"Ah, I'll be fine. Taking a big space truck with a bunch of strangers across a diamond planet called Midnight... What could possibly go wrong?"
Episode #202: Midnight.
Companions: 10th Doctor and Donna Noble.
Air Date: 14th June 2008.
The Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble go to the leisure planet of Midnight for a simple, relaxing vacation. However, life with the Doctor can never be that simple, and things go horribly wrong for the Doctor when he decides to go off on a bus trip to see the Sapphire Waterfall, starting with the bus shutting down. When a mysterious entity infiltrates the shuttle bus, no one is to be trusted. Not even the Doctor himself.
I'm never really sure what to make of this episode. On one hand nothing really happens and it just trundles along. On the other hand, it is delightfully disturbing and creepy. I think the problem is that you never actually see what the monster looks like or learn what it actually is. Less is often more but not in this case. As such I never really know how I should view the episode.
Partly I think that the problem is that tension is built up by having several characters trapped in an enclosed space paranoid and shouting at one another soon loses its power. It just becomes annoying instead after a while. I have the same opinion of similar situations in other disaster movies and shows.
Donna Noble only appears twice during this story as it focuses exclusively on the Doctor's adventure on board the train. In the next episode it swaps and Donna gets an adventure without the Doctor. As I understand it, this was done as a cost cutting endeavour and still occasionally happens in later seasons.
The episode features David Troughton, son of the second Doctor Patrick Troughton. He had previously appeared as King Peladon in The Curse of Peladon.
I'll leave this one to your devices to decide what you think of it.
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