Your Own. Personal. Sutekh.
Now that’s more like it. The Well immediately feels more authentically Doctor Who than whatever Doctor Who has been trying to be for the past couple of episodes. After the T K Maxx clearance rack of plot points of The Robot Revolution and the big swing whiffer that was Lux, The Well takes us not only back to basics but back to somewhere we’ve boldly gone before.
When the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda (Varada Sethu) fail in their latest attempt to follow their V[ortex] Indicator line to May 24th 2025, the TARDIS lands instead on a dropship orbiting Planet 6-7-6-7 some four hundred thousand years in the future, relatively speaking. The drop ship belongs to a troop of soldiers who were investigating the sudden cessation of communications from a mercury mining operation which appears to have dived too greedily and too deep. Arriving at the installation they find signs of struggle and death and a sole survivor, Aliss Fenly. But Aliss isn’t quite alone, and The Doctor finds himself confronting an old adversary.
Co-written by Sharma Angel-Walfall and Russell T Davies, The Well opens with a straight-up Aliens homage, right down to borrowing the “nuke the site from orbit line” but it doesn’t detract from the efficient set-up of a classic base under siege set-up. Of course, this time the siege is coming from inside the house, thanks to a powerhouse performance by Rose Ayling-Ellis as ersatz final girl Aliss.
I’m not sure Doctor Who has ever deployed jump scares before The Well and if it has done, they haven’t been done as effectively as they are here, not even the last time Davies toyed with a hidden presence on a character’s back in Turn Left. This is Doctor Who as horror, it’s the hidden harbinger of Death clinging not the the TARDIS but to an individual, like a single serving Sutekh, and it’s not messing around in ramping up the scares.
There are shades of Forbidden Planet and The Babadook in the tense stand-off between the soldiers and whatever is lurking just out of sight behind Aliss and while the tension and visuals are slick and effective, the blocking gets a little confused and arbitrary about what counts as being “behind” the possessed person. Davies – I assume it’s him, it certainly feels like him writing – can’t quite resist one of his faux-clever bits of wordplay in the reveal as the Doctor proclaims if the situation is like a clock, you die at Midnight. Slow clap. A+. Very clever. Thing is it only works if you arbitrarily decide you’re standing at six o’clock (in the evening). Judging by the episodes thus far this season, I’m more inclined to expect death at 7:50, diametrically opposite the time Davies settles most of his plot points: ten to two? You’ll do.
Before the end, we get a couple more classic horror homages thrown into the mix as The Well dips into John Carpenter’s The Thing before tying things up with a neat Alien3 nod. The supporting cast are a decent bunch, although it’s pretty easy to tag every member of the troop with their eventual fate. The performances are pretty good across the board, with Caoilfhionn Dunne and Bethany Antonia particularly impressing and Christopher Chung hamming it up a little too much.
There’s an efficiency to the storytelling here and if it has a particular flaw, it’s the choice to leave a dangling tease that the Midnight entity – surely Who’s creepiest recurring monster now – may not have perished on the planet after all. Then again, that might just be an unexpected thoroughness in the Aliens homage.
There are hardly any detours or dead ends in this lean, kinetic episode and even the obligatory contributions to the ongoing arc are neatly dropped in without labouring the point. It’s clear that in the current timeline Earth is gone and the future history of the human race along with it – profound stakes that are somewhat muddled by an apparently contemporary Earth-bound adventure involving Ruby Sunday next week – and for the first time there’s a glimmer of credibility to the optimistic reading that the lack of any renewal announcements might be a sincere attempt to raise the stakes for the season’s May Bank Holiday weekend finale. But for once, let’s not fret about the future, let’s just sit back and bask in a truly great episode – the first in quite some time. It’s not as clever or experimental as Midnight, but it’s a brilliant slice of sci-fi horror in its own right. It was fun. It was scary. It was Doctor Who firing on all cylinders.
