Midnight

The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own; for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone.

- Rod Serling, The Monsters are Due on Maple Street


The recent Doctor Who was a masterclass in drama, of how to write eight characters simply talking.

Eight people trapped in a windowless passenger cabin of a tourist craft.

One possessed by something.

And no visible monsters, no special ray-guns, but just a focus on how people behave when trapped, and when faced with the fear of the unknown.

While the Christmas "Voyage of the Damned" followed disaster movie protocol in showing the very best that human beings can be, this showed the very worst that they can be, as they react out of fear, lashing out verbally, and then threatening to throw out first Lesley Sharp's Sky, and then David Tennant's Doctor.

Like Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" or Rod Serling's "The Monsters are Due on Maple Street", the real monsters are those within. As the Planet Gallifery review noted: "definitely dark, claustrophobic and intense, exploring the true side of human behavior under extreme fear and pressure."

A Behind the Sofa review has an interesting framing of the story within the context of the 42 day detentions, the war against terror, and what Adam Curtis has called "The Power of Nightmares"

As the Government heaves a sigh of relief over its narrow victory in the vote over the 42 day detention ruling for terrorist suspects, I keep wondering where this is leading us all? The manipulation of public fear, by such disaster capitalists, to erode civil liberties is one that taps into our very primal reactions to 'otherness'. The strangers who deplore our foreign policies and the strangers who migrate to our borders are, deep down, tokens of our own fractured human psyche. There is a single moment in Midnight that tells you all you need to know. When Val Crane spits out venomously 'Immigrant' at the Doctor then we know that as a human being, and like most of us, she's reacting to the strangeness of the 'other'. Here she's attacking the Doctor who can't tell them his real name and is far too clever for his own good, and dealing with her xenophobia with one of two choices. Either you try and understand and accommodate this experience of strangeness or otherness or you repudiate it by projecting it exclusively onto outsiders, in this case the possessed Sky Sylvestry and the seemingly arrogant and alien Doctor. By having Val utter that one word, Russell T Davies encapsulates the arid mind-set of millions of Daily Mail readers.

All too often we choose to use our paranoia about outsiders to make sense of our confused emotions, resorting to schizoid states where we will follow a pack mentality and seek to follow an individual, around whom a leadership consensus might form, and also identify scapegoats whom we can blame when disaster strikes. The cleverness of Midnight is that it flips this troubled state back and forth between the ensemble of characters like a barometer traveling between right and left wing views. Eventually, even those who might be considered liberal humanist in their outlook descend into monstrousness. The consensus forming pack leader is, to begin with, the well meaning Doctor but this status terrifyingly unravels as we see the 'other' that possesses Sky, and the effects of this, reverse our perceptions of the rational and liberal inquisitiveness of the Doctor. In the eyes of his fellow passengers, he's seen as the arrogant, clever alien and he is rapidly demoted from leader to scapegoat in 45 minutes of screen time. I like the way that Davies shows us a mirror image of the Doctor where those that don't know him at all would probably react with suspicion and fear especially when there is no companion to mediate on his behalf.