Doctor Who Reviews: "The Well"

The Ncuti Gatwa era of Doctor Who has not yet had a proper horror episode -an undervalued staple of the series that every Doctor (certainly of the twenty-first century) ought to have. After all, as was reiterated last week the most popular favourite episode of Doctor Who is one of its greatest horror shows. Both “73 Yards” and “Dot and Bubble” had strong horror moments, but don’t really count. “The Well” at long last does.

It’s got all the classic traits of a Doctor Who monster episode -the mysteriously abandoned outpost, a small collection of characters whom the Doctor and companion embed themselves within, and a body count. And it seems to be as much about showcasing Gatwa’s capabilities with this formula as it is with creating its unsettling atmosphere and air of paranoia, which it does quite well -credit to director Amanda Brotchie. What it is less successful at is relaying much substance through its premise or rabble of guest characters, and the concept of its terror which, though chilling in some respect, isn’t as inventive or interesting as it wishes to be.

Partly attached to this is of course Belinda’s continuing anxiety over the inability of the TARDIS to get home. The Vindicator couldn’t find 2025 at all from the 1950s -something it seems is obscuring Earth in that moment in time from the TARDIS’s reach, raising suspicions that something has happened to it. Once again, we see that particular need Belinda has to get home again even if the Doctor detects her starting to enjoy their adventures when they land in a new place. The pull of her parents is notably strong, and I like that we keep learning more about them through her -the Doctor too, who wants to meet them and promises Belinda he will. First though, they have to try again with the Vindicator.

This time, they are 500,000 years, in the future and emerge on a military drop ship above a planet that they are immediately pushed to descend upon with a squadron of soldiers with some intergalactic federation, there to investigate and potentially rescue the workers of a carbon mine that has gone radio silent. Essentially, the Doctor and Belinda are thrust into the opening premise of Aliens, something Russell T. Davies (who wrote the episode with Sharma Angel Walfall) apparently lampshades with a comment about “nuking the site from orbit”. Obviously, these two showing up out of the blue is suspicious, so once they and the eleven-member team are on the surface, the Doctor gets to play his psychic paper trick and assume the role of a higher-up in their chain of command, amusingly getting the facts of the mission out of them as a ‘test’. It is a fairly elite crew, rigorous and disciplined -the Doctor and Belinda stick out, but manage okay with their bluff as they all reach the facility and began to snoop around.

As abandoned stations in Doctor Who go, this one is fine -the best eerie set-piece is the titular well, a vast room taken up by a giant chasm stretching far down into the planet’s depths to extract its resources; of a width broad enough to comfortably house a sandworm from Dune. First though they come to a chamber where they find what seems to be the station’s only survivor, terrified and sitting still in the centre of the room. She is Aliss Fenly (Rose Ayling-Ellis), the deaf station cook looking for her lost daughter -and whom the squad is immediately suspicious of, but the Doctor of course approaches with kindness and empathy, signing to her their helpful intentions. Of course Aliss does admit to killing a woman, a friend, who had apparently attacked her under the plague of psychosis that took out everybody else. Ayling-Ellis plays very well her fear and vulnerability, such that the Doctor and Belinda are compelled to comfort her even amidst signs that something might not be right. I appreciate that it puts them at minor odds with the others, trained to be discerning in these matters -perhaps to their own fault, unable to come at the situation with compassion. Certainly one called Cassio (Christopher Chung) is suspicious of this Doctor and nurse’s behaviour as supposed officers and it doesn’t take long for him to show himself to be the impulsive, abrasive personality of the crew -but his observations aren’t unfounded.

Still, like most of his colleagues, he is destined for the meat-grinder, and there isn’t any effort to generate any investment for this unlucky crew, beyond the mission commander Shaya Costallion (Caoilfhionn Dunne), a soldier from fourteen  whose dedication to duty has been her motivating factor in life -the presentation of this exposition is quite clearly an attempted hook for some later pay-off, and not explored at all in terms of how her life has been effected by this trajectory, much as the Doctor prods a little bit. Their conversation though, as they observe the emptiness of the mineshaft, yields the first creepy implication of the episode: despite what the Doctor apparently knows of this time-period and a critical partnership between Shaya’s world Lombardo and Earth, Shaya has never heard of Earth, or humans. Separately, keeping an eye on and tending to Aliss, Belinda also learns that those things have no meaning either to Aliss or the troopers. Earth, it appears, does not exist; more hauntingly, it has not existed for so long that it has been forgotten in all memory.

Both the Doctor and Belinda are perturbed by this, and the episode gives it the requisite weight, as it likewise influences the mood of the moment -alienating the two of them severely from their colleagues. It would appear that hint at the end of “The Robot Revolution” really meant something -and whatever happened to the Earth in 2025 has had a ripple effect into the future. The shock to Belinda is quite palpable. Though it is succeeded and momentarily forgotten by a more visceral shock. When Belinda looks up at Aliss, she momentarily sees something -a shapeless shadow behind her. It’s a fright to the audience too, so quick and indistinguishable they might themselves question if they actually saw it -if not of course for the typical horror music cue. This of course sparks paranoia with the soldiers on guard, already predisposed not to trust Aliss, as Aliss herself insists there is nothing there. Yet after a time, Belinda catches it again, and so do the others -but there is nothing they can find in the room apart from themselves and Aliss. When a soldier tries to go behind her to ascertain for sure though, they are thrown against a wall by some unseen force and apparently killed.

