About Midnight

I was thinking of doing that thing where I’d go absolutely gaga championing “episode ten”. You know, saying that while this recent series had its ups and down, the last couple of weeks had been absolute blinders, while the latest one was utterly compelling and absolutely gut wrenching. You can pretty much see where it was going with it, right?

Obviously the inference would be that I was discussing Doctor Who. The reveal, of course, would be that the show in question was actually Battlestar Galactica. But I think I tried that one already, back when the shows were about to start. After finally catching the latest Who episode on iPlayer, I don’t think I could have worked out and carried on a decent pretence anyway. Because, quite frankly, I think my brain is still numb from the experience.

Unconditional love doesn’t wash in the Good Dog kennel. Though the Moffat two-parter was an astonishing piece of storytelling, it doesn’t mean that I’m now a paid-up fan for the series. Everything pretty has to stand by its own merit – although there’s always a little leeway when I’m feeling benevolent – which means Midnight stands and falls on its own merit. And the way I see it, this episode is still tumbling ass over tit, down into a bottomless pit.


I did think that the idea of showing that, without an assistant around to act as a buffer, The Doctor can come across as a self-serving, know-it-all tool. Which makes him sort of like an alien James Cameron. It was great to have an entity that nobody could explain rather than some tired old monster from bygone days. That aside, Midnight appeared to be written by someone who had absolutely no understanding of science fiction and absolutely no respect for science fiction.

A while back I mentioned the Agatha Christie episode and how the appearance of her book, published in the year 5,000,000,000, was simply the icing on an already fucked up cake. Sure, it’s a little throwaway gag, but I found it yanking me right out of the story. The cogs are whirring away and I’m thinking: five billion AD? Why a book and not some slender digital reader? What is literature still doing in the same format? What about the trees to make the paper?

You get something like that and the spell is broken. Like a light sleeper easily awoken, little inconsistencies yank me right out of the story. Of course, funnily enough, the very next week there was a whole library of books – a library the size of a planet, filled with every book every written. But that was fine because the parameters were quickly set up and within them the story made perfect sense.

Here you could begin by asking what kind of name for a planet is Midnight, especially since it’s all diamond shiny? But then that was the least of the barrel load of nonsense that, once tipped out, really stank up the screen. By now I would hope that we all know that science fiction stories still require internal logic. By now I would hope that we all know that people who say things like, “Ah, don’t worry about it! Nothing has to make sense, its just science fiction!” should be dragged away and painfully abused by fire-pissing demons of the underworld.

Let’s just look at the basic scenario here. It’s set on a planet made of diamond where there’s a self-contained holiday resort. Comments so far? How about: if you discover a planet made of diamonds you mine the shit out of it rather than turn it into a holiday destination. That would seem like a plan, but on Midnight the diamonds are “poisoned by the sun” so that nobody can touch them. Also, the sunlight is “exotonic”, which means that it will “destroy any living thing in a split second.” Oh, and there’s no oxygen either.

Remember that scene in Armageddon when Owen Wilson’s character asks what the surface of the asteroid is going to be like? After he’s told about the extreme temperatures, razor-sharp rock and unpredictable gravity, he replies “So, the scariest environment imaginable.” How did this holiday resort, on an irradiated planet, with no atmosphere and direct sunlight that with vaporise you, get Health & Safety certified? And who in their right fucking minds would go there?

The Doctor and Donna, obviously. While Donna sunbathes beneath fifteen foot thick glass, The Doctor is off to see a “sapphire waterfall.” Apparently, an enormous jewel reaches the Cliffs of Oblivion and shatters into sapphires at the edge, falling 100,000 feet into a crystal ravine. Of course it does. I suppose explained that like it should make sense, even though the Cliffs of Oblivion sound like something out of The Princess Bride.

Yet, while the resort looks pretty upscale, why does the caterpillar- tracked transport to the waterfall appear to be so utterly low-rent? Since the windows have to be shielded, meaning there is no view out, why are they travelling by land in the first place, especially since this particular mode of transport takes four hours there and four hours back?

Since it is a business venture, and the passengers are paying, the object of the exercise is to take them to this Diamond Palace to see the waterfall, getting them there and back as quickly as possible, and then get ready for the next party. Why not have shuttles, or even a monorail of some kind, running people back and forth?


Then we get to the passengers themselves. Given that the story is about ordinary people feeding off growing paranoia and giving in to the pressure of the situation, it would help to have ordinary people. Really you want characters like the folk in The Monsters are Due on Maple Street, the Rod Serling-scripted episode of The Twilight Zone in which residents of a suburban street start to believe their neighbourhood has been invaded by human-looking aliens.

Instead, aside from a dull scientist who is there to also become an object of ridicule, because it’s just what fuckers who deal in things like science and facts deserve, onto the transport steps the sort of oiks who drag their knuckles around Lakeside or thecentre:mk. Descended from the apes that certainly didn’t touch the monolith, given their default setting seems to be constant arguing, they don’t really have far to go when everyone gets leery and it all kicks off.

With parts of the resort looked like it had been fitted out for a higher class of customer, wouldn’t it have been better if this journey had been taken by a much more civilised group; the sort that would likely include an equivalent of Caldicott and Charters? That way – far from the sort that would start a ruck with, “Did you spill my sherry?” – their descent into primal madness would be that much more frightening.

Instead, nothing seemed to be taken into consideration. Does anybody give Russell The Doughnut notes? Some of the exposition sounded like rebuttals to what some people may have observed in the initial draft. With this sort of nonsense let through unchecked rather than sitting down and reconfiguring the whole thing, I would have loved to be at the table read to see who rolled their eyes and tried not to descend into giggles.

As I said at the beginning, the idea of the Doctor without a companion coming across as a complete cock and an unexplained entity was pretty good. Unfortunately, the execution was completely and utterly fucking awful. Hell, they might as well have made an episode of Holby City where a surgeon turns up for work on a camel that’s painted blue, then, during a heart transplant operation he replaces the dodgy ticker with a cheese and pickle sandwich.