"If it was a clock face, you die at midnight."
IN THIS ONE... The Doctor and Belinda are dropped into a mining station where everyone appears to be dead.
REVIEW: Of all the stories to call back to, who had Midnight on their bingo card? Not many, I'll bet. While the Xtonic creature (credited as "It Has No Name", very creepy) doesn't exactly conform to the rules set in that episode - it's 400,000 years later, after all, it can have evolved, especially under the pressures of its habitat being destroyed by a failing star/mining - it still grafts itself to people, plays on their paranoia and makes them turn on each other, etc. So like Midnight, this is a paranoid horror-thriller with a bleak ending, more The Thing than Aliens, which is what it first seems to be. The reveal that we are actually on Midnight is well handled, with red herrings like The Satan Pit, Listen or even Utopia (the diamond sky quote) dangled in front of our eyes. It probably clicks just before the Doctor outright says it, which is just when you want it to click.
The horror atmosphere is palpable, with "corner of your eye" stuff playing right there on screen (freeze framing is cheating). Added to the monster is the notion that Earth has been wiped from history beyond May 25th 2025 (without much of an impact half an eon later), which is creepy in and of itself the way it's teased. Where it fails is the onscreen deaths when troopers fall prey to the monster's "rules" (which you will just have to take on faith, but if the tension does its job, you won't have time to ask questions). They're just thrown around on wires and it's really not as gory as the story really wants it to be. It's just not possible on Doctor Who, so this is one place where the well-lit spaces required to make the story otherwise work (it needs to hide the creature in a well-lit room), doesn't. We needed people to be pulled into shadows and let the sound design put images in the audience's mind. Nevertheless, the ending is a real banger. Revealing the monster's survival after the TARDIS has left is very creepy, and as with Midnight, its nature remains ambiguous. Did it not go to Shaya after she (temporarily) killed Belinda (they didn't completely understand the rules)? Was it never ON Belinda, only whispering to her from its hiding spot behind Mo? Was it able to move from Shaya to Mo after the former's sacrifice? We don't know, but some of these theories imply that Shaya killed herself for nothing, and that's bleak.
Caoilfhionn Dunne is quite good as Shaya, a woman who can run faster than the Doctor, leading to tragedy. Bethany Antonia as Mo is immediately sympathetic in a group of troopers that, in Doctor Who, rarely are. Christopher Chung kind of gets the "bad" role, as the trooper who doesn't want to be called "Babes" (I mean, he probably has a point, #consent #unprofessional) and ends up getting everyone killed because he won't listen to the "civilian". But of course, it's Rose Ayling-Ellis who steals the show as Aliss, the mining station's deaf cook and lone survivor of the Xtonic's massacre. She's a victim and scared and allows all the good stuff to pour out of the Doctor and Belinda (if they share any trait, it's their overwhelming compassion, these two). But the paranoia of the story also allows us to believe she's not acting in everyone's best interests and could certainly be willing to see other people die so long as she didn't. Very nice way to get around the deafness too, with the text screens on everyone's suits, since like Belinda, we don't all know signing (it makes good points about who really should though).
The raves are going to the guest cast, but our regulars do well too. I like the Doctor's promise to Belinda at the top of the episode, and the biographical details we get about her. It's too bad we don't get more time with these characters in these short seasons, because she could otherwise be remembered as one of the best companions on record. She still might be, we'll see. As for the Doctor, he wastes his trademark tear on fear, which is a change from the norm, but sad for Shaya. I question how quickly he agreed to let Belinda get shot by someone who doesn't ACTUALLY know human anatomy - couldn't they just have gone back to do the mercury/mirror trick somehow? But we were running out time, by then. As for other issues I'm sure you want to read about, I'll direct you to Theories.
THEORIES: In Lux, I took the wardrobe "quick-change" to be a stylistic touch. A quick time jump. In this episode, it happens again, but not only is RTD recycling "Toxic" (what was the point of that?) on the jukebox (making time continuous during the sequence), but the TARDISeers are wearing the exact spacesuit/uniform design matching the crew of the ship they landed on. If we take this as just style again, we might imagine a missing scene where the Doctor scans the exterior and the TARDIS creates matching selections. If it's as quick as we see it, then the TARDIS has developed the ability to just redress and recoiffe you instantaneously (perhaps with your preferences telepathically factored in). It's a great capability in an era where the Doctor is a clothes horse and we're not trying (as JN-T had in the 80s) to create a single "iconic" look. And we really need the wardrobe theory to be true in some way because the alternative is that they just "happened" to grab the exact right spacesuit.
Oh what? You actually wanted me to talk about Mrs. Flood and her strange appearance in THIS episode? Well, okay, but she's getting less interesting by the hour. She doesn't break the fourth wall, this time, and she asks questions about the Doctor's "vindicator" like she knows less than usual. She's really being played like Sue in the previous season, someone who seems to be scattered across time in different incarnations (like Scaroth in City of Death) and may therefore be another Harbinger for one of the Toymaker's children (albeit one that's more self-aware than Sue was). That's less interesting than her being one of those entities directly, but we get so many counter-clues - she helps Ruby, but welcomes Sutekh; she dresses like old companions; she's aware of the audience; "The Flood" was another Doctor Who monster; etc. - that it's hard to really know what aspect to latch onto.
REWATCHABILITY: Medium-High - A strong, paranoid thriller. Very Lovecraftian.
Comments
It kind of deflated for me at the creature reveal level, 'strange spooky action at a distance' explanations always annoy, the general accusation being that they could just as well be a series of otherwise arbitrary story conditions designed to create (unmoored) dramatic scenes.
And as such, it's seemingly evolved chameleonic abilities don't offer much by way of effective protection, the opposite, it seems in fact, and it's seeming 'psychic vampire' tenancies don't feel particularly well served either, given that it kills sentient creatures outright rather than to strategically harvest such emotions as deemed necessary, spending countless eons upon lifeless barren rocks as a direct result.
I know the average viewer doesn't care about such matters, but the Doctor does, so one is at least entreated to consider such perspectives.