"The Well” (15th
Dr, 2025)
(Series 15/2A episode 3,
Dr 15 with Belinda, 26/4/2025, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writers: Russell T
Davies and Sharma Angel Walfall, executive producers: Julie Gardner, Jane
Tranter, Joel Collins and Phil Collinson, director: Amanda Brotchie)
Ranking: #N/A *but #230ish
reviewed 27/4/2025
I start with a joke this week because there was
almost none of that sort of thing in this week’s sombre episode, seemingly
deliberately made to be dark and monochrome in contrast to last week’s riot of
technicolour. That’s maybe not a surprise because it’s sequel to another famously sombre episode –
I’ll assume that everyone reading this knows which one but if you don’t look
away now, because that really would spoil the twist. No? Still here? Okay, ‘The
Well’ is what happens when the clock strikes ‘Midnight’ a second time. It is, in
Russell’s own words from this week’s ‘Unleashed’ behind-the-scenes documentary
‘the sort of story you should never ever make a sequel to – so of course we
dove in headfirst!’ A lot of fans are confused and/or upset that we got one.
After all ‘Midnight’ is as close to perfect as TV comes, the story that many
fans consider Russell’s best work (me included) I can still absolutely see why
he wanted to go back to it: that story was the last (specials aside, the first
of two which were written mostly concurrently) that Russell wrote the first
time around, after different episode fell through. It came at a difficult time
in his life: his husband Adam was dying and he was preparing to leave the job
he adored to look after him. It is a story about language, about how your words
can be taken away and used against you and my pet theory, as put forward in the
‘Midnight’ review, is that it came from Russell realising that he’s got too
full of himself in his ‘old’ job, that the 10th Doctor who was his
spokesman had become ‘like a God’ (being in charge of a show this big for five
years will warp anyone’s brain) and could bend the universe to his whims –
while the universe has just handed him a gigantic reminder that he couldn’t.
So, then, I for one am not surprised he felt like ‘Midnight’ was an itch he
couldn’t scratch. This time though things are different. Russell is coming to
this story from a humbler place. He knows, now, that his job isn’t just to
entertain and raise big issues but to protect those without a voice
We know from the first time round that the Midnight
monster likes to create a ‘host’ for itself, picking on the nearest Human and
that in ‘Midnight’ it jumped on The Doctor, using his own words – the one thing
that gets him out of trouble – against him. What we learn in this story is that
the monster jumps into whichever being it thinks is most likely to attack it.
Notably that’s no longer The Doctor even though the creature seems to remember
him (and whispers his real name in his ear, something only The Doctor and – at
a push – River Song actually know).So this time he writes the same scenario
from the point of view of a deaf survivor attacked by a monster who makes
people talk in whispers, with the 15th Doctor – his new, softer,
kinder, more humanistic mouthpiece – promising that she isn’t going to be
abandoned ‘because we’re here for you – we’re all here for you’. Just look at
what Russell’s been doing these past two years, writing strong parts for the
LGBTQ and disabled communities and casting two actors of race in the main parts:
the message is no longer an angry stomp round his writer’s room that ‘I could
do so much more!’ but a gratitude that he’s in a position to do so much good
for so many people.
I love that angle of this story, which I say is as
good a reason as any for writing a sequel, even if there are still aspects of
this episode I’m not best keen on. After all, since Russell wrote that story
sixteen years go, we have more whisperings going on than ever and even more
human paranoia in the world (this is a story that shows it’s source material
even more openly than ‘Midnight’, the brilliant Twilight Zone episode ‘The
Monsters Are Due On Maple Street’, where a mob kills an innocent little boy for
play-acting his innocent story about aliens from a book he’s reading). It turns
out the ‘Midnight’ monster – ejected into space at the end of that story – has
been sleeping (or perhaps it’s offspring have been sleeping) down the bottom of
a well. The planet is no longer a tourist trap and the planet has been mined
almost completely for its diamonds but it’s left a well at the bottom that’s
just enough to live in. Until this latest bunch of humanoids come along and
wake it up, accidentally causing a massacre. Aliss has survived precisely
because of her disability, because being deaf she can’t hear anyone whisper to
her. Russell is clever in making her out to be as ordinary as possible though
rather than having a ‘super-power’, in a lovely line telling us that she’s the
‘cook’, though in this era all that amounts to is ‘getting things out of
packets’. The thing is, though, the
massacre has taken place before we get to this base: what we see instead are a
bunch of soldiers pointing their guns at her while the same paranoia starts
again. What is so different about her? Maybe the monster is inside her? Or
maybe it’s this mysterious thing they can just see out the corner of their eye
when they look at her, hiding behind her back. Being around someone disabled
makes them uncomfortable. Much as they pride themselves on being an inclusive society
in the future. How I wish we had the options of suits with subtitles we could
turn on) they keep forgetting what it’s like; even The Doctor has to be
reminded to please turn his captions back on so that Aliss (a perpetually
terrified Rose Ayling-Ellis, who seems to be in everything at the moment) can
understand what’s happening. Because without them she’s scared and alone and
cut off even from her peers. She’s no different to how they are, except for one
thing, ‘no different except that I’m the only one left’. So why are they acting
as if she’s the monster?
