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TARDIS Guide

Review of The Well by ButterCashier

26 April 2025

This review contains spoilers!

A review of The Well, written from first impressions:

Well, well. Not exactly the best. To say the least I’d rather watch the first two again, I definitely enjoyed episode two more, for it was more fun and enjoyable. But this one, I feel much more strongly compelled to write about…

Now, I love Midnight. Fantastic episode, absolutely one of the best episodes ever - tense, frightening, sombre ending, claustrophobic, great dialogue (if a bit repetitive haha), overall, incredible, pretty much my favourite and most-watched episode of all. Naturally, therefore, I am a little more critical of this than usual, since I’ve spent years thinking about Midnight, about the mysterious entity, watching it carefully, reading the script, considering the metaphors and symbolism and ideas, how it creates effects, etc. This episode is deliberately playing into the greatness of that, featuring a little scene from it. Nice idea maybe but I didn’t like that, just showing the old episode, it’s kind of like they’re saying “hey, look, remember this old great episode? We’re doing that again!” A bit like that, just like the opening of The Star Beast. I don’t like that. It suggests they’re not so confident, sticking to where they are right now, they have to make a jump from over a decade ago, literally showing it, just to remind everyone. Maybe if one hasn’t watched Midnight for years it would be a lot more effective, but in my case of course, it was quite laughable, like a lot of it.

Great atmosphere for a while here, very much seeking inspiration from Aliens and a number of other DW stories (namely, The Impossible Planet with its equivalent big hole, more mysteriously arrived at and revealed there). Some nice music, although re-using the bit from Midnight (twice even?) was just as over-bearing and over the top as it was the first time. All quiet, subtle, then suddenly WHAM! Really loud crazy theme when everyone’s getting flung around. Reduces the fear, it kind of fits for Doctor Who but it takes away all the build-up. Same with the jump-scares. Every moment building up a sense of fear, relishing in anguish and torment, I love, but then every time there’s a big loud sound, it takes away completely. It’s (sort of) like a drop on a rollercoaster, like, there’s the big scary moment, now we can relax for a bit. Woah! Scary noise. Ok, now let’s calm down. Takes away the rising tension which Midnight handled a lot better over a longer sustained period. Since anyone can just walk out of this room that the creature-infected Aliss is in, it cannot hold such a sense of being trapped in a room, naturally.

This episode demands comparison to Midnight, it outright wants one to go back and watch that episode, it seems, based on showing it in the episode, directly referencing it all over the place. Why does the Doctor act so strange about it? All right, yes, it was a terrifying experience for him the first time, but inevitably in doing a sequel to Midnight, the power of both parts, here and there, are reduced. The compelling aura of Midnight, the name, the planet, the whole original story, is the mystery, much like the mystery of who the Doctor is - of course, showing more of the monster makes it less mysterious, in such a way as it would be very hard to do a sequel without lessening the impact of the original. This seems a lot like the writers wanted to do another go at it, having loved the first one (and since it wasn’t just written by RTD, I wonder which one had the idea), and then to show how massive a fan they are, they show a clip from the old episode. Halfway through, we find this out, it’s like the Sutekh reveal, like the Master reveal in Utopia, but it shouldn’t be, I don’t think. Why must we treat all these monsters like gods? Like the great evil of the universe?

The excellence I love in Midnight is the lack of knowledge. As Professor Hobbes says, “there is no history”. We know very little of the Midnight entity. We don’t know what it looks like, other than Claude’s description of it. Now we have a clear CGI image of it, well, all right then. Shame really. Just like the grey creature behind them in Listen. Showing it directly will always lessen the power of course. Why is it we treat this creature as though it’s the same one? This is set thousands of years later, isn’t it? Way, way after Midnight was set, and that was already a long time in the future. So why would one assume this is the same organism? Why does the Doctor talk to it as though it’s the same thing? Or that it’s evil? It’s just taken ahold of someone, Aliss, that’s how it operates, surely, maybe it’s just curious, not necessarily evil. But, oh, it smashed, or it made her smash, all of the mirrors. Did she forget this, was she possessed, did it do it and then take over her? I’ve only just watched The Well so I’m sure I’ve missed some particular pieces of dialogue, but whatever the explanation is, trapped to those results, not a very good look for poor Aliss. Since this being, behind her apparently, lives on her back, and makes people fly up in the air for some reason, kinetic force as someone says, well, that doesn’t make it evil, does it? Maybe it just has that effect on living organisms altered to its state? For all we know, only this species can survive in an Xtonic light. It acts nothing like the original creature so why does everyone, especially the Doctor, act like it’s the ultimate evil? Not much attempt to reason or comprehend or calm people down.

