Review: Doctor Who The Well is a Master of Tension that Lives Up to its Predecessor
Entertainment gossip and news from Newsweek's network of contributors
If there is one episode of Doctor Who I never wanted to see a sequel to, it's Midnight. That story about an unseeable, unknowable monster that completely and thoroughly beat the Doctor and terrified them more than anything they'd ever known – a story about how unrestrained, unquenchable fear can turn even the best of us into the worst people – is simply perfect. You can't top perfection, so don't even try. It's horror movie sequel syndrome, the Weeping Angels all over again; learning more about the monster kills everything that's special about it, so just don't bother.
And yet...I think The Well nails it.
We learn just the tiniest amount more about the monster, just about what it does, not about what it is, and that's the crucial difference. That's how you keep a monster terrifying. We now know that it kills anyone who tries to perceive it and has seemingly unlimited strength when doing so, yet we still don't know how or why, and that keeps it scary.
The Doctor talking to a woman sat on a box in the middle of a futuristic room.
The Doctor talking to a woman sat on a box in the middle of a futuristic room.
BBC
I applaud the visual work here. There is one shot where it shifts in the shadow that I could've done without, but aside from that, it is masterful VFX work where we see something move, just out of focus, just behind the characters, for barely two frames of screen-time. It puts us in that terrifying uncertain mindset of the characters, where they're not even sure they saw anything at all, and yet they can't shake the feeling that something is there.
The episode revels in this feeling, and it's glorious. I had seen rumours going around that this episode might be about the Midnight Entity, but I didn't know for sure and that feeling enhanced the experience for me as I tried to pick up on every clue I could to work out if this was what I thought it was or something different. In an amazing twist, that put me in the shoes of the Doctor, who spent the first half of the episode slowly putting the pieces together.
It barely needs to be said at this point in his run, but what an actor Ncuti Gatwa is. From the word go, you can see this glimmer of dread in his eyes, this sense that he desperately hopes he's wrong – that he's not about to re-encounter the one foe that truly terrified him. It takes just over half the runtime for the Doctor to realize he's on Midnight, and yet it flies by as I was thoroughly gripped by the creeping build to the creature's first kill.
Belinda entering a room in a futuristic suit, flanked by two soldiers pointing guns.
Belinda entering a room in a futuristic suit, flanked by two soldiers pointing guns.
BBC
The human dynamic isn't forgotten either. Such a huge part of what makes Midnight so brilliant is that we get to see what the fear of this unknowable entity does to the ordinary people who are trapped in a room with it. This isn't as big of a focus in The Well, we still get a great taste of it, as the disciplined military man who always follows The Rules™ slowly acts more and more irrationally as the fear warps his mind at the cost of many lives, including his own.
The other big thing that keeps the mystique of the monster is that The Doctor doesn't beat it this time, either. We get our triumphant moment where he finally gets one up on it, but he still can't win. The moment was set up perfectly, too. I'm sure I wasn't the only one to put "it broke all the mirrors" and "we're in a mercury mine" together, and yet it waits just long enough that you let it slip your mind until the moment the Doctor floods the room the mercury to force the creature to perceive its own reflection.
Yet that triumphant moment can't stand. Even though perceiving it has been instant death for anything we've seen up until this point, this entity somehow survives, and we're dragged right back into the tragedy, partly because the Doctor just can't stand not knowing what this thing is. I must once again complement Ncuti's performance, as you see on his face how deeply his encounter with the Midnight Entity scarred him before, and how it means he can't stop himself from trying to know what this thing is, as I'm sure many people watching do too.
The Doctor and Belinda crouching in front of a woman in the middle of a futuristic room.
The Doctor and Belinda crouching in front of a woman in the middle of a futuristic room.
BBC
Then, for the second time, the Doctor only survives an encounter with it because someone sacrifices themselves on his behalf. Then it caps things off in the perfect horror movie-esque way, teasing us with the idea that maybe we made the wrong assumption about who the entity latched onto, and maybe it did get away with the crew like it wanted. Like last time, I like not knowing, and I hope we never find out.
I am ecstatic that The Well is as great an episode as it is. Living up to what I believe to be the greatest Doctor Who episode of all time is no small task, but it captures all the things that made Midnight great and gives us hints of the entity's lore without giving us so much as to ruin the mystique.
Is it as good as Midnight? No, but it comes about as close as a sequel ever could, making for a fantastic duology of episodes, and that is an astounding achievement.
