The Well Review
More than most episodes, it pivots in the middle, at the Midnight reveal. I knew it was coming, because that’s how life is, and was sus. And I can’t say I liked it. I stared bitterly at the sequence of mounting realization. Especially because it’s so unprompted. “We don’t know what it is”? Seriously? That’s what tips the Doctor off and starts the “do you recognize the plot of Midnight” run, saying “XTonic” and “diamond mine” before doing the title drop and running the quick clips of a, and I’m sorry to do this to you, seventeen year old piece of television. Now, admittedly that seventeen year old piece of television was seen by more than twice as many people as The Robot Revolution, so maybe it’s fair enough to do a throwback seven years longer than bringing back Omega for Arc of Infinity, the previous benchmark for “wait, seriously?” in sequel reveals.
But, to quote the trolls on GallifreyBase, this is cancellation shit. I mean for gods’ sake, it’s even a fucking Saward homage. By the time we’ve gotten to this reveal absolutely nothing in the episode had come close to “something I haven’t seen before,” and my memory only really needs to go as far back as Flux for that to be true. After a cold open TARDIS scene recapping the season and doing an arbitrary needle drop on “Toxic” (I suppose that I need to go back to The End of the World for) it’s just twenty minutes of standard issue sci-fi gubbins—running around on a video game set pointing guns at things. It’s clearly working its way towards horror because modern Doctor Who only uses military sci-fi for a few things, and besides it’s called The Well, but it hasn’t even gotten around to being scary yet. The only interesting material comes in the grace notes around Aliss and her deafness, another example of his determination to virtue signal leading Davies in a useful direction by reminding him that some human drama might be worth adding. And then we get this bland callback reveal. Reader, I am making a face.
It’s not even the same monster! Midnight is vocal repetition; the thing that’s behind you is Hide, which you’d be hard pressed to do a callback to. I’m utterly unsurprised that what’s happened is they belatedly threw out Sharma Angel-Warfall’s actual script, which was an attempt at giving Gatwa his “Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Orisha” request, and just subbed the Midnight explanation in, because it’s an absolute fucking nothing that reeks of a desperate 48 hour rewrite. There’s no reason for it other than giving them something to hype in the behind the scenes footage. Which, I suppose once again making episodes with legs for streaming is a sound strategy. If we get a third season out of Disney it’ll probably be down to the long tail numbers. But I am still just not vibing.
Ironically, then, the back half is rather good. Cassio’s panic and execution is a great payoff to an immaculate performance of “the asshole one that doesn’t like the Doctor”—one of the most brutal and sickening “the wrong guy takes charge” beats in Doctor Who. The Doctor coming right up to Aliss and listening to the creature’s whispers is a fantastic use of Ncuti Gatwa’s trick of playing the Doctor with choking intensity, and I’m an absolute mark for “the solution is Mercury.” The “one more run with the monster” bit is inevitable, but even that concludes with a shockingly hard beat in shooting Belinda. It’s just a chain of sharp, interesting beats that go in novel directions.
On balance I still end up disliking it, purely because the final “oh no the monster escaped” beat felt like overegging the custard and left a bad taste in my mouth. But the reality is that, as midseason inventory episodes go, this is one of the better ones.
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- Patrons may have noticed that the Unleashed recap never happened. All I can say is that I finished the Unleashed for The Robot Revolution and realized I had taken exactly zero notes about it. It’s just not been a rewarding feature to date this season. I miss the in-vision commentaries. Those were reliably good.
- Patrons do, however, have ten thousand words about Alan Turing, artificial intelligence, and the nature of language.
- “Is 2025 broken” is real “tell me you’re not from 2025 without telling me you’re not from 2025” energy, huh?
- The other part of the first twenty minutes that I liked was the end of the cold open—stepping off the TARDIS straight into the jump off a spaceship was a really nice smash into credits.
- I do like how they shoot Aliss, with a lot of emphasis on the vast space behind her, and really focusing on head-on shots. The production on this one—from the same director as last week—is a big part of what elevates it above its ambitions.
- Odd little shift in Mrs. Flood this week. Obviously part of that is putting her in the milieu of individual episodes, but having her call out the Vindicator—a very gun prop—is a sharp deviation from her thus far frockish aesthetics.
- I expect we’ll get rather more of her next week for our presumptive Doctor-lite episode that’s clearly going to be teasing the finale a bit. And by Pete McTighe no less. I imagine that one will give me a bit more to work with.
- Which does rather get at the problem I’m having here, which came up with The Robot Revolution as well: I’m bored. Nothing about this feels essential or vibrant. We’ve gotten back to doing competent Doctor Who, and thank fuck, but we’re not doing Doctor Who that rises to the moment on any real level. It feels dated. And I’m just not excited by it right now. I enjoy it, and I enjoy writing reviews of it, but it’s not taking up more of my brain than that. Maybe that’s fascism and depression and the fact that the schedule is awful. Idk. But it’s a disappointing way to feel about a possible last season of the show, and I hope it changes sometime before the end of May.
- So, reckon it’s a bad sign that new episodes aren’t getting announced in the rotating banners at the top of the Disney+ frontpage?
- Let’s not end on such a grim note. Here’s Emmylou Harris with “Deeper Well.”
Ranking
- Lux
- Joy to the World
- The Well
- The Robot Revolution
April 26, 2025 @ 8:11 pm
I respect doing a Midnight sequel that ditches everything that people remember from Midnight, and I thought the direction and performances, especially from Rose Ayling-Ellis, were astonishingly good. That said I do agree that this isn’t really anything we haven’t seen before – the mid episode murders reminding me, of all things, your “massacre separated by half an hour of screentime” bit from the Waters of Mars entry – a real “we’re getting this out the way” moment.
I feel like I’m the only one who enjoys Mrs Flood – Anita Dobson is clearly enjoying herself immensely
April 26, 2025 @ 11:31 pm
I love her more with every appearance, personally.
April 26, 2025 @ 8:15 pm
Oh gosh, I thought I was the only one who felt dread at the lack of the Disney+ banner. The one for last week was gone by Sunday.
I liked the episode pretty well, even though the connection to the Midnight entity seemed very random. I wish it had been something new.
Which is how I’ve felt since last year, actually.
April 28, 2025 @ 4:17 am
Cam someome tell ke WHY WHY theubditched the original initialmidea of orishas reslly ?? I cannpt imagoje hownornwhy itneouod be offensive. Will the Midnight entity return later in,thr bseason as part of the climax??
April 29, 2025 @ 4:38 am
It’s still on the banner for Disney+ in Aotearoa/New Zealand…maybe it’s had a reasonable viewership here?
April 26, 2025 @ 8:22 pm
The mercury did feel like another “Rusty reads the Eruditorum” moment.
While, adding to the general air of panic rewrite, “unexplained enigmatic entity attached to a character and drastically affecting other people when they occupy a particular spatial position in relation to said character, a phenomenon which is deliberately weaponised against someone” feels like cannibalising 73 Yards in a much more rudimentary form.
April 27, 2025 @ 2:21 pm
I’m working out a theory that the cancellation rumours are a carefully engineered narrative collapse for creative purposes which means either Rusty Reads the Eruditorum or I need to go touch some grass. Happy Sunday, y’all!
April 26, 2025 @ 8:30 pm
Am I missing something or maybe just terminally silly, or … does the whole Midnight -> 12 o’clock -> “Behind you!” thing not work? Twelve o’clock is dead ahead. Six o’clock is behind you. This monster should have been from the planet Suppertime.
April 27, 2025 @ 6:53 am
You’re absolutely right – I had this same complaint. It needs three people to work, and only if you assume the third person’s position at the six doesn’t count.
But also, as soon as they say that, it’s a solved game. The tension goes out. They just have to not stand in a way that activates it. It’s not like “don’t blink” where it has an in built ticking clock. I think they had to drop the Midnight reveal there to tell you the entity could do more than one thing.
April 27, 2025 @ 2:16 pm
It’s a solved game until you introduce the multiplayer aspect plus the fact that at any given time one or more players are invisible and incommunicado. Just as Texas Hold ‘Em would play very, very differently with actors as opponents as opposed to space marines, so would this game.
April 26, 2025 @ 9:01 pm
Typo – Walfall, not Warfall
I agree, Aliss was great (the character writing and the performance). I also am looking forward to seeing more Anita Dobson.
April 26, 2025 @ 9:12 pm
Davies leaning into the allegations that’s he’s returning to the well.
April 27, 2025 @ 6:54 am
Very good
April 26, 2025 @ 9:19 pm
There’s something cinematic or photographic in how Aliss is shot — something two-dimensional and unreal, contrasting with the humanity of her performance.
April 26, 2025 @ 9:48 pm
The ‘Midnight’ reveal bummed me out. I watched it twice now (I’m Australian: So first time in my afternoon, and then again this morning) and while there are bits that are really good, the Midnight connection really isn’t. The monster is too different, and now it knows the Doctor’s name. I don’t understand how being deaf keeps you safe because it whispers at separate points to our two leads and they both survive.