I would say that it’s about people turning their
backs on the disabled (though, of course, in the context of the story it’s
about people too afraid to turn their backs on the disabled because they might
be ‘scary monsters’ despite looking just like ‘us’). As someone with an
invisible illness myself I know exactly where this story is coming from. The
looks you get from people who don’t understand it. The intolerance from people
who only vaguely remember being sick and think it’s an easy life rather one
that’s a struggle for survival each and every day. The people who think it’s a
sign of weakness and little realise that it could just as easily happen to
them, that everyone will end up disabled if they don’t die of something that
kills them first. Some days it feels very much like being stared at with
soldiers with guns who’ve been stirred up by online whispers about where your
taxes are going and what you do all day (write in my pyjamas and nap mostly, if
you’re wondering, it’s the best way to stay connected to the world the days I
can actually sit upright and the pain stops enough to be able to think
straight). Just being alive seems to make people jumpy, perhaps because they’re
aware that one day they can end up like you. Though not on benefits I’ve also
seen how friends of mine are affected by that discussion, by the media fixation
on ‘other people taking things from you’ despite the fact that next to no one
was ever successfully prosecuted for benefit fraud and even then it was pennies
through mistakes for the most part (compare this to millionaires dodging the
system with tax havens and getting out of paying taxes). This isn’t a world
where the strongest helps the weak, it’s a world where the weak are seen as the
perfect scapegoats because no one cares and they’re too ill to fight back for
the most part. The thing is, though, it could be you tomorrow: getting rid of
the target for the abuse doesn’t ends the abuse, it just switches people and
minority groups until, unchecked, only one person is left standing. If you’ve
ever read that famous Niemoller quote: ‘First they came for…But I did not speak
out’ that ends with them coming for you, then that’s what this story is about:
the thing that makes people hate on other people is always changing hosts. When
one is killed it just jumps to another.
Until it jumps to you for being ‘different’ in some small way. We need
to help each other or we all fall. One telling line is the way one of the
soldiers tells Aliss to hush, that ‘you will be quiet or you will be considered
a threat to life’. A lot of disabled people will identify with that, tolerated
as long as you don’t speak out and make people feel awkward.
I’ve never been deaf but I can imagine that’s even
more isolating: everyone else is connected in a way you aren’t and you feel
left behind, through no fault other than an accident and/or a quirk of
genetics. Too often the universe feels like it’s deliberately made to keep you
left out of it. So when The Doctor turns round and tells Aliss/me/us that ‘whatever
the monster does to you, you’ve got us’ and that we’re not going to be left
behind (because, after all, he knows what it’s like to have a mob turn on you)
it’s one of those golden moments of Dr Who that I live for, that no other
series could offer. The Doctor is saving us from the whispers this time rather
than himself though once again it’s not him who saves us all but a human (or
humanoid anyway, given that the Earth apparently no longer exists) dies through
a moment of great sacrifice having realised the ‘truth’ (because the squadron
leader, played with no-nonsense charm by Shaya Costallion) saves her because
‘that’s my job’, hurling the monster back down the well it was lurking in, deep
in the planet (it might be significant that, like the air hostess on
‘Midnight’, if she has a name I can’t remember it: our heroes are the unsung
nameless people we never get to thank. It might also be relevant that, once
again in a Russell-era story, the ‘Devil’ lives down a ‘pit’ and Humans reach
it when they’ve ‘mined’ it for its resources too far: see ‘The Impossible Planet/Satan’s Pit’).
I love the message of ‘The Well’: we don’t need to wait for The Doctor, for an
outsider, even for Russell’s wise words to save us because we have the power to
protect each other. If that isn’t the true Tardis-blue message at the heart of
Doctor Who then I’ll eat my scarf.
