Being a Doctor Who fan is incredibly rewarding, but sometimes, longtime Whovians can accidentally bury themselves under the weight of their own theories and expectations. Just ask this Pop Break reviewer!
Of course, every now and then, our patience is rewarded. For instance, the 60th anniversary specials marked Wilfred Mott’s (Bernard Cribbins) on-screen return (and real life farewell). It was a huge gift to earn one last moment with a character who endeared himself to fans as the Tenth Doctor’s strongest tether to humanity. This week we are once again rewarded for our patience, but the nod is more likely to chill our blood than warm our hearts.
From the jump, it’s clear that the latest Season 2 episode of Doctor Who’s Disney era, ‘The Well,’ is excited to show its hand. After another fun, snappy costume change from last week’s 1950s fits, The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa, Sex Education) and Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu, Andor) step out of the TARDIS and onto a standard sci-fi space marine drop ship. Seconds later, they plummet toward the planet’s surface. Despite the fact that they’ve swapped Doctor Who’s signature orange space suits for sleek, black armor, it only takes one look at the creepy abandoned space colony to evoke ‘The Satan Pit’ or ‘The Waters of Mars.’
Inside the mining facility, Team TARDIS essentially works their way through a video game level as they discover a series of corpses alternately beaten and shot to death. In addition to having killed one another, the team members seem to have broken all of the mirrors in the facility. It’s a pretty grim scene for Doctor Who, but the suspense runs deeper than evoking space horror vibes. Not only are these space marine companions cold and businesslike, but they seem pretty eager to use their weapons and pretty disinterested in finding any survivors. Squadron Leader Shaya Costallion (Caoilfhionn Dunne, Industry) is regimented, but open to new information. Guy-most-likely-to-mutiny, Cassio Palin-Paleen (Christopher Chung, Slow Horses), on the other hand, is not amused by The Doctor’s jovial nature or the fact that he has so quickly taken control of the operation.
If that weren’t bad enough, only one week after The Doctor won the trust of a grieving mother by citing the power of hope, members of this military squadron twice repeated the saying, “hope is irrelevant.” No, this doesn’t quite feel like the rosy picture of humanity 500,000 years in the future that The Doctor paints for Belinda (and that multiple iterations of The Doctor have championed over the years). In fact, it turns out that these marines don’t represent humanity at all. They’ve never heard of humans, the human race, or planet Earth. Uh oh. Audience members aren’t too shocked by this development since they already saw scattered Earth debris floating where the planet should have been back in the season premiere.
Ultimately, there is little time to fret about the status of Earth or humanity, because the team is too busy figuring out how to manage Aliss Fenly (Rose Ayling-Ellis, EastEnders), the lone survivor of the tragedy. While she evokes innocence through her desperation, fear, and desire to be reunited with her daughter, it’s also clear that Aliss is hiding something about the attack. We see her strength of spirit and character as she advocates for herself, a woman with a hearing impairment, in the face of a group of soldiers who do not know how to use British Sign Language, and require prompting to keep their voice translation screens active and visible. Aliss even meets the empathetic Belinda with a sense of surprise because nurses in this distant future are required to understand and use sign language.
Ultimately, Aliss admits that she is aware of some kind of creature that has been hiding “behind” her, always just out of view to others from every and any angle. Apparently it worked its way through the entire mining colony, changing hosts along the way.
Eventually, The Doctor asks enough questions to learn that the mining colony was acquiring minerals that formed below the planet’s surface after it collapsed hundreds of thousands of years ago; it was once a planet made of diamonds, called Midnight. At this point, longtime Whovians are transported back to one of the most suspenseful Doctor Who episodes of all time: ‘Midnight.’ Newer initiates are treated to a flashback shot of David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor, his face frozen in fear as he faces down the threat of an entity he doesn’t understand.
Ncuti Gatwa effectively captures The Doctor’s enduring trauma from this incident: one of the only times The Doctor wasn’t clever enough to save himself; one of the only times a human being rescued him.
Overall, ‘The Well’ is a fun sequel to ‘Midnight’ that delivers much deeper suspense and emotional nuance than the latest Russell T Davies run has generally put forward. Navigating Aliss’ motivations is particularly engaging; even as we support her self-advocacy, we know it would be unwise to trust her unconditionally – this sucks us into the paranoia that overcomes the soldiers. Additionally, Aliss’ delivery of the words, “don’t turn your back on me,” are particularly poignant when you consider the fact that turning the translator device away from Aliss cuts her out of the conversation, and more broadly, how often the needs of people with a disability are ignored. Doctor Who is always at its best when it is pulling this sort of emotional double duty.