In an interesting twist of fate, I’ve been revisiting Eruditorum posts and the day before The Well, I read your post on Earthshock. I can’t help but feel The Well shares the same problems: a very gun story that has a reveal designed for ‘Doctor Who’ fans. It even has the fuzzy flashback clips.
In Australia, ‘Doctor Who’ is appearing on the front-page banners. At least for a few days before and after each episode which seems fair-ish. However, I haven’t seen it listed in the Top 10 in Australia.
April 27, 2025 @ 11:19 pm
Alarmingly, Doctor Who doesn’t seem to have cracked the top 10 for Disney+ a single time this season, as far as I can see here in the U.S.
April 28, 2025 @ 11:58 am
I agree and also noticed this. The fact that Attack of the Clones is currently in the US top 10 and not brand new DW is…not great!
April 28, 2025 @ 12:17 pm
I actually disagree, and I think the Attack of the Clones comparison largely speaks to why. Here’s a breakdown of the current top ten.
Recent movies: 1 (Mufasa the Lion King)
Nature documentaries: 1 (Penguins)
Children’s catalog movies: 3 (Shark’s Tale, Rio 2, Lilo and Stitch 2)
Adult catalog movies: 2 (Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones)
TV: 3 (Andor, Daredevil: Born Again, Andor S1 recap)
This simply isn’t a chart where current TV series land unless they’re massive franchise tentpoles. It’s literally half catalog material. Either the entire new release slate of Disney+ is failing appallingly or (and I think this more likely) it’s a streamer with an unusually robust catalog and a lack of granular charts. I’d be really interested in seeing a “TV shows” top ten, or a “new releases” top ten. And if Doctor Who failed to make either of those, I’d be a lot more worried. (Likewise, the detail that worries me is that Disney isn’t putting a lot of effort into promoting the show—a fact that speaks less to ratings and more to Disney’s priorities.
April 26, 2025 @ 10:00 pm
Showing clips from previous episodes is a gimmick that always grates me, and something RTD2 seems to rely on fairly heavily. It’s part of this era’s problem with not trusting the audience’s intelligence. (Although, to be fair, that’s more relevant to when an episode will flashback to something that happened in that same episode. Maddening.)
When the clip is – as you point out – 17 years old, my issue with it is more aesthetic than anything. The juxtaposition between what television looks like now and what it looked like then is so incredibly jarring, and Doctor Who never makes an effort to smooth it over, to integrate the clip in a more naturalistic, creative way.
In this instance, I also take issue with the reasoning behind it. The whole point of a Midnight sequel and the lead-up to the big reveal is to please long-term fans who are intimately familiar with the episode. Sure, that works. Those fans don’t need to see the episode to remember it so, presumably, the clips are for the vast portion of the viewership who don’t possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of the show. But what does a quick flash of Tennant and a random women tell them? How could that possibly inform their interpretation of the episode in any meaningful way whatsoever?
I know I’m hung up on this very small, insignificant detail, but it’s a personal pet peeve of mine. The people who understand the clips don’t need them. And the people who need the clips won’t understand them.
Who are they for?
April 26, 2025 @ 11:03 pm
My hypothesis: they are for people who haven’t seen Midnight, but after watching The Well, will go and look it up on a streaming service. The clip shows newer fans that the reference is to an earlier episode, not an off-screen adventure. In the age of streaming this makes sense, since people actually have a means to delve into a show’s back-catalogue. Harder to see the rationale in the Saward era…
April 27, 2025 @ 1:45 am
I mean I saw someone on Twitter say their mum only recognised that it was midnight when she saw the clips, so I think that’s who it’s for – casual viewers who remember the episode vaguely from back in the day but aren’t obsessive enough to catch the reference without the visual cue (or the doctor just explaining what happened in doctor who midnight which would be worse imo)
April 26, 2025 @ 10:06 pm
After the years of Chibnall nadir, all I want from Doctor Who these days is to be entertained, and while I was entertained, here, nothing says cancellation is imminent besides “well, at least the hardest of hardcore fans are entertained.” Saward homage, indeed…
April 26, 2025 @ 10:29 pm
I may have more detailed things to say later, but I will lead with: my wife remembered “Midnight” as “The one where Donna went shopping”
April 27, 2025 @ 2:11 pm
I mean, that’s absolutely how Donna remembers it so. . .you obviously have a very wise and perceptive wife. 😁
April 26, 2025 @ 10:45 pm
The best thing I can say about the Midnight reveal is that it was at least better executed than the Sutekh reveal last season. (That one even made the audience wait a whole week before playing some fuzzy TV footage of Tom Baker.)
At least we haven’t gone full Saward (yet) where every episode is so obsessed with being an homage that they’re able to hack in a “anniversary season full of returning monsters!” hook to it. We’ll have to see how much the rest of the season is committed to new ideas.
It’s very difficult to judge objectively though, because like El and the other comments have said, after coming away from the Chibnall era, just having competently made Who in itself feels like such a victory that you kind of shut out that part of your brain that’s wondering what you’re going to think of episodes like this five years from now. Especially if there isn’t a show anymore by then.
April 27, 2025 @ 12:15 am
“At least we haven’t gone full Saward (yet) where every episode is so obsessed with being an homage that they’re able to hack in a “anniversary season full of returning monsters!” hook to it.”
To be fair, I’m inclined to think the homage-obsession of the Saward era was more at the behest of JNT and Ian Levine than Saward. (Did Saward actually like any of the classic monsters besides the Cybermen, and maybe the Daleks?)
April 27, 2025 @ 2:09 pm
I do think Ian Levine could be a useful bellweather of exactly what to make of this episode.
April 26, 2025 @ 11:22 pm
Weird, it’s in my Disney+ banner. Might be because I have my age range set a bit down for my kids?
I liked the episode the least of RTD2 (which I have otherwise firmly enjoyed) save maybe Empire of Death, but I’m a base-under-siege Grinch and I know my limitations. Aliss was a standout for me; I appreciated the way the performance and the cinematography communicated that she was not the stock vulnerable-person-targeted-by-the-monster Doctor Who character, and clearly hiding something with her own priorities – when the Doctor and Belinda treat her as a stock DW victim, it’s to their detriment, and while I do think Davies has been doing this on purpose – highlighting the Doctor’s mistakes, assumptions, and recklessness – I’m perplexed by how covert it is, given how overtly it’s referenced in TRR. And the really nihilist moment – that the entity went up to the space station with the first crew, so that Belinda is shot and the captain commits suicide out of sheer paranoia – is likewise so covert, with just the one-second shot of the life signs scan on the elevator, as to be lost on the majority of viewers. It does feel like there’s a more demanding Doctor Who in here that gets watered down in rewrites.
As for cancellation imminence, I did have a moment this week that made me think the Disney numbers were better than we assume. I help run the Scholastic Book Fair at my kids’ school and have for many years, and for the first time in at least a decade (if ever), they sent us Doctor Who books. To give some context, this is an American public school, and the other franchise material we get is Minecraft, Pokémon, Stitch, Mario, Taylor Swift, that sort of thing – basically only the big stuff. The books had Jodie on the cover, so when we called to complain about how much Dogman crap they sent us, I asked if they had any Gatwa material and was told not yet, but they’re sending these to try and meet demand – so Who knows, but it’s not nothing.
April 27, 2025 @ 7:08 am
I completely missed the life scan shot and its implications on first watch.
April 27, 2025 @ 10:32 am
I kinda just assumed this was the usual “is the monster reaĺly gone?” horror beat, rather than a serious suggestion that it had actually escaped the planet.
Then again, maybe we’ll find out in another 17 years 😉
April 27, 2025 @ 12:38 pm
I kinda just assumed this was the usual “is the monster reaĺly gone?” horror beat, rather than a serious suggestion that it had actually escaped the planet.
Then again, maybe we’ll find out in another 17 years 😉
April 27, 2025 @ 2:07 pm
😉 Hey, who turned out the lights?
April 26, 2025 @ 11:39 pm
Even if this season never produces another very good episode, I’d say the Disney experiment has to be considered a success, even if a qualified one. The best five episodes so far I’d call Boom, Dot and Bubble, Rogue, Joy to the World, and Lux, and at the very least Lux couldn’t have been made without Disney’s partnership. The only big reason to worry, I think, is that so much of the creative success of thoes five episodes rests on the proverbial pens of two men who have been writeing for the show for twenty years.
April 27, 2025 @ 12:22 am
Thinking of the mercury as an Eruditorum shout made me realize there’s also a possible alchemical significance to the carbon-46: humanity (the missing thing in this season’s mystery) is a carbon-based life form with a standard diploid chromosome number of 46.
April 27, 2025 @ 12:34 am
Po-faced horror is probably my least favourite mode of Doctor Who, so I naturally disliked this one. Felt the script at least needed more gradations of tenseness. The soldiers are all tense and anal-retentive at the start, and they basically continue to be so throughout, resulting in an episode that feels like it’s just bluntly yelling at you for drama, a-la Earthshock or Villa Diodati. The captain who announces that she doesn’t believe in hope, then believes in hope at the end before performing a stock noble sacrifice, landed with sheer bathos for me, reminding me of nothing so much as the end of Series 12 when a Game of Thrones actor gets the honour of resolving the plot. This is the only episode of Gatwa so far that’s sophomoric enough to feel like Chibnall on a higher budget to me. Hope it’s just a blip.
