Doctor Who: Season 4, Volume 3

DVD review (region 2)
Starring David Tennant, Catherine Tate
Release date Out now

The Doctor and Donna arrive on a deserted planet-sized library, and a tour group comes under attack from an unseen force on the planet Midnight…

If you’re only going to own one volume from season 4, then this is definitely it. Instalments scripted by soon-to-be-showrunner Steven Moffat are always series highpoints (Blink remains one of the best episodes of TV drama in the past decade), and the two-parter Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead is no exception.

The episodes find the Doctor and Donna answering a distress call and, along with a band of explorers, they end up on a deserted library planet. They soon discover that they need to stay out of the shadows if they’re going to survive... All of this is intercut with sequences in which a little girl talks to a psychiatrist about her nightmares of a deserted library. It’s a clever, ambitious story that rewards viewers with surprising plot twists and an escalating sense of horror (helped by a weirder-than-usual score). Moffat also has a real skill in crafting well-rounded supporting characters that lesser Doctor Who writers lack, and the frightened little girl (played by Eve Newton) and Alex Kingston’s mysterious Professor River Song are especially intriguing figures.

Midnight is another series highpoint that eschews the fun-but-formulaic runarounds of the beginning of the series. The episode starts off in high spirits with short snippets of The Doctor joking around with other passengers aboard a tour shuttle – before the vehicle grounds to a halt in the middle of nowhere and comes under attack. The relentless mimicking technique of the alien force is increasingly sinister, and – after much squabbling over how best to react to the threat – the tone eventually becomes quite astonishingly downbeat. Like Moffat’s two-parter, it’s a brave and unusual drama that shows new Who is at its best when it breaks free of a safe formula. James Skipp