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New York Times
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Blast from the Past Delights Delights ‘Doctor Who' Fans
This article contains spoilers for the 'Doctor Who' episode 'The Well.' The latest episode of 'Doctor Who' conjures a feeling of dread that has been missing from the show recently. Called 'The Well' and written by the showrunner Russell T Davies, along with Sharma Angel-Walfall, it is gripping and eerie, featuring a monster even the Doctor struggles to understand — despite the fact that he has faced it before. Set half a million years in the future on an inhospitable planet called 6-7-6-7, 'The Well' sees the Doctor join a squadron of soldiers investigating a mining operation that has lost contact with base. The operation's only survivor is a cook, Aliss (Rose Ayling-Ellis). But it's strange: People keep thinking they see something move behind her, though clearly nothing is there. The thing behind Aliss has no face, no physical form, not even a name. It's more the idea of a monster — and only once before has such an unseen villain featured on 'Doctor Who.' At the episode's climax, the reveal comes that some 400,000 years earlier, Planet 6-7-6-7 was called Midnight. That name alone will be enough to delight 'Doctor Who' fans. 'Midnight' is a 2008 episode, created by Davies and starring David Tennant. Seventeen years later, fans still regard it as one of the show's best — and most frightening — episodes. But just what makes 'Midnight' so terrifying? Here's everything you need to know. What happened in 'Midnight?' In 'Midnight,' the Doctor heads out on a bus tour across the deadly but beautiful diamond-covered planet of the same name, where intense radiation means nothing can survive. But then a loud noise bangs on the outside of the vehicle, sending the ragtag group of tourists on board into a panic. An unseen entity seems to enter the bus, where it possesses a passenger, Sky (Lesley Sharp), and makes her repeat the words of the other travelers. Learning as it repeats, the thing inside Sky soon begins to speak in unison with the people it is mimicking, terrifying the other passengers. They want Sky thrown off the bus so that the radiation outside will vaporize her, but then the Doctor seems to come under the control of the same strange force. It is only when Sky has convinced the tour group that they should dispose of the Doctor instead of her that the tour group's leader (Rakie Ayola) realizes that Sky has stolen the Doctor's voice and that she is controlling him. The tour leader sacrifices herself by dragging Sky outside, where they both die. But whatever has possessed her endured the radiation on Midnight before — so it is probably still at large. What is the monster from 'Midnight?' Fans have been speculating about the monster from 'Midnight' for years on Reddit and other message boards, where it became known as 'the Midnight Entity.' Very little is known about it. In fact, the only proof we have that the monster exists at all comes from a 'Doctor Who' spinoff web series called 'Captain Jack's Monster Files,' which ran from 2008 to 2010. In that series, the monster is described by Captain Jack, a character played by John Barrowman, as a creature with a physical form 'that can eat its way into the brain and take over the speech of its host.' It seems to have learned a lesson from 'Midnight.' The monster in 'The Well' no longer regurgitates words, but stands directly behind the person it has latched onto, so that others can feel its presence but only rarely catch a glimpse. It whispers in the ears of those it possesses, causing them to violently turn on each other, just as they did on 'Midnight.' Why do fans love 'Midnight' so much? 'Doctor Who' fans can get bogged down in complex lore — but the appeal of 'Midnight' is its simplicity. The episode was created to inexpensively fill a gap in the 2008 season with a story largely set in one place — a device that TV executives call 'a bottle episode.' Davies has said that he struggled with the script. 'If you're not devoted, hooked, and scared, and passionate, it just reads like a bunch of boring people stuck in a box,' he explained in his book 'The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter.' Davies has said that he wrote the script for 'Midnight' in just three days, yet its elevation of a seemingly basic conceit — a monster that nobody can see — makes it electrifying. It's also an acting master class. Sharp displays remarkable dexterity as Sky, and when she speaks in unison with the other cast members, it is fast-paced and technically perfect. But it is Tennant's performance — one of his best — that really made the episode so beloved. The Doctor is a known smart aleck, though here he is on the back foot. His lack of control and fear of the monster make the episode and the monster utterly horrifying. 'Midnight' ends as an unsolved mystery, whereas 'Doctor Who' episodes usually tie everything up in a bow at the 45-minute mark. The monster, we must presume, is still out there. 'The Well' ends like this, too, when it seems that there is something lurking over a soldier's shoulder. The final shot of her petrified colleague's face, seeing but not knowing what she's seeing, leaves open the possibility that this sinister villain will return again.
Newsweek
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Newsweek
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.
