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| Tales of the Parodyverse >> View Post |
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This episode has provoked more of a divisive reaction than any NuWho episode I can recall, which is especially impressive in light of its obvious status as a bottle episode. Why? Because Russell T. Davies has actually managed an even more impressive feat, by writing the Doctor Who equivalent of the "Homer's Enemy" episode of The Simpsons: Yes, Davies displays his apparently pathological cluelessness in dealing with characters of color, but to my mind, what's more significant about "Midnight" is that, like "Homer's Enemy," this is the episode that deliberately sets out to undermine many of the most important narrative tropes that its show requires in order, not only to run, but simply to exist, and as such, a lot of the discomfort that comes from watching this episode stems from how successful it is in undermining the show as a whole. Just as Frank Grimes illustrated how dangerous and maddening a character like Homer Simpson would be in real life, in spite of how much the audience for The Simpsons has been conditioned to see him as harmless and lovable, so too do the stranded passengers illustrate how much the audience for Doctor Who takes it for granted that a) the Doctor can ultimately solve any problem and b) he can rely upon the supposedly baseline decency of human nature to pick up the slack, whenever he can't solve a problem by himself. To me, that was what made this episode chilling, more than any fear of the stubbornly unexplained monster (and I love that it remained stubbornly unexplained), because it showed the Doctor responding to a crisis situation entirely in character - which is to say, with nothing less than his standard level of capability, but also with his typical tone-deafness of social skill and sensitivity - and yet, for once, it also showed the guest-starring masses failing to fall into line behind him, and doing so in a disturbingly believable way. This is far from a flawless episode, but a lot of the "flaws" I've seen ascribed to it can be boiled down to, "But they were behaving so stupidly," which is a tricky criticism to level at an episode like this, since the self-destructive stupidity of the characters was pretty much the whole point of the episode. Someone on LiveJournal-land reported that Davies stated that this episode was intended to be the opposite of "Voyage of the Damned." He could have extended that statement to include all of NuWho, though, since under Davies himself, Doctor Who has become associated with nothing so much as Care Bear Stares and a Norman Vincent Peale-level of faith in humankind's allegedly essential goodness that - ironically enough, for an outspoken atheist like Davies - borders on the religious. Which leads me to believe that that's the point of "Midnight" ... Davies the humanist is on his way out as showrunner, so as long as he's heading out the door anyway, he might as well take a parting shot at the show that he loves so much, in a way that he could only do if he knew that he was leaving it behind forever. | |||
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