Now, Russell, that's it. You did one sequel and you got away with it. No more.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Newsweek
4 hours ago
- Newsweek
Escaped Zebra Captured, Airlifted After Week on the Loose
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A zebra named Ed has been captured and safely returned home in Rutherford County, Tennessee, after spending a little over a week on the run, according to a press release from the local sheriff's office. Law enforcement officers spotted Ed near a tree line off Interstate 24 in Christiana using a drone and subsequently arranged for his rescue. The zebra, owned by Taylor and Laura Ford, was then airlifted home. Why It Matters Ed's escape rapidly became a viral sensation, sparking debate online about the ethics of keeping exotic animals as pets. Zebras, however, are legal to own in Tennessee and no special permits are required to acquire one, The Tennessean reported. The animals can also be difficult to catch once they escape because of a "strong ducking reflex," according to the Environmental Literacy Council (ELC). Ed the zebra is seen being airlifted on June 8 in Rutherford County, Tennessee, after being on the run for a little over a week. Ed the zebra is seen being airlifted on June 8 in Rutherford County, Tennessee, after being on the run for a little over a week. Rutherford County Sheriff's Office via AP What To Know Ed broke free less than 24 hours after arriving from a Texas breeder at the Fords' home in Christiana, Newsweek previously reported. The zebra escaped on May 31, and was soon seen sprinting along highways and hiding in wooded regions south of Nashville, according to a Facebook post from the Rutherford County's Sheriff's Office. Numerous videos shared across social media showed close calls between motorists and Ed as he ran alongside the road. Doorbell cams also captured the zebra wandering through neighborhoods. Ed quickly became a local celebrity, with memes and artificial intelligence (AI)-generated images circulating throughout social media. Business owners and Murfreesboro residents actively took part in the phenomenon. Stuart Irby, a barber, told local News Channel 5, that "everybody's just getting a hoot out of it, here in Murfreesboro." As Ed remained elusive, Rutherford County Sheriff's deputies employed drones to monitor his whereabouts. Officials worked to minimize stress on the animal throughout the search process, the sheriff's office said. After many days of surveillance and multiple sightings in wooded and residential areas, Ed was finally located and carefully tranquilized with a veterinarian's help before being airlifted to safety. The sheriff's office repeatedly urged the public to avoid interfering with the search on social media. Celebrity Zebra Ed rescued safelyRutherford County Sheriff's Office is happy to report Tango 82 aviation crews located Zebra Ed and returned him to... What People Are Saying The Ford Family, Ed's owners, told CBS News: "Through viral posts, news coverage, and thousands of messages, he became known as Ed the Zebra. And now, he will be forever known as Ed—a symbol of joy, laughter, and unity." Local resident Kathy Dunn told local television station WSMV: "Everybody knows about the zebra, everywhere. I had a man this morning, one of the drivers, he's from out of state, and he saw it on the news." ELC said in a website about zebras: "...Zebras are more aggressive and dangerous than horses. They can bite and kick and are not typically suitable for domestication. Zebras are difficult to domesticate due to their aggressive nature, lack of a family structure, and a strong ducking reflex that prevents easy capture." What Happens Next? Authorities have returned Ed to his owners, and his health will be monitored by a veterinarian. Local officials, animal welfare advocates, and policymakers could face renewed scrutiny regarding laws that permit the private ownership of exotic animals like zebras in Tennessee.