April 27, 2025 @ 1:24 am
Agreed about general sloppiness, but I do like this sort of episode in general and I’m glad to see it represented; it was nice just getting to hang out on a creepy sci fi world for a bit again, even if Midnight, Impossible Planet/Satan Pit, etc. are better versions of it.
Some sort of connection to Midnight is cool, but the Doctor having this Important Realization Moment is strange. This doesn’t make sense to be the same creature, and the Doctor realizing he’s on the same planet doesn’t actually contribute to anything. It could have been a casual reference combined with the “Midnight” title drop in the clock image and the connections this sparks in the viewer’s mind would have felt more interesting.
April 27, 2025 @ 1:35 am
Just one thing re the ‘it’s not the same monster’ – I think that was handwaved by the Doctor mentioning it liked to play games. The simultaneous and then overlapping speech was the game it was playing when they first met; hiding behind people and triggering madness and paranoia was its latest game, maybe?
I also wasn’t keen on the end as well – the ‘hope’ mentioned in the episode was cynically dashed at the end…
BTW was Mrs Flood’s costume a callback to earlier characters or episodes? It looked a little familiar but maybe that’s just me.
April 27, 2025 @ 1:37 am
… and the comment about it liking to play games also led me to a moment of “oh god, it’s not been retconned as another one of the bloody pantheon is it?” but thankfully so far no…
April 27, 2025 @ 2:08 am
Have to strongly disagree with the idea that the Midnight tie-in added nothing to the proceedings. It’s the thematic engine of the episode, elevating it from a merely competent Base Under Siege to a metatextual drama about the problem of the past/lore/nostalgia at this juncture in the show’s history.
This is Davies literally returning to the well and wondering if what emerges is or can be anything of worth. The main driver of suspense here isn’t the fate of Aliss (in wonderland), it’s the fate of the classic Who episode Midnight. Will this sequel ruin it? Will it allow us to see the entity and thereby immediately kill it (literally and figuratively)? The episode keeps flirting with the ruination of revelation (the glimpse Belinda catches of the entity, the slow build-up to the mercury mirror, the beginning of the suggestion of a shape with the midnight worker). We’re the Doctor: “I want to see it!” But also the prospect of actually doing so is too awful to pass.
Even the entity now knows it’s in Doctor Who (it knows the Doctor’s name) and it aligns its M.O. (death at spatial midnight) with the name given to it by the fans: the Midnight Entity.
Davies, like the Midnight Entity, climbed out of the well after his planet (Who) had been strip-mined of its diamonds and abandoned to decay. He’s learned a few new tricks since the last time he was here, but he’s still the same entity. Is that enough? Davies doesn’t know either.
April 27, 2025 @ 5:54 am
Oooh that’s a good reading- similar to how Moffat introduced tension in the barn scene from Listen, selling the danger by tying it to the metatextual threat the scene poses to Doctor Who as a show. It just doesn’t come off as well imo because “what does the Midnight Entity look like” wasn’t actually that important to Midnight, where the whole point is that it has no physical form. The real shark-jumper would be explaining The Entity’s origins or what it’s supposed to be (eg. Pantheon, Not-Things etc) and that never really gets covered.
April 28, 2025 @ 10:20 am
Oh I LOVE this reading of it. I really enjoyed the episode and didn’t find myself being bothered by the Midnight connection at all (despite having been spoiled on it ahead of time and dreading it) and you’ve perfectly put into words why it worked for me.
Besides, in a 62-year-old show, it would be a shame to never work with your older material and try and make something new out of it. If you didn’t, the great pantheon of classic Who monsters simply wouldn’t exist. The fanbase (myself included) already bemoan the lack of a great addition to that pantheon since at least the Silence, and even if the Midnight entity isn’t quite on the same level as the Weeping Angels, Sontarans, or Slitheen, it’s still wonderful to see it come back, have its history with the Doctor be a driving force behind the tension and fear of the episode, while not exclusively relying on that history. There’s plenty new and interesting things being done here, using a familiar face (or lack thereof) as a bit of an anchor, in a way.
April 27, 2025 @ 2:20 am
I have to say I really enjoyed this one overall, especially the stuff with Allis, but am I the only person who was really irked by the doctor and belinda just having the exact spacesuits ahead of the adventure?
It felt emblematic of RTD’s approach this era – “let’s just have them put the suits on in the tardis to save time. The audience won’t care”.
But it doesn’t make a lick of sense. And even though it is a small thing it made the stakes feel lower for me for the first 10 minutes. It felt like the doctor implicitly knew exactly where he was, so the unease of him being a fish out of water was completely dashed.
April 27, 2025 @ 3:56 am
It put me off too. The cold open in general felt rather lazy and underwritten. Rehashing the season plot, exploring some emotional stakes with Belinda, and then leaping straight from “oh no my parents might be dead” to (another) “hooray for the TARDIS wardrobe!” sequence was total tonal whiplash.
The worst part about the suits for me was the Doctor and Belinda’s total lack of reaction to seeing that they just so happened to be wearing the exact same thing as everyone else. That, the convenient two-person gap in the line-up, and their goofy, casual attitude made it feel as if (like you said) they knew exactly where they were. Worse, it was like they knew they were in a Doctor Who cold open and so were just going through the motions until the plot kicked in.
At the very least, RTD could’ve thrown in some naff line about the TARDIS psychically manipulating them into wearing the right suits.
April 27, 2025 @ 4:22 am
Yeah that was weird. And when they step out of the Tardis there are two spare helmets immediately in front of them?
April 27, 2025 @ 4:24 am
Oh, just saw Suitable Scrutiny’s response.
April 27, 2025 @ 12:48 pm
Having the right suits was so weird that I thought it was setup for a twist where the Doctor actually came here on purpose for some reason, was really surprised when that didn’t happen
April 27, 2025 @ 1:51 pm
It makes perfect sense to me if ‘Joy to the World’ is seen as a showcase for the Fifteenth Doctor’s modus operandi: make sure to show up dressed exactly right for the occasion and everything will fall into place from there. It worked for him and Belinda in Lux, and it worked for them this week. Presumably after making it back to 2025 a version of him from his own future will show up next to the TARDIS before they pick up Belinda, sneak into the wardrobe, and arrange it so the right outfits will be at hand to get Fifteen and Belinda through this spring in one piece.
So that means that, despite all appearances otherwise, this was really a stealth Frock episode all along. 😉
April 27, 2025 @ 2:45 pm
The TARDIS is, whatever her faults, very good at ensuring she can provide contemporary costumes which precisely fit the Doctor and the latest “stray” companion they’ve brought home. So, while I certainly noticed it, it didn’t bother me. That’s just how she rolls.
If the Doctor and Belinda hadn’t been standing in the middle of the line, the troopers would have obviously bunched up, and so of course there had to be helmets there.
Incidentally, I wasn’t at all surprised by the ending. After Shaya orders troopers 7 and 9 to go first through the airlock and “get Aliss out”, we clearly see the display showing there are FOUR occupants. Nice touch.
April 27, 2025 @ 11:42 pm
Well yeah ok, the line formed around the Doctor and Belinda. It’s hard to catch but it looked like there were exactly the right number of helmets for the number of people. And the troopers don’t seem very surprised to see them, at least at first. YMMV.
April 27, 2025 @ 3:02 am
An odd one. On its own terms, a competent and effective space horror. Aliss is a very rich and well performed character, an interesting one to have at the centre of this incredibly Gun episode.
I’m not as appalled by some at the reveal that it’s sequelising Midnight, but it’s a truly odd decision because it adds nothing. It doesn’t actually add anything either to this story or to Midnight, it doesn’t build on it as a narrative foundation, it doesn’t even play the hits of the previous episode. In some ways maybe this is a ‘good’ sequel to Midnight because it’s not an episode I think ought to be sequelised at all. The idea of going back to it and doing “the Stop Copying Me Monster is back but this time on a speeding plane” or “and this time the Doctor will learn it’s the ghost of his dad” is madness, so maybe doing another bleak sci fi horror about how awful everyone is and saying “btw it’s Midnight” is the best way to do it if, for some reason, you have to?
Again, you feel the influence of Steven Moffat on RTD2: the rules of the monster and the way they can be deployed against it feels like it reflects one of his approaches, and the whole thing feels like a dark reflection of Silence in the Library: the investigation of the monster-silenced outpost (but with professional soldiers not quirky research types), the risk of being caught in the ‘infected’ character’s shadow, the final run of the expedition leader but to descend into darkness and death not be saved or save anyone.
In all, a genuinely horrible horror episode. But the Midnight sequel aspect of it is so weird, only not ruining the episode because it makes no impact on the episode, that it shakes my faith in Davies, newly restored after the previous two episodes.
April 27, 2025 @ 4:20 am
It was solid and spooky.
I don’t mind getting a few trad Doccy Who stories in a season. Last year was a wild swing nearly every week up to the finale and it felt hard to place the Doctor and Companion as real people. Although there were some really nice character moments in s1, at it’s worst, there were wild time jumps and narrative shortcuts which stopped me from engaging with the duo more than “they’re fun and have nice chemistry”.
