Radio Times

We never found out what the monster of the week really was - and I couldn't care less if you paid me to. The monster, the jokes, those gorgeous landscapes on the planet of Midnight - it was all there just to get people in a room shouting at each other. Fantastic.

And add it up. There were six ordinary passengers in the luxury cruise bus, plus a hostess and, of course, the Doctor. Add in the driver and mechanic who stayed in their control cabin, bung in this thing banging on the hull and top off your count with the flickering image of Rose on a monitor.

There you go: this wasn't Doctor Who, it was Twelve Angry Beings.

In Reginald Rose's famous drama, his Twelve Angry Men boiled at each other in a jury room for an entire movie. I was shown that film in college as an example not of drama but of brilliant psychological analysis of character. Best lecture I ever had. And here Russell T Davies achieved exactly that in Doctor Who, just via a more leisurely, spooky route.

You surely laughed a lot at the start, with the Doctor's giddy excitement at being on the space equivalent of a National Express coach, and we got to know each of the very different passengers swiftly but naturally.

But then I think you got so caught up in the escalation from jolly to vicious that you didn't realise how quickly everything moved. The Doctor always makes people better, makes them strain to their limits and become better human beings. And that did happen here, just not very much. Here the people are frightened senseless, the Doctor is trying to reason with a mob and every sane point he makes to them is countered by their scared, blunt but indisputable logic. You can see horribly soon that there's going to be a lynching here and you're powerless to stop it.

I'd have liked just a beat more, just a tiny further step before the resolution; can't even tell you what was missing but I needed one more stage in the journey. Still, those tremendous final scenes of the survivors sitting there waiting for rescue were so unlike Doctor Who's typically upbeat endings that they were startling.

Only, you do have to doubt that Donna really spent the whole episode back there on a sun lounger. Place your bets now on whether next week's tale is what she did instead.

this was my fave episode of all!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the episode seemed very reminiscent of tone of the old twilight-zone series (1950s-60s? )

There I was, happily watching the UK premiere of the "Midnight" episode of Doctor Who when a clip of this performance came on. I almost choked! I thought: surely that's not Raffaella Carrà !? How do the British even know of her existence?! Little did I know that in the far 1978 she travelled as far as London. And she was in the top 10 on Top of the Pops even!! Poor Raffaella is lampooned here as the epitome of the trashiest europop. That's not the first time. Oscar winning Italian director Gabriele Salvatores has a despairing Diego Abatantuono shoot at a TV set blaring out a Carrà song-and-dance routine on Mexican TV in the riotous comedy "Puerto Escondido". Yes indeed, Raffaella travelled as far as Latin America, where she squeezed out the last drop of a successful, but for all the wrong reasons, singing career. She is the Italian equivalent of British Cilla Black: a four-note singer who later reinvented herself as the doyenne of trashy TV. However, having said all that, I cannot but feel a bit of warmth towards her. She was my idol when I was a child in the early 70's. Her unsophisticated, down to earth, even humorous attitude endeared her to my childish self more than more sophisticated, and therefore more unapproachable singers/TV stars...

As for the people above who did not like this episode, it was clearly a re-imagining of Twelve Angry Men, where people under duress turn against each other. I for one felt distressed and claustrophobic, which is clearly what they were going for. I feared for the Doctor more that I have when he was facing alien monsters.

I've started to have some doubts over this series and this episode was the low point for me. If I wanted to watch stupid people shouting at each other I'd watch Eastenders. I suspect Donna was left out as to have her included in the shouting would have bought out her side that would have ended it for me.

An experiment gone wrong.

I found this episode especially dull. For me the worse episode of any of the recent series. If this is the best that RTD can write maybe its a good thing that he's handing the reigns over to Steven Moffatt.

It's a real shame because I think that RTD is normally excellent and I have to thank him for bringing the Doctor back in such a brilliant way.

I thought that this was not only the best episode of series 4 so far, but also the best by RTD since Doctor Who returned. Intense, claustrophobic, and the use of dialogue was unsettling. It could have been written by Steven Moffat, and you can't have higher praise than that! Bodes well for the remaining episodes, which are also penned by RTD.

perhaps, if I may, I can answer my own question: clearly the entity required more personalities to build up and learn far more quickly than it otherwise would have done invading the soul of a numpty pilot whose soul aim in life is to drive a bus!

This was definately one of my favourite Doctor Who episodes I've ever seen. There's just something about it I love. It was a great storyline, even though it had nothing to do with the current storyline at the moment.

can anyone explain to me why the entity could not have simply made an easier job for itself by entering the cockpit and taking over a pilot

I've enjoyed the variety provided by all the "Doctor-lite" episodes so far, even the much derided Love & Monsters in 2006.

Some people belly-ache about the dearth of Doctor, but it was quite commonplace in the 1960s, when Messrs Hartnell or Troughton fancied a holiday. Their Doctors were written out for entire episodes in such classics as The Dalek Invasion of Earth, The Time Meddler, Web of Fear and Seeds of Death. And oddly, Hartnell had only one line of dialogue in an episode of Marco Polo. "Lite" work if you can get it.