Another 31 Days, Another 31 Screams: Day 26 (Doctor Who: Midnight)

"And now I'm mirroring you"
      "And now I'm mirroring you"

I promised you your Doctor Who writeup, and here it is. This was, for the longest time in my memory, the single scariest episode of Doctor Who ever. Most people would cite Blink, and Blink is pretty good at it and has a neat concept. Midnight, though? This stuck with me for all these years. Ten years on and I still remembered it vividly. What about Midnight makes it work? Let's start with the ambiguity, I guess. Steven Moffat, as much as I've adored the things he did with the show when he had a hand in it? He did kind of make the Weeping Angels less scary after a point. Oh, their two-parter in the first Matt Smith season worked (mostly) but after that? Not really. Familiarity breeds a sort of reliability. Oh, thank God. It's just the Weeping Angels, don't blink and we'll be out of this one. Midnight, though? We don't know what the holy fuck the monster was. We never will. Russell T. Davies never took another crack at it, and he shouldn't. Explaining this away would take the magic out of it. It's remarkably fresh for this particular era of the show, where the Doctor was a bit of a mythic know-it-all... but that's really what makes the episode effective. This is an episode of Doctor Who all about human paranoia and fear, and it's also an episode where being Doctor Who is not only a bad thing, but the worst possible thing. Any other day, being the mythic know-it-all is what makes the Doctor the hero. Here it makes him suspicious and drives a further wedge between him and everyone when the shit hits the fan, and he fails to save the day. The situation is actively made worse by his attempts to be the dashing Doctor who saves the day, and an extra person dies because of it. This shit is grim.


I don't usually go for that shit when it comes to this show. I like my Doctor Who to be generally uplifting and full of hope. The fact that Midnight is one of the few forays into the pure despair and nihilism of "the Doctor doesn't save the day" actually makes it stand out. If the entire show were like this, it would be utterly dire. Hell, the episode after this, Turn Left, is also an episode that shows what happens when the Doctor doesn't save multiple days on Earth. Turns out the planet gets nuked and falls into a police state with concentration camps and shit. It's bad news, but it's not horror. No, in context of the series in which this aired, this is a string of episodes set to put the Doctor and his companion at their lowest points before rising up and saving the day in the finale. Well, we know the narrative cost for Donna Noble, but LET'S NOT GET INTO THAT. Let's talk about the actual horror. A bunch of people trapped on a space train, and one of them gets possessed and starts repeating everything the others say. It's simple. It's genius. It's almost Moffat-esque in how things play out with the rules of the monster; I could see something like this in his era for sure. The tension only builds as the repeating escalates, soon becoming outright mirroring happening simultaneously... and then stealing the Doctor's voice and reversing shit. Any and all attempts by the Doctor to do his usual thing and save the day backfire due to the intense paranoia the people have. Indeed, he doesn't stop them from throwing the possessed woman out in the end; all he's done by refusing to let them do it in the first place is create a scenario where the hostess of the train dies as well. It's a nasty piece of work, this one, but that's what makes it an effective piece of horror. It's grim and uncomfortable, and sometimes that's worth more than any strobe light shots of Weeping Angels.