Doctor Who: Series 4, Episode 10 – “Midnight” (2008)

*Episode premise spoilers*

After a rocky start with “Love and Monsters,” the original RTD era got onto a pretty good track record with its Doctor- and companion-lite episodes. Series 4 was the first season to split these into two separate episodes, and we got a strong one-two punch with the back-to-back of “Midnight” and “Turn Left.” Today, we’re looking at the Donna-lite half that equation, with the Doctor front and center in “Midnight”!

On the leisure planet of Midnight, spas and tourist attractions alike are shrouded behind thick impenetrable barriers to protect the guests from the deadly x-tonic radiation of its sun. It’s a beautiful place where absolutely nothing can survive. But when the Tenth Doctor joins a tour to see a diamond waterfall, some impossible unknown entity infiltrates the coach and takes over one of the passengers. Trapped on a broken-down coach with a lifeform that shouldn’t be able to exist, the Doctor and the other passengers await rescue as the lifeform attempts to understand them.

For starters, excellent premise. A simple but effective subject for a creepy bottle episode—I love the notion of something living on a planet that’s completely incompatible with life, something that’s never encountered another living thing before. And while it has similarities with Who’s good old “base under siege” format, that’s not quite what’s going on here. Because it’s not a base, it’s a tourist coach. The oneshot characters aren’t all soldiers or scientists, and they have no specialized equipment to try and face this unknown entity that’s come for them. Rather, it’s a group of vacationers with a range of knowledge and skills, some more helpful than others. They’re not trained for anything remotely like this, and while that means the Doctor is by far the most qualified in the room, there’s no organized command structure for him to find his way into with the psychic paper. He can’t rely on credentials or orders, he just has to get a group of terrified people to trust him. And his best friend, the human companion who helps legitimize him for other humans, stayed behind at the spa.

Because that’s really the crux of the matter. The humans’ fear and distrust have a huge impact on the story, first as the Doctor argues against killing the entity—who, again, has attached itself to a passenger—and later as they start to question this strange “doctor” who can’t tell them his name or where he comes form. In addition to this being a supremely creepy alien story, it also deals a lot with the horrors that humans can visit on each other.

When it comes to the creep factor, this would be high on the list of scariest new Who stories, and it manages to do that without any “creature” effects. It always impresses me when Doctor Who can pull that off. Much of it comes down to Lesley Sharp’s chilling performance as Sky, the passenger who’s taken over. She’s able to come across as so utterly alien, and the other characters’ reactions to it just increase that creeping sense of dread. Also well deserving of a shoutout is the incredible sound design!

And of course, David Tennant is no slouch in the acting department either. I really like when the Doctor is in these kinds of situations, where they’ve come up against something terrifying and unknown, but even as they’re desperate to defeat it, a part of them is simply so hungry to understand it. That sense of, “This is new! It’s brand new—no one has ever seen what we’ve just seen! Don’t you want to know more?” As the episode goes on, his reactions in particular highlight the horror-inducing nature of the entity even more.

Although this is the companion-lite episode and Donna just bookends the story, she’s still used quite well. Donna is totally the companion who’d say, “Have fun on your very long day trip, I’m staying at the spa,” and I love their reunion at the end of the adventure.

Joel Fry-days: Requiem: Episode 6 – “Carys” (2018)

*Note: there isn't a single non-spoilery shot of Hal in this episode, so I'm using a picture from episode 5's fantastic argument scene* 

*Spoilers from episode 5*

Here we are at the final episode—I’m still thinking about the ending. For me personally, I don’t think they quite stuck the landing on the resolution, even though there’s still a lot of good stuff going on here. We’ve got great acting, strong character moments, and some nice twistiness.

Okay, big spoilers from episode 5: after discovering some strong evidence that Matilda’s birth certificate is fake and that Janice really did kidnap her, Hal repeatedly tries to get a hold of Matilda as he returns from a fact-finding mission to Manchester. While he’s driving, one of the Thin Ones suddenly appears behind him, and he flips the car. But when Matilda is called to the scene of the accident, Hal is missing.

