We’re back with another 60th anniversary special, and this one harkens to one of Russell T. Davies’ best—“Midnight.”
Recap
Isaac Newton (Nathaniel Curtis) goes out and sits under an apple tree; one apple falls and hits him on the head. The TARDIS crashes into said tree immediately afterward and the Doctor and Donna emerge, realizing who they’ve accidentally run into. Donna insists on making a joke about how Isaac Newton could certainly understand “the gravity of the situation,” and the TARDIS dematerializes. Newton tries to recall the excellent word Donna used and comes up with “mavity.”
The next place the TARDIS materializes appears to be some sort of spaceship. The TARDIS is still exploding from the coffee that was spilled, and Donna asks the Doctor if it can be fixed. The Doctor plugs his sonic screwdriver into the lock and the TARDIS begins a sort of hard reset. Immediately after this, it dematerializes and strands them. Donna beings to have a panic attack, but the Doctor promises that he will get her home, and thinks that the TARDIS left them because the HADS (Hostile Action Displacement System) engaged. Basically whenever the TARDIS senses that it might be in imminent danger, it leaves until said danger is resolved. The Doctor had deactivated the system, but with the reset, it came back online. So as long as they can figure out what the “hostile action” in question is and neutralize it, it should come back and they’ll be able to leave.
The ship is large and empty and keeps shifting its shape and carries one robot that is moving very slowly. Occasionally there’s an alarm and words spoken, but the Doctor doesn’t know the language. Donna and the Doctor get to the bridge of the ship and find a seat for a commander but very little information: What they do know is that three years before, an airlock was opened and closed. When they look out there’s no stars—they’re at the edge of the known universe looking onto vast nothingness. The Doctor has Donna work in one room to try and get the ship to stop running on automatic. He leaves to work in another room across from her, then comes back and listens to Donna talk about her family. He keeps asking leading questions about all the people in her life, then mentions that his arms are too long.
In the other room, the Doctor is working and Donna comes in and begins asking him a lot of questions about Gallifrey… and mentions that her arms are too long. These are entities copying the Doctor and Donna’s bodies, and Donna hears the Doctor scream her name at the same moment that his duplicate begins to stretch apart at the arms. The Doctor and Donna reunite, and ask these beings why they are copying them and what their purpose is. The entities say that they come from outside their universe, suggest that they will eat the Doctor and Donna, and chase them down the spaceship corridor, but they grow too big and get stuck because they don’t have the hang of physical form yet. The Doctor and Donna try to get away in the hidden tunnels of the ship, but they get separated and run into the entities again.
The Doctor winds up believing that this copy is the real Donna because she tells him that she has his more recent memories from being the DoctorDonna and that she wants him to talk about the Flux and all the terrible things that have happened to him. She can’t hold the form for long enough, though, so the Doctor runs away and winds up breaking down, screaming and hitting the wall and sobbing. Donna tricks her copy into revealing itself and runs away. All four run about until they meet up again, but the Doctor figures out which Donna is the real one, then suggests that these entities can’t cross a line of salt without counting it, like fae or vampires. The trick only works for a while, and the Doctor copy tells them that they were drawn to the universe because all the hatred, pain, and war called to them, and they want to join in by taking form.
Donna and the Doctor make it back to the bridge, pursued by the entities, but Donna thinks to ask why they keep trying to scare them. The Doctor realizes this is a good point… and that the answer is that adrenaline makes them thinks more and faster, making them easier to copy. They try not to think to slow the entities down, but of course, the Doctor can’t do that for long. They find the body of the ship’s captain outside, long dead, and know that she killed herself—that was the use of the airlock three years ago. The Doctor figures out that the ship is on a slow countdown to destruction because the captain didn’t want these entities unleashed on their universe, and the slower the system goes, the harder it is for them figure it out. They speed up the countdown and race the entities to the robot about to push the button to destroy the ship. Because the countdown is nearly complete regardless, the TARDIS is no longer in danger and materializes to pick up the Doctor. He gets on board and goes to pick up Donna, but she’s mixed up with her copy. He tests them, asking why a joke they made earlier was funny, and picks the Donna who insists that the joke is simply funny because it is… but he picks the wrong Donna.
Thankfully, the Doctor realizes that the entity still has arms that are a fraction too long and kicks her out, pulling the real Donna on board moments before she dies in the explosion. The Doctor worries that he shouldn’t have invoked superstition with the salt gambit, that it feels like a mistake. They materialize in the same alley a little off from the day they left and find Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) waiting for them. The Doctor embraces his old friend, but chaos breaks out all around them: Wilf tells them that they have to do something because it’s the end of the world…
Commentary
He licked something and then pretended it was killing him to freak Donna out, the absolute bastard. I love him. I love them. Argh. This episode did so many of my favorite things.
They clearly got a big ol’ Disney-backed CGI budget to make the space more expansive (and the copies more frighteningly uncanny), but this is that good crunchy locked-room style mystery with extra creepiness for flavor. It’s just like “Midnight” in that respect and relies on similar dynamics throughout—namely using your actors to create the unease, and really letting it sit there. The computer graphics worked well, but the episode’s most upsetting moments were created by David Tennant and Catherine Tate looking just a hair off: a bit nasty, a little too vacant, just the wrong side of calculating, all dead in the eyes. Then there’s the strange contortions done by their body doubles.