This season so far we’ve had the standard Companion and Doctor bond over a trio of continuous present day, historical, and future adventures (like Martha and Bill had). And it’s a welcome return for me because I have a better handle on Belinda and the Doctor. It means I can enjoy a ‘nothing new’ story because I’m connected to these characters.
I will say though that I think there is at least something in this thematically which develops from Midnight. Whilst Midnight was about an obvious bigotry. Here, the episode centres around the idea of turning one’s back on something as being the same as killing it. It’s echoed in Aliss’ desperation when the crew turn their back on her. And unusually for the BUS formula, the tension isn’t driven by a locked door, but by whether they will leave this woman on her own. It feels prescient as ever.
Of course, the problem with that approach is that the tension in the first half doesn’t really seem to ramp up with deaths or locked doors or chases. I never felt they were in that much danger when they realised how it worked. They just need to avoid Aliss doing pirouettes. Luckily the actor puts in such a compelling performance that I can worry for her even if I was pretty certain of the safety of the Doctor and Belinda.
April 27, 2025 @ 10:10 am
re: the Moffatness of it – watching it i really felt like this is Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone to Midnight’s Blink. a sequel that expands and modifies the rules of the monster in order to tell a new story with it after a perfectly self-contained concept
April 27, 2025 @ 1:41 pm
I think the fact that both stories are also nods to Aliens (nuke the site from orbit indeed), the paradigm-setter for sequels doing just that thing you said, seals the deal on RTD having intentionally approached the episode this way. 😄
April 27, 2025 @ 5:57 am
I enjoyed it but perhaps I’m easy to please, but I do think that it might have been better if they’d just made it something new, instead of the Midnight Entity but inexplicably different. Maybe bringing back an old monster but having it behave completely differently to it’s original appearance while the Doctor talks about it as if it’s exactly how he remembered is another nod to Earthshock.
April 27, 2025 @ 6:37 am
I was aware of the leaks stating that this would be a sequel to Midnight which I think softened the clunkiness of the reveal for me somewhat, and on paper the idea of a sequel to Midnight sounded awful to me but in execution I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected.
But it’s also made me appreciate how Moffat would handle callbacks, I’m reminded of the clockwork androids returning for Deep Breath, the story avoids grinding to a halt by instead playing with the Doctor not being able to remember where he’s seen them before and doesn’t spend too much time dwelling on it. I think a similar beat would have worked better here, leave threads for diehard viewers to pick upon and speculate that it’s the same entity from Midnight rather than “HERE’S A FLASHBACK FROM SERIES 4”.
April 27, 2025 @ 1:36 pm
There’s a bit of a necessary marketing feint there, I think. That sequence would be engaging new Disney viewers of Who by reminding them there’s a whole era of the show on another platform (Max at the moment for me, but Who knows what it would be for them) which it features a younger David Tennant than the one who played Fourteen.
April 27, 2025 @ 7:00 am
Surely the longest waits between villains are Sutekh last year and the Toymaker before that?
April 27, 2025 @ 1:31 pm
RTD’s last act as showrunner will be to revive Kal of the Tribe of Gum.
April 28, 2025 @ 7:47 am
He’s the Boss. The One Who Waits. He’ll be the big bad in the finale.
April 29, 2025 @ 8:17 am
adaptation of DWM’s ‘Hunters of the Burning Stone’?
April 27, 2025 @ 7:06 am
I enjoyed it on its own merits. A bit of spooky Base Under Siege from time to time is fine by me. And I could see this as something that kids could take up in the playground (if they do that these days, I’m too old to know).
There are a few dissonant notes, I agree.
The story is happy to reach out to Midnight, when it adds nothing to the plot. Doesn’t explain anything. Doesn’t help the Doctor resolve the plot. If you’d only seen the Disney series, what would the extremely short clips from S4 actually mean to you? Nothing. Personally, I had a feeling it would be something like “what’s that on your back” from Turn Left. It could equally be that.
And wasn’t there a shot where Aliss did a 360 turn with no ill effects? That would mean the monster wasn’t compelled to attack just because someone was stood exactly behind its host. So it would not be compelled to attack itself by seeing itself in the mirror of mercury?
A+ execution of B script. I try very hard not to get involved with the cancellation speculation.
April 27, 2025 @ 8:07 am
It’s not because someone is standing behind Aliss, but because someone is standing behind Aliss relative to someone else. The creature is always hiding behind Aliss from any point of view and it can grab people when Aliss blocks that view
April 27, 2025 @ 8:55 am
I’ll take that, I guess. As Rules Monster, it kinda works.
April 27, 2025 @ 7:27 am
I think increasingly one of the hallmarks of this era of television is the decision that nostalgia be played as a dramatic beat. The reveal that this is the Midnight entity doesn’t really add any dramatic stakes, it only really makes the existing stakes seem stakier.
The main successes Davies has had with these reveals are the Daleks coming back in Army of Ghosts and the Master in Utopia (I don’t count the Daleks in parting of the ways as the trailer revealed them) because those reveals fundamentally changed the story they were in. I don’t think this reveal added much – it’s still a story about a mysterious entity grabbing onto a random person and wondering if that person should be left. I guess it confirmed the entity was malevolent instead of potentially misunderstood, but that seemed pretty established. (Although maybe the episode needed a shot in the arm once the game was solved).
And also, I know this isn’t really how drama works, but I hate that after an episode about how it isn’t right to turn our backs on desperate people, the reveal that the monster got out kind of suggests it would have saved more lives if they left Aliss there? Chuds on the internet could do the same maths they did on Raiders of the Lost Ark to say if nothing was done it would have worked out the same or better.
But maybe it’s like Bob from Twin Peaks. Maybe it didn’t get out and the suspicion of the monster is what lives on. Maybe the monster is just The Evil that Men Do. Maybe there’s an episode to be made out of the Doctor thinking he’s dealing with the entity but it was just people all along.
April 27, 2025 @ 1:27 pm
I enjoyed 73 Yards a lot more than El did so I appreciate the Bob reference. I think in both these episodes the show is reaching towards a sort of Lynchian dreamlike horror mode it hadn’t done previously, with productive even if not entirely successful results.
April 27, 2025 @ 7:54 am
Oh dear. The one where RTD returns to a well, drops the bucket down it and I overstretch my metaphors.
I’m avoiding spoilers like a pandemic this season so I didn’t know what the big reveal was going to be. In a way it might have been better if I had because when it finally happened it was anticlimactic.
The potential issue with sequels is that there must be a reason to return to the well other than “They liked that one let’s do it again, but bigger”.
This seemed to be another attempt by Rusty to “do a Moffat” and invent a Rules Monster, then realise he already had one of his own – the Midnight Entity and then proceed to bugger about with the rules so they made even less sense than they did the first time, “It’s behind you!” is really draining the well of drama school warm-up games.
And welcome platoon leader Shaya, yet another Doctor Who gritty female space commander with RADA enunciation and her surly “shoot first” second in command JD Vance, sorry, I mean Cassio.
Speaking of messing about with the rules. Anita Dobson has now gone from being a delightful Fourth Wall breaking Greek Chorus to a recurring time travelling McGuffin. What are we meant to make of that?
Is Mrs Flood Susan Twist?
April 27, 2025 @ 1:12 pm
Mrs. Flood seems more and more definitely connected with Susan Twist however. . .Clara Oswald is ALSO a recurring time travelling McGuffin of sorts. Just throwing that out there. I think every major creative decision RTD makes during this era is deliberately engaging with either Moffat or Chibnall’s previous work.
April 27, 2025 @ 1:19 pm
And/Or with his own previous tenure as showrunner of course. Perhaps it’s better to phrase it as saying that “RTD2 is constantly in conversation with any number of Moffat, Chibnall, and RTD1 all at once. But to spice things up a bit, Mickey Mouse is his plus one.”
April 27, 2025 @ 2:31 pm
RADA accent? I detected Irish. Your mileage may vary.
April 27, 2025 @ 6:50 pm
I used RADA as shorthand for generic drama school. And the comment was more about the type of character Doctor Who is fond of than any specific actor. Irish or not, the actoriness will out.
April 27, 2025 @ 7:02 pm
Also I said enunciation not accent. Two different things.
April 27, 2025 @ 3:05 pm
I think you’ll find that Caoifhionn Dunne attended the Gaiety School of Acting, in Dublin. So RADA accent is definitely inaccurate.
April 27, 2025 @ 6:51 pm
See my reply above.
April 29, 2025 @ 6:48 am
I feel like this has become a bit “thing that only I know what it means”. What is a RADA enunciation exactly if it’s not an accent and doesn’t rely on the person having gone to RADA?
The overwhelming majority of actors on Doctor Who will have been one drama school or another. Most actors cast as authority figures will look for ways to sound authoritative.
What are some other examples of this type? I’m just not seeing it.
April 29, 2025 @ 7:09 am
She…uh, speaks clearly, or something.
April 27, 2025 @ 10:09 am
Excellent review, as ever.
