Doctor Who: The Well

Three episodes in, and while this season of DOCTOR WHO hasn’t quite yet lived up to the heights of the show at its best in years past, it does feel a lot more sure-footed and on-point than it has in recent memory. This week’s outing “The Well” isn’t a timeless classic by any means, but it is good meat-and-potatoes DOCTOR WHO of a particular type. Over the years, we’ve semi-regularly had adventures that paired the hapless Time Lord and his companion with a company of Space Marines, often investigating some mysterious goings-on in deep space. But that familiarity of approach is something of a comfort here, as is the fact that the episodes plays things for tension and suspense pretty much all the way through, never breaking for a gag or a bit of whimsy.

Right off the bat, I loved the pre-title opening. The fact that it picked up directly from the preceding episode, with the Doctor and Belinda still in their 1950s period costumes, was a nice touch, as was Belinda’s concern for her family back home and her growing bond with the Doctor. The arrival and entry into the mystery was really good as well–stepping directly out of the Tardis and into a HALO jump made for an invigorating beginning. I did sort of wonder at the fact that the Doctor had attired himself and Bel in uniforms identical to the ones worn by the soldiers, which seemed like a hell of a contrivance, but I opted to give it a pass as everything else was proceeding so nicely.

Varada Sethu gets to once again show some great chops as shanghaied nurse Belinda Chandra, who endlessly keeps trying to help people even though she’s completely out of her depth this time out, unfamiliar even with the medical equipment of this future time that is the backbone of her profession. The Companion is by nature pretty well indestructible in this series, but the tension of the situation and Belinda’s awkward fit within it made her jeopardy feel real–and by extension, the jeopardy of the rest of the party. And Ncuti Gatwa was able to pull off the more intense moments here just as readily as he handles the lighter ones, adding to the weight of the drama. And while the Doctor isn’t the one who solves the problem, it always felt as though he was trying to, was being active in the story and not just a participant.

The big take-away for longtime viewers is no doubt going to be that this episode is a sequel to the much-praised 2099 episode “Midnight”, something the production team wisely kept hidden until the information could be dropped for maximum effect within the story itself. I was glad of the callback, if only because this generation of DOCTOR WHO seems to be working really hard to establish itself as something unique and apart from what had gone before, to the point where it sometimes doesn’t even feel like quite the same show at all. And “The Well” is an effective follow-up to that prior episode, though I did feel like it would have helped to cement the connection had the nameless, faceless entity mirrored the Doctor or some other characters’ words, as it had done in that episode. The conceit of this follow-up, however, wasn’t as consistently handled. The rules of the invisible creature seem to shift and change as the story requires them to, creating just a bit of fuzziness around the logic of the entire story.

I also thought the episode did an effective job in building up the arc-long storyline of the season, with nobody in the future having any recollection of the Earth, which seems to have been destroyed back in May of 2025. On that same note, however, I’m already a bit sick of Mrs. Flood turning up everywhere and in every time–Russell T Davies did this bit last season with Susan Twist, and it didn’t really wind up paying off, so I’m finding the cameos this time out to be a bit trying rather than clues to some larger mystery; I suppose that I’m not confident that the mystery will be solved properly or that there’s any point in scrutinizing these sequences for clues. I also feel as though the end of the episode overplayed its final beat, the notion that the Midnight creature may have escaped into the ship. I like the intent of that moment, but as though to make sure that even the dimmest audience members got it, I found the execution of it to be overdone and labored.

Regardless of all my nits, this was a solid and suspenseful story that worked pretty well. Next week is this season’s “Doctor-light” episode (can anybody explain to me why there needs to be Doctor-light episodes given that our main distribution platform is now streaming and these episodes were shot a year ago?) with the return of former companion Ruby Sunday. I’m slightly trepidatious about this one, largely because Ruby never came together as a character, existing as pretty much just a couple of mystery traits and the performance of the actor. So I’m not convinced that doing a Ruby episode in the middle of this season is the best idea. On the other hand, it is a way to include a story set in the more-or-less contemporary present without violating the premise of the season. So I suppose we’ll see how it all turns out.