 Name: The Midnight Entity
Format: Television show
Time of Origin: Far future on the planet Midnight, surviving for at least four hundred thousand years.
Appearances: "Midnight" and "The Well"
Doctors: Tenth Doctor and Fifteenth Doctor
Companions: Belinda Chandra; Donna Noble was on Midnight when The Doctor first faced the entity but didn’t confront it herself.
History:
Of the many foes The Doctor has faced in his lives, the creature known as the Midnight Entity is one of the most mysterious and terrifying. The most significant aspect of the creature is that where The Doctor has known of creatures such as the Black Guardian ("The Armageddon Factor") or the Vashta Nerada ("Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead") before he faced them, evidence indicates that even the Time Lords have never encountered the creature in question.
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| Midnight |
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The creature is named as such due to the fact that it was first confronted on the planet Midnight, an airless world covered with diamonds and bombarded with X-tonic radiation that made it uninhabitable to any life form ("Midnight"). Colonies and mines had been established with suitable shields, although the level of radiation was so intense that these locations had to be lowered onto the planet and surrounded with glass fifteen feet thick. Even though all tests indicated that literally nothing could live on this planet, the creature known as the Midnight Entity somehow evolved on this world. The creature declared that it had waited ‘so long in the dark and the cold and the diamonds’ of its world, its words suggesting that it sought to escape the isolation of its dead world.
The Doctor stated that the entity had no face, no name and no self, although when it was glimpsed from the tour bus it was described as a shifting, dark form akin to a moving shadow that ‘ran’ towards the bus. It was glimpsed in a low-standing form that suggested a quadrupedal structure, inspiring terror in all who witnessed it, but they never described it directly. It possessed great strength in its natural state, able to tear ships apart with its bare limbs, enjoying the chance to learn about its surroundings while playing sadistic games with those it targeted. When it took a human host, it was able to rapidly burrow into the subject’s mind, able to absorb and mimic languages and words without making a single mistake. In its next appearance, it was able to latch onto a host without overriding their personality, its physical body appearing and disappearing from sight if it was forced out of its host. All sources indicate that the creature could rapidly escalate feelings of cabin fever and internal aggression, ensuring that people under attack by the entity would turn on each other far more quickly than if they were left alone.
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| Sky Silvestry |
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The Doctor first encountered the creature when the Tenth Doctor and Donna Noble visited the planet for a holiday, Donna staying in the spa for a few hours while The Doctor departed on a tour with Crusader Tours, departing from the Leisure Palace Company on a bus that took him around a range of locations such as Winter Witch Canyon and the Sapphire Waterfalls. The initial stops on the tour went well, but the bus was frozen when a new detour around the Sapphire Waterfalls went wrong, with the driver noticing a shadow running along the outside diamonds, ‘running’ towards the bus, knocking on its exterior to inspire panic among the passengers. The Doctor and another passenger confirmed the entity was intelligent when it imitated their own pattern of knocks, but subsequently somehow entered the bus, denting the hull, killing the pilots as it tore a hole in the cockpit, and transferred itself into Sky Silvestry, one of the passengers who had been particularly panicked about the situation.
Now possessing a human form, the entity began to ‘express’ itself by repeating the words that everyone else in the passenger area spoke, even imitating an attempt to cite pi up to thirty decimal places. The creature began by copying others word-for-word, able to imitate them exactly as they spoke, but soon focused on The Doctor as the most intelligent passenger, playing on the others’ paranoia and hysteria. The entity soon managed to paralyse The Doctor and essentially ‘steal’ his voice while remaining in Sky’s body, intending to convince the other passengers that Sky was free and the entity was now trapped in The Doctor, even suggesting that they throw The Doctor’s body off the bus to stop ‘the entity’. Fortunately, the hostess recognised a particular phrase spoken by ‘Sky’ as something The Doctor had previously said, allowing her to realise that the Entity had stolen The Doctor’s voice while remaining in its initial host. The hostess grabbed the entity and forced them both out of the shuttle and onto the planet’s surface, vaporising Sky and the hostess but breaking the creature’s bond with The Doctor and restoring him to normal. Once the tour bus returned and explained the situation, the Leisure Palace Company took action to move their tour sites off planet to ensure that the creature would remain contained as they recognised that it most likely survived the destruction of Sky’s body.
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| The Well |
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Several thousand years later for the universe and a few centuries later for The Doctor, the Fifteenth Doctor found himself on the planet Midnight, although by this point it had become a very different world, to the extent that it was now known as Planet 6-7-6-7. Although the holiday facilities had been abandoned, the diamond mines exhausted, and the planet’s star having collapsed into a grey star, the entity remained in existence, now residing beneath the planet’s surface. When another mining colony was established on the planet by the Lombardic people (a humanoid race), the miners drilled five miles before the surface, the entity emerging from the subsequent well with a sound that resembled laughing. The entity apparently latched on to the colonists one by one, with the additional twist that anyone who passed behind the entity’s current host while a third party was standing in front of the entity’s host would be violently killed, all their bones broken as the entity moved from host to host. This led to the entity compelling their hosts to destroy all mirrors on the colony, as the entity could be affected by its own power if its back was facing a reflective surface.
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| Aliss Fenly |
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As the miners began to kill each other trying to stop the entity, eventually the only surviving colonist was Aliss Fenly, the colony chef, who was immune to the entity’s whispered influence due to her being deaf. Aliss was left trapped and alone in the colony until a military team were sent to investigate the colony’s disappearance, the expedition being joined by the Fifteenth Doctor and companion Belinda Chandra when the TARDIS materialised on the military ship and the two joined the expedition before they realised the extent of what was going on ("The Well"). Having found Aliss, the expedition witnessed glimpses of the entity over Aliss’s shoulder, causing them to become increasingly paranoid, but The Doctor determined what he was facing when he learned the planet’s original name and the entity whispered his name to him.
With some of the military forces having already turned on each other, The Doctor managed to use liquid mercury to create a reflective surface while the survivors kept an eye on Aliss’s front. The Doctor was able to force the entity out of Aliss by turning its power against itself, but when he tried to get a glimpse of it the entity was able to pass into Belinda as a new host. Expedition leader Shaya Costallion subsequently shot Belinda in a manner that would be seemingly fatal while allowing her to survive if she received immediate medical treatment, the entity passing to Shaya so that she could run back to the well and jump into it, apparently sacrificing herself to trap the entity. The Doctor suggested that the planet be nuked from orbit to stop the entity once and for all, but the entity may have escaped the planet already, as a previous use of the airlock as the expedition departed indicated four entities present when only three people were present (although one of the expedition may have been pregnant or something similar).
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