It’s bizarre that The Well is a Midnight sequel when they are such different stories. Midnight is rich with comedy and character work in its first act; all the personalities on board are well drawn; the Doctor is put in a genuinely vulnerable position. It’s a story about something – the paranoia of the mob, ‘humanity at its worst’. The Well doesn’t have any of this. It’s a generic sci-fi horror. Grimdark slop without any characters and any point.
I’m disappointed – but not surprised – that a lot of the fan chatter on social media channels is so positive. I’ve seen posts and comments along the lines of ‘finally a serious episode’, ‘best episode in years’, ‘hopefully the silliness stops’, and so on. The sort of people who think Love and Monsters is terrible, and whose fondness for Midnight seems to miss what’s effective about it.
Once upon a time, I might have hoped that the best of Moffat could have defeated the Gun side of fandom once and for all. If The Big Bang, Hell Bent, et al haven’t brought about Frock Supremacy, what will? Or must we forever endure those fans who regard The Well (and The Waters of Mars and The Impossible Planet) as quality Doctor Who?
With fans like these, another Chibnall Era feels inevitable.
April 27, 2025 @ 12:22 pm
I think there’s much more going on here with the Gun/Frock dialectic than meets the eye. Christopher Chung rather brilliantly plays Roddy Ho on Slow Horses as exactly the kind of twit who would be online praising exactly this kind of episode as a serious return to sf form. The way in which the ‘hot guest star of the week’ engaged with the monster, and what came of it, seems to me a rather pointed statement that has RTD’s fingerprints all over it, to mix a couple of metaphors. 😅
April 27, 2025 @ 12:27 pm
To put it another way, there are certain things a gentleman and professional like RTD could never say to or about a valued colleague like Chibnall. However. . .
April 27, 2025 @ 1:47 pm
I think you’re too deep in an insular fandom debate if you’re imagining the enemy as not just “people who have a regressive vision of what DW is supposed to be as opposed to other possibilities”, but “people who liked Impossible Planet”.
April 27, 2025 @ 2:28 pm
Hmm, I’m not sure that ‘regressive’ is the best term for this! After all, An Unearthly Child is more Frock than Gun, and Hartnell is rarely Gun. ‘Regressive’ inaccurately implies a chronology that just isn’t there. [I appreciate you might mean ‘regressive’ politically, but that’s not quite the same dichotomy that I’m getting at.]
Frock and Gun have clearer meanings, and are well established in Doctor Who discourse, hence my use of them. 🙂
April 27, 2025 @ 2:50 pm
Well, that is an accurate way to school my impreciseness I suppose, but it kind of dodges what I said. Though you could argue I’m being just as reddit nitpicky by taking an issue with “must we forever endure people who regard these episodes as good”, but like… yeah, you must.
April 29, 2025 @ 5:36 pm
I’m not sure what you mean by that. The very early Hartnell era (i.e., everything prior to The Reign of Terror) seems pretty Gun to me; An Unearthly Child in particular treats the caveman politics seriously in a way that Dennis Spooner wouldn’t have.
April 27, 2025 @ 4:00 pm
It’s funny you should mention Chibnall, I have a weird sense of deja vu between his run and RTD2. Starting with a series that, while flawed, shows a bit of a vision and some experimentation, followed by a series that pivots back hard to doing Proper Doctor Who(tm) and getting the average anorack back on board (at least temporarily), potentially at everyone’s expense.
Obviously I’m being a bit dramatic here based off two generic episodes and a dodgy callback, and I’m a lot fonder of this episode than most people here, and and RTD2 is much better than Chibnall, but it doesn’t really feel essential on the whole. I suppose it’s more oriented at the new Disney viewers than us miserable fans, though I don’t really have a clue how well it’s actually going down with them. Also worth mentioning on the Frock front that a good chunk of fans still hate Hell Bent so idk if there’s been a “winner” on that front just yet.
April 27, 2025 @ 7:32 pm
Mmm! The big exception to this, of course, is that Lux was so good! If RTD can do Lux this series, maybe there’s hope yet…right?
April 27, 2025 @ 6:14 pm
I always thought the point about the Frock Vs Gun turf wars was not that one was better than the other and must be trounced forever, but that Doctor Who is a remarkable show to encompass both tones (as well as dozens of others) a d is only enriched by having such diverse notes to play.
The idea that Moffat wanted to (or should have) “defeated the Gun side of fandom” to bring about the “Frock supremacy” is, pardon me, playground bollocks. Moffat was telling love stories using space marines and psychopaths and clockwork rules. He was using all the notes.
For better or for worse, it’s not the bloody 90s any more and hasn’t been for ages. Fulminating against fans who like The Impossible Planet is a mad, bitter waste of energy.
April 27, 2025 @ 7:54 pm
To be sure, suspense, darkness, the epic, ‘all the notes’ – all of these are good things! But all of these can be done with Frock. To quote El: ‘an aesthetic that recognizes that irony, camp, and outright silliness are not only compatible with drama, they make it better and more effective.’ Apart from a few Doctor quips, The Well was pure Gun. And dull.
Ultimately my point with my original comment is to say that I want Doctor Who episodes that feel like Doctor Who; The Well is generic sci-fi, and it depresses me that some fans like this. Maybe I’m fulminating wastefully, maybe I’m mad and bitter, but it makes me sad when DW doesn’t bother to be DW, and sadder still that some people love this.
April 28, 2025 @ 2:34 am
Yes, I think to ignore the interesting readings people have contributed here, the highlights Sandifer notes in the review herself, Rose Ayling-Elis’ performance and simply say “I am sad that people love this” is the absolute definition of mad and bitter.
We are evidently not in the hands of someone who thinks Doctor Who should be space marines all the time. Your fear that the wrong people from rec.arts.drwho will get to win is obviously not correct. Demonstrating that Doctor Who can go from the colour and multilayered camp of Lux to grimdark space marines is itself the show luxuriating in the broadness of its time, its ability to go anywhere and do anything. I find your attitude deeply sad. A clannish, fannish inflexibility of thinking that is worse than any given Worst Episode of the show.
April 28, 2025 @ 4:48 am
‘Demonstrating that Doctor Who can go from the colour and multilayered camp of Lux to grimdark space marines is itself the show luxuriating in the broadness of its time, its ability to go anywhere and do anything.’
Here is where I disagree, though. I don’t think it’s a strength that Doctor Who can go from Lux to The Well, just as it’s not a strength that it can go from Gridlock to The Lazarus Experiment, or from a Moffat episode to a Whithouse episode. Doctor Who can and should explore all sorts of styles and genres, but I don’t see any value in doing po-faced sci-fi action rubbish that we can find anywhere. Is the show somehow richer for having, say, The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos in it? I don’t think so. I’d always prefer a much more Frockish finale, i.e. like every Davies and Moffat finale.
I’m not saying that everything needs to be like Lux – I adore plenty of episodes that aren’t. But I am saying that every episode should be ambitious, experimental, and have something idiosyncratic and frock-ish about it. The original Midnight more than qualified.
If you found those elements in The Well, then more power to you, you had a better time than I did. Certainly Rose Ayling-Ellis gives a decent performance and there are a few small elements, as El highlights, that are well-executed; but none of these make up for the fact that The Well is drearily banal, and I’d prefer something fresher and weirder.
Finally, you seem quite hung up on this idea of me being clannish; for what it’s worth, I’ve never used rec.arts.drwho, and I’m too young to remember the 1990s. I use Frock and Gun not because I’m part of the era that created them, but because they remain relevant aesthetics that I learned about from the Eruditorum.
April 28, 2025 @ 12:05 pm
I still get to be amused that Diamanda Hagan declared it the best episode of the RTD2 era before watching it.
April 28, 2025 @ 6:50 pm
@Louis: I feel like if you are going to kick off a subthread by saying “Once upon a time, I might have hoped that the best of Moffat could have defeated the Gun side of fandom once and for all. If The Big Bang, Hell Bent, et al haven’t brought about Frock Supremacy, what will?”, then you should not be shocked if people accuse you of being clannish, because whilst this is a place which can be justifiably proud of finding new ways of reading texts, there really isn’t any way to parse the words you actually wrote which doesn’t amount to a declaration you’d be fine with Gun aesthetics going away from Doctor Who forever in favour of wall-to-wall Frock.
I don’t think anyone disagrees that DW’s distinctiveness is an important part of its appeal, but the tension between Gun and Frock aesthetics is part of that distinctiveness. Kill one side or the other and that distinctiveness is, in fact, reduced. Homogeneity is, in fact, homogeneity regardless of the particular monochrome colour you paint it.
April 28, 2025 @ 6:55 pm
In fact, hell, let’s go back and remind ourselves what El taught us about Frock/Gun, since this blog is where you learned the term…
https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/time-can-be-rewritten-33-the-shadow-of-the-scourge
We should perhaps start by pointing out that this is a spectacularly loaded framing of a debate. In one corner you have the gun, an implement which the Doctor is typically defined in part by his tendency not to carry. In the other you have the frock coat, which the Doctor habitually wears. So it’s pretty clear which side of the debate whoever framed it falls on, and that is in turn something that influences the tone of the debate. Scads of people identify as frocks, but guns are all “those people.”
