Doctor Who: “The Well” Forgets Much of What Made the Midnight Entity So Terrifying – 2nd Opinion, Take 2

J.C. reviews the third episode of Series 15.

Watching “The Well”, I found myself torn. On the surface, it is a solid, spooky standalone episode of Doctor Who. If it had remained just that, I think I would have come away feeling largely satisfied. However, by unnecessarily linking itself to “Midnight”, the episode invites a comparison it simply cannot win, a burden that ultimately drags it down.

First, there are some fundamental changes to how the monster works this time around, and they are too hard to ignore. In “Midnight”, the entity was a purely psychological threat. After the crash, it never physically harmed anyone, never touched anything. It latched on to its victim and manipulated through mimicry, seeding fear and suspicion until the group turned on itself. In “The Well”, it seems to have been reimagined into more of a generic horror monster.

The monster now possesses brute strength, is able to throw people across rooms, and wreak physical havoc, all while remaining mostly invisible. Yes, I say “mostly”, because there are now brief glimpses of it throughout the episode, which feels like breaking rule 101 for a “Midnight”-style story: do not show the monster! Even briefly. It would have been far creepier to leave everything unseen, letting the characters react in shock to something we never witness (and have us questioning it, exactly like the scene in “Midnight” when Claude thought he saw something.)

There is also a deeper problem, one that all too often crops up with Davies’s writing: his tendency to think that bigger is always better. “Midnight” was small, claustrophobic, and terrifying precisely because it was so stripped back. It was famously written under severe budget constraints, and that lack of resources forced a ruthless focus on tension, dialogue, and paranoia. Without those limitations, “The Well” takes the opposite approach. With a much larger budget to play with, this episode adds unnecessary bombast: a bigger cast, more locations, more CGI, layered whispering voices, characters thrown about the set, and gratuitous jump scare noises used to artificially boost the tension. It makes the episode feel less confident in its own horror.

All that said, there were still things to praise. “The Well” does retain some creepy scenes, particularly early on, and again in later scenes that echo the tone of “Midnight”. When it works best is when it gets back to the core of what made that episode effective: the fear of the unknown. The scenes inside the silent, abandoned mining base, with shattered mirrors and unnatural quiet, create a wonderfully tense atmosphere. Aliss’s terrified account of her friends going mad taps straight into primal fear, and the growing paranoia about something “behind” her is suitably creepy.

I found Belinda at her most likeable here. She feels more at ease and more engaged as the companion, and her banter with the Doctor is warmer and more natural. I especially appreciated her compassion towards Aliss, which brings a human touch to proceedings, and her quick thinking around the entity’s attack pattern shows she’s not just keeping up, she’s contributing. By the time the credits roll, her trust in the Doctor feels nicely earned.

Ncuti Gatwa’s performance was, for the most part, good. Here he is given a chance to capture some of the best qualities of the Doctor. Moments like his promise to Belinda that he will meet her family, his gentle reassurance to Aliss when she is terrified, and his realisation that mercury could trap the entity felt more Doctor-ish. His final offer to the entity, pleading for it to spare Belinda and offering himself instead, was especially moving, a better showcase of the Doctor’s compassion and self-sacrifice.

However, Gatwa can’t quite paper over some of the usual missteps. Once again, the 15th Doctor cries, and while this moment arguably earns it more than most, the impact is dulled because we’ve seen it so many damn times already. For contrast, take “Midnight”, where the 10th Doctor is left utterly powerless by the entity and his eyes simply well up. That silent, tearless grief is all the more powerful for its restraint, and it perfectly suits the psychological horror of the moment. And on the subject of tonal missteps, when Cassio says, “It is not appropriate to call me babes,” and the Doctor flippantly replies, “Okay, hun,” he sounded more like a bitchy TikTok influencer than an ancient Time Lord.

There are a lot of guest characters this week, arguably too many for a 45-minute episode, but Aliss is clearly the centrepiece of the episode. Rose Ayling-Ellis gives a strong, heartfelt performance, bringing fear and vulnerability to the role. That said, Russell T Davies has spoken openly about concerns that portraying disabled characters as villains could, in his words, “associate disability with evil.” With that context, it’s perhaps understandable, but still regrettable, that Aliss is never allowed to fall fully into the possession and mimicry that made Mrs Silvestry so terrifying in “Midnight”.

This is especially striking because Aliss is effectively the monster’s host for much of the episode, yet she remains purely a passive victim, never displaying the behavioural changes that once made the entity so disturbing. Victims can still be complex, and allowing Aliss to express that ambiguity, to become unsettling in her own right, might have deepened both the character and the horror. By portraying her only as helpless, the episode blunts the creature’s menace, misses a greater opportunity for haunting drama, and denies Aliss any meaningful agency.

Of the numerous troopers, Shaya, played by Caoilfhionn Dunne, made the biggest impression. She’s tough but principled, drawing comparisons to Captain Adelaide Brooke from “The Waters of Mars”. Her final sacrifice, while noble, sadly does not quite carry the same emotional punch, largely because we do not spend enough time understanding her beyond her military duty. Cassio also feels like a missed opportunity. Written as the archetypal trigger-happy trooper, he lacks any nuance or believable internal conflict. His quick turn to mutiny feels more like a plot device than a human reaction. It is also a waste of Christopher Chung, who is capable of handling much richer material (just watch him in Slow Horses, where he brings far more energy and range).

In the end, Doctor Who: “The Well” is a solid enough episode when judged on its own terms, with a lot of atmosphere and some decent creepy moments. But as a sequel to “Midnight”, it inevitably suffers by comparison. It tries to explain and expand too much, when the real horror of “Midnight” came from the unknowable. Sometimes, less really is more.