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"THE WELL – A FAITHFUL TRANSLATION THAT STRUGGLES TO CLIMB OUT OF THE DARK"

Gareth L. Powell’s The Well is a Target novelisation of Sharma Angel-Walfall and Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who episode from Season 2, and it brings with it the daunting task of translating a high-tension, highly visual base-under-siege story into prose. While it largely succeeds in deepening character perspective and capturing the desolation of the setting, its effectiveness is hampered by the limitations of the format and a few questionable pacing choices.

FROM FILE TO FICTION

One of the novel’s cleverest structural additions is the inclusion of trooper personnel files between chapters. These short interludes offer assessments and biographical snippets of the supporting cast—those sent to the inhospitable remains of Midnight to infiltrate an abandoned research base. In a story where many of these characters die before we’ve had a chance to know them properly, these little dossiers are a welcome flourish. They lend texture to an otherwise thinly-sketched group and add a faint trace of poignancy to the story’s attrition rate.

We also spend more time inside Shaya Costallion’s head. Her rigid leadership, tactical decision-making, and subtle insecurities are explored in more detail, allowing for a clearer sense of her motivations and internal conflicts—though she still doesn’t entirely emerge as a rounded character. The Doctor’s internal monologue is similarly expanded, particularly his emotional reaction to being back on Midnight and his fears about the entity that dwells there.

MONSTER MEMORIES AND META REFLECTIONS

There’s a brief interlude that revisits the Midnight episode, with Ten and Donna, serving as a primer for those unfamiliar with the creature’s original appearance. It’s a helpful if slightly redundant inclusion—seasoned fans will likely skim it, but it allows newcomers to grasp the gravity of the threat.

More intriguing is the way the entity itself is given a voice—or at least a perspective. Powell dips into its point of view at key moments, capturing its alien hunger and chilling fascination with humanity. However, some of its logic seems subtly altered. In the TV episode, the horror lay in the simple visual of something walking behind Aliss. Here, the rules are more complicated—reframed around positioning and line of sight—which makes the threat less immediate and arguably harder to visualise.

STRAIGHT TALKING AND STALLED TENSION

Powell’s prose is clean and direct, but it occasionally veers into dryness. Attempts to enrich the narrative with tangents—like the Doctor musing on why so many aliens have humanoid forms—are intellectually interesting but ill-placed. These interruptions often arrive mid-crisis, undercutting the urgency of scenes that should be accelerating.

The biggest hurdle is that The Well was always a visual and aural story. The horrifying creep of the Midnight entity, the tension in its stalking silence, and the slow-building paranoia of the group under siege—all were conveyed on TV through performance, direction, and sound. In prose, these elements lose potency. The moments where characters begin to repeat questions and react with rising dread, which felt authentically chaotic on screen, read here as circular and exhausting. The fear becomes abstract, not visceral.

And while the book captures the setting—the rocky ruins of Midnight, the deep pit of the Well, the horror-laced atmosphere of the base—it doesn’t quite replicate the episode’s sharp pacing. Instead, the novel tends to plateau emotionally during extended action sequences, where the impact of the deaths and rising paranoia dulls with repetition.

THE DOCTOR RETURNS TO MIDNIGHT

Fifteen is well-rendered throughout, his dialogue intact and his emotional core perceptively expanded. His familiarity with the monster and his internal conflict over facing it again are handled with care. The novel does an admirable job of giving us a more rounded picture of his headspace, and of clarifying his decisions during the mission.

Yet the entity—so powerfully terrifying in the original—is diminished slightly in prose. Its ambiguous form and elusive logic worked on screen because they were unseen and unexplained. But describing it, even abstractly, chips away at its aura. The mystery thins.

📝THE BOTTOM LINE:

The Well is a competent and sometimes insightful adaptation that sticks closely to the structure of its TV counterpart while adding some much-needed depth to its supporting characters. The personnel files are a great touch, and the Doctor’s psychological exploration is welcome. But the novelisation struggles to translate the sheer intensity and immediacy of the original into prose. Where the original episode excelled through performance and sound design, the novelisation occasionally stalls in exposition and circular dialogue. Gareth L. Powell does his best with challenging material, but this one doesn’t quite hit the terrifying highs of its source.