Long after a shuttle got stranded on a planet nobody could name, a squad of soldiers lands on a dead mining colony there and finds one survivor who insists she’s alone. She isn’t. There’s something standing directly behind her, always, in the one place nobody can look without getting close enough to die. “The Well” is a direct sequel to Midnight, which is the best thing this programme has ever made, and the enormous surprise is that it comes close.
I really enjoyed this. It’s the best episode of the Gatwa era and one of the strongest things the show has done since the revival. It’s also the episode that best justifies this era existing. Two series of enormous budgets and cartoon gods, and the standout is a horror story in a dark corridor built on one rule and two good performances.
The rule is superb
A sequel to Midnight is a terrible idea on paper, because the original works by refusing to explain anything. What this does instead is take the one thing we know, that the entity attaches itself to a person, and build an entirely new rule from it. The creature stands right behind Aliss at all times. Looking at her from the front is safe, but looking from behind means you’re looking at it, and it takes you. That single constraint governs the whole episode, so every scene becomes a problem of angles, of where people are standing and who can safely approach from where.
It’s also brilliantly cheap, in the way the best horror usually is. The monster is a space behind a woman, so there’s nothing to render and nothing that can look silly, and the tension comes entirely from where people stand and where they look. The colony is all corridors, work lights and a lot of dark, and it turns out the show is still at its best in a corridor with a torch. The soldiers’ scanners report one person in the room when there are obviously two things present, which tells me whatever is behind her doesn’t count as alive. Nobody explains what that means, and it gets worse the longer I think about it.
Aliss, and a properly frightening situation
Rose Ayling-Ellis is extraordinary as Aliss. She’s deaf, and the story uses that as a practical fact with practical consequences: she can’t hear what’s behind her, she reads faces, and she notices people backing away before she notices why. Nobody makes a speech about it. The scene where the soldiers work out the rule and start retreating from her, and she can see them go and doesn’t understand, is genuinely upsetting. She’s been alone for a long time and is desperate for company, and Ayling-Ellis plays the loneliness first and the fear second, which is the right order.
The soldiers are drawn quickly and killed without ceremony. There’s no plot armour here: the episode sets a rule, and then people break it and die, one after another, exactly as the rule says they will. After a run of episodes where consequences kept being waived, a story that kills people according to its own logic is enormously welcome. Nothing about this hour is waiting for a finale to explain it, either. After two years of mystery boxes, the relief of watching something that simply happens is considerable.
The Doctor is frightened, and says so
This is Gatwa’s best work in the run. The Doctor recognises where he is well before he admits it, and the moment he says the planet’s name out loud and can’t finish the sentence is continuity used for character instead of fan service. He’s scared in a way this Doctor hasn’t been. He tells Belinda he’s met this thing before, that he never found out what it was, and that last time it got someone and he couldn’t stop it. That’s an admission of an old failure, and it gives the episode a weight that has nothing to do with the plot.
The choice to have him lose again is the bravest thing in it. The creature isn’t beaten or understood, and the Doctor leaves with the thing still out there. The sequel also declines to explain the creature, which is the most important decision in the episode. It could easily have filled in an origin, a name or a motive, and it takes real restraint to give none of them. A monster that stays unexplained after two encounters is far worse than one with a backstory, and it’s the opposite of this era’s habit of sorting everything into a pantheon with a grievance.
Rating: 4/5. Really enjoyed this. It’s tense, cleanly built and genuinely frightening, with a monster made out of geometry instead of money and an outstanding guest performance from Rose Ayling-Ellis. It follows the best episode this show has ever made and doesn’t embarrass itself, which is about the highest compliment available. Only the slightly rushed final act keeps it from going higher.