Newsweek
5 hours ago
- Newsweek
Shock As Millennial Teacher Shares 'Artifacts' From Youth With 6th Graders
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. A history teacher in Alabama left her sixth-grade class astounded with a showcase of "artifacts" from her childhood. Malinda Nichols has taught history for 10 years and always strives to bring creative flair to the classroom, whether it's crafting parachutes like the ones the "Candy Bomber" used to deliver treats during the Berlin Airlift or tracing the journey to the 1969 Woodstock Festival. "My students don't just memorize 'dates and dead people,'" Nichols told Newsweek. "They step into the shoes of the people who lived and created history through hands-on simulations, civil discourse, examining multiple perspectives, asking hard questions, creative writing, and primary source analysis." Nichols is right to take this focus. A survey of just over 1,800 people by the American Historical Association found a little over three out of every four high school students polled felt history focused on memorizing names, dates and facts. Her aim is to make it "active, relevant and deeply human." That aim was what informed her creation of the "Museum of the Millennial" for a recent sixth grade social studies class. History teacher Malinda Nichols and her Museum of the Millennial. History teacher Malinda Nichols and her Museum of the Millennial. hipsterhistorywithmrsn /Instagram It was an idea that first sparked to life last summer, during a family vacation in Colmar, France. "We visited a toy museum with a perfectly preserved 1980s childhood bedroom on display," said Nichols. By creating an exhibit that revisited the technology and pop culture of her youth, Nichols saw an opportunity to get her students thinking about history and how "their parents live it and even they are stewards of their own historical legacy." As a teacher of modern U.S. history, she often found herself during lessons on topics like the Cold War and fall of the Berlin Wall telling classes "your parents lived through this, talk to them about it." The Museum of the Millennial felt like a natural extension of this but, in order to be effective, it would require the ideal primary sources; the parents. She emailed moms and dads pitching an idea for a "reverse show and tell" where they would come in and surprise the class by presenting on the personal cultural touchstones that shaped their young lives. "The response was incredible," Nichols said. "Parents supplied every artifact you see except the orange New Kids on the Block lunchbox, that one is mine." On the day of the museum's opening, Nichols had parents hide in the hallway, while she "dialed into" AOL Instant Messenger before opening the door to reveal her guest historians: the assembled crew of parents, many of whom dressed up in clothes of the era. School kids learned about Game Boys and playing POGs. School kids learned about Game Boys and playing POGs. hipsterhistorywithmrsn /Instagram Everything was done with a focus on helping students understand the major cultural and technological shifts that shaped their parents' generation. "We raised Tamagotchi pets and felt the thrill of seeing Home Alone in a packed theater. We watched the twin towers fall in real time. We saw the rise of Blockbuster, the birth of YouTube, and the shift from landlines to cellphones. We were the ones who said goodbye to analog and hello to the digital age," Nichols said. "That's pretty historic." The response among students was a mix of excitement and shock. "I passed out questions for them to ask that aligned with my state's history standards like, 'How did you find your way before GPS' and 'Would you consider yourself a latchkey kid?," Nichols said. "They couldn't fathom how long it took for us to do things they take for granted." Parents explained how to get Nintendo cartridges to work, the best method for rewinding a cassette tape, the lengths they had to go to find out how much a baseball card was worth and what texting on a PalmPilot was like. "I even did a small group instruction on how to play POGS!" Nichols said The next day kids were allowed to pick one item from the previous lesson to research further. "The most popular were Beanie Babies, Tamagotchis, and the Furby," she said. A regular presence on TikTok and Instagram with posts shared under the handle @hipsterhistorywithmrsn, Nichols' Museum of the Millennial ended up going viral on TikTok, with a video showcasing the day's activities racking up almost 800,000 views. While the extra attention is undoubtedly motivated in part by nostalgia, Nichols hopes her efforts show the possibilities when subjects like history are taught "with purpose, creativity, and emphasizes the connection of our shared humanity." Parents showed how flip phones worked, how to rewind a tape with a pencil and the inner workings of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Parents showed how flip phones worked, how to rewind a tape with a pencil and the inner workings of the Nintendo Entertainment System. hipsterhistorywithmrsn /Instagram The Museum of the Millennial gave students a chance to compare and contrast the world of yesterday with life as we know it now. It gave Nichols the chance to do the same. "The best part was growing up without hyper-connectivity and constant access to everything. Ask any teacher, and they'll tell you that the skills built through productive struggle have left the building. Why take the time to understand an issue when an influencer, AI, or Google can just tell you?," she said. "However, growing up as a millennial also meant pioneering the internet with no parental safety controls. AOL chat rooms were our Wild West." There have been improvements though. "The internet and social media have also created space for more voices in much-needed conversations that were often dismissed when millennials were growing up," she said. Right now Nichols is the one comparing then with now, but one day, those sixth graders will be the ones fielding questions from kids asking about what 2025 was like. They will have quite a story to tell.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Marcel Ophuls, maker of The Sorrow and the Pity, which examined French collaboration with the Nazis
