Day 748: Midnight

Midnight is, quite simply, one of the best episodes of Doctor Who ever produced. It works perfectly on every level, in particular through Russell T Davies' writing and the frightening performances through the members of the cast (Tennant's face once his voice has been stolen is one of the most haunting performances he has ever given and fully sells the notion that the situation has now gotten completely out of control). And amongst the many things that I think about when watching this story, one that often comes to mind is how the story was originally written: as a riff on Voyage of the Damned.

Both Midnight and Voyage of the Damned are stories with similar premises. The Doctor goes on a journey on some vessel when a disaster happens. His role is then to band together a group of people to find safety and get all of them out of that situation alive. Voyage of the Damned looks at the situation when those people can bring out the best of themselves in horrific situations, while Midnight concerns people who bring out the worst of themselves. The people in Midnight are not brave, nor do they care for others. Instead they are ruthlessly paranoid and frequently nasty. There are a few good eggs in the bus where Midnight takes place, but their voices are drowned out by the louder and more judgemental.

I think that the differences between the two episodes are summed up best by their endings, just after the crisis is over. In Voyage, Rickston Slade, the least likeable of the survivors, thanks the Doctor personally for saving his life, before quietly gloating about how he's been made rich because of the event. He's not a particularly nice character, but he goes to the trouble of thanking his saviour. In Midnight, Val, the character who has been voicing all of the paranoia and was one of the main people who took away the Doctor's control and attempted to take away his life, instead attempts to cover her tracks by saying that she said that the monster was Sky. A simple moment of a horrible woman failing to admit her own faults and instead jumping to what she sees as her own moral high ground. But it, of course, is pointless because we all know that she was just as at fault as the rest of them. The differences between the two scenes are stark. One shows a man who isn't a nice man, but still has goodness within him. The other is about a woman who tries to show that she's a nice woman, when really she has truly awful qualities within her.

Of course, what makes this all the more frightening is that, whilst we can watch Voyage of the Damned and think that this is how everyone would behave in a crisis, we can watch Midnight and know that it is how everyone behaves in crises. People jump to conclusions and blame anyone for the events that have taken place, resulting in a heightened state of unrest within the area of the situation. You only have to think of the recent terror attacks that took place last year and the reaction of certain elements of society, be they politicians, the media, or just ordinary people on the street, and you can realise that this simple little story is one of the most accurate representations of the problems with the world today.