WHO REVIEW: 15-3 - "The Well"

Well, well, well...

There are going to be spoilers from the outset for this one, although if you'd heard the rumours swirling about before the episode aired then you probably know what's coming. However, you can still back out now if you don't want to know the twist in this one. If you don't mind knowing or you know already, click "read more..."

The first big problem with the twist - well, less of a twist, more a revelation - in this story is that it's all fans are talking about with regards to this episode. It overshadows the actual story, so that, yes, I'm starting this review with it instead of actually talking about the other forty minutes of the episode.

The second big problem is that if you're not a fan, it's essentially meaningless. Having the Doctor scared because he's facing something he barely survived before and is now even more powerful - well, we did that with Sutekh, and it didn't have the clout it needed then. It can work, but you have to sell it in a way that includes both hardcore fans and casual viewers. Calling back to a single episode that aired seventeen years ago with a clip of David Tennant and Lesley Sharp that explains precisely nothing is going to alienate a lot of viewers, even if they did watch it back in 2008. My partner is a Doctor Who fan - not a full-on weirdie like me, but she knows who the Meddling Monk is and has a theory on the Doctor's true origins - but she couldn't remember "Midnight" at all. 

The third big problem is that the being that is killing the miners doesn't act like the being that took the Doctor's voice and turned his fellow passengers against him. A being that is always right behind you, whispering to you, keeping you on edge, while making you a lethal threat by killing anyone unlucky enough to stand behind it - that's a great horror concept. It's just not the same as something that usurps your agency by copying you until it's able to move a step ahead and make you copy it. Yes, it's been sitting on this planet for 400,000 years, and has doubtless grown and changed in this time, which is better than the Weeping Angels suddenly developing new rules and powers out of the blue. It's still a very different concept, and it's frankly baffling that the Doctor realises he's dealing with the same entity, especially as his eureka moment is "We don't know what it is." There's no end of things the Doctor doesn't know when he arrives somewhere. It's all rather sloppy.

It's also somewhat infuriating that co-writer Sharma Angel-Walfall originally wrote the episode to include the orishas, Nigerian folkloric spirits, something that Gatwa had wanted to explore. It's understandable that this was backed away from to avoid offending those who follow that belief system, but it smacks of RTD coming in and removing the most original elements from the work of a woman of colour, and replacing it with something from his own back catalogue. 

Which is all a shame, since "The Well" is actually a pretty decent episode. It's a really effective primetime horror, giving us an unsettling threat with well-established and easy to understand rules. Even its trick of latching onto the killer of its previous host is, if tried and tested horror fare, a truly chilling premise. Amanda Brotchie's direction is exceptional, truly selling the scale of the mining facility while, at the same time, lending it a distinctly claustophobic feel. Rose Ayling-Ellis is astonishingly good as Aliss, giving a powerfully sympathetic performance while at the same time - also thanks, in part, to Brotchie's careful direction - appearing questionable and out-of-place.

It's beyond time that we had another D/deaf character in Doctor Who, the first since Sophie Stone played Cass in "Under the Lake"/"Before the Flood" ten years ago. The Doctor's finally learned some sign language, after having deleted it sometime before the earlier episodes. We must gloss over the fact that he's using BSL to communicate with an alien woman who's never heard of humanity, and assume it's a TARDIS translation effect like the speech and written text. (A benefit of watching with my partner, who is fluent in BSL, is that she can translate the parts left untranslated on screen, brief though they were.) It's remarkable that Aliss wasn't originally written as D/deaf, but that this was incorporated into her character when Ayling-Ellis was cast; her deafness, the paranoia of the troops when faced with sign langauge that they don't understand, and the recurring insult of people turning their backs on her even as her back is always to the entity, all seem so essential to the script. More could have been made of her lack of hearing making her immne to the entity's manipulation (predictable though this element was), but this was never built up as a crucial power of the being. 

A bunch of soldiers undertaking a mission to a deadly planet is about as bog-standard a Doctor Who set-up as you can get, but it just exists to hang the horror story off. Caoilfhionn Dunne gives a strong and likeable performance as , who in many ways provides the character Sasha 55 failed to: an engaging, intelligent soldier who understnad and has chemistry with the Doctor. Unfortunately, 45 minutes just isn't long enough, with this many characters, to fully realise her and give the audience a stake in her story. For that reason, her sacrifice at the end hasn't the emotional impact it really deserves.

The remaining cast do their best with limited time to build characters, with the exception of Christopher Chong as Cassio, who gets stuck with the obligatory hard-nosed, dull-witted soldier who can't adapt to a weird situation and gets people killed by bullishly sticking to brute force and military tactics. Fortunately, Shaya sorts him out by using the entity's rules against him (easily my favourite moment of the episode).

The two regulars are predictably excellent, although Varada Sethu has less to do this episode. I don't have the issue some viewers have with Gatwa crying so frequently as the Doctor; it's usually a single tear and is a powerful way of expressing high emotion or pain. Here, though, is when it feels most earned, as tears stream down the Doctor's face when he is confronted by the entity that tormented him, thousands of years ago. It's the only time that it truly seems like this could be the same being encountered in "Midnight."

The final act has some lovely beats; the use of mercury as a mirror to turn the creature against itself is classic horror (as well as a nice callback to defeating the Mara, one of the various gods and one I'm genuinely surprised hasn't turned up yet). The final twist - has the monster survived? - is extremely predictable but almost compulsory for this type of story, as well as making Shaya's sacrifice (and the unnamed hostess way back in "Midnight") a total waste of life. A suitably grim note to end on. 

Rewatching in the future, with some distance from the hubbub of the revelation of a returning villain, "The Well" will likely stand up as a solid example of spooky Doctor Who.

Setting: Planet 6767, aka Midnight, c. AD 400,000.

Future history: The planet Lombardo should be in alliance with Earth, but in this revised timeline, they've never heard of the planet or the human race. It's good to see the series take the destruction of Earth as a plot point with some logical fallout, rather than showing us future times that don't take it into consideration. On the other hand, Shaya readily reporting that the planet was once called Midnight is hard to credit. Not only does she know what the planet was called almost 400,000 years ago, but that name was given to the world by an explicitly human expedition, who now never went there. For that matter, surely the events of "Midnight" never happened...

Speculation: Perhaps the biggest change to the entity's nature is that it now has a body, albeit one that remains almost out of sight. It had been glimpsed as a fleeting shadow in "Midnight," and now still appears mostly as a shadow, but is in fact played by Paul Kasey in a full, jet black costume. The being was seemingly incorporeal in the earlier episode, and possessed Lesley Sharp's character Sky Silvestri, before being pushed out the bus into the lethal environment. Now that it is apparently fully physical and able to throw people around, is it possible that it's still possessing Sky's body, mutated after thousands of years?

Flood Warning: An odd turn, this, with Mrs Flood appearing seemingly in character as a military officer in a Starfleet-esque uniform. She speaks as though she's a completely different person to the one we met in 2024/25 and in 1952.

Title-Tattle: "The Well" is a distinctly horror movie-type title (there are at least two horror films with the name and a horror game, plus a raft of drama films and a novel). I'm not sure how the upcoming novelisation will adapt it to the page, but at least the old-style Doctor Who book titles aren't in use: Doctor Who and the Well just doesn't sound as creepy.

Maketh the Man: The Doctor and Belinda change into spacesuits used by the Lombardic military in the year 400,000, perfectly suited for the mission they drop into, evne though they've arrived in an altered timeline. The TARDIS is really on point these days...

The Shallow Bit: On that subject, only Ncuti Gatwa could make a spacesuit look that hot. Seriously...