It doesn’t repeat things as before. Good to do something different, more interesting than a repeat of a repeat, but why treat it as the same organism? Ages and ages dedicated to characters standing around in a room, basically going, there’s nothing there. I just saw something, I swear! No, there’s nothing. No, I saw something. No, nothing. For ages. Predictable. Obviously there’s something, the more we know, the longer we linger, the less scary it is, especially when interrupted by jump-scare sounds, please can we stop having those?

Then people for some reason keep doubting the other people for no reason I see, and walk around the poor Aliss, and die. Predictable. Interesting notion in the sense that no one went “behind” Sky in Midnight, but that was a totally different system of operations. I thought they were going to use the talking function thing, have some kind of dialogue spooky action, using the screens, but nothing came of that, it seemed basically pointless to me. Actually totally pointless from a story perspective. The only one I had trouble understanding was Aliss and she was the only one without subtitles!

They make a huge deal of not walking behind Aliss (leading to a sort of pun, about not turning their back on her, that was fun). A bit like the Time Beetle in Turn Left. But this makes no sense. Someone walks behind her and gets flung, no one ever checks if maybe someone survived, it’s just assumed, oops, they died. I mean, think about it - this creature would be really profitable in a big outer space trampoline party! Flinging people all over the place, great fun! But no, no trampolining here, just everyone gets killed, no point checking apparently. People walk behind Aliss and fly up and back down, but there’s a bit midway through where someone tries walking behind her, leaving someone else directly, 180 degrees behind her, and Aliss turns around to face this person circling her. As she turns her back on the crowd, why don’t they each get flung up into the air? Hmm? What!? I didn’t understand that at all, maybe I missed something obvious. But if it’s behind her that’s the danger, then as she spins around, everyone should just get flung up, surely? I had a huge problem with this in particular, since they make such a big deal of it. Does the person have to be directly behind her, for several seconds then? Maybe she has to maintain that back-view for a while, maybe the creature has to decide to throw people. Calling the entity “behind her” was a little off, as well, I thought, it’s sort of attached to her, “behind” could suggest some unknown distance between her and the creature, rather than attached to her back as it seemed.

It’s left as a mystery exactly how this creature works, why it does this, but treating it like a sort of tutorial, a gimmick explaining the idea for most of the episode takes a lot of time, without really doing anything other than explaining in a slow, supposedly scary way. At least setting it in one room saves money, like a lot of great stories in the past have done. Really nice atmosphere in the first half more-so, good launch into the title sequence, a lot of little… well, some ideas I liked. I will re-watch this at some point and maybe comprehend some bit I missed that explained some of my problems. But overall, I really didn’t care for The Well. Disappointing after such anticipation. Maybe it’s not the best way to view Doctor Who, but somehow the knowledge that a lot of people apparently liked this episode made me even more opposed to it, since I just kept finding problems. Like at the end, when that lady falls back into the Well itself, she just leans back and falls in - gonna hit her head in a few seconds! At least jump into it. All the bits about the people not knowing what humans are, what Earth is, sort of interesting but not very well integrated into the plot. What were they, if not human? Digi-humans, proto-humans, human-ish like Cassandra says in The End of the World, perhaps.

Didn’t make much use of the Well itself, either, it was just in a room, fairly obviously leading to something, the final moment as it turns out. I like the idea of a slow-paced subtle scary story, as DW has attempted many times (loved that it was in a quarry!), but this was really a major failing in many ways. I think if I hadn’t watched Midnight so much, I’d like The Well more, but since the two desire to be linked (and hence compared), the answers as opposed to mystery, the plot confusion and nonsensicality, the simpler characters, the general repetition without much justification, and the general stand-still plot all are factors that negate the merits of the adventure, and my score. Knowing that not much happens, maybe understanding more of the ideas and intentions, maybe I’ll like it more (also from DW Unleashed) but from an initial sudden response, having just watched The Well, … I just didn’t really like it very much. 3/10 = 1.5/5.

Oh and the Doctor cries again.


ButterCashier

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