Spoilers ahead for Doctor Who: “The Well”
Hello and welcome back to our Monday morning quarterbacking of the new season of Doctor Who. Discussion of this week’s episode, “The Well,” contains heavy spoilers.
As always, here’s a bit of trivia so you don’t feel like you’ve wasted the click. In the 2008 episode “Midnight,” Professor Hobbes was played by David Troughton, son of Second Doctor actor, Patrick Troughton. In fact, David has been incredibly prolific in the Whoniverse, narrating several books and appearing in radio plays as the Black Guardian and King Peladon. At one point, the Virgin New Adventures novel line was even considering creating a new Doctor specifically based around David.
Now onto the article.
Ask one hundred Whovians what their favorite post-2005 episode is and I’ll bet you 20 of them will say “Blink.” The show itself even acknowledged this in last week’s episode, “Lux.” There’s good reason, too. The Weeping Angels were a terrifying addition to the monster gallery, the script was tight, the acting superb, and it just tapped into some deep, primal fear of being hunted that made it an instant classic.
Fans clamored for more Angels, and they got more Angels, but every adventure since starring the Angels has been worse than the last. Their simplicity was mired down with new abilities in “Time of the Angels/Flesh and Stone;” they became overtly ridiculous in “The Angels Take Manhattan” and by the time “Village of the Angels” rolled around, it was as if the writers had forgotten what made them scary in the first place.
Post-2005 Doctor Who has always struggled to create a new recurring villain on the level of the Daleks or the Cybermen. Only the Silence has really come close. The reason is surprisingly simple. Stuff like the Weeping Angels are monsters; nemeses like the Daleks are concepts. There is always some new wrinkle of fascism for the Daleks to make horrifying. The Angels are one-trick ponies. It’s a good trick, but that trick doesn’t really open itself up for wider ideas to explore other than “oh, that is scary.”
Which brings us to “The Well.” I have always been one of the voices screaming hard for a return to “Midnight” since it debut 17 years ago (it physically hurt me to type that). I still have nightmares about that adventure. It’s claustrophobic and cosmic all at once, builds a monster with nothing but vocal tricks, and is a rare case of The Doctor being utterly helpless in the face of a new foe. It was like a twisted fairy tale.
“The Well” finally returns to both the planet Midnight and the concepts of “Midnight.” The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda (Varada Sethu) are still trying to triangulate a way back to May 24, 2025, but find themselves right in the middle of a military operation onto a dead planet where the miners have stopped responding. Inside is a single survivor, Aliss, a deaf cook played by (Rose Ayling-Ellis).
Things start off promisingly despite borrowing nearly every early story beat from Aliens right down to the “nuke it from orbit” line. Aliss cannot explain all the corpses, Belinda gets spooked while treating a cut on Aliss’s arm, and paranoia runs wild until The Doctor makes the reveal they are on Midnight at the halfway mark.
What’s good in the beginning is so good. Ayling-Ellis deserves a BAFTA for this performance, expertly moving between terrified pleading and indignant response to suspicion. Her deafness is handled with both some interesting technological advancements and some well done social commentary. When she chastises Belinda for not speaking BSL, Belinda admits that she should as a nurse.
Musical stings and cut away shots make the audience and cast believe they see something hiding behind Aliss. I went back and looked carefully at the brief second and I don’t think there is even something in the shot. I believe that director Amanda Brotchie might just be screwing with us for some of the episode, which is a pretty clever trick.
Then it gets mediocre real quick. The Doctor realizes that the monster is the thing from Midnight, but this time it has a totally different approach. Rather than copying someone’s speech patterns, it throws people violently if they walk behind Aliss while someone else is looking at her from the front. This is, frankly, stupid. The effect of them flying through the air is more comical than scary, and there are so many shots where people should definitely go flying and they don’t. It would have been much more frightening if the people who edged behind Aliss simply disappeared, a new bit of incomprehensible horror from a monster that defies explanation.
Like the Angels, the Midnight monster is done no favors by handing it another ball to juggle. Worse than the Angels, “The Well” take away its original gimmick and replace it with something out of a Monty Python skit. Gatwa does his best with this change, offering another riveting emotional performance, but it can’t fully replace the feeling of silliness.
It’s doubly annoying because we’ve already had a stellar spiritual-sequel to “Midnight,” 2023’s “Wild Blue Yonder.” It used the same themes and even some of the copying gimmicks to make what I consider to be the best episode of the Disney Who era. I actually thought the creatures in “Wild Blue Yonder” were aspects of the thing from Midnight.
Elizabeth Sandifer over at Eruditorum Press said that writer Sharma Angel-Warfall’s script smacked of a last-minute rewrite by Russell T Davies, and I can believe that. The sudden tonal shift from engaging mystery to predictable Midnight” sequel is as awkward as tripping over a bit of turned-up carpet. From the moment of the reveal, the rest of the episode is dull and lifeless. Part of what made “Midnight” brilliant is that we never learn what it was or what it really wanted. This? This is just a more-expensive version of “Hide,” and “Hide” was a bit crap.
I am all for confronting the intangible horrors beyond the stars. “Lux” was masterful. However, this era of Doctor Who has been at its best when it deals with simple and banal human evil turned up to fantastic levels. The privilege of “Dot and Bubble,” the pettiness of the aliens in “Rogue,” the casual cruelty of the “pro-life” government in “Space Babies,” and the capitalist nightmare of “Boom,” take the show in brilliant directions.
This? This spun in circles, never really achieving the basic scares of its source material or using the cosmic to give us new insight on anything. It’s just a more “Midnight,” like a nightmare that loses its edge once you’ve already dreamed it once.
Doctor Who airs Saturdays on Disney+.