The central idea then? Fantastic. I’ll even buy
the fact that Russell is mining children’s games again, with this episode an
extended version of ‘What’s The Time Mr Wolf?’ (given that Aliss is the cook apparently
it’s ‘dinner time!’ The script keeps mentioning the monster being at ‘midnight’
like a hand on a clock, while the stage directions set out at which angle of
the clock face the soldiers spread out) even if it’s nowhere near as creepy as
the ‘repeating everything you say’ game of ‘Midnight’. However in every
other way ‘The Well’ is a poor sequel that misses out on all the things that
made ‘Midnight’ so special. That story was claustrophobic, full of easily
identifiable characters who only too believable went off like a powder keg when
lit the right way. This story is a bunch of cool-headed soldiers in an
open-planet (Ncuti’s first ever quarry! In Bridgehead, for a change. That has
to be a record, right? Hartnell aside, back in the days when telly didn’t
really do location filming, it’s never taken any Doctor as long as their
twenty-first episode to have some quarry filming. And yet Ncuti still got a
quarry before meeting a Dalek. If he does get a Dalek story – as I hope he does
– then that will be a record too. The 8th Doctor, obviously, is an
exception to both rules given that he only got one ‘proper’ story, though even
then if you count the minisode ‘Night Of The Doctor’ as a second he ticked both
boxes. Sort of. I mean, Daleks were the cause of the crash that caused his
regeneration after all). Though you can
see they’re spooked, it’s not in the same way. They’re also far too similar to
each other. ‘Midnight’ was made to be like a play, in a contained environment,
with everyone talking at once with a largely static camera shot for the most
part. ‘The Well’ isn’t. We keep jumping from one character to another. The
creature doesn’t use people’s words against them this time so there’s less of
Russell’s delicious dialogue to go on. ‘Midnight’ was full of sudden
jump-scares, ambiguous noises that could be the monster trying to get in or
just the sound a space-shuttle makes in outer space, while the whole point was
that the beings were stranded with nowhere to run. ‘The Well’ has no real
scares, just lots of people staring around them, being petrified. The ‘Midnight’
monster was terrifying the first time round despite never being seen, one that
takes over your own wordsd and personality and turns people against you. This
incarnation doesn’t steal your immortal soul and personality and thoughts from
you, it just hides behind people’s backs and chucks things. It’s an invisible
toddler basically, hardly the greatest threat The Doctor’s ever seen and we
miss the ‘worst’ this monster did by it happening before we get there.
There are a few little niggling plot details too,
such as the rather odd little bit at the beginning about the Tardis being too
far to run to, which suggests it was patched on at the last minute when someone
asked Russell why, once The Doctor has learned the planet’s name, there’s no
reason The Doctor doesn’t simply get everyone the hell away and off to safety
(surely there’s something in the Tardis that can block out a monster, however
invisible? ‘Midnight’ was a budget saver, one that did a lot on a little and
that was part of its charm: there’s a reason why it’s this story that’s one of
a small handful of stories that have been re-created on stage (albeit without
The Doctor, for copyright reasons: it still works surprisingly well). ‘The
Well’ just feels cheap when it doesn’t need to be, with just the one
(admittedly magical) shot of a space sky showing how far we’ve come from the
1980s days of digitally enhanced pink skies. Even so, so much for worrying that
the Disney budget would ruin the series: it’s being used a bit too sparingly
lately (or maybe everything is being saved for a season finale again? I just
hope it’s not a big dog this time): we don’t even see the diamonds or the same
sense of scale of the planet we had last time when we were on a much tighter
budget. Having a companion along for the ride really changes the feel too: on
‘Midnight’ the Doctor was alone like never before, but this time Belinda’s
along for the ride and to accommodate the pair Russell has to split them up,
having The Doctor off fiddling with stuff with Belinda talks to Aliss, then
when The Doctor comes back she barely says another word. There’s just not
enough room here for ‘unlucky thirteen’ characters either, plus Aliss and the
monster. After years of wishing Dr Who had proper troops, with full proper army
units to look more in keeping with what a situation would really be like, now
there’s too many to serve the story who get in the way tripping over each
other’s feet. Typical!