While the episode is certainly a success and a standout from the show’s Disney era, it falls quite short of its predecessor. Part of the success of ‘Midnight’ came from its refusal to define rules and parameters for the unknown entity at the center of its story. While the entity seems to cause physical damage to a shuttle and one character believes he might have spotted a “shifting” figure or shadow, we can never be sure. Similarly, the creature in ‘Midnight’ is described as being “inside” of the minds of different characters, reading them and growing through the insights it absorbs from each host body. This is frightening, particularly when it culminates in David Tennant’s egotistical Doctor being dragged helplessly toward his doom by a group of paranoid tourists.
‘The Well’ makes the error of establishing clear rules and physicality for this entity. We get brief flashes of a form “behind” rather than “inside of” Aliss. Also, this iteration of the creature attacks with physical force on screen, sending space marines flying through the air like ragdolls whenever they stand directly behind Aliss. Alternately, all of the on-screen violence in ‘Midnight’ is perpetuated by human beings acting under the influence of their own paranoia. While ‘The Well’ does employ a clever visual gimmick of shooting the crowd from above with Aliss at the center of a circle to reinforce The Doctor’s clock comparison: “If it were a clock face, you die at midnight,” learning that our characters have so much control over their safety and positioning undercuts horror. Similarly, the revelation that all of the mirrors were destroyed to protect the entity from seeing its own reflection makes this mysterious force of nature seem small: The Doctor gets to win the sort of “clever” victory that we thought was impossible in the face of this formerly unstoppable foe.
This would be less of a problem if the characters in the episode followed their own rules. After proving she is a thoughtful and resourceful leader, after surviving a mutiny at the hands of itchy-trigger-finger Cassio (“and Cassio…he did his best,” one of the survivors will later remark), after sharing an entire backstory of sacrifice and survival, after freeing Belinda with a near-fatal laser trick shot to take on the burden of the entity, after deciding to sacrifice herself for the greater good – Shaya INSTANTLY turns her back on every single other survivor – putting them in the exact position they spent the last twenty minutes trying to avoid.
Oh, Shaya. Well, we can’t all be as clever as The Doctor.
Oh wait.
Apparently, not even The Doctor can be as clever as The Doctor, because he then proceeds to chase her down a hallway at the deadly “midnight” position. Just before Shaya drops herself into The Well, The Doctor stares at her directly from behind…again from the deadly “midnight” position. In any case, it’s not at all surprising when the episode’s final reveal lets us know that the entity escaped on the back of another space marine after all. It felt downright cruel for a show like Doctor Who to undercut Shaya’s whole sacrifice (and melodramatic hero monologue) with these obvious errors in judgment and a cold reminder that her sacrifice was meaningless.
Unfortunately, this episode also makes room for another Mrs. Flood (Anita Dobson, EastEnders) sighting, committing to the “recurring face” gimmick from last season. She seems to be advising and/or manipulating the space marines as she tracks down another instance of The Doctor’s “vindicator” device. Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait until the finale for an answer to this mystery when we already know that every clue is probably just a misdirect and we’ll ultimately just have to wait for whichever piece of lore they decide to dredge up as an answer.
Fortunately, despite these gripes, there is a lot of rich thematic potential to be excited about moving forward. Gatwa’s take on The Doctor continues to deliver across the board, from sassy to sensitive. Belinda, similarly, continues to match his energy, and she continues to be drawn closer to helping people on a cosmic level. Fifteen also echoes some of the core principles and ideologies that we always want to hear from our Doctors. For instance, just like the Tenth Doctor back in ‘Midnight,’ Fifteen reminds us this week that it is possible for someone (or something) to be both a killer and a victim.
In an episode where the space marines believe “hope is futile” and The Doctor argues that hope is essential, it would be fascinating to see the series embrace a more nuanced gray area. Hope is a beautiful ideal to work toward, but it doesn’t spare us from sacrifice or tragedy. Hopefully, The Doctor will get a chance to grapple with the complex dichotomy of his thirst for adventure and the sobering reality of how many sacrifices others have made along the way to keep him travelling through time and space. Belinda, a nurse, is the perfect companion for this sort of emotional journey. She has presumably witnessed both miracles and tragedies in the hospital; this week she even delivers bad news with an “I’m so sorry” worthy of Tennant’s Tenth Doctor. Let’s hope these dynamics hold precedence over Easter eggs as we move through the rest of the season.
Next week’s episode, ‘Lucky Day’ is giving some strong Buffy the Vampire Slayer vibes and marks the return of Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday. This reviewer always loves to watch The Doctor sweat when current and former companions get together to swap stories, so here’s hoping that we are on the precipice of another classic!