That’s the situation as we enter the finale. Matilda, worried about Hal, tries to uncover the people controlling the Thin Ones—she thinks she knows who some of them are, and she’s received a message that they’re preparing for their biggest move yet. Desperately, Matilda tries to get PC Graves to believe her and help her stop them.

Obviously, there are a lot of spoilers to avoid here, so I’ll be talking around things a lot. Matilda catches a solitary lucky break in that she’s able to show Graves proof of one small part of the puzzle, earning herself a smidgeon of trust. When Graves admits, “You were right [about this,]” Matilda simply replies, “I’ve been right about a lot of things.” However, the same dogged bulldozer tendencies she’s been displaying throughout the whole miniseries may endanger that fragile trust. When Matilda doesn’t listen to Graves’s directions, when she charges in and grabs people and makes wild accusations, she doesn’t help her case. Her opponents are perpetually calm and appear rational, and she comes off as unstable by comparison.

It’s clear that the conspirators have been feeding into this all along, backing Matilda into corners so she gets more and more desperate. And then what do they do? They throw it back in her face. Matilda confronts one of them about everything she’s lost while trying to solve this mystery, and the conspirator tells her, “No, Matilda. You did it. All those things, you sacrificed them to get to here.” I have very rightly given Matilda grief for how she’s treated people here, but at that icy remark, I feel like she should at the very least get to explode the conspirator with her mind.

Matilda has been periodically seeing visions of Janice since her death, and there’s an excellent scene between the two of them in this episode. Also, shoutout to Brendan Coyle as Stephen, who kept me guessing practically to the end about whether or not I could trust him—even when I was 99.9% sure what the answer was, he’d still give me these moments where I’d get a tiny flicker of, “But maybe…?”

As I said, I’m not sure about the ending. Since I don’t engage much with horror as a genre, it’s possible that I don’t really know my way around the types of resolutions that work as a satisfying horror ending. I just know that, for me, it left me underwhelmed, with a bit of an, “...Oh,” reaction. It’s a shame, because there’s a lot that I like about this miniseries—including some stuff I love!—but a lackluster ending can color my overall opinion of a story.

In the finale, Hal is an important plot point without, unfortunately, being a major presence. He’s only in a few brief scenes, and while he’s effective in them, there’s very little for him to do here. That said, I promise my dissatisfaction with the ending isn’t just about a lack of screen time for Joel Fry! I understand why things shake out the way they do there.

Unfortunately, every bit of Fry’s limited screen time here is quite spoilery, so I won’t really discuss it. Instead, I’ll talk about the ways he remains crucial to the narrative without actually being onscreen for much of the episode. Obviously, the car accident and his disappearance weighs heavily on people’s minds, from Matilda to Trudy to Graves (who’s investigating it.) Trudy regrets the last conversation they had before Hal left for Manchester, and Matilda is determined to help if there’s any hope of saving him—when another character urges her to flee, she insists, “I won’t leave you, and I won’t leave Hal.” (There’s no specific mention of whether Matilda regrets the last conversation she had with Hal before he left, but hopefully she does.) Besides that, the evidence he found is important to the plot, we see Matilda learn why he hadn’t been able to get a hold of her, and there’s a great gut-punch moment when Matilda realizes how many times he tried to call her.

Before I get into my final thoughts, there’s one more thing I have to get off my chest. I found out that back in 2021, the director of this show cast Joel Fry as Capt. frickin’ Wentworth(!!!) in an adaptation of Persuasion that got canceled by the studio after Netflix announced their incredibly shaky version with Dakota Johnson and Cosmo Jarvis! It was going to star Sarah Snook from Succession. Aside from the Joel-Fry-as-a-Jane-Austen-leading-man of it all, that cast pairing is fascinating to me, and even though I’m four years late on this news, I’m in mourning that this film isn’t getting made. Why?!?