An unseen force, but not for long an unknown one. The Doctor, learning from Shaya that Carbon 46 -the material being mined- is in fact the diamond that once covered this planet, realizes he had been to this world 400,000 years prior… when it was a resort called Planet Midnight.

The reveal of this episode being a stealth sequel to “Midnight” in much the same way “The Legend of Ruby Sunday” was to “Pyramids of Mars” I’ll admit is kind of fun. Much as Doctor Who should continue to invest in new monsters, concepts, and places, there have been so many through the series’ history it is good to see a few of them recur. There is a brief flash to the episode on the Doctor’s recognition in case you forgot -though I’d warrant “Midnight” is not a very forgettable episode to those familiar with the David Tennant era. It is the episode from the fourth series where the Doctor boards a train through Planet Midnight that is terrorized by an unseen entity possessing one of its passengers in the form of the repetition of everything said to it, the repetition gradually becoming closer and closer to the speaker until it is saying things before they do as a way of possessing them in turn. It is a high watermark of creepy Doctor Who episodes (Davies’s own answer to “Blink” arguably).

Of course the invocation of “Midnight” obviously invites comparisons, which might be a bit unfair if it weren’t Davies’s material in both instances. The entity here is identified as the same, though it functions in a very different way. While it remains incorporeal, the repetition thing is gone, and with it the former episode’s sense of creeping tension. The paranoia it inspires is still present and violent -Aliss finally admits to the thing behind her and how it is what drove the madness in the station, leading to people killing each other as it apparently hopped from one person to the next. But the grimness of that paranoia in the present with these characters is not the same. “Midnight” was a fairly uniquely dark episode of that era of Doctor Who in how it illustrated what people turn to under pressure of fear -they nearly killed the Doctor out of it. Here though, the most we get is Cassio staging a mutiny, fed up with Shaya’s trust of the Doctor, not out of paranoia but stubbornness. Determined to kill this creature, he and the troopers attempt to get behind her -in her own effort to stop them, Aliss turns around causing the deaths of everybody who faces her back until all but about five are left. Though the scene is a veritable bloodbath, the way it is executed, with everybody being thrown around and falling dead, it can’t help but resemble the bridge scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail more than anything genuinely scary.

And the concept, though it does have creepy insinuations, also doesn’t quite translate them successfully. The idea of the hidden terror behind you just out of sight is a good one -other horror stories have interpreted it- but the fact that the audience is not in the head-space of the victim until late in the episode when it attaches to Belinda, and then only briefly, saps some of the power of that concept. And the very thing that ostensibly keeps Aliss from going mad by it -her deafness, which renders her unable to hear its whisperings, also keeps the effect of this monster quite literally muted. The best sense of its horror may come just from Gatwa’s reaction to it when the Doctor addresses it directly and can hear it (though we cannot). It is some good work on his part, though his reaction is undercut by discovering its weakness moments later. The creature has been allowed to thrive on this barren world without those diamonds that once covered it, forcing its reflection. To free Aliss, the Doctor simply needs to create that reflection -which he does by having the troopers make a waterfall behind her.

They hightail it back to the entry chamber and Aliss is saved, but four of them inadvertently trap themselves there with the entity which has attached itself to Belinda now -wherein we get one effect I really liked in a subtle bit of almost subliminal movement behind her when the camera is close-in on her face to indicate its presence. It’s a very short-lived bit of suspense though -while the Doctor obviously tries to take it on himself, bribing it with travel across the galaxy, Shaya opts to shoot Belinda (non-fatally) and take it on herself -her backstory providing a not-so-convincing bit of pathos as she runs with it back to the mineshaft, throwing herself down it to the Doctor’s horror. I wish there was more dramatic power to this -for her part, Dunne performed it very well. It just didn’t capture the weight that it really meant to.

The episode ends with the Doctor and Belinda back in the TARDIS, reflecting -and with the issue of the entity gone, are able to address that underlying revelation of the Earth being gone. The Doctor has no explanation -their best bet is to keep trying with the Vindicator. The episode really ends however with a couple more little twists -the first a fairly obvious one. Clearly Davies, back on his kick of planting seeds of a series-long mystery every episode (as he did for “Bad Wolf” and “Torchwood”), has settled on Mrs. Flood, showing up here as the squadron commander now ranking officer Mo (Bethany Antonia), the nice one, must report to -and she’s very curious about both the TARDIS and the Vindicator, which she knows by name. The second twist is better and effectively pretty chilling as shortly after the TARDIS disappears, Mo runs into one of her colleagues, who thinks she sees something behind her back…

I’d have liked more moments like this in “The Well”, but there were a few there that were nicely done. The enigma of this horror, the fact we could never quite make it out, was quite effective. Its tact however wasn’t nearly as creative or scary as the last time, and the characters and setting, with the exceptions of Shaya and Aliss, weren’t terribly interesting, the themes not so strong. The episode also just forgot entirely about Aliss’s daughter -once freed, she didn’t seem concerned with finding her anymore, and I can’t imagine why Davies would ignore that. Also given the ending, it’s entirely possible Aliss is not in fact free of this creature after all, rendering the mission futile -a bleak eventuality to be sure, but not one that feels smart. Like the last episode, this is unfortunately one where the parts are greater than the whole. Hopefully the Doctor and Belinda find better luck at their next stop.

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