus, the characters are thrown around for a bit.
- Screen-to-Stage Adaptation The episode was adapted into a stage production. The cast of characters was reduced by one, with Jethro's lines given to other characters, but the script was otherwise complete; Sky's repeating and synchronizing was kept completely intact, done live with no editing tricks or retakes.
- Shout-Out:
- To Christina Rosetti's poem "Goblin Market". It makes an already creepy situation even creepier.
- Also, Professor Hobbes in a story where Humans Are Bastards.
- Smug Snake: "Sky" sounds way too smug for someone who's supposedly been freed of alien control. The passengers really have no excuse for thinking the entity merely "moved on" to the Doctor.
- Something Only They Would Say: "Allons-y!" and "Molto bene!" finally tips off the hostess that it's not Sky talking, it's the alien, stealing the Doctor's voice.
- Stay in the Kitchen: Professor Hobbes' attitude towards Dee Dee smacks of this, chastising her for doing the same thing he'd done, introducing himself to the Doctor.
- Stealth Pun: The Hostess says that the Doctor just "came in out of the blue". Now, what colour is the TARDIS?
- Stop Copying Me: The possessed Sky repeats everything anyone says, and then synchronizes to say it at the same time. Instead of comedy, it's played for Surreal Horror.
- Tempting Fate: Invoked by the Doctor; since we know of his thirst for trouble, it's with full self-awareness that he says: "Taking a big spacetruck with a bunch of strangers 'cross a diamond planet called Midnight? What could possibly go wrong?"
- Thrown Out the Airlock: When the entity invades the ship, the passengers and hostess decide to do this to the possessed Sky—they'll toss her into the space above the planet, where she (and the monster inside her) will be vaporized by radiation. The Doctor convinces them not to...which prompts the entity to paralyze him and use Sky to talk the other passengers into tossing him into space instead. When the hostess realizes the truth, she grabs hold of Sky and opens the airlock herself, saving the Doctor at the cost of her own life.
- Trapped-with-Monster Plot: A group of people stuck inside of a bus on a Death World while a monster turns them against each other by running them through a psychological maze.
- Troll: Jethro decides to say "six-six-six" to the creature out of dark curiosity. He gets rebuffed by his parents for doing so and smiles for successfully pissing them off.
- Uncertain Doom: A particularly chilling part of the ending: the entity could already clearly survive on the surface of Midnight, so it's very unclear as to whether the Hostess dragging Sky outside to their deaths actually killed the entity itself. Even the Doctor isn't sure, and taking no chances, he convinces the authorities to seal the entire planet off to prevent anything like this from happening again.
- Unreliable Narrator: Sky claims that her ex-wife left her and moved a galaxy away, but when the entity begins hammering on the craft, she instantly launches into panic mode and cryptically says that "she said she'd get me". Maybe even a galaxy between them isn't enough for Sky to feel safe...
- Unwanted Assistance: The Doctor takes this attitude when Dee Dee points out there's a brief window where someone could safely be thrown out.
- Wham Line: "Do we have a deal?" Not for what was said, but because this is where the creature says it first.
- What Could Possibly Go Wrong?: The Doctor gets this exact line in The Teaser. He sounds like he almost wants something to go wrong when he says it. It makes him look suspicious to the other passengers. Although the day's upcoming events will prove to be a lot more than he was hoping for...
- What You Are in the Dark: The Doctor's argument, quoted above, is about appealing to the humans' better natures and hoping that they will prove in this dark time that they are above murdering mobs. Unfortunately, it doesn't take.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist: The Doctor tries to reason with the entity, telling it that if it wants life or a form or voice or consciousness, it doesn't need to steal it. This comes after he has discovered that the entity has already killed the driver and the mechanic.
Ready for the next episode...?
Ready for the next episode...?
...Oh dear...
...Oh dear...
Ready for the next episode...?
...Oh dear...
...Oh dear...
