WARNING! THERE MAY BE UNMARKED SPOILERS!
- Which would raise some questions about what the Meta-crisis Doctor received from him. Maybe Ten deciding to burn a regeneration was not only for "appearance issues"...
- Does that mean that the Meta-Crisis Doctor is contaminated? Does that mean Rose is in danger?
- Or maybe it stayed with the actual Doctor and is remaining latent. Maybe that's where the Dream Lord and/or the Valeyard came from.
- Also raises the question of whether anyone else on board was similarly contaminated. As I WMG below, as soon as she's able to move again, Sky asks the professor to help her up, and then embraces Val. Could the entity have planted seeds of itself in the others, too?
- Specifically, it is (or was) a member of the Horde of Travesties. A "travesty" is a distorted representation of something, and the Midnight entity copies the behavior of others, thereby becoming a travesty of another being. If so, there are more.
- And what better prison for it than a planet where the sunlight turns you to ash?
- But all of these were named specifically by the Doctor, so presumably he would be familiar with them. So why didn't he recognize the Entity as any of them?
- Perhaps it was an ascended Time Lord? A "creature of consciousness alone" who was able to escape the Timelock, just as Rassilon planned to survive the "ultimate sanction" of the end of Time itself... and, as to why the Doctor didn't recognize it, well, he may have experienced the Horde of Travesties and the whole gang of nasties during the Time War, but the Time Lords' plan never got enacted, to his knowledge, so he never came up against one until Midnight.
- Even worse perhaps it's the Valeyard!
- Sky's the first (only?) person to notice the Doctor is not what he seems (she spots him using the sonic screwdriver.) Once it realizes it's got interesting prey, it gives the pilot a hallucination to get them off course, making sure that a handful of ordinary people are going to an unusual location, one that was never explored before.
- She seems to encourage the Doctor's cheekiness and encourages the suspicion of him later; she's even the first to speak to him when he comes back from the cockpit, adding a stressed tone to her speech and reacting dismissively to the Doctor's assurances.
- She causes the knocks, then says "Is there something out there?!", presupposing that there could be something outside the craft.
- She also claimed the knocks "answered", planting the concept of communication with something unknown, and shut down the hostess when she tried to calm the group.
Viewing her behavior in this context, her panic is perfect: she's helping the rest of the group crack. Her breakdown of "it's coming for me, it's coming for me" gives the rest of the group a horrible thing to imagine happening to each of them in turn. She even turns on the entertainment system for a second or so when she shuts down power in the pod. Simple hallucinatory phenomenon meant to fuel the fear reactions of the passengers explains the knocks, and once a creature is scared enough, she can effectively preempt its higher thought and motor cortex; hence, no movement, hence, only speech. Once the Doctor was scared enough, his only chance was for one of the other passengers to save him.
If true, one might say the worst fear of the Doctor is that humans will abandon him, even turn on him.
- This theory works even better if you replace fear with extreme discomfort. After all, she booked a ride on a vehicle with a very annoying in-flight entertainment system and things only got strange after the Doctor turned it off.
- Wow, a very well-thought out WMG. This makes a lot of sense.
- Two problems with this. First, your timing is off. The detour was announced before the entertainment system was turned on. Second, something ripped the cabin off of the front end of the bus!
The, for lack of a better phrase, "monster" was capable of really nothing, when you think about it. Disagree? Well, let's see what it did during the course of the episode:
- Copied speech
- Stole other people's voices
- ...
Now, let's say something could have been out there. If something could survive the x-tonic rays, it doesn't necessarily mean it was the thing in the charter. Maybe the Midnight Entity had incredibly thick skin, or had somehow built up a tolerance to the rays. It would explain the thumps, the missing cockpit, and the responses to the knocks. However, this leaves one question that urgently needs to be answered:
- It didn't just copy speech, a couple of times it copied them just before they happened or kept going just beyond the copying (when the Doctor said part of the alphabet, he stopped 2 letters sooner). So, it had some power to know what letters came next, or some sort of ability over time.
The fuck was that thing?!
We never learned what species Sky was, now did we? Maybe she was, as an above WMG suggests, some kind of alien species who fed off fear. And the fear of the Midnight Entity caused feedback, of sorts. So, she shorted out, so to speak. Then, she rebooted, mimicking other human voices. The feedback of Sky's blackout interfered with whatever makes a time lord tick.
She Came Back Wrong.
It went From Bad to Worse.
- You left off "ripped off the entire cabin, killing the driver and mechanic!" That would require at least some pretty strong telekinesis for your theory to work.
Viruses can play dead until they find themselves a new host, then they resurrect and wreak havoc on the new host's body. This would enable the entity to survive in an environment that was previously assumed to be uninhabitable because it would mean that technically it WAS uninhabited: the virus WAS dead, until that nice bus full of new hosts arrived to bring it back to life.
In addition, viruses can affect the brain as well as the body, which would make it somewhat scarier because hysteria and hallucination could be symptoms of the virus.
The only things I can think of against this WMG would be how the driver and the mechanic were killed in a way that involved the bus being ripped in half, and why the virus would affect humans and Time Lords similarly.