So if you really did learn all you know about the Frock/Gun debate from the Eruditorum, but you’re taken aback that people should regard you as being clannish then… you weren’t paying attention, because the whole idea was introduced here by El pointing out that the very framing of the terminology is clannish from the get-go.
April 29, 2025 @ 5:27 am
I’m replying to myself here because we’ve gone too far down a nest of comments:
“Finally, you seem quite hung up on this idea of me being clannish; for what it’s worth, I’ve never used rec.arts.drwho, and I’m too young to remember the 1990s.”
Then why are you so dead set on reenacting a 30 year old argument from a defunct platform, using terms that the very text you learned them from exposes as shadow boxing? The Frock/Gun argument is simply no longer relevant. It’s a profoundly weird dichotomy to attach yourself to in 2025. It’s like historical reenactment.
April 29, 2025 @ 8:11 am
So ‘profoundly weird’ a dichotomy that El uses it in this very review…? 😅 Scroll up and look at the bullet point about Mrs. Flood. These aesthetics remain useful terms, which is why El uses them, and why I used them.
To quote El (https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/has-it-taught-you-wonderful-things-human-nature):
‘The frock perspective allows itself a Terrance Dicks-style ambivalence that recognizes that the dramatic and the over-the-top romantic are not only not antagonistic but actively complimentary. Whereas the gun perspective, by deciding that drama comes out of gravitas, leaves itself wide-open to critique. A critique, it should be noted, that Cornell gives voice to, having a character muse about “how close masculinity is to melodrama.” Which, well, yes. Yes it is. And that’s the problem with the gun side – it so rarely realizes just how silly it is.
The frocks, much like Xena: Warrior Princess, know exactly how silly they are, but decline to accept that this in some way imposes a limitation on what they can do. And this book is Paul Cornell going ahead and demonstrating just how far frockery can go and just how dramatic and effective it can be. A story that is unabashedly sentimental, full of humor and warmth, and nevertheless genuinely and unapologetically dramatic…
The book only works because it openly invites the reader to be an unrepentant romantic about things. It’s not just that this works dramatically, it’s that its sense of levity and joy is the reason it works. This is Cornell killing the gun/frock debate off. And fair enough. Well done. Aesthetically speaking, debate over, frocks win. This is the future: an aesthetic that recognizes that irony, camp, and outright silliness are not only compatible with drama, they make it better and more effective.’
If you can’t see that this piece champions Frocks over Guns, I don’t know what to tell you. And if you – for whatever reason – intensely dislike these terms so much, then I can, as before, put it another way: I favour experimental, weird, and surprising Doctor Who over run-of-the-mill sci-fi action.
April 29, 2025 @ 8:45 am
Just to add an additional point to my comment above:
‘Whereas the gun perspective, by deciding that drama comes out of gravitas, leaves itself wide-open to critique…And that’s the problem with the gun side – it so rarely realizes just how silly it is.’
This isn’t shadow boxing! As El articulates in the quote above, the self-serious Gun side exists! And indeed, surely you’ve come across this? I certainly have. The old school fans who think Doctor Who was at its best when it was bases under siege fighting monsters; people who think Lux is silly and love The Well. This isn’t an imaginary tradition; this is an aesthetic and a part of fandom that exists. I don’t know why you want to pretend it doesn’t…
April 29, 2025 @ 9:09 am
For my part at least I wasn’t trying to say that perspective doesn’t exist, but I am saying it’s overly clannish to regard people who hold that perspective as an enemy to be purged from the fandom, or to take the stance that people cannot and do not enjoy a mixed diet of Frock and Gun. I enjoy both, I think Who is enriched by having both, I think wanting Who to be simpler and less nuanced is flatly incompatible with your declared tastes and goals and I think scrubbing an entire perspective on Who from the show would in fact lose that richness and nuance you claim to value.
April 29, 2025 @ 10:09 am
Fair enough, Arthur!
Part of me wonders if you are defining these terms somewhat differently. As I’ve said, I love darkness, suspense, and the epic, and I praised Midnight in my original comment. I love Wild Blue Yonder too, which – unlike The Well – is emotionally rich, more about the leads’ emotional journeys than the sci-fi, and boasts a good amount of comedy and frockery, courtesy of Isaac Newton, Donna, and the first act of exploring the ship. My dream series would take us from Lux to Gridlock to Listen to Human Nature to Mummy on the Orient Express to Midnight to The Giggle, without stopping off for an Impossible Planet or Under the Lake along the way. I don’t think such a series would be lacking in richness and nuance.
April 29, 2025 @ 12:34 pm
Again, having to go a way up and branch a comment to reply:
@Louis M: Sandifer uses the terms as lenses to view the story through, like critics with different readings (because she is one!), not as sides in a war.
It’s an interesting observation that a mostly frock-type character is getting involved with gun-inflected sci fi hardware. It’s not a victory for one side or the other. In fact it’s exactly what I was saying: enriching the show by mixing gun and frock together.
But still, these are mostly meaningless terms now. In the review they’re basically an injoke. A little aesthetic shorthand we all share because we’re nerds. Taking it as a serious dichotomy, getting mad about it…it’s like trying to refight the Wars of the Roses. It’s not important anymore. This is the most anyone has cared about, or even used Gun and Frock in years. Possibly decades.
April 29, 2025 @ 1:18 pm
@Cyrano Why do you ignore almost everything I say? The point about the review was one small detail. The bulk of my last reply was to quote at length from this entry https://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/has-it-taught-you-wonderful-things-human-nature, a piece which is very clearly pro-frock, and sets out why a frockish approach means better Doctor Who.
‘…an aesthetic that recognizes that irony, camp, and outright silliness are not only compatible with drama, they make it better and more effective.’
As I said already, if for some reason you don’t like these particular terms, that’s fine, but they refer to different aesthetics and traditions that remain relevant; comparing that to refighting the Wars of the Roses…? With respect, what are you talking about?
I don’t think talking to you is getting anywhere because you’re not engaging with what I’m saying, so this is my last word in response to you.
April 29, 2025 @ 1:54 pm
And for my part, I think you can find zero value in whatever episodes you want, that’s your perogative, but I return again to what was actually said – “Or must we forever endure those fans who regard The Well (and The Waters of Mars and The Impossible Planet) as quality Doctor Who? With fans like these, another Chibnall Era feels inevitable.”
It’s you who is arbitrarily deciding that those episodes are bastions of Gun and therefore the Enemy(!), and that you no longer wish to endure the existence of people who like them. But personally, I don’t plan on offing myself soon, (sorry for that?) and my liking of sci-fi horror episodes always has to do with the weirdness in them. I just didn’t happen to declare the ones I like to arbitrarily be Frock like you did.
But if you’re saying that Gun side of the fandom has always represented “a planet inexplicably stuck within the radius of a black hole that contains caged within it a being who claims to have inspired every devil figure in history”, or “a creature that exists perfectly behind someone relative to everyone else observing them”, then okay, you’re making Gun sound pretty interesting, actually!
April 29, 2025 @ 2:20 pm
As I’m being routinely invoked in this debate, I figure I should weigh in to note that the idea of Moffat defeating “gun fandom” forever strikes me as preposterous–that would be the same Moffat who wrote Boom, World Enough and Time, Dark Water, A Good Man Goes to War, and Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone? Come now.
More broadly, whatever my preferences may be—and a glance at my favorite stories makes clear they’re frockish—I’m bitterly opposed to any notion that Doctor Who ought eschew certain tones and genres. The whole point and appeal of the show is that it can be anything.
April 29, 2025 @ 3:13 pm
@Elizabeth Sandifer
Fair enough, and I appreciate and respect where you’re coming from.
Given how much your writing on the show has influenced my own thinking about it, I feel hesitant to challenge you, but I would say two things:
1). Part of the appeal of those Moffat episodes is that they‘re much more than standard gun stories. There’s a focus on relationships and emotion – particularly in Dark Water – that’s absent from the more straightforward gun stories I dislike in Classic and NuWho. Dark Water is about the Doctor and Clara far more than it is about the Cybermen. And all the stories you mention are, delightfully, quite weird! Time of Angels plays with visual logic and fictionality in a way that Chibnall and Whithouse never would. So while these Moffat stories are dark and have action, they aren’t gun stories in the way that (IMO) The Well is. They’re driven by people, emotion, and strange ideas, not sci-fi action beats. I think Steven Moffat is actually incapable of writing a pure gun story; he is too optimistic, too funny, too idiosyncratic a writer for that.
2). I don’t think Doctor Who should be anything. It should never be snuff film, gratuitously violent torture porn, slasher horror, religious fundamentalist allegory, or a racist fantasy. You famously and rightly said that you don’t regard The Celestial Toymaker as canon. Doctor Who shouldn’t be an empty vessel to pour whatever anyone wants in; that would mean it has no identity at all. And (in what I recognise is a contentious opinion!) I don’t think it should be churning out standard sci-fi action that audiences can find anywhere else. It should always be telling stories that only Doctor Who can do!
April 29, 2025 @ 3:14 pm
Alright Louis, so you’ve decided The Impossible Planet, Under the Lake, Waters of Mars and The Well are terrible.
