TV Review: ‘Doctor Who’ Episode “The Well” Pays Off for Longtime Fans of the Series

The reason I love Doctor Who as much as I do is because there’s so much of it. The show has lasted 41 seasons across six decades. According to Google AI, “The Well” is the 887th episode of the series overall, if you count the classic series and the modern series as one continuous whole. As one of the crazy people who has actually taken the time to watch all 887 episodes, I can tell you that it’s a lot of work, and it’s a lot to try and remember. But when you’ve done the work to watch all these episodes and learn all these stories, there are really satisfying pay-offs when, one day, a new episode comes out that references an old episode. Sure, they do their best to write every story for the sake of the uninitiated, but those of us with extensive knowledge of the series get little gifts when those references to past episodes show up. And “The Well” gave us one of the most satisfying call-backs to a past episode that I’ve seen in a long time.

Unfortunately, that’s all I’m willing to say before I drop the spoiler warning. So beware of spoilers from here on out.  

“The Well” turned out to be a surprise sequel to a 2008 10th Doctor episode called “Midnight.” For those of you who don’t remember, “Midnight” is when the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) goes for a train ride across a diamond planet called Midnight that lives under a sun that emits radiation so strong that no living creature could live on it. At least, that’s what the Doctor thought, until a mysterious force starts taking over the bodies of the train passengers one by one. “Midnight” is one of my favorites ever written by Russell T. Davies, and to see a sequel to it was really exciting.

In “The Well,” The 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and his companion Belinda (Varada Sethu) land on a planet 500,000 years in the future that turns out to be the planet Midnight once its surface has been stripped and people start mining the core of the planet. Something came out of the well and started killing people, and The Doctor and Belinda find themselves joining the search team that shows up afterwards to figure out what happened. It turns out that there was a strange creature that attaches itself to people, so that everyone sees something on their back that they can’t quite make out, and if you stand directly behind the infected person, the creature will kill you. If you kill the infected person, however, the creature goes behind your back, and the process starts all over again.

According to Wikipedia, the original script for this story revolved around Nigerian spirits known as Orishas, but it was turned into a sequel to “Midnight” instead out of concerns about cultural sensitivity. Frankly, I think it was a better option to not use the Orishas and instead give it some of that mystery of “Midnight.” In many ways, the tone and style of this episode mirrors the darkness of “Midnight,” and demonstrates the range of styles this show can pull off when you compare it to the more lighthearted predecessor episode, “Lux.”

One of the dangers of making a sequel to “Midnight” is that a big part of what makes “Midnight” so scary is that the Doctor never fully comes to understand the creature he’s up against. Revealing too much about the creature in the sequel would potentially ruin that mysteriousness of “Midnight.” But, instead, “The Well” maintains the sense of mystery, with no further explanation coming about the nature of this creature. We see that the creature has evolved to find new games to play with people’s lives, but we don’t get to see it or understand it better. It’s still shrouded in ambiguity.

In terms of the overarching story of this season, we have the added thread to the mystery that nobody in the future has ever heard of the planet Earth or the human race. This is at odds with previous episodes which have seen the human race existing until the end of the universe. So this means that something has happened which has caused the human race’s flight into the stars to be erased from time, leaving a lot of questions for the upcoming season finale.

I also had to appreciate the show’s continuing dedication to inclusivity, as the only survivor of the creature is a deaf woman named Aliss Fenly (played by deaf actress Rose Ayling-Ellis). There are vague implications that her deafness helped her survive, but in traditional Doctor Who fashion, it seems that, for the most part, a disabled person is being featured just for the sake of normalizing it. It had little to do with advancing the plot.

In another thread that’s been running through both of Ncuti Gatwa’s seasons, Mrs. Flood, shows up at the end. She seems to be jumping around in time following the Doctor and Belinda, and all the clues seem to hint towards her being a Time Lord. She knows what a TARDIS and the Doctor’s other technology are and what they’re used for, and she claims to know that the Doctor is headed for his doom. I feel like, at this point, it’s pretty obvious she’s a Time Lord, and I’d guess she’s either the Doctor’s main nemesis, The Master/Mistress, or a more obscure villain from the ‘80s called The Rani. I really hope it’s The Rani because that would be more exciting.

Overall, “The Well” is a testament to the longevity and range of this series, and it adds to what has been an excellent season thus far. If this ends up being the last season of Doctor Who for a while, as seems likely, at least the show is going out with one of its best seasons in a while. Not all the fans see it that way right now, but it will be remembered fondly as time goes by.

Rating: 94/100

Doctor Who is streaming now on Disney Plus.

Featured photo courtesy of James Pardon/BBC Studios/Disney/Bad Wolf