Its body was imprisoned at the centre of the planet Midnight but, like the Beast, its mind escaped and was able to possess people, and had a large degree of telekinetic power, allowing it to knock and rip the cockpit off the truck. Like the Beast, it worked by sowing fear and, in this case, paranoia amongst its victims. The other powers it displayed, like voice stealing and being inherently disturbing, were just powers that it had where the other demons didn't, like how Abaddon killed with its shadow. Midnight's sheer inhospitability (no atmosphere and deadly sunlight) was a mechanism to keep people away from the demon and ensure that the act of physically escaping would kill it, like how Krop Tor was in orbit around a black hole and would fall in if the Beast escaped. Evidently, its references to the cold and the dark were references to its imprisonment.
- Seconded. The Entity could've been one of the copies of the Intelligence, and it was able to survive on Midnight because it doesn't have a physical form. We also know that the Intelligence has powerful psionic abilities, so it could've caused all of the events on the ship. The Hostess also could've had links to Clara; maybe Clara made sure she got on that flight, or the Hostess is a version of Clara, but Gone Horribly Wrong for unknown reasons (though we do know there was a Clara on Gallifrey — maybe she regenerated into a form that resembles the Hostess and that somehow got into the timestream of the Doctor with the main Clara through some sort of interaction, causing a different replication that became the Hostess).
- Or, not all of Clara's splinters actually look like Clara physically; either we only saw ones that did, or we saw her from her own pespective, of being herself, but her exterior appearance was different.
- Seems likely, about the Great Intelligence at least. Its behavior resembles the Midnight Entity in that both imitate other people for their own purposes. Additionally, the Great Intelligence is strong enough, and occasionally incorporeal enough, to survive the X-tonic rays. To add on, perhaps The Pilot was also a similar agent of the Great Intelligence. Perhaps, upon being stranded, The Pilot took the Midnight Entity and the Great Intelligence's imitation talents and used them for Heather's personal reasons? Maybe Humanity Is Infectious? The Pilot had, after all, shown ridiculous commitment and endurance. X-tonic rays would not stop her. Brilliant Arc Welding here.
- Alternatively, it could be what became of the Great Intelligence after it was splintered across the Doctor's timeline. It's been slowly piecing itself back together, reforming on Midnight (for whatever reason). Whatever state it was in, it still remembered the Doctor when he showed up on the planet and went after him.
- This would also put the Midnight entity in the realistic position to be the prophecied Four-time-knocker, who will... well... we will see.
- Spoilers for later in the series: Jossed. The four-time knocker was Wilfred, not the Beast or the Midnight creature.
- In that case, we get one more example of Humans Are Bastards... Evil its actions might have been, but the humans just killed an innocent living being that was just starting to learn. Imagine what it could have become if better people had been on that bus, or even if it managed to sample more gentle aspects of humanity after it got off.
If the entity spreads by touch, it explains why the Doctor was the (first?) one affected. Val and the professor are both potentially contaminated as well. Also, Biff and Jethro may not have touched Sky, but they did touch the Doctor after he was under the entity's control. The Hostess touched Sky when she dragged her out, so the only person on the whole shuttle who is in the clear is Dee Dee.
- The entity messes with people by making its host repeat what others say. By disabling the entertainment, the Doctor gave it an opening, so to speak.
- Of course not, but it's still fun to speculate
OK. So in the Children in Need preview of "The End of Time", there's a point where the Doctor quotes the Master ("Funny? No? Little bit?"). This combined with his behaviour in "The Waters of Mars" has led some to believe that the Master is somehow controlling the Doctor on some level.
Also, at the same time we have the theory that the monster in Midnight was the Master. It came 'through the dark' (afterlife), knocked four times at one point (drums) and controlled its victims (hypnosis) while specifically wanting the Doctor.
So if we take the second as true, it could have influenced or caused the first... after all, the Midnight monster (according to this, the Master) made people repeat things...
- Throughout the episode, even before it enters the bus and Skye's body, it imitates the passengers- for example, it knocks three times when Biff does. Going by that, and by the relatively harmless imitation of the passengers for a good 2/3 of its appearance, there is a good possibility that it simply wanted to learn and to belong, as the Doctor implied. The passengers were hostile and mistrustful to it, so it assumed this was simply how other life forms were like, and began to increase this dis-trustfulness in order to make them happy.
To play Devil's Advocate, the biggest detractors from this argument are the murder of the bus drivers and the possession of Skye, while also overwriting her personality and memories, which cause the passenger's distrust of it in the first place.
As for why it started terrorizing and possessing people, it may have been confused and not understood the consequences of its actions, or it may have felt threatened by its alien surroundings and lashed out blindly. That, or it was banished to the Void in the first place for good reason, because it's a vicious SOB.
The big issue that the various "the entity wasn't evil, it just echoed the cruelty of the humans" theories is that it killed the driver and engineer. But the entity doesn't display any sort of ability to cause that damage once it got inside. As for why they both arrived at the same time, perhaps the main entity was fleeing the other one, and sought out the group in hopes of being protected from the second creature.
