<i>Doctor Who</i> Revisits a Terrifying Villain in “The Well”

This did not go at all where I expected, and it turns out there’s an interesting reason why…

Recap

The Doctor and Belinda have landed 500,000 years in the future and need to take another Vindicator reading. They wind up on a drop ship and jump down to a planet below with a crew that question who they are. The Doctor uses the psychic paper to suggest that he’s everyone’s superior and here to test them. The group commander, Shaya Costallion (Caoilfhionn Dunne), explains that they’re here to investigate a diamond mine that’s gone quiet. There’s galvanic radiation suffusing the entire planet, so it’ll take five hours before their ship can pick everyone up, leaving the Doctor and Belinda with five hours to kill.

The mine is full of dead bodies. It appears that everyone has been shot or broken into pieces, and all the mirrors have been shattered. The group eventually comes across the lone survivor, Aliss Fenly (Rose Ayling-Ellis), the mine’s cook. She’s terrified, and uses both sign language and speaking to explain that everyone went mad; she had to kill her friend to stop herself from getting killed. The crew activates text-to-speech tech in their gear to communicate with Aliss, while the Doctor uses sign language. They ask her questions, and it’s eventually decided that part of the group will go to the control room to find more information. The Doctor goes with them, leaving Belinda behind. Talking to Mo Gilliben (Bethany Antonia), Belinda learns that no one in this group has heard of humans or Earth (they’re all Lombardians, who look similar, but are not the same species). Suddenly, Belinda starts seeing something move behind Aliss. She keeps insisting that it’s nothing.

The rest of the group begin to see something as well, and grow more paranoid. Aliss grows even more distressed, as this is what happened last time with all the miners before everyone started killing each other. The group fans out and, when one of the crew walks directly behind Aliss, she is thrown into the air and killed. In the control room, the Doctor and Shaya find out that whatever caused this came out of the well they’d been drilling down into. The Doctor asks about the history of this planet, because something feels familiar. Shaya explains that it used to be under an X-tonic star and that the planet used to be covered in diamonds. The Doctor asks what its ancient name was… and Shaya replies that it was called Midnight.

The Doctor rushes back to find the dead crew member. Aliss explains that the thing behind her is what’s killing people or causing them to kill each other. Cassio Palin-Paleen (Christopher Chung) decides that the easiest way to end said threat is to kill her, but Aliss warns him that it will just attach itself to his back if he tries that. Belinda explains that the entity kills anyone who stands directly behind the person it hides behind. Basically, if the room is a clock face, you die at midnight. Cassio gets angry that Shaya keeps listening to the Doctor’s advice and issues a usurpation of command with one crew member seconding to make it official. He tells the group to fan around her, which leads to multiple deaths as Aliss turns in a panic, including Cassio’s—caused by Shaya herself. She apologizes, but the Doctor insists that this is what the entity is good at. 

Shaya tells the Doctor that they’ll need to abandon the mission as a failure, but the Doctor isn’t willing to leave Aliss behind. He tries to speak to the entity like he did years before, and comes up with an idea. He has Shaya shoot pipes and bring up mercury, creating a reflective surface that allows them to see the entity. Aliss is shoved forward, free, and the Doctor instructs everyone to run. Aliss and a few others escape through the airlock. As he and Belinda rush to get their spacesuits refitted at the airlock, the entity catches up. The remaining four—the Doctor, Belinda, Shaya, and Mo—look back and forth to figure out who it has attached itself to. It’s Belinda. Shaya decides to shoot Belinda in such a way that she can hopefully narrowly avoid death, taking on the entity herself. She does so, and runs to the well, as the Doctor tries frantically to catch up to her. Shaya lets herself fall down the well backwards, and the Doctor, Belinda, and Mo get to escape.

Mo contacts her superior (who turns out to be Mrs. Flood), and heads off to write her report. Another crew member who didn’t go down to the planet seems to see something behind Mo… but dismisses it as nothing.

Commentary

There is a bit of context here that is important to know: This episode was not originally intended to showcase the Midnight entity as antagonist.

Early on in interviews after being cast, Ncuti Gatwa was asked where he would take the TARDIS during his tenure if he had any choice. His reply was that he would love for the Doctor to visit Nigeria and meet the orishas, spirits of the Yoruba religion. The original draft, written by Sharma Angel-Walfall, featured the orisha as the antagonists of this story. According to showrunner Russell T. Davies, the orishas weren’t working within the Toymaker Pantheon he’d been setting the Doctor against, so he rewrote the episode with the being from Midnight instead.

It’s heartening to know that Doctor Who is employing Black writers again, and so cool that one of them wanted to give Ncuti the adventure that he asked for. I’m not sure if the point about the Pantheon was the entire reason for the rewrite; often the need for rewrites are more complicated that a single soundbite can entail. (Orishas are not generally depicted as malevolent spirits within the Yoruba religion, to my understanding; perhaps that had something to do with it?) But either way, this is far from the original concept of the script, and results in bringing back one of the most terrifying antagonists the show has ever conceived.

