10 Best Doctor Who Minisodes That You Need To See

Good Night is another minisode featured as part of Night and the Doctor on the DVD release of Series 6, and in contrast the the usual, humorous style of these extra snippets, focuses on a quieter, more introspective moment between The Doctor and Amy.

Unable to sleep, Amy sits in the TARDIS console room in the middle of the night, waiting for the Doctor to return. He eventually does, guiltily attempting to conceal a euphonium (as you do). Amy quizzes him on where he goes at night, pointing out that her and Rory must make up such a small fragment of his life. The Doctor tells her this couldn’t be further from the truth, and that of all the many people who he crosses paths with on his adventures, Amy and Rory are all he ever remembers or wants to come back to.

Reassured, Amy opens up about why she can’t sleep - she’s been wrestling with the fact that her life doesn’t make any sense - everything is muddled, and her personal history has been altered more than once. She touches on the fact that she now has parents, which she never did before, and the two also discuss the fact that Rory lived for 2,000 years as an Auton Centurion - these are two things that she show is often accused of glossing over, despite the fact that they will have had a massive impact on our central characters, and it’s nice to hear them discussed properly, if only briefly.

Sensing that Amy needs cheering up, The Doctor hooks her up to the TARDIS telepathic circuits, focusing in on her saddest memory. It turns out that the memory is her dropping an ice-cream at a fairground as a child (not, you know, any of the many other traumatic experiences she’s been through). Landing the TARDIS at the fairground, he asks Amy what happened next. We watch as her memory of the moment is altered, and she suddenly remembers a girl in a nightie buying her a new one - the same nightie Amy is wearing now.

Amy asks if The Doctor’s solution to Amy’s existential crisis is to go and buy herself an ice cream, and he tells her that his solution is actually to buy him an ice cream as well. In better spirits, the two head outside to spend an evening at the fairground.

There are a real shortage of moments like this in the main show, in part due to the fact that they don’t neatly slot anywhere, but we really see The Doctor being a good friend to Amy here. Not in the usual sense of rescuing her from alien capture, or making a heroic sacrifice to protect her - he just listens, reassures her, and takes her somewhere genuinely nice to cheer her up. It’s a very humanising moment for a Doctor that is, at times, the most alien of them all.