The Cutprice Guignol

After last week’s truly fabulous episode, we are getting back to what I love most about Doctor Who – horror.

Doctor Who was pretty much my first introduction to real, bonafide, behind-the-sofa horror – and, for my money, there are some excellent examples of the genre scattered through the series, from classic ghost stories like The Unquiet Dead to more abstract horror like Can You Hear Me. To this day, nothing gets me excited like an episode that’s touted as a real spookfest, a true creep-fiasco, as nasty a kick to the face as can be contained in show broadcast at 7pm on a Saturday evening.

And that is exactly how this episode, The Well, has been advertised – as the kind of freaky, unsettling speculative horror that Doctor Who occasionally excels at. Following the Doctor and Belinda as they join a crew investigating an apparently-abandoned mining colony, but they soon discover a single survivor, Aliss (Rose Ayling-Ellis – and, while we’re in these brackets, I have to take a moment to recommend the extraordinary Reunion, which was out earlier this month and also stars Ayling-Ellis in a central role) – and the horrors that wiped out the rest of the community before they arrived.

And, as a piece of horror TV, I think The Well is pretty serviceable. I’ve got a huge soft spot for futuristic-colony-as-haunted-house stories (the set design here really reminded me of Soma, one of my favourite video games of all time, which kicks off with a similar premise), and, while we’ve certainly had creatures who fulfil that “can’t be looked at” thing before, the jump scares here were well-crafted and effective, the interactions with the Doctor eerie and unsettling. There were a sprinkling of fabulous details throughout the script – like the counter on the airlock screen counting four entities instead of three to indicate the presence of the monster – and you will never catch me dogging on horror that leaves the actual design of the villain up to your imagination. We caught a few glimpses here and there, and I’m sure there will be dozens of screenshots floating around by now as people try to piece together what form it actually takes, but I’m happy taking the Ghostwatch approach and remaining ignorant.

Beyond the horror aspects of the episode, I….like it well (heh) enough, I suppose. I loved Ayling-Ellis’ performance, and Caoilfhionn Dunne as the group leader Shayla (styled like a woman I would bum a cigarette off outside a gay bar and obsess over for the rest of my life) was a standout in recent one-shot characters for me, stoic without feeling stiff. The rest of the group investigating the mines were a bit humdrum for me, even foolish at times, and if I never have to see the belligerent-man-with-a-gun stock character in Doctor Who again, I’ll be a happy gal.

While I appreciate the representation of hearing-impaired people on TV and the underscoring of the importance of people in official capacities learning sign language (hey – did you know the Doncaster Deaf Trust offers a free course in basic BSL?), I thought it could have been wrapped into the story a little better, perhaps as a mechanic of why the monster had chosen Alliss as a host. And speaking of story, I couldn’t help but feel an ache in my soul for a good two-parter, which this episode seemed to be crying out for – with such a limited run this season, I get why this had to be wrapped up in less than fifty minutes, but there was room to build out this story with a slower, steadier drip of tension in much the same way The Satan Pit did.

But this episode isn’t just an episode in its own right – no, it turns out that my cat waking me up this morning by throwing my Tenth Doctor figurine off the mantlepiece was actually foreshadowing, as it’s also a sequel to the iconic and much-beloved Tennant-era classic, Midnight. When this reveal hit, I have to admit, I wasn’t entirely convinced – I have been burned by the Forest of the Angels showing the Weeping Angels strolling around like me on the hunt for a pecan slice of a Sunday afternoon and I have not forgotten it. And the rest of the episode, while pretty solid, didn’t convince me that this had always been the plan for this script – no, to me, The Well felt like a slightly-hurried retooling of another story in order to capitalize on the popularity of Midnight. The function and execution of the creature was too different, far more in line with the Pantheon adversaries we’ve seen earlier in this run than anything else, for me to believe this was initially conceived with Midnight in mind. I don’t think it takes away from the original in any way, which is a good thing, but the reveal left me a bit “oh….uh, alright?” rather than bouncing around on my couch with excitement like I was last week.

Not to mention the fact that we seem to have given up on the idea of a reboot, now that we’re seeing direct sequels to episodes from a decade and a half ago. And, speaking of what’s going on in the meta-narratives around this show, I think I need to talk a little about the way Russel T Davies has been making use of the fandom and the previous iterations of the series to add layers to this season. Obviously, last week, with Lux, we actually got to meet some sort-of fans of the show, and we’ve consistently had Mrs Flood prodding her way through that fourth wall and into our living rooms, but this episode made use of an iconic moment from the second episode of the reboot, The End of the World – with Britney Spears’ Toxic. As soon as I heard it, my ears pricked, because that’s such a fun, famous scene from the 2005 season, and it seemed to foreshadow some of the world-building later in this episode, when the characters reveal that they have never heard of the planet Earth, presumably pointing to its destruction.

If Toxic is the final blare of the apocalyptic trumpet for planet Earth, so be it, but I’m still trying to figure out where Russel T Davies is going with these meta-references. It’s clear that this era of Doctor Who is one far more engaged with the real world than it ever has been before, at least as far as NuWho goes, and I have seen some speculation that some of the press surrounding the season might factor in to the storytelling – which would be ground-breaking, for sure, but I’m not certain that dirt needs to be overturned at all. These kind of meta-references are a hard thing to walk back, and it has the whiff of a snake eating its own tail to me – great fun in the moment, but it does change the context of the show in a pretty undeniable way. That said, I still love to see Doctor Who trying something really different, and I’m going to hold off on too heavy a judgement till I see how it plays out.

Overall, The Well is a solid episode, but one that suffers from a comparison to such an iconic originator. Three episodes in, and things are taking shape with some confidence – though, with just five episodes to wrap this all up, I’m not sure it’s going to satisfy the way I want it to.

What did you think of The Well? Where does it rank up against other horror episodes of Who, and do you like it as a sequel to Midnight? Let me know in the comments below!

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(header image via BBC)