Most controversially of all we actually hear and see
this monster this time, albeit briefly and quietly. It’s only there for a few
frames but you can see it, both in one shot behind Aliss and in another when
The Doctor looks back. The monster looks like ‘Captain Zero’ from ‘The Eleventh Hour’ in its purest form
(and might well have regurgitated some pixels), skeletal and reptilian. ). It
turns out controversially that the midnight monster whispers in people’s ears
to make them paranoid – something that’s a bit of a shame given that ‘Midnight’
works better as a ‘humans getting paranoid under pressure’ scenario rather than
a ‘monsters made me do it, honest! scenario (I rather like the fact that, up
until the last five minutes, there might not even be a monster – that they’ve
just been in an unfortunate traffic accident that killed the two co-pilots –
and contemplated murder over their own shadows). Things are complicated by the
fact that the Midnight monster appears to act completely differently, no longer
using people’s words or copying them and simply whispering something we can’t
hear, while the standing in shadows where it can’t be seen is new (and a bit
too like the Vashta Nerada from ‘Silence In
the Library’). But hey ho, we’re 400,000 years of evolution down the line,
this one had days to gather data as opposed to their first contact with
‘aliens’ (i.e. us) and maybe there’s more than one monster here with more than
one characteristic anyway? (I mean, even invisible monsters can procreate,
right? Maybe they aren’t invisible to each other?)
There are all sorts of nods back to other stories
which made even the most inventive and original ideas in this story seemed
repetitive: we’re back to a ‘Caves Of Androzani’
type world where people mine into the planet’s crust the way they did in ‘Inferno’ (waking up a monster that
lies sleeping: I’m surprised the Doctor doesn’t point out more that it was
people’s greed trying to get that last diamond that woke up the monster) with
soldiers very like the ones in ‘Time Of The
Angels/Flesh and Stone’, though the story didn’t quite live up to any of
these (even that last, sometimes dodgy one). There were no sub-plots to give us
detail and character and though the episode ran surprisingly long (forty-eight
minutes to Lux’s forty three) we could easily have lost twenty without changing
the story at all. They could have done a lot more with that main plot too: I
wish Aliss had been just a little more proactive, just to prove that disabled
people aren’t wimps who always need protecting: I totally understand the being
traumatised after losing your friends part, but how much better for the message
it might have been if Aliss fought as hard as anyone once she had an army round
offering protection, rather than being sent home. It’s a bit of an odd idea to
show something we’ve all imagined the past sixteen years and which can’t
possibly match up to the image we have in our head and breaks the magical
illusion for no real purpose. It’s like writing a sequel where Romeo and Juliet
both wake up or ‘Waiting For Godot’ where Godot finally turns up.
The biggest problem though? ‘Midnight’ crackles with
tension, each sentence pushing the story further out of control from where The
Doctor could stop it until he’s a mere ‘passenger’, in all senses of the word.
‘The Well’ is just a wee bit dull. I’m
not one of those fans who think ‘Midnight’ was so perfect he should never have
tried re-writing it: this story does lots that’s new and worthy. But I wish
that he’s made it a short story, a coda for a Dr Who annual or for a Target
novelisation of the story: after coming up with the idea for the story there
just wasn’t anywhere else to take it. We have the same lengthy scene in
the middle that must have taken days to film, but compared to ‘Midnight’, where
the energy was constant and ebbed and flowed, this story is just filled with
empty space and people staring. There’s
no sense of buildup to match Russell at his earlier best and more
padding than an Abzorbaloff in a fat suit. What could have been time spent
getting to know the members of this base, of seeing how different they are to
each other and what they’re like before a crisis hits, we just see soldiers
following orders to greater or worse effect. There are moments in the dialogue
that make it come alive, such as the idea that the monster is hiding behind Aliss
‘as if a clock hand was pointing to midnight’ and Belinda’s suggestion that she
and the Doctor have arrived like ‘mystery shoppers’ is a great gag that would
have solved lots of earlier stories full of suspicion as to who these
interlopers are stepping out of a blue box. A lot of the dialogue is
perfunctory though, without the spark or wit or character of ‘Midnight’ and the
story drags until the two-thirds part when something finally happens (it speaks
volumes that the major thing to happen – the monster attack – isn’t seen, just
its aftermath).
The coda also spoils it all to some extent. Mrs
Flood turns up again and while her cameo was welcome in her other stories,
giving them an extra ‘lift’, it feels somewhat forced in this one. Apparently
she was the one back at base in charge of things, which raises some awkward
questions that may or may not be answered (although it does, at least, solve my
biggest gripe for most of the story: that the Doctor and Belinda knew exactly
what costumes to get out of the Tardis wardrobe, that frustratingly we still
haven’t seen in Ncuti’s era despite getting lots of mentions, without seeing
what the soldiers were wearing first; presumably Mrs Flood gave a memo though
it’s still odd neither of them comments on it. I’m starting to wonder if the
wardrobe is like Mr Benn’s shop – see ‘Joy To The World’ – with costumes ready for
every adventure. I’m also grumpy that The Doctor’s not in his old orange
spacesuit for old time’s sake but a darker number closer to the frogsuits of ‘Enlightenement’). She is apparently
keen that The Doctor is carrying a ‘vindicator’. What that all means we’ll have
to wait and see, along with how she seems to know where The Doctor will be and
can travel far further in time than we’ve seen her manage before. It’s also
unclear whether the seeds of doubt that are obviously still in the minds of the
survivors are caused by Mrs Flood starting whispers, human paranoia or the
monster returning, which is a shame (the idea worked better when it was kept
simple and seemed to be human paranoia solved by human sacrifice – throwing a
possible pantheon God/timelord/bi-regenerational villain/postmodernist
storyteller at it seems the wrong way to go).