The key is then combining that with both Donna and the Doctor being far too raw to handle this kind of runaround. Allowing the Doctor a moment where he thinks Donna might understand his more recent pains, and then viciously clawing that away from him—a breakdown was the minimum that demanded. (And no one breaks down like David Tennant, as these episodes are keen to remind us.) Donna is very clear-eyed about what failure means this time around because she has far more to lose than she used to. She fully walks herself through the steps of how her family would grieve her, and we do it with her in that moment.
Having said that, this episode is also full of Donna Noble brilliance—the way she tricks the copy by just babbling at him for ages until he forgets about the tie and she notices that it’s gone is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. The fact that the Doctor simultaneously screws up the same scenario because he’s so desperate to be seen and known is spot on. The Davies episodes never forget to make the crux of most drama (and problems) the ways that people are people, and it’s always true for his versions of the Doctor as much as all of the companions, in a manner that is always deeply satisfying to watch. All the joking and teasing, running right alongside the Doctor and Donna fighting over whose fault it is that they’re stranded, knowing that it won’t help. And it’s this exact people-y problem that almost causes Donna’s death: She overthinks her answer to the Doctor’s question because she’s scared, and the fact that it’s only a little piddly mathematical thing that gets the Doctor to notice he’s got the wrong person… oof. That’s what makes the episode truly scary, far more than contorting void invaders.
It seems remiss not to mention that age plays into this as well, in a way that feels so real and earned. This is true for the fact that our actors are both fifteen years older than when they last inhabited these roles together, but it’s true for both characters as well (in ways that are frankly unfathomable to a human brain), and it makes the drama play very, very differently than it ever has on Doctor Who. When Donna is scared and the Doctor is trying to shore her up through his own panic, there’s a depth to the emotion here that is borne of time, plain and simple. Real time that is measured in the experience of its actors, and the narrative of the show, and it hits on a much deeper level than I think the show has ever achieved.
It’s interesting to note that most of the previous Davies era’s more frightening concepts hinged on the idea of nothingness and what crawls in to replace it: “Midnight” features an entity that exists in a place where no other life can survive, and it creeps into the bodies of sentient beings and steals their voices; the Wire, which takes people’s faces and leaves them blank on the street; the Daleks emerging from the Void between realities, after residing in a ship that could survive that lack of matter and life; now these beings from beyond the universe itself, drawn in and shaped by our worst impulses and copying our persons down to every memory. It’s a more extreme fear of the dark, in a way, what lies beyond our understanding.
And the parallels to “Midnight” in particular come through in the plot being exacerbated by Fourteen… just being himself. On the planet Midnight, the Doctor winds up nearly getting killed because he can’t stop himself from interfering in the situation at hand and believing his own cleverness will fix things. He also nearly has his personhood stolen by a being capable of perfect imitation and replication. Practically any Doctor would have difficulty not trying to think their way out of a problem, even knowing that more thoughts gave their enemy an advantage. But Ten (and Fourteen) is one of the worst for that because he has far too much energy and desperate need to show off programmed into the base code.
The tenderness between the Doctor and Donna, this deep well of understanding, is only growing in the next episode of their reunion. The way that the Doctor keeps physically needing to touch Donna, to remind himself of her presence, to reassure her in fear, to ground himself in his own anxieties, it’s plastered all over the episode. It elevates their banter and their turmoil to a devastating pitch.
And then to end with the streets of London exploding and Wilf! Knowing that Bernard Cribbins lost his wife, held on just long enough to shoot these episodes, and then passed away… it’s hard not to feel like he wanted to say goodbye here. To give the Doctor another hug, get him to set things right, and move on to the next adventure. Get your tissues ready for next week.
Bits and Bobs
- The use of “Wild Blue Yonder” feels very much like a seed being planted for something later, either in the specials or the upcoming season: It’s an interesting aside within the episode, but it doesn’t really play into the themes of what’s happening. I’m hoping it pops up again in the next episode to tie something together—after all, it’s not often that the TARDIS randomly plays music on speaker. The salt thing is going to come back too, of course, and I can’t wait to see how it’s used.
- The HADS has shown up in several Doctor Who episodes, most often during Moffat’s tenure, but technically first showed up in a Second Doctor serial “The Krotons.”
- The “mavity” joke plays throughout the episode with the Doctor and Donna both occasionally saying “gravity” and then realizing their mistake, changing to “mavity.” To say that I would be extremely happy if the show had to use “mavity” forever is an understatement. This is what’s good about a ridiculous time travel show. It’s mavity now. It was always mavity. The Doctor and Donna keep making the mistake because some part of their time traveling brains can remember the original timeline where it wasn’t. Yes.
- So here’s a thought: The Doctor agrees with Donna that Isaac Newton is hot, then has a moment of surprise wondering if this is what he’s like now. Other incarnations of the Doctor have been either canonically or implicitly queer—I’d make arguments for Three, Five, and Eight, while Nine and Thirteen simply are—so it’s not as though this is a first for the character. And it’s not as though it doesn’t work for Tennant’s portrayal, which was mostly Rose-sexual throughout his original tenure, but always had wiggle room he never truly explored. But… it occurs to me that perhaps this is a clue. What if these moments (where the Doctor finds himself surprised at new traits, maybe even the elevated desire for touch) are the Fifteenth Doctor’s personality attempting to surface? We know that something has gone amiss, and we don’t know exactly how this next regeneration is going to emerge. Maybe this is Fifteen beating against Fourteen’s skull, trying to push his way out? I’m thinking about how this arc into our next Doctor might play, and I’m kinda galaxy-braining with the theories right now, so everyone should probably ignore me, I will be down this well all week.
Next week. The Toymaker is coming…
