A Doctor Who classic was given a surprise and unexpected sequel in the third episode of Series Two, penned by Russell T Davies and Sharma Angel-Walfall.
Doctor Who classics don’t always get sequels. Many of us are still waiting for a ‘City of Death‘ follow-up and the further adventures of Duggan. But in Doctor Who Series Two, Russell T Davies surprised everyone by delivering a sequel story to a Doctor Who classic from 2008. Indeed, many of ‘The Well’s viewers wouldn’t even have been born when the Tenth Doctor episode was first shown.
The Doctor Who classic in question is Series Four’s ‘Midnight’ – a ‘bottle’ episode which was set almost exclusively inside a tourists’ space bus. In the adventure, the Tenth Doctor is on vacation with his friend Donna. She stays behind at the leisure palace whilst he goes on an eight-hour round-trip across the surface of the diamond-covered planet Midnight, whose rocks have all been poisoned by X-tonic sunlight, meaning they’re completely untouchable. Or so the Doctor thinks.
On the journey, the truck is attacked. The front section is completely torn away, killing the drivers, leaving the passengers stranded and awaiting rescue. In the meantime, some unknown entity penetrates the cabin and possesses one of the passengers, repeating every sentence that is uttered to her. It sounds annoying, but in reality it’s very, very creepy – and the situation only gets worse.
This Doctor Who classic was applauded at the time for its scary simplicity; the beauty of ‘Midnight’ was that the viewers never actually saw the mysterious, hostile entity that somehow lived on the poisoned planet. The drama derived from the interplay between the stricken travellers, who found themselves trapped in a confined space with an unseen, demonic force.
And over the years, there have been few on-screen references to this Doctor Who classic (if any), despite the fact that fans have continued to discuss and enjoy the episode. But Doctor Who Series Two changed all this by dropping a surprise sequel called ‘The Well’ in 2025, starring the Fifteenth Doctor and Belinda.
In the story, the pair find themselves returning to the diamond planet of Midnight, some 400,000 years later. But initially, the Doctor doesn’t know where he is; he believes the planet to be a lifeless rock, poisoned by galvanic radiation, and mined by a small crew who have mysteriously gone quiet. He and Belinda join a rescue party which is heading down to the planet to discover the fate of the missing workers.
Unfortunately, when they get there, they discover that virtually all of the team have been killed, having either been shot or had their bones broken. Mysteriously, all of the mirrors in the mining facility have also been broken, but there is a single heartbeat coming from one of the chambers.
In here, the Doctor and the team discover one of the survivors of the attack – a woman called Aliss Fenly. And whenever anyone tries to walk behind her, they get thrown up into the air and slammed into the ground, killing them. Seemingly, there is some kind of force, or creature, lurking behind Aliss, and the team quickly learn that if they try to kill the host, the entity will simply go behind them. There doesn’t seem to be a way to defeat it.
It is during his discussion with Aliss that the Doctor soon realises where he is, and that he is dealing with the same creature that he encountered 400,000 years earlier. And as in that Doctor Who classic, the alien remains unseen in ‘The Well,’ apart from a couple of brief, tantalising glimpses – but you would have to freeze the video in order to see it. And like ‘Midnight,’ much of this episode is contained to a single room, with the Doctor locked in a confrontation with a creature trying to figure out a way to beat it.
Ultimately, of course, he does, and we won’t spoil the ending here. And it’s every bit as dramatic as its predecessor.
Certainly, fan reaction to ‘The Well’ seemed to be overwhelmingly positive (if reading the comments on X is any measure of how well a Doctor Who episode is received!) Fans seemed surprised and excited to get a sequel to a Doctor Who classic, and deemed it a worthy follow-up to 2008’s ‘Midnight.’ Some viewers even went so far as to say that this was their favourite episode of the Ncuti Gatwa era so far, and Steven Moffat (who penned the fan favourite ‘Blink‘) even took to the webosphere to suggest that this episode might be better than his own.
But of course, these things are subjective, and there will always be some people who would have preferred something else. But arguably one thing that these Doctor Who classics highlight is how well the programme handles simple concepts and ‘restrictions.’ In ‘Midnight,’ for example, the Time Lord is confined to a single room of a space bus for the majority of the episode. And in ‘The Well,’ most of the story takes place in a single area of the mining facility, with the Doctor and his friends confronting Aliss and the unseen creature.
Fortunately, this is something the series has done well from its inception. One of the very earliest Doctor Who classics – a William Hartnell adventure called ‘The Edge of Destruction‘ – was confined to the TARDIS set and only featured the series’ regulars. And then there is the first episode of ‘The Mind Robber,’ which features just the TARDIS, the main cast, a white void and a pair of recycled robot costumes, and it’s perhaps one of the most powerful episodes of the Patrick Troughton era. And 2015’s ‘Heaven Sent‘ is led almost exclusively by Peter Capaldi, as he tries to find his way out of a mysterious, castle-like maze.
As such, it will be interesting to see how history views ‘The Well.’ Certainly, at the time of writing, it sounds like it will be regarded as a Doctor Who classic for many years to come. At the very least, most seem to agree that it is a worthy follow-up to one of David Tennant’s best adventures.
What did you most enjoy about ‘The Well’? And what is your favourite episode of the Ncuti Gatwa era so far? Let us know in the comments below.
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