It’s time to stop being quite so weird and do something a bit more traditional now as Doctor Who’s latest series gives us a good old fashioned claustrophobic space horror with a fun, if not a little visually silly, twist. It’s also a sequel to a popular original Russell T. Davies era story, but really you don’t have to be familiar with that one to watch this, it’s actually pretty damn different, but different in a good or bad way? Let’s take a look!
The Well continues the series arc of not being able to get companion Belinda (Varada Sethu) home to Earth in 2025 and The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) having to use a special kind of tool to “anchor” the TARDIS to send it to the right time, in this case they end up some 500,000 years into the future on a planet simply named “6-7-6-7”. There the duo meet a good selection of generic “space marines” though without the obnoxious American jock character that’s most commonly found, which is nice. Shaya (Caoilfhionn Dunne) is the leader of the group and while a steadfast order-giver she’s also got a bit of a softer side, Cassio (Christopher Chung) is the by-the-rules type with zero sense of humour and an itchy trigger finger, and Mo (Bethany Antonia) is the really nice one who seems in over her head once the action starts… plus a bunch of others there just to get killed. They all play their roles well, don’t get me wrong, but there’s nothing new to be found here personality wise. The Doctor flashes his psychic paper and gets him and Belinda in on the mission, which turns out to be exploring a research station that had stopped communicating with home base.
The Doctor and Belinda take in the view, blissfully unaware of what’s behind them… a running theme for the story!
So we get a good bunch of scenes walking around the station, finding corpses and broken mirrors and no explanation for any of it, until they meet the sole survivor in Aliss (Rose Ayling-Ellis) a deaf cook who just wants to go home to her daughter yet is unwilling to explain what happened beyond that she had no choice but to kill her close friend whose body is lying not to far from her. As The Doctor, Shaya and Cassio head to the control room (complete with a colossal hole dug deep into the ground) Belinda starts seeing something out of the corner of her eye behind Aliss that makes her jump, and then when one of the random soldiers finally decides to check if there’s anything behind her he’s suddenly thrown into the air and dies upon hitting the floor. Everyone else enters the room and Cassio asks for an explanation or he’ll kill her and we find out from Aliss that a monster invaded the base, one that hides behind the back of someone and kills anyone who goes round the back of the person and sees it (I know it would’ve been hard to believe, but could she not have tried explaining that before people started dying again?) The reason the base was wiped out is because people were either killed by the “cursed” person turning around and therefore sending the monster to them, or people killing the person cursed think it will stop the creature but all it that does it make it move to the person who killed the previous host.
The Doctor and Belinda try to comfort Aliss… which given the situation is impossible really, but they give it a go!
Cassio has none of it and sends one of his men around the back of her and sure enough that person is also comically flung into the air, which leads to Aliss panicking as more people point guns at her causing her to turn around and “send” the monster to more soldiers before Shaya has enough the kills Cassio herself to calm the situation down. Now with just a few people left we get a little bit of a lore drop and find out that 400,000 years ago this planet was covered in diamonds, and its old name was “Midnight”, meaning the invisible creature is the same one that drove the group of tourists and the Tenth Doctor to madness and nearly to the latter’s death in the classic episode, and it’s just found a new way to “play” with its guests, while still having the end goal of wanting to escape its planet and find a way out to the wider universe…
It’s a fun story, all together. Tense in places, well shot and acted, but the way it kills being to comically fling people into the air took some of the tension away from the scene of its little killing spree. The ending was good though, which I’ll get to in the spoilers, naturally!
The Continuity:
Obviously the big one here is the Tenth Doctor story “Midnight”. Beyond that you’d just get base under siege stories and the like, which is obviously too thin a connection to make, though I will say a giant hole finding something evil in a far future mining facility leading to an entity that possesses people is very similar another Tenth Doctor story, the two parter “The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit”, though the possessing was different, and so was the enemy, that’s for sure!
Overall Thoughts:
That’s one tight uniform. It looks like The Doctor is wearing nothing at all, nothing at all, nothing at all…. Stupid sexy Gatwa!
“The Well” was a nice return to a bit of normality. A futuristic setting, generic military people in matching uniforms, some tense stand-offs and a fun alien creature going around, it kept me entertained for its 50 minutes. Obviously innovation is good, but sometimes familiar and comfy is good too.
After The Doctor gets his weekly crying quota out of the way by having a one-way (for us) conversation with the creature he remembers the smashed mirrors and figures that the creature also can’t stand the sight of itself so has Shaya shoot a pipe full of a reflective liquid metal behind Aliss which causes it to see itself and flee which allows The Doctor and co to get out of there and into an airlock. Aliss and two extra guards head out first, leaving The Doctor, Belinda, Shaya and Mo waiting for their turn only for the creature to invade the space and latch on to someone. A tense game of finger pointing ends with it clearly being attached to Belinda, and with no other option sharpshooter Shaya essentially shoots Belinda dead but in such a way that she can be saved with their technology, allowing the creature to come over to her, and then she bolts it down to the large bottomless put and does a proper Ripley-from-Alien-3 self-sacrifice jump to take the creature with her.
Belinda thinks she sees something… much earlier in the episode, but as per usual with the just-aired stories I was limited in terms of pictures I could use!
Belinda later wakes in the TARDIS recovering from her near death (or temporary death, I guess) and the two discuss how nobody had heard of Earth and what that might mean for why they can’t reach 2025 (forgot to mention that during the main review bit… oh well, I mentioned it now!) Meanwhile Mo reports to her superior which ends up being Mrs. Flood again (Anita Dobson), and then the other soldier thinks she sees something behind Mo and we get a good “one last scare” moment that implies the creature managed to latch onto Mo somehow and was now free…
Hogan Reviews 