Marcel Ophuls, who has died aged 97, was a German-born documentary-maker who fled his homeland in the 1930s and spent much of his career interrogating the various legacies of the Second World War; his international breakthrough, the landmark The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la Pitié, 1969), revealed the extent to which his adopted France had collaborated with the Nazis. The son of the German-Jewish director Max Ophuls – known for such elaborate melodramas as La Ronde (1950) – Marcel began his career in film drama but achieved greater traction with complex, rigorous, meticulously edited non-fiction work. In documentaries such as The Memory of Justice (1976) and Hôtel Terminus (1988), the filmmaker set multiple testimonies side by side, sometimes corroborating, often contradicting, always inviting the spectator to shake any passivity and judge for themselves. In The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls spent four and a half hours of screen time – and many more hours of shooting – staking out the city of Clermont-Ferrand 'to analyse four years of collective destiny'. Patiently hearing from residents of all walks of life, the film picked insistently away at the Gaullist myth of a country united against an occupier, instead revealing two Frances at odds with one another – one resisting, the other collaborating. In France, Sorrow was denounced by conservative politicians as 'a prosecutorial film' and initially rejected for both theatrical and television distribution. After much legal wrangling, it finally opened in 1971, earning an Oscar nomination the following year, but it did not air on French television until 1981; a station director said the film had 'destroyed myths the French people still needed'. Ophuls subsequently made films on Vietnam (The Harvest of My Lai, 1970) and the Irish Troubles (A Sense of Loss, 1972), though the latter was rejected by the BBC. His personal favourite, The Memory of Justice, revisited the Nuremberg trials in the context of more recent conflicts in Algeria and Vietnam, though the project was again beset by lengthy and expensive legal challenges; Ophuls filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter and spent a decade on the lecture circuit. He made a triumphant return, however, with the Oscar-winning Hôtel Terminus, on the life of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. As free-roaming as its subject, unearthing material both disturbing and absurd, the film ends in one of documentary cinema's most extraordinary sequences, as Ophuls witnesses a chance encounter between a woman who as a child had seen her father carted away by the Gestapo and an elderly neighbour who had turned a blind eye to the same events. Though Hôtel Terminus sparked violent arguments at Cannes, the critic Roger Ebert admired its tenacity, calling it 'the film of a man who continues the conversation after others would like to move on to more polite subjects'. Yet as a characteristically combative Ophuls countered in 2004: 'I'm not obsessed. I just happen to think that the Holocaust was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century. Think I'm wrong?' He was born Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt on November 1 1927, the son of Max Oppenheimer and his actress wife Hildegard Wall. The family fled Germany for France in 1933, taking French citizenship in 1938, whereupon Max dropped the umlaut from his stage name, Ophüls; after the occupation they fled anew to Los Angeles, where Max began an unhappy spell as a studio filmmaker and Marcel attended Hollywood High and Occidental College. Marcel Ophuls completed military service in Japan before studying at UC Berkeley, taking US citizenship in 1950. Upon graduation he moved to Paris, briefly studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, before dropping out and working as an assistant director (initially under the pseudonym Marcel Wall, to dodge nepotism accusations) on John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father's sweeping Lola Montès (1955). He made his directorial debut with a German television adaptation of John Mortimer's The Dock Brief (Das Pflichtmandat, 1958), before being tapped by François Truffaut to contribute to the portmanteau film Love at Twenty (L'amour à vingt ans, 1962). By now he was part of the New Wave set: Jeanne Moreau funded his detective comedy Banana Skin (Peau de Banane, 1963), but his fiction career came to a halt after the flop thriller Place Your Bets, Ladies (Faites vos jeux, mesdames, 1965). Ophuls moved into documentary, taking a job with the French broadcaster ORTF, where he railed against the prevailing state censorship; he was eventually fired in May 1968 after making a film deemed sympathetic to the student rioters, though by then he was well into post-production on The Sorrow and the Pity. After Hôtel Terminus, Ophuls suffered mixed fortunes. November Days (1990), on the subject of German reunification, played as part of the BBC's Inside Story strand, but The Troubles We've Seen (Veillées d'armes, 1994), on wartime journalism and the Bosnian conflict, failed to reach an audience, despite a César nomination in France. He worked more sparingly in the new millennium, completing Max par Marcel (2009), on his father's legacy, and the career overview Ain't Misbehavin' (Un voyageur, 2013), his final completed film; a later project on anti-Semitism and the Middle East, Des vérités désagréables (Unpleasant Truths), ran into financial and legal troubles and remained unfinished at the time of his death. During a visit to Israel in 2007, Ophuls attempted to define his life's work: 'I'm not a preacher, a judge or an adviser. I'm just a filmmaker trying now and then to make sense of crises... Life made me, unwillingly, an expert on 20th-century crises. I would've preferred to direct musicals.' He is survived by his wife Regine, née Ackermann, and three daughters. Marcel Ophuls, born November 1 1927, died May 24 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
