Review by Tim Robins
Far in the future, on a tough, brutal planet, a devastated mining colony has only one survivor. To discover the truth, the Doctor and Belinda must face absolute terror.
SPOILERS AHEAD
The Season Two (2025 episode) “The Well” felt like the most Doctor Who the series has been since the series returned in 2023. That was a mixed blessing.
The Doctor and Belinda are swept up in a mission to explore a mining operation on a planet. Inside, they find that the only person to survive is Aliss Fenly, a young, deaf woman sitting alone. Everyone else has killed each other. The Doctor must find out what’s going on, before he, and everyone with him, suffers the same fate.
Showrunner Russell T Davies and Sharma Angel-Walfall are credited as co-writers and “The Well” is a sequel, of sorts, to “Midnight”, which was written by Davies for David Tennant’s fourth season. I was left wondering who originated “The Well”. It felt like a story that had been retrofitted into Doctor Who continuity.
The premise – a rescue mission to a mining operation – didn’t necessitate the return of an old, unnamed “monster”. Apparently, the story was originally supposed to be about Nigerian spirit creatures. However, the returning, invisible menace seems to have added excitement for fans with long memories. There’s a view that as ratings fall, those who remain become more appreciative, because you are drawing from a more dedicated audience.
There was plenty to appreciate, too. The Doctor and Belinda became rapidly part of the rescue mission and got to visit an actual quarry! There was some business about the Doctor’s psychic paper which only plastered over some of the cracks caused by his behaviour. I winced when he called an officer “Babes”. I wonder if that scene would have been written the same way were the officer a woman? Anyway, the Doctor’s fresh mouth created enough distrust for the-second-in-command, played by Christopher Chung, to stage a mutiny. Given The Doctor’s and Belinda’s half-hearted attempts to stay disguised, I really don’t blame him.
A lot of the scenes were rather generic stuff, familiar from Aliens (1986) but toned down a bit for the kiddies. “The Well” has been described as a “base under siege” story. In this instance, as in Aliens, it’s the rescuers besieging bases.
I found myself comparing “The Well” to the first episode of “Earthshock” (1982), in which a force of armed geologists came to blows with destructive robots. Doctor Who doesn’t do battle hardened troops particularly well, and it certainly can’t get away with sexual banter and hard core swearing. It was no surprise, then, that Caoilfhionn Dunne played a much more nuanced, and therefore more interesting, character, as Commander Shaya Costallion.
At the heart of the show and the base itself was a terrific performance by Rose Ayling-Ellis as Aliss Fenly, the sole survivor on the base. Communications between Fenley and her rescuers had to circumnavigate the fact the character was deaf. As it turned out, in this enlightened future, this was dealt with shield-like communication palettes. Only Belinda was put to shame by not having taken a compulsory course in sign language.
Ayling-Ellis thoroughly convinced me of the horror of Fenley’s situation – watching colleagues turn against each other, her best friend eventually trying to kill her and the horrible feeling that there’s an invisible “something” behind you. However, in retrospect, victimising a young woman to deliver the thrills seemed a bit of a cheap shot.
I know some fans think that “The Well” was a fitting sequel to “Midnight”, but, for me, this just raised more questions about the current relaunch’s relationship to the 2000 stories.
It was as if one, or both, of the two writers had gone back and rewatched not only “Midnight”, but the following episodes, too, including “Turn Left” and the “The Stolen Earth”. I certainly did.
There was a lot of “there’s an invisible something behind your back” dialogue. The idea of a party glimpsed but otherwise invisible creature is chilling, but it is an idea drawing more from “Turn Left” than “Midnight”. In the former story, a horrid, mostly invisible beetle was clinging to Donna Noble’s back and was only partly glimpsed by the people she met. The creature in “Midnight” was only partly glimpsed, but was more about mimicking others and manipulating their thoughts as it also does in “The Well”.
Talking about similarities with “Turn Left”, I was surprised during my rewatch to find that Davies had used the same “you’re so special and important that reality wraps itself around you” schtick with Donna, and he resurrected the idea for Ruby in last year’s Season One. “The Well” also echoed the scene in the 2000’s Season Four, in which the Doctor and Donna Noble opened the TARDIS door to find the Earth had vanished.
I think Davies has been deliberately reworking his “greatest hits” without acknowledging this. Although he did admit that he thought no one would recall the similarities between “Rogue” and “The Doctor Dances”. For the record, I don’t believe that.
The trouble is Davies’s reuse of past stories and dialogue give the impression that he is drawing from an emptying well. I don’t believe that, either. There’s been a lot of dazzling creativity in Seasons One and Two. Enough to leave me eagerly anticipating the following stories.
Tim Robins
Doctor Who in all its many iterations is available on BBC iPlayer in the UK. The Robot Revolution and other recent stories stream on Disney+ internationally
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A freelance journalist and Doctor Who fanzine editor since 1978, Tim Robins has written on comics, films, books and TV programmes for a wide range of publications including Starburst, Interzone, Primetime and TV Guide.
His brief flirtation with comics includes ghost inking a 2000AD strip and co-writing a Doctor Who strip with Mike Collins. Since 1990 he worked at the University of Glamorgan where he was a Senior Lecturer in Cultural and Media Studies and the social sciences. Academically, he has published on the animation industry in Wales and approaches to social memory. He claims to be a card carrying member of the Politically Correct, a secret cadre bent on ruling the entire world and all human thought.
Categories: Doctor Who, Features, Other Worlds, Reviews, Television
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