A) Do you feel the same or differently about Planet of Evil? Explain your answer.
B) Do you agree that a set of “acceptable Doctor Who concepts” that includes those episodes is inherently broader and accommodating of a wider variety of stories than a set which excludes those stories? If you do not agree, explain your reasoning.
C) Do you agree that a broader set must be able to accommodate more nuance than a narrower set? If you do not agree, explain your reasoning.
D) Do you agree that wishing that people who enjoy a set of Doctor Who episodes you happen to dislike would cease to exist is about as cartoonishly clannish as you can get, and you are acting like a massive arsehole by going for that rhetoric? Do please explain your reasoning if you disagree.
April 29, 2025 @ 3:25 pm
I don’t think “weirdness” or “formal complexity” have anything to do with the gun/frock distinction in the first place. That’d be the rad/trad debate.
I’ll also point out that my “Doctor Who can be anything” was in the context of tones and genres, and so I think “racist fantasy” and “religious fundamentalist allegory” are relevant to my point, as they’re ideological positions, not narrative shapes. More broadly, I do think there are rules for what a Doctor Who story is, most of them centered on the Doctor as a character. These rules can make genres quite difficult, and perhaps even impossible—gratuitous torture porn is an example of one that’s quite hard to do. But I think that’s more an interesting challenge than a rule. Indeed, elsewhere in this very comment section you’ll find a Doctor Who writer—one who was in fact there for the initial gun/frock distinction–who’s written numerous stories in which the Doctor is quite brutally tortured, and they’re all fucking great.
As for “Doctor Who does slasher horror”… isn’t that just Horror of Fang Rock?
April 29, 2025 @ 3:46 pm
@Arthur
Just to quickly respond to this point because it’s important: I never once suggested I wanted anyone to cease existing (!). I asked ‘must we forever endure those fans’; I think it’s quite a reach to suggest that means I want them to die (!!!). I’m sure many people in the 1980s expressed frustration with enduring Ian Levine, but that didn’t mean they wanted him to cease existing.
April 29, 2025 @ 3:56 pm
@Louis: Rather than subjecting yourself to the indignity of arguing that “must we forever endure these fans” does not constitute pining for a time when those fans no longer exist -something which can only come about through the deletion from the world of people with differing tastes from you in this respect – wouldn’t it be easier, friendlier, and more dignified to just say “You were right, I was being clannish and my rhetoric was intemperate, I will think about what I have said and reexamine my attitude to fellow fans”?
April 29, 2025 @ 4:10 pm
Yes, it’s true that there is another way besides death for you to no longer have to endure my existence – I could also just never watch or talk about DW ever again. I suppose this is “reasonable” in comparison?
April 29, 2025 @ 5:10 pm
@Louis M: are you not now in a position of just casting stories you like as Frock and the ones you don’t like as Gun? And saying things like “actually I think a season made up of my favourite stories would be best for everyone” without much trace of self awareness?
This is very immature fan stuff. It’s not about reading the show throw different critical lenses. It’s not about identifying an aesthetic you prefer. It’s picking a team and cheering for them and taunting your opponent. It’s not, fundamentally, a good way to understand television. Or to participate in a discussion. Weirdly, it’s championing Frock in the most hostile, self serious Gun way possible. Performance art.
To go back to your words “must we forever endure those fans who regard The Well (and The Waters of Mars and The Impossible Planet) as quality Doctor Who?” Yeah. Yeah you must, because they’re not bigots or crooks they’re people who like a few different episodes of the same TV show you also like. Blimey, it’s like left wing politics: “hang the right, it’s time to concentrate on the real enemy: people on our side who are doing it wrong, the bastards”.
This vituperative championing of one side over another in this debate really does belong to the Wilderness Years. It was relevant then because fandom was small and intense and the barrier between fan and licensed Who writer was porous, and it felt very important to decide what Doctor Who ‘should’ be if, when or do it could come back to television.
Now it *has *come back to television the answer is very clearly “something that can Lux one week and The Well next week (or The Impossible Planet one week and Love & Monsters next week)” and it’s better for it.
April 28, 2025 @ 7:53 am
“It’s a story about something – the paranoia of the mob, ‘humanity at its worst’. The Well doesn’t have any of this.”
It does: this is what happened off screen when all the colonists killed each other. So this is a sequel to Midnight also in the sense that it follows directly from a Midnight-like situation. In Midnight itself, the story ends after the threat is defused. But what did those characters think about their predicament? Did they realise they were being horrible? Did they look at themselves in the mirror to reflect of what they had done? So in The Well we get not another Midnight situation, but a post-Midnight one where characters literally need to reflect about the paranoia. I think this is actually smarter than making another episode showing the same dynamics.
April 28, 2025 @ 11:26 am
I like this reading a lot. It gestures towards a “what would happen if the Doctor isn’t there to help” scenario that might be where RTD is going. Next episode is a Doctor -Lite one. Like 73 Yards… I wonder…
April 29, 2025 @ 8:26 am
I really thought people were going to be criticising the episode for being so overtly a metaphor for shame/guilt that it kinda lacks depth for that reason…
April 27, 2025 @ 1:38 pm
I was so thoroughly disappointed by the reveal.
Midnight is one of my favourite episodes of the show, and a huge part of that was its standalone nature. The fact we just had a solid one-off with a great cast and humour giving way to the horror of paranoia as they try to solve and survive the mystery of what is going on, and the fact the mystery is never actually solved, punctuated with the final moment of realisation that we were so concerned with it that we never even noticed the characters that died never even were named, contrasting the same cast that endeared us so much otherwise.
Was the entity evil? A monster at all? It was repeating people, learning a language. Isn’t that curiosity? Is it evil at the end of the episode because it seems to be taking delight in convincing the others to kill the Doctor? Or is it just ensuring its survival? Was it a native of the planet? Was it trying to escape? Why? Why does it even attack them? Why now, and why does it need to physically run into the ship, if it then seems to have no physical presence? Did Miss Silvestri still have any notion of who she was? Was she just possessed? Was she dead?
All of this was what made the episode for me. All the mystery around these questions, and then the restraint to not answer them. Except now, 17 years later, Rusty decided to answer some of them, and not even for any good purpose. The entity is outright evil, it does things because it likes to play games with its prey, it looks like a man wearing an old football as a helmet. And no matter how much Midnight still exists as an episode by itself, it’ll be impossible for me to not have awareness of these choices when rewatching it in the future.
I was watching with friends, and we were interested enough in The Well as it was going on. Nothing too special, but we were trying to at least figure out what the twist would be- my bet was it was a monster spreading through sound, because I was easily taken by the probably accidental red herring of Aliss’s deafness (which I do like was not relevant to the plot per se, in the end- disabled people should get to just exist and not be plot devices, etc). And then the reveal, and the dumb flashback, and all interest was gone to the point I’m not sure I even fully paid attention to the rest of the episode. I didn’t even notice the bit with the life form scanner in the shuttle showing 4 life forms (didn’t the scanners earlier not pick up the entity?).
I don’t know, Rusty. Did Disney force you this direction? I get the “we tried to make it about the Orishas and it wasn’t working because I didn’t feel comfortable with villainous Orishas”, but was this cheap connection the solution? couldn’t even just make it a ripoff and not damage the previous episode? It’s funny he got a little jab going previous week at fans loving Blink, an episode infamous for being a great standalone episode concept that then got progressively more and more ruined with each sequel.
Ah well.
Side observations- Rusty seems to be doing something intentionally with the Doctor and comparisons to “incel” etc, as set up in TRR, but at this point I’m starting to fear maybe I read too much in the setup and it won’t pay off in any way or satisfying way. Belinda hated being called Bels and didn’t want to travel with the Doctor and called out how his interactions with companions are basically like a well-intentioned pick-up artist and how he doesn’t respect their autonomy, and that was great- and in the two episodes after slowly she stopped caring about each of those elements. I get that you can’t have those realistic elements of interaction stop the stories from happening, but it just feels they got written off too easily. And then the Doctor is also acting too-familiar non-boundary-respecting in this episode and it doesn’t seem to have meant anything more than a gag? Like, I’m not alone in finding that the soldier was right in going “don’t call me that” and the Doctor’s response of just switching to a different belittling nickname was flippant and would land abusively if the soldier was a woman?
In a similar token, I did enjoy Rusty setting up Belinda having some basic understanding of science-fiction conventions and logic in TRR, since it makes sense for modern society. So each time they try to land in 2025 and can’t, it’s driving me nuts she doesn’t go “ok, can you land us in 2024 and then we can just wait?” Maybe this could’ve been handwaved away if the Earth no longer existed overall as a concept, but then we got immediately an episode in Miami in the past. Come on.
April 28, 2025 @ 1:01 am
It’s a quick line, but the soldier is vindicated—when the Doctor is laying out his plan with the mercury to get the entity off the back of Aliss, he tells Belinda, “we should have kept our suits on,” because having to stop and put them on will slow them down as they attempt to flee. Which is the Doctor admitting that the soldier he mocked with “hon” was right: he shouldn’t have taken off the suit.