The difficulty with bringing back a being so frightening is that it’s always diminishing returns after the first run. (See: The Weeping Angels. I’ll never stop being depressed over how their continued reuse and expanded mythology turned them into little more than a gimmick.) It’s hard to replicate everything that made “Midnight” one of the best locked-room style episodes that sci-fi television has ever produced. The whole story was largely an acting exercise meant to showcase the dramatic chops of a few extremely talented people. The entity of Midnight was terrifying because it was unknowable; filling in more information strips some magic away.

A number of clever techniques have been utilized here to make up for that, and many of them are successful. For one, we don’t ever really see the entity full on, only out the corner of our eye. For another, setting this story 400,000 years ahead of the first one means that the entity should have evolved somewhat—and so should its methods. There’s also a new suggestion as to how the creature manages to sow paranoia amongst the people it contacts: a whisper almost impossible to detect, but affecting anyone who can hear it. Thankfully, we don’t really learn anything more about it; its only desire still seems to be toward some form of escape, and beyond that… who knows?

The trouble is, because this wasn’t initially conceived as a sequel to “Midnight,” the setup has none of the punch of the original. It’s still creepy, but supplies none of the terror at having one’s voice subsumed. The entity outright kills now by simply tossing folks into the air? But only if you stand directly behind the person it is behind. (Which is a “rule” that gets enforced pretty willy-nilly within the episode itself, when all is said and done.) Furthermore, the idea that the creature doesn’t want to be seen feels arbitrary; it’s only in the script to make the creature more frightening, but without cause. Does something happen to it if you observe it? Is there a reason it’s difficult to see? Does it have a natural inclination toward camouflage?

Moreover, the core of “Midnight”’s premise—the presence of the entity bringing out the absolute worst in normal people via their own fear and panic—doesn’t play out here. Or rather, it did, before we arrived. The group that heads down to the base with Doctor and Belinda are a militarized outfit who are ostensibly prepared for potential threats, and the person who is the most aggressive in that group (Cassio) continues to be so throughout the episode up to his death. When Shaya causes said death, the Doctor immediately forgives it because “that’s what this being does to people,” a pretty casual out given what’s occurring around them.

It seems to me that a far more substantial rewrite needed to take place in order for this to feel like a worthy successor. As it is, the episode feels nice and spooky at first. We are given a lot of little clues throughout the opening that cue in the audience about where we might be: There’s talk of galvanic radiation, then the diamond mine, then the mention of an X-tonic star. We get to watch the Doctor reliving this terror as he realizes where he is. All of those elements are spot on, but once the reveal has taken place, the whole things starts to wobble.

I’m of two minds about how Aliss’ character was used in all this. Creating more disabled characters and having disabled actors to portray them is something the show has been working on consistently, which is impressive to see. There are a lot of touches to that effect, including the point where Aliss tells Belinda that it’s illegal in this time/place for medical personnel not to know sign language. The Doctor does know sign language (yes!), and the group has voice-to-speech tech that they’re required to use in communication with Aliss (yes), but they frequently leave her out of the loop regardless (unsurprising), and the Doctor still has to be called out for failing to suspect that Aliss can also lipread (it’s important for even the Doctor to be imperfect in this). Aliss is not the only disabled character in the episode either. One of the soldiers has a prosthetic leg, so this all feels a bit less tokenizing and, importantly, more realistic: Disabled people exist everywhere, all the time.

That said, the episode started with the better conceit for her being the last one standing among the diamond mine crew, and ended on a worse one. The initial suggestion is that the entity didn’t go for her because she wasn’t “important” enough as the crew’s cook. The episode then turns around and makes her specific disability the cause: If she can’t hear the entity, it can’t affect her as well. It’s the more obvious choice and, awkwardly, only works because the entity’s parameters have been altered for the episode. The being from Midnight operated by “stealing” people’s voices initially… and Aliss has a voice. It might have been far more interesting if the episode had used that as a starting point, rather than making Aliss’ disability essential for her character’s relevance to the plot.

And, of course, Shaya is a pretty great character whose death ultimately means nothing by the end. So that was disappointing.

Overall, we’re left with a tense episode and more clues about what’s coming: Mrs. Flood has her designated appearance (and I do like how exaggerated they’re becoming as we continue), the Earth has vanished, and Belinda still hasn’t made it home.

But the entity of Midnight has been freed—the one thing it truly wanted. Who knows where it might show up next.

Time and Space and Sundry

• The idea of the entity hiding behind people also draws similarities with the “there’s something on your back” accusations leveled at Donna throughout the (previous) fourth season, culminating in “Turn Left.”

• Doctor Who’s last “Toxic” cue occurred during “The End of the World,” the second episode of Nine and Rose Tyler’s tenure.

• So, does the Doctor have a 3D clothing printer in the wardrobe room now that scanned the ship they landed on, or… has he hung out with this group before? I’m gonna have to assume the former.

• Ncuti Gatwa is (obviously) a phenomenal actor, and now suffering from the common affliction that faces any actor housing so much raw emotional power: Every episode is churning out excuses for him to cry.

• Murray Gold used a few 20-year-old soundtrack flourishes on this one, but I almost wish I’d heard some echoes of the original “Midnight” score—that episode’s soundtrack was devastating.

See you next week!