What's this? A Midnight story in late 2023? Yep. Because this episode has lived rent-free in my head ever since I first watched it.
No plot, just thoughts. A lot of people have written on the aftermath of Midnight and none of it so far rings exactly right to me, so I thought I'd throw my own two cents into the mix, because who's gonna stop me? Enjoy. And go rewatch Midnight if it's been a while.
Donna has always known she's way out of her depth when it comes to the Doctor. His life has been very long and very deep. If she feels like a brand new person from the paltry time she's spent traveling with him, then how much enrichment and knowledge and pain can he be carting around in that sticklike body? Her time in the TARDIS feels like it condenses most of the meaning she's found over her whole life, but it's a drop of water in his ocean.
When her friends do something stupid and totally predictable, which nearly all of them have at one time or another, she usually has at least something helpful or comforting or appropriately scathing to say, but not now. Not with him. She has no words.
And the very problem is that, for once, he doesn't either.
He doesn't look back. That's one of his many problems, if you ask her. Not after Jenny. Not after Professor Song. Not after any of it. And that's only from her time with him. How much loss has he been subjected to? How many companions? How many children? She has no way of knowing, because he won't talk, and contemplating that frightens her.
But everything he is, the workings of his ancient and brilliant mind… it's all beyond her ken, and who is she to therapize him, anyway?
So at least it's not surprising that he doesn't look back. Oh, sure, after these recent traumas he was willing to reflect on them for half an hour or so, but by the time she went to sleep and woke up he had clearly made up his mind to put them behind him, and it was on to the next thing. He'd fill any empty space with words, back any silence into a corner and obliterate it, and his energy was a little too high for her to believe it, but maybe his own standards were just a fraction lower.
The issue is, this time, he's not moving forward.
He's not looking back either.
He's just… stuck.
For several days, there is no talk of their next destination. She doesn't push it—in any case, she'd been all gung ho about the Leisure Palace, ready for a nice, laidback vacation, and while she'd prefer to be spending it in a gorgeous resort, she can certainly make do by the TARDIS's pool for his sake.
When their paths cross, he seems almost normal. He talks, but not about anything in particular—how the room they're passing in the hallway was his favourite the last time the TARDIS constructed it, the future of the brand new galaxy they're currently floating by, a funny story he was just thinking about that he heard from a fourteenth century monk. Innocuous. Safe. Of no real consequence. And he smiles, and says nothing about where she's going, where he's going, where they're going.
He's visibly tired, but she could miss it if she didn't know him so well.
And, of course, the major oddity is his apparent disinclination to run.
He's always running somewhere. Usually, away from somewhere, too.
But now he seems too tired to run.
She doesn't know how to help, except give him time. Time heals all wounds, she knows—but does she? He'd be the one to know about time, and what sort of healing properties it has. Maybe he exists outside all that. How on earth—or anywhere else—is she to know?
And of course, he won't just open his mouth and tell her what he needs. I'm fine, Donna. I'm always fine.
By the end of the third day, she's kicking herself over not having chased down at least one of the other passengers and beating the real story out of them. He was clinical and cagey when he gave her the rundown, and she doesn't think he lied about anything, but he downplayed probably everything—including, she suspects, the other passengers' conduct.
"They were scared. It's not the first time I've seen humans do horrible things when they're scared. But at least one of them was brave enough to save me, save us all."
She wonders if keeping her out of sight is part of his coping process, whether consciously or not. She wonders if he just needs a break from humanity.
She gets that, of course.
So she keeps herself occupied, and asks how he's doing when she comes across him, even though the answer is always the same. She waits patiently for his gloom to fade back into the background, where it has sat comfortably for much longer than she's been alive. She waits for him to talk at length, to laugh again. She waits for him to put himself back together in the best way he knows how, because she bloody well doesn't have anything to offer in that regard—he didn't need her to survive before, and he doesn't now.
She waits for any indication that she's wrong, that she's needed—which she knows will never come.
And when he comes to her and breathlessly asks if she'd fancy a trip to the green spires of the highest mountain of Roskid-7 and climb the Impossible Staircase to their nearest moon, she pretends not to have noticed how he had to take a few breaths at the beginning to build up his own enthusiasm, and smiles.
There are many things he will never tell her.
He will not draw attention to the fact that as he wanders the halls, he has to find a balcony every so often to stand and stare into the vacuum of space, to feel its vastness, its immensity, because the thought of being trapped in a space so small again steals his breath away.
He will not let her see the extra blankets he's piled on his bed, or wander around in all these extra layers when he knows she's awake and about, because he could not begin to explain how sometimes, the cold strikes him out of the blue, and he is back there, crouching numb on the shuttle floor, his bones turning rapidly to ice.
He will make no mention of the times he's flinched away from bright light or shining silver, thinking of the way the diamonds caught the sun, because any speck of beauty could still be hiding a dangerous shadow that he may not even see before it's too late.
He will not reference the horrific combination of a complete loss of control—over his movement, his safety, his emotions, his voice—and the knowledge that, even if he somehow managed to complete the process of regeneration, he'd still be stranded in X-tonic sunlight, which together meant that, unless someone, impossibly, saved him, he spent several minutes knowing with a terrible black certainty that he was going to die.
He will not speak of the nine times he lost himself and had no companions who understood well enough even to mourn properly; of the grief and guilt he has never and will never escape in the wake of the genocide that ended the Time War and altered him forever; of the tragedies he's seen and wrought in countless lives dear to him; of the heavy knowledge that the worst day of his life might still be ahead of him; of the minutes he felt that faceless creature poking, prodding, teasing through his mind, searching for every label, every name, every word he had ever used or known, and plucking it out of him, leaving him with nothing but fear.
The seizing of each word shook loose every time he'd ever used it in over nine hundred years. And once it was gone, it left only darkness behind it. Like stars going out, one by one. Everything in ten regenerations, dredged up and brought to the surface for extraction. She had traced her way languidly through his brain with a pair of tweezers, and bit by bit, it was shutting down, until only she was left. He could not move, could not breathe, could not think. The only clarity he was afforded came from her voice—the voice she had taken from him, and now turned against him. It was like looking into a mirror and finding his reflection all twisted, promising to reach out and replace him.
And then it had all been released, and rushed back into him all at once, a welcome deluge, but a deluge nonetheless, and all he could do was latch onto an idea, an assurance, the thing most immediately in front of him, and repeat the same words to himself, over and over and over.
So yes, it was just another addition to a long line of horrors, and it will hardly be the last. He will move past it, as he always has.
But it also was the closest he's brushed against his own ultimate end in a very long time. It was a door into his mind that he didn't know he had, opened and passed through by a hostile before he even knew it was happening. It was something precious to him—and he doesn't have a lot of those left—very nearly stolen away forever.
His voice now feels like a heavier responsibility than he can manage.
He wonders if there's anything at all he has left that he isn't cursed to overthink.
That's life, though, isn't it? The joys of being a nine hundred year old war criminal. Nothing will ever be okay. Not him, not anything he touches.
This is just one more bit of ugliness on his past and his psyche which he must assimilate into himself. As always, it isn't pleasant, but as always, he will come out the other side. He's done it enough times to be sure, by now.
The only comfort he can offer himself is that he still has the strength to try. No matter how many times he is backstabbed by a creature he would sooner have helped, no matter how many liars and monsters and big scary unknowns he encounters, he will never stop trying his damn best. At least he has that.
That, and his blue box.
As long as he has these as anchors, he can carry on being the Doctor.