Doctor Who The Well Review – Do You See What’s Behind You?

It’s been a trying time in this new Doctor Who season. The first episode of the new season felt very flat, and the second one wasted a lot of potential with its “animated villain.” What I will say about “The Well” is that this was definitely the best episode of the season so far. However, as my Doctor Who The Well Review will explain, that doesn’t mean it was as good as it could’ve been, especially when the series once again decided not to explain itself as well as it should’ve…and once again, pardon the pun, dipped back into Davies’ “well” once too many.

Immediately following the events of “Lux,” The Doctor and Belinda suddenly find themselves shooting into the future…500,000 years into the future! That’s quite a jump! They accidentally find themselves on a dropship with some soldiers who seek to find out what happened on a mining colony that “went silent.” Naturally, we Whovians know EXACTLY the episode we’re about to get because of that setup…but there were some fun twists along the way that made it special and unique…for the most part.

The first twist is pictured above. We meet a young woman named Aliss, who is the only survivor of the massacre that we find out happened on the mining site. She’s deaf and even admits to having to kill her best friend because she was going to “kill her first” and had to defend herself. So, you might’ve thought, there’s something the people hear that drives them to madness and to kill one another…and you’re partially right.

The second twist comes when Belinda and the others “see something” behind Aliss, but can’t describe what it is. It makes the soldiers paranoid, and soon, after stepping into the “midnight position” directly behind Aliss…they start to die. The panic scene was very well directed visually, for the most part, as the panic between the “sure of himself” soldier and the others who slowly get picked off because of his stupidity was very tense. All of which led to the true leader, Shaya, pulling off a “cold equations” move and killing him herself via the monster so that the others could have at least a chance to figure things out.

…and that’s where the final shoe dropped, as The Doctor DID figure things out, including that “Planet 6-7-6-7” used to be called…Midnight. Yes, another Russell T. Davies episode gets called back into the limelight, as the “Midnight Entity” that he couldn’t beat during the Tennant era was back and causing havoc once again.

And sadly, this is where things went off the rails a bit. You’d expect there to be a lot of drama to try and figure out how to get rid of this “thing” that even The Doctor couldn’t defeat last time. If you didn’t know, “Midnight” ended with this thing continually possessing people in a tour bus The Doctor was on until one of the people chucked themselves outside with this “thing” possessing them to ensure it didn’t harm anything else. Even he was rattled by all that happened before his eyes.

Yet, here, after a teary-eyed “witnessing” of this thing, he “suddenly realizes” what to do and creates an oddly worded scenario where the thing would “be behind itself” and thus attack itself…somehow. On the plus side, the episode didn’t end moments after that, which I was grateful for, as that would’ve been too quick an end for things. On the negative side, we got another cop-out ending for the villain twice over, as The Doctor, Belinda, Shaya, and one other were trying to escape when “the thing came back” and was suddenly behind Belinda. We knew that she and The Doctor would get out alive, and so Shaya stepped up to “almost kill Belinda,” get possessed by the thing, and then sacrifice herself so that no one else would die.

That second “decision period” was incredibly rushed, with Belinda barely getting a moment to feel the “terror” of the thing being behind her until she was “saved” by being shot, which honestly didn’t even make much sense in the long run. With the “sacrifice” made, the remaining three were able to get out alive. Belinda was healed, the two left, and everyone was safe…

…except they weren’t, because “it followed” the other soldier back to their ship, and the terror would continue.

With so much going right and wrong with this episode at times, it’s hard for me to parse everything out in my Doctor Who The Well Review, but I’ll do my best. While the terror itself was great, the “Midnight Entity” faltered in a few key ways. First, the way it killed the soldiers was way too basic. One of them literally looked like they were just tossed into the air and somehow died from that. Second, it’s never explained HOW the entity went from being shoved into space in the Tennant episode to being found in “a well” 500,000 years later, only to have entirely different powers and ways of toying with humans.

Finally, how did it go from Shaya to the other soldier when that soldier was saving Belinda at the time? If anything, it should’ve gone to The Doctor, who witnessed Shayna diving into the well to save everyone else. The fact that it SOMEHOW got to the ship was scary in a certain way…but it made the sacrifice worthless, which made the ending feel truly hollow.

It also didn’t help that the reason the four remaining people in the station were only caught was that “The Doctor wanted to see it” for himself. That literally got a bunch of people killed. Oh, and while it’s a smaller negative, it was very odd to hear The Doctor say that it was “impossible” for life to live on this planet, when he knows from hard experience that “life always finds a way.”

As for Belinda, she really keeps getting the shaft in the “character development” department. She has these “wild swings” of character that make her seem like nothing more than a cardboard cutout. Case in point, she goes from talking about her parents on Earth to asking, “Do we get new clothes?” with a smile on her face before stepping out into the unknown. Then, for much of the episode, she’s more focused on how the others “have never heard of Earth or humans,” including RIGHT AFTER she got nearly killed! And, once again, why doesn’t The Doctor just go to May 23rd and see what happens to Earth?

Finally, and I’ve seen many comments on this particular thread, too, the fact that Mrs. Flood keeps showing up “Susan Twist-style” is both annoying and contradictory. This implies that she’s not only immortal, but that she got off Earth somehow, yet she was okay with staying on Earth when Suketh wiped everything out, and was even surprised when The Doctor saved them all? Reveal who she is or move on!

As I wrap up my Doctor Who The Well Review, I do want to reiterate that this was the best episode of the season so far. When the tension was there, it was palpable, and I was very curious, up to a point, about where things would end. Yet, the episode stumbled across the finish line, and we’re no closer to understanding the “grand scheme” of things to come.