There are, at least, some really strong performances
this week. Rose does well given that Aliss has nothing much to do than blub,
while Caoilfhionn Dunne is one of
Dr Who’s better soldiers, tough and uncompromising and all the things soldiers
have to be (but which UNIT mostly weren’t!) but with enough humanity and
gentleness to make her the sort of leader you follow because you want to, not
because you have to. Everything she does, even when it puts The Doctor and
Belinda in danger, is because she thinks it’s the best way to save people. Varadu
has her best episode as Belinda yet, someone who has by now fully acclimatised
to travel but still doesn’t quite trust the process yet, with a good line in
looking terrified without overdoing the scared part (especially when the monster
takes her and they have to shoot her and bring her back to life – a surprising
ending, to say the least and I’m not quite sure what that says to the overall
metaphor. That to protect people you end up with a damaged heart perhaps?) This
is Ncuti’s show, though, as he shines, demonstrating all the ways The Doctor
has changed since he was David Tennant.
He is no longer bossy and authoritarian, strutting in to take charge
like he owns the place and is far more careful with his words. He knows when to
tease (‘It’s inappropriate to call me babes’ snaps a soldier. ‘Okay hun’ he
smiles’). Russell was keen enough on the plot to send the whole cast to ESL
(European Sign Language Courses) and Ncuti, especially, looks a natural doing
it, a reminder that this Doctor isn’t of England in the 21st century
but a traveller that belongs everywhere (it’s a surprise that shouldn’t be a
surprise but has become one through familiarity, like when the 3rd
Doctor suddenly started speaking Mandarin in ‘The
Mind Of Evil’. Because why wouldn’t he know it, even if we’ve never seen
him use it before?) This Doctor knows what it’s like to be scared and alone, so
is way more sympathetic to Aliss than anyone else on the base. Just look at the
quiet smile he gives Aliss after he’s got to her safety, a sad bittersweet smile
for all that she’s been through and all the trauma she’ll have to recover
through, but that she’s safe now, protected from any more attacks. Though
ultimately it’s the soldier who gives up her life to save Belinda, The Doctor
tries to offer his first and Ncuti’s wide-eyed look of pleading innocence and
care makes you believe this Doctor really would lay down his life for
strangers, never mind friends. I know not everyone has taken to Ncuti’s Doctor,
that they find him too emotional and flamboyant, but I’m really enjoying his
portrayal, a regeneration that really wants to have fun and strut through life
looking cool, but has seen too much of the sadder part of life to turn his back
on people who are hurting. The Doctor has spent too long being closed off, full
of anger over the timewars and afraid to let people in; I love having someone
who’s open-hearted. It shows how far he’s come as a character: if he’d stayed
the same hard-nosed demi-God Tennant was at the end of Russell’s run then the
same story of ‘Midnight’ would just have happened again and the monsters would
have won. It’s not just the Doctor either of course, Russell has come this far
too: just look at all the series he’s written in between his Dr Who stints
which all give a voice to the disenfranchised.
POSITIVES + I might have
been quite hard on Murray Gold’s incidental scores in the past, which tend to
like telling us how we should feel rather than give us the space to work it out
for ourselves. I wasn’t expecting much from him on a score for a story that’s
all about deafness. Credit where it’s due though, his work is gorgeous across
this episode and it’s easily one of his best. While Russell’s dialogue can’t
quite build the tension layer by layer this time around Murray’s score very
much does, filling in the silences and building the layers. It reminded me of
the ‘Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?’ theme music in the way that it builds the
tension subtly, layer by layer, until the tension is ready to burst by the time
all hell breaks loose. However it’s subtle: you’re not beaten over the head
with tears this week. It’s quite beautiful too, sparkling the way the score for
a diamond planet should.
Previous ‘Lux’ next ‘Lucky Day’
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