This is all quick but it’s there in the text, so I think you’re right, Davies is building to something there.
April 28, 2025 @ 9:08 am
“….the Doctor is also acting too-familiar non-boundary-respecting in this episode and it doesn’t seem to have meant anything more than a gag? Like, I’m not alone in finding that the soldier was right in going “don’t call me that” and the Doctor’s response of just switching to a different belittling nickname was flippant and would land abusively if the soldier was a woman?”
The assumption here that the Doctor was ‘belittling’ Cassio by calling him “Babes” or “Hon” is a misreading. It is a mode of speech and, as RTD will know, a common mode of speech in the British LGBQT+ community (I can’t speak for 5020th century Lombardo or planet 6-7-6-7 but the TARDIS translator will be doing its job here). Gatwa is Scottish. In Scotland it is common to hear people (male and female in the LGBQT+ community) referred to as “Hen” just as in the north of England (and lots of planets have a north!) you will hear people of all genders addressed as “Duck”, while in the South you may expect to be called “Luv” “Babes or “Hon”. So, on the contrary, Cassio’s reaction may be read as disrespectful by not acknowledging the Doctor’s language usage as a signifier. His response to this and his instance on not taking off the suits, I believe, rather than demonstrating correctness, was meant to be read as ‘uptight marine, following orders to the letter and unable to process difference or waver from protocol’.
April 28, 2025 @ 9:52 am
It’s absolutely common language in queer circles, but as far as Cassio knows, the Doctor is his boss. So yeah, he’s right, it IS deeply inappropriate for his boss to turn up and call him “babes” and then double down on it with a similar equivalent when he makes a formal complaint.
April 28, 2025 @ 11:15 am
I don’t know how heirarchical protocol signalling works in the 5020th century but one might assume the Doctor does. He’s telling the space marine to loosen up because his uptight attitude might put them in danger. Subsequent events prove him right to do have done so.
I’ve definitely been called “babes”, “mate” and worse by people in authority over me. That’s just my experience.
YMMV.
Lastly, the Doctor is always cheeky to authority figures, especially military. It’s funny.
April 28, 2025 @ 4:41 pm
[Replying to my own comment because the reply chain is too lengthy now to directly respond to Anton’s:]
“I’ve definitely been called “babes”, “mate” and worse by people in authority over me. That’s just my experience.”
…and all of the above is workplace harassment one would be well within one’s rights to complain about. I’m not saying it’s not a fun cheeky moment from the Doctor (on first watch I was chuckling away), but at the same time, Cassio the uptight soldier is not being particularly uptight in this moment but setting a very reasonable boundary that this is not something he’s okay with his boss calling him. Now obviously the Doctor isn’t his boss and soon they’re all much more worried about something else, so in the end it’s a moot point – but it’s not a great thing to replicate workplace harassment from beloved children’s hero Dr Who.
April 28, 2025 @ 4:46 pm
In my notes on this episode I had the following:
Is someone going to complain about the Doctor calling the guy babes? Probably. Somebody complains about everything.
And it’s nice to know I’m right.
April 28, 2025 @ 6:26 pm
Replying to Einarr.
I’m big and old enough to get over being called mate or babes by a manager. To consider it workplace harassment is ludicrous. Context is everything and there are more serious things going on in workplaces, that should be addressed, to clutch one’s pearls about a colloquial phrase. If “Beloved children’s hero Dr. Who” has taught us anything it’s to mistrust authority and prick pomposity.
Replying to Elizabeth Sandifer
Indeed babes!
April 29, 2025 @ 1:13 am
Replying to Anton, again, sigh:
I’m glad you feel the need to police what other people regard as workplace harassment. I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt so respected in, and impressed by the maturity of, an Eruditorum comment.
April 28, 2025 @ 7:03 pm
I’m not bothered by the Doctor calling him Babes originally, but I do think just switching to Hon when the soldier asked not to be called that is provocative and disregards a clearly implied request to keep thing more formal. Which is often the Doctor’s way, but that does give him some responsibility for the course of events leading to the deaths of most of the soldiers. If the Doctor had respected the guy’s wishes, then he might in turn have been respected and so not prompted a mutiny. So for me this does go with the Doctor’s highhandedness in TRR, which I hope will be addressed further down the line.
April 29, 2025 @ 10:58 pm
The assumption isn’t that he’s belittling him by calling him “babes” but by being told “this is inappropriate” and insisting on it, though. In a normal context I wouldn’t care, but in a season that started with an episode that specifically went out of its way to call out that the Doctor has a lot of casual attitudes that can be had as disrespecting others, by the very same writer, attention has already been called to it. Much like how the Doctor calling Belinda “Bels” wouldn’t be relevant, except for there being a line in the first episode specifically calling out “don’t call me Bels”.
And I think my angle here has been misinterpreted, frankly a bit in bad faith. I don’t think it’s bad that this is something that’s being done- if anything it’s a setup for an interesting exploration of the character, that a lot of his traits and attitudes are not that different from those with bad intent. Which again, TRR seemed to be doing intentionally- the same episode where the villain is “an incel” is the one where the Doctor gets called for pick-up-artist attitudes, etc. My angle here is that after seeing RTD disappoint me in how this connects to Midnight, I am losing trust he’ll be able to deliver this story angle correctly, or that it even is a story angle he’s trying to deliver at all and that it’s not just reading potential in that’s not intended.
Surely this is not too insane or absurd an analysis, speculation, or worry?
April 28, 2025 @ 3:54 am
Right there with you about feeling disappointed about how the Entity turned out to be straightforwardly evil, I was always partial to the idea that it was the paranoia and terror from the passengers shaped it into something malicious. But with that said, I think it makes sense that 500,000 years of isolation after the events of Midnight would be enough to make anything evil. As for The Doctor considering it vile and game-playing, I think he’s just wrong. After all, he’s not coming from the usual place of knowledgeable authority- we know as much about the Entity as he does. It’s one of very few times that The Doctor has a negative bias against a creature that colours his worldview.
April 27, 2025 @ 3:33 pm
Belinda’s character arc in Lux, as I see it, is that she came to realize that despite initial appearances, the Doctor is inherently trustworthy because of how well they vibe. This in turn builds on her arc in TRR, where she learns she should trust her gut instincts about men over surface appearances. So I don’t see that thread you’re picking up on as being actually all that loose at this point.
April 27, 2025 @ 6:19 pm
Random comments again
After 400,000 years, upright pianos look the same.
Why was there a sudden narrative jump back to the TARDIS at the end, as Belinda recovers?
I’m bored by Mrs Flood. She does virtually nothing except turn up after every episode and basic say Oh Look At Me I’m An Enigma. At least season 8 Missy left a few clues.
I continue to enjoy the episodes, which are much better than Chibnallese. But the whole somehow is less than the sum of the parts.
April 27, 2025 @ 8:16 pm
Someone made the point – why didn’t they ask Aliss to lie flat on the ground, face-up, once they found out what the threat was?… I share the sense that nothing very original is happening in the show these days – Lux being a significant exception. I often wonder if my boredom thing in relation to my lifelong-favourite programme is just my age, so it’s a relief to hear others say likewise. I long for some slowness and time-taking in the narrative amongst all the hyperactivity, and some real character and plot development that coheres. That, of course, isn’t possible within the 45-minute time frame – or rather, it’s only been successfully achieved a relatively small number of times since 2005. It takes really skillful writing indeed to make a truly satisfying 45-minute (single story) DW episode. I really like the Doctor and Belinda’s dynamic – much prefer it to the one with Ruby – but the writing is too generic. Whether human, Time Lord, or any other species, I feel sure that dialogue and personality traits would and should be way more inventive or surprising or quirky or enlightening for us, as viewers. The forces driving TV drama production these days require so much of “event” programming, that spectacle and constant sensory or emotional stimulation take precedence over genuine originality or boldness. Bah-humbug-grouch, and all that. But yes, at least it’s better than Series 11, 12, and 13…
April 27, 2025 @ 9:29 pm
This was reasonably entertaining and I doubt I will remember any details of the story 17 years from now, which I suppose makes it a lot like Midnight.
April 28, 2025 @ 6:32 am
I enjoyed the episode, I love a bit of straightforward spooky DW… but something was stopping me rating it higher by the end, and I can only conclude it was the decision to make it a sequel. I appreciate Russell not succumbing to a Gatiss-like desire to show the creature (if you’ve seen any of Gatiss’s Ghost Story for Christmas instalments, he several times spoils otherwise fine efforts by doing this), which certainly helped.
But for me, making it a sequel had the effect of lessening it. Because the entity behaved so differently, there was no need to make it the same adversary we saw in Midnight, and I think it would have been more effective had it been allowed to stand on its own merits. By making it a sequel it not only invites comparison, it changed the way I watched it. After the Midnight reveal, instead of “oh, this is interesting and spooky”, I was watching thinking “please don’t retroactively ruin Midnight”. It was a distraction and a pressure the story didn’t need. Why shouldn’t the universe contain more than one malevolent entity that can’t be seen?
April 28, 2025 @ 6:54 am
Wild Blue Yonder was a superior spiritual-but-not-actual “sequel” to Midnight for precisely this reason.