Moving along…

Accent Watch

Southern British English.

Recommend?

In General – I think I would. It’s still a good ride, even if I’m not entirely happy with where it goes in the end.

Joel Fry – Yes, yes, yes! Fry’s performance is beautifully nuanced. He does such great work as Hal!

Warnings

Strong thematic elements (including suicide and child abduction,) violence, disturbing images, language, drinking/smoking/drug references, and brief sexual content.

Y tu Luna también: 3Below: Season 1, Episode 12 – “Last Night on Earth” (2018)

*A few spoilers from Trollhunters’ “The Eternal Knight, Part 1.”*

The last two episodes of the season run parallel with the final two episodes of Trollhunters. Throughout the season, we’ve gotten hints here and there about what the Trollhunters crew has been doing in the background of all the alien hijinks, dealing with the coming threat of supernatural apocalypse. This episode brings that out in the open for all of Arcadia Oaks to see.

The Mother Ship is nearly back to full power, and the Akiridions will be leaving tomorrow. As Aja says goodbye to her many friends, Krel ponders some way to “make his mark” in Arcadia Oaks before they go. He throws his energy into the Battle of the Bands, but their last day is marred by a couple of major events. First, someone arrives from Akiridion-5 with a stunning revelation. And second, an ancient sorceress sets off an eclipse and unleashes her troll army on the surface world. Suddenly, Aja and Krel aren’t even sure if they’ll live long enough to leave Earth!

We melded sci-fi with the supernatural a little back in “D’Aja Vu,” but here, we see it at full tilt. It’s neat to see Varvatos size up next to Morgana’s troll army, or see how Akiridion weapons hold up against magical threats. While the adult aliens who care about Aja and Krel are primarily concerned with getting them away safely, our heroes know they can’t just abandon Arcadia Oaks to the calamity it’s been hit with. When there’s danger afoot, Aja’s moral compass is always pointed towards helping others, which is one of my favorite things about her.

There’s a lot of action to be had here, with the main characters doing battle in the streets against the enemy horde, but this episode isn’t solely about sci-fi/supernatural fight scenes. We also get some classic 3Below comedy. Looking dreamily at Steve, Aja sighs, “Do you think we can make it work long-long-long-long-long distance?” And her goodbye kiss with Steve, in the heat of the battle as Eli and Krel clobber a swarm of goblins in the background, is both funny and sweet.

It's a good episode for Krel. Even if his sudden obsession with leaving his mark in Arcadia Oaks feels a little manufactured, the episode builds some decent groundwork for it. Throughout the season, we’ve caught snatches of him envying the way other kids regard Aja, and he laments that his yearbook is filled with the dreaded “have a great summer” blow-off line. “See? Your pages are filled with variety!” he insists to Aja, gasping, “Is that a poem?” In light of this, it makes sense that he’d be so intent on doing the Battle of the Bands, despite everything else going on in the episode.

Krel doesn’t quite have Aja’s resolve or her combat skills, but he’s not about to leave her alone when the battle kicks off. I have a lot of respect for the way he scrambles and flails but stays in the fight, often making up for his clumsiness with quick thinking. It’s an obvious line, but I love when he shouts to Aja during a critical moment, “I got this! I got this! I-I don’t got this. Any time now!” As the icing, after Aja dispatches the threat, he adds, “…I totally had him.”

I briefly mentioned a stunning revelation that comes from Akiridion-5; I won’t spoil the specifics, but Diego Luna is just splendid as he plays Krel’s reaction to this shocking news. Krel is dismayed, hurt, and angry, and he clings to his duty as king in waiting because he doesn’t know how to deal with it any other way. The scene on the whole is so well done, and Luna really makes me feel Krel’s sense of dismay, his attempts to harden himself even as he starts to cry.