Doctor Who - The Well

Tennant To Midnight

Doctor Who - The Well
UK/USA 2025
Airdate: 26th April 2025

Warning. Yup... spoilers from the outset.

Oh rats! What a shame. 

The first two episodes of this latest series of Doctor Who were actually better than anything we got last year but, just when I thought it was safe to go back in the Whoniverse, we get an episode, The Well, which is... while still better than pretty much all of last year’s episodes... just a bit of a mess, to be honest.  And that’s made more irritating by the twist reveal, halfway through the episode.

Okay, so we have Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu on form as The Doctor and Belinda, at least. Although Gatwa’s performance as The Doctor is once more tempered by the bad writing, which means he is tearing up at the drop of a hat again (this has to stop at some point... surely?). And we have a good supporting cast around them when they accidentally find themselves as part of a group of marines dropping onto a planet which they don’t name right away for fear that viewers will see the twist coming a mile off. With good reason because, the twist only works as a kind of call back to the name of a former, David Tennant episode called Midnight (there’s brief footage flashing back to the 2008 episode, just in case people don’t ‘get’ the joke). I didn’t see it coming and that’s probably because...

Okay, so I was having misgivings s about the episode being shoddily written right from the start but the reveal that it’s the unnamed ‘mimic antagonist’ of Midnight actually makes things worse. For one thing, the antagonist of the original story did not have the same modus operandi as the version of it in Midnight at all. So it really is a sequel in terms of labelling only, it seems to me. Secondly, Midnight was one of the best stories of the original Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who... so turning this into a ‘by name only’ sequel invites comparisons to that original and, honestly, this thing isn’t a patch on that one in any way, shape or form. Invoking the name almost denigrates the original episode.

The other thing about this one which was really bad was the damned costumes that The Doctor and Belinda choose to wear. When they find out the TARDIS has landed far in the future, without knowing anything about what or who they are gong to run into... they decide to dress up in future garb. And they choose these very specific matching jumpsuits which immediately had me thinking... “wait, what?” Are they going on a space expedition or something. To which the answer was immediately, yes because... well the suits they are wearing are an exact match to the uniforms being worn by the troops they go down with to the surface of the planet Midnight. Which... um... what? That’s pretty crazy. They accidentally dress in some uniforms belonging to the group of random strangers they then go on to meet? What happened to the writing on this thing? Explain this, please because, this makes no sense.

The only decent part of the episode was the surprise appearance of Anita Dobson as Mrs. Flood at the end of the story, as a character turning up in situ with other characters. So that was a novelty but, honestly, makes me start thinking of the inclusion of Susan Twist in every episode of the last story. And we all know how completely terrible and stupid that reveal turned out to be. But, it does look like she’s gathering intel on The Doctor here.

And I think that’s me done on The Well. This has got to be one of my shortest Doctor Who reviews ever but, I just don’t have much of anything positive to say about it, truth be told. This was definitely something and, I think that somethings was... just another unremarkable episode of modern Doctor Who. I won’t be revisiting this episode again any time soon.