Ok so I had an epiphany the other night and I’m pretty much 100% certain I know what the mysterious creature in Midnight was. But first off, let’s review what we know about the Midnight entity.
It was able to survive at least in some form on the surface of the planet where the x-tonic radiation vaporized any living thing in split seconds.
It communicated by repeating what the people in the transport were saying, first with a lag-time, then instantaneously.
It was able to inhabit the body of a human.
It was able to take over the mind of the Doctor.
There was something about the transport that it was drawn to, but it had never attacked a transport previously.
So that’s what we know, and it’s not much to go on. But there is one significant other entity in the Doctor Who canon who exhibits all these traits. Ready for it?
The Midnight Entity is a Tardis.
If a Tardis were somehow to crash onto the surface of Midnight, one could assume that the x-tonic radiation would effect it in the same way as it would any other living creature, vaporizing it instantly. However, the interior of the ship exists on a different dimension than the exterior so we can safely assume that only the exterior would be destroyed, while the interior was preserved. Without a physical exterior however, a Tardis would loose the ability to materialize in another location, essentially trapping it both on, and equally not on the planet.
Aside from It’s human form in “The Doctor’s Wife” we never hear the Tardis speak directly. However, this is not completely true, in another sense we nearly always are hearing the Tardis speak… through the translation matrix. Translation, a Tardis’ main form of communication, is in essence, simply listening to what someone says and repeating it after them. Typically this is done in another language, however, if the Doctor’s Tardis was already translating instantly we wouldn’t hear this, instead it would just sound like an echo. As the Midnight Entity, superseded the link of the Doctor’s Tardis, we would lose the echo first of the other passengers, then of the Doctor. Once the mental link to the Doctor is fully established the translation would become instantaneous, however since the entity is still inhabiting a physical body it would be physically voicing the words as well.
In the Doctor’s Wife, we see that it is possible for a Tardis to inhabit the body of a human.
We know that a Timelord has a mental link that enables him to pilot a Tardis. However, a Tardis is an incredibly powerful entity and one would assume that were it’s motivations malicious, or were it particularly desperate, the same link could be taken advantage of to enable a Tardis to essentially “pilot” a Timelord. In fact, it’s hard to imagine any creature besides a Tardis, having that sort of power.
So under the circumstances I’ve described, a trapped, and damaged Tardis would need two things to escape the Midnight planet. Firstly, it would need an external hull that could withstand the x-tonic radiation. This it found in the transport ship itself. However, there would have been no point in attacking any previous transports until it found the second thing it needed to escape, a Timelord to pilot it. In this light all the creatures actions make sense. The first thing it does is remove the driver’s cabin, because it needs to sever the shuttle controls in order to replace them with itself. Secondly, it finds a way to get it’s consciousness inside the cabin, it does this by taking over Sky’s body. Next it forges a mental link with the Timelord, this process is complicated by the fact that he is already linked to another Tardis. Once that is done, the entity would need to get the Timelord out of the transport and into it’s own interior. I believe that while the exterior of the entity Tardis was lost, there would still be a non-physical portal of some sort to the interior. This would be the shadow the Mechanic sees on the surface of the planet. The if the entity could convince the crew to throw the Doctor out of the transport, then it could line it’s portal up with the door so that they were essentially throwing him into the ship’s interior. Once that was done, then the final step would have been to take on the outer hull of the transport and dematerialize out of there. Unfortunately, it didn’t quite work out that way.
Anyway, so there you have it. The Midnight Entity is a Tardis.
Absolutely brilliant. Also, somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure Midnight is the only episode of New Who to not feature the Doctor’s TARDIS at all. The Doctor frequently gets separated from his ship, but here we never even see it in the first place (or at the episode’s end). The lack of the conventional narrative framing in this episode that shots of the TARDIS usually provide adds to Midnight’s general eerieness – but I am completely on board with the suggestion that its place has been usurped by another more malevolent model.
