Warning: contains spoilers for Doctor Who series 15 episode 3 “The Well”. Me about 20 minutes into this episode: hmm, getting real “Midnight” vibes from this. Me about 25 minutes into this episode: ah! In a surprise sequel to a classic from the Tenth Doctor era, the Doctor and Belinda find themselves on an inhospitable […]
The post Doctor Who Series 15 Episode 3 Review: The Well appeared first on Den of Geek.
Warning: contains plot spoilers for Doctor Who episode “The Well”.
If they were really concentrating, fans may have got there just before the Doctor did, at the mention of an Xtonic Star. If they were really really concentrating, they could have drawn the connection even earlier, with the very first reference to Galvanic Radiation and a planet where nothing can live.
What connection? The surprise that series 15 episode “The Well” takes place on the same planet as acclaimed series four episode “Midnight”, and features the same baddie – perhaps now retconned as another member of Doctor Who’s growing pantheon of gods, seeing as it survived half a million years between the Doctor’s visits, and appears to have a thing for playing games.
In “The Well”, Fifteen and Belinda’s latest TARDIS “bounce” shoots them 500,000 years ahead of 1952 Miami, to the “cold, lifeless and dead” Planet 6-7-6-7. At least, that’s what it’s known as in that time; it used to go by the rather more poetic “Midnight”. In the 2008 Who episode of the same name, Midnight was where the Doctor was paralysed by a malevolent creature whose mystery he never solved.
And now it’s back.
The June 2008 series four episode saw Donna Noble take some time off from the TARDIS (while Catherine Tate filmed Doctor-lite adventure “Turn Left”). Donna relaxed in a leisure spa while Ten, like the beautiful nerd he is, went on a sightseeing tour of sapphire waterfalls on a planet the surface of which was made of diamond. Except, he never made it to the waterfalls because a shadowy beast attacked their Crusader shuttle and killed four people, very nearly including the Doctor.
Written by Russell T Davies and directed by Alice Troughton, “Midnight” is about two kinds of evil: the faceless horror evil of the entity that possesses the tourists aboard the sightseeing shuttle, and the paranoid, protectionist evil of the passengers themselves. When the shuttle breaks down en-route and one of the group becomes ‘infected’ by the monster, the others turn on her and plan to cast her out into the planet’s deadly irradiated atmosphere. The Doctor appeals to their humanity, which makes them also turn on him. It’s only thanks to a heroic act from someone on board that the Doctor isn’t killed and forced to regenerate on the surface of Planet Midnight (and then presumably, to immediately die of radiation poisoning, regenerate again, immediately die, and so on, forever. Though while we’re thinking about this, it was the Toymaker’s use of UNIT’s Galvanic Radiation beam that caused the Doctor to bi-generate, so perhaps if he had been thrown out onto the planet’s surface, there’d now be thousands of Doctors running around, all sharing the constituent parts of a single outfit. Quite the mental image.)
In “The Well”, Fifteen tells Belinda that the first time he encountered the Midnight monster, he had never been so scared in his life. That reads, remembering the look on David Tennant’s face while he was paralysed by it, and while it parroted his every word through its unfortunate host Sky Silvestry – brilliantly played by Lesley Sharp. Ten was so shaken by his encounter with the creature that when Donna playfully repeats his words in the epi
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