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Doctor Who: Midnight
Given NuWho's tendency to fumble the exposition it was interesting to see how much better it is when it simply doesn't bother trying to explain (although I could have lived without extonic light) but uses the SciFi and the scares as a driver for a different sort of drama altogether.
So for the first fifteen minutes or so this looked all set to be a closed room, pick off the survivors one-by-one, disaster style story but then it suddenly turned on a dime into a study of people under stress and the lengths to which they may be prepared to go. In some ways it was very alien to Doctor Who and New Doctor Who, in particular, in which we are used both to the assumption that the Doctor can, fundamentally, bring out the best in ordinary people and that humanity is, underneath it all, a force for good. Here we had a story where Davies took those two tenets, which he virtually set at the centre of Doctor Who, and threw them out of the window.
The characters were, ultimately, a little one-note but they were played with such conviction that you hardly noticed. Much was made in the pre-publicity of Lesley Sharp's turn as Sky Silvestry but in the event her performance was mostly about technical excellence. Her scenes repeating the other character's words and, in particular, mimicing the Doctor's movements were a technical tour-de-force but she was never really required to convince us of a character as the other's were. I found Ayesha Antoine as Dee Dee the most sympathetic, but that probably just betrays my background as a scientist because the characters kept surprising you, none of them were wholly sympathetic and even the married couple, the least sympathetic of the bunch, weren't wholly unsympathetic either.
In some ways this is the sort of drama we were half-promised when Davies started producing Doctor who. Something that, if not exactly character-led, was about humans and the situations they find themselves in. Something that was prepared to be a bit more adult than the public expected Doctor Who to be, a little more critical, a little less simple.
In many ways this reminded me most of Love and Monsters of all Davies scripts and it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be equally divisive. I'm not sure I'd class it as a great piece of Doctor Who, but it was the best 45 minutes of television the series has served up so far this year.
EDIT: So there are some interesting race discussions going on surrounding this episode (and, as ever when race raises its head in fandom, some less interesting ones as well). There is an interesting tension in this episode between what I assume was the intended message: It is the unheard voices and the nameless people, those that are put down and told to shut up, that prove to be right and we should pay more attention to those voices. And, interestingly, the Doctor is explicitly included in that criticism since, although he pays attention to Dee Dee he is, in general, dismissive of the Hostess something he appears to acknowledge when he realises he never knew her name. Set against that is the, presumably unintended, message that the role of black servants is to sacrifice themselves for their, predominantly white, masters with the added observation that while 2/3rds of the white characters survive only 1/3 of the black characters do and the black characters are all cast in subservient roles (to the passengers, the Professor, or the Captain).
So for the first fifteen minutes or so this looked all set to be a closed room, pick off the survivors one-by-one, disaster style story but then it suddenly turned on a dime into a study of people under stress and the lengths to which they may be prepared to go. In some ways it was very alien to Doctor Who and New Doctor Who, in particular, in which we are used both to the assumption that the Doctor can, fundamentally, bring out the best in ordinary people and that humanity is, underneath it all, a force for good. Here we had a story where Davies took those two tenets, which he virtually set at the centre of Doctor Who, and threw them out of the window.
The characters were, ultimately, a little one-note but they were played with such conviction that you hardly noticed. Much was made in the pre-publicity of Lesley Sharp's turn as Sky Silvestry but in the event her performance was mostly about technical excellence. Her scenes repeating the other character's words and, in particular, mimicing the Doctor's movements were a technical tour-de-force but she was never really required to convince us of a character as the other's were. I found Ayesha Antoine as Dee Dee the most sympathetic, but that probably just betrays my background as a scientist because the characters kept surprising you, none of them were wholly sympathetic and even the married couple, the least sympathetic of the bunch, weren't wholly unsympathetic either.
In some ways this is the sort of drama we were half-promised when Davies started producing Doctor who. Something that, if not exactly character-led, was about humans and the situations they find themselves in. Something that was prepared to be a bit more adult than the public expected Doctor Who to be, a little more critical, a little less simple.
In many ways this reminded me most of Love and Monsters of all Davies scripts and it wouldn't surprise me if it turns out to be equally divisive. I'm not sure I'd class it as a great piece of Doctor Who, but it was the best 45 minutes of television the series has served up so far this year.
EDIT: So there are some interesting race discussions going on surrounding this episode (and, as ever when race raises its head in fandom, some less interesting ones as well). There is an interesting tension in this episode between what I assume was the intended message: It is the unheard voices and the nameless people, those that are put down and told to shut up, that prove to be right and we should pay more attention to those voices. And, interestingly, the Doctor is explicitly included in that criticism since, although he pays attention to Dee Dee he is, in general, dismissive of the Hostess something he appears to acknowledge when he realises he never knew her name. Set against that is the, presumably unintended, message that the role of black servants is to sacrifice themselves for their, predominantly white, masters with the added observation that while 2/3rds of the white characters survive only 1/3 of the black characters do and the black characters are all cast in subservient roles (to the passengers, the Professor, or the Captain).