Warning: This assessment incorporates spoilers for season 2, episode 3 of Doctor Who, “The Well.”
“The Well” is an immensely irritating episode of Doctor Who. There’s actual promise scattered all through its runtime, together with some placing horror imagery that feels pulled straight from a Stephen King novel, however it struggles to construct on that basis. Flung 500,000 years into the longer term, the Doctor and Belinda arrive on a crumbling, ice-laced mining colony the place one thing has clearly gone improper. The infrastructure is in ruins, the crew has vanished, and just one shell-shocked survivor stays. Right from the off, there’s a chilly stillness that slowly settles in and wraps round us like a brisk fog, permeating a gradual, creeping dread. It’s a pointy distinction to the sensible chaos of final week’s outing, however the shift to a slower, extra ominous tempo is a welcome one.
Surprisingly (until you’ve learn the leaks), it additionally serves as a direct sequel to 2009’s “Midnight” – a tense, near-perfect bottle episode constructed round one of many present’s easiest, most chilling concepts. For higher or worse, the follow-up isn’t a retread of that one-off, and doesn’t attempt to be. But whereas “The Well” begins as a daring successor to an all-time nice, it in the end finally ends up slipping into pale imitation.
To their credit score, Russell T Davies and co-writer Sharma Walfall make a deliberate effort to keep away from merely rehashing “Midnight.” The entity has been reimagined with contemporary guidelines and visible methods, and there’s some spectacular restraint in how little we truly see of it. They even discovered just a few creative methods to make this entity virtually as terrifying as the primary time we encountered it, and there’s nonetheless some clear intent in how the mysterious alien is dealt with. The creature’s design is generally left to the creativeness, and director Amanda Brotchie impressively leans right into a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it embodiment.
But it’s arduous to not really feel that this return chips away on the energy of the unique. “Midnight” was about concern, groupthink, and the fragility of belief, whereas “The Well” simply awkwardly gestures towards a scary monster and calls it a day. Where “Midnight” left gaps for the creativeness to fill, “The Well” feels too keen to clarify, too fast to visualise the horror fairly than let it hang-out from the sides. For all of the unease Brotchie’s path rigorously conjures, the story beneath feels disappointingly skinny by comparability. The Midnight entity is now not this terrifying enigma counting on mimicry and manipulation to sow paranoia and panic. Instead, it’s now a much more typical monster of the week, leaping between victims in a parasitic chain in a clichéd pass-it-on setup that remembers horror flicks like It Follows or Smile. Gone is the mental dread, the eerie unknowability that made its first look unforgettable. It was a malevolent intelligence that even the Doctor couldn’t motive with or outwit, toying with language and fracturing a room utilizing simply its guile.
It shares so little resemblance to its unique look, and it’s arduous to flee the sensation that the reintroduction of considered one of Doctor Who’s most enigmatic villains is pointless at greatest, and actively disappointing at worst. Even taking the episode by itself deserves, and placing apart the unavoidable comparisons, “The Well” nonetheless struggles to search out any approach to stand out. The supporting solid is painfully forgettable, the story lacks any substance past the Midnight reveal, and even Ncuti Gatwa feels off-tempo, his normal spark dulled by dialogue that forces a semblance of emotional catharsis from scene to scene as a substitute of really incomes it. There are flashes of nice pressure and horror, however they’re trapped in a script that desperately struggles to search out its footing anyplace else.
