Doctor Who Season 2, Episode 3 Review – “The Well”

Warning: This review contains spoilers for season 2, episode 3 of Doctor Who, “The Well.”

“The Well” is an immensely frustrating episode of Doctor Who. There’s real promise scattered throughout its runtime, including some striking horror imagery that feels pulled straight from a Stephen King novel, but it struggles to build on that foundation. Flung 500,000 years into the future, the Doctor and Belinda arrive on a crumbling, ice-laced mining colony where something has clearly gone wrong. The infrastructure is in ruins, the crew has vanished, and only one shell-shocked survivor remains. Right from the off, there’s a cold stillness that slowly settles in and wraps around us like a brisk fog, permeating a slow, creeping dread. It’s a sharp contrast to the brilliant chaos of last week’s outing, but the shift to a slower, more ominous pace is a welcome one.

Surprisingly (unless you’ve read the leaks), it also serves as a direct sequel to 2009’s “Midnight” – a tense, near-perfect bottle episode built around one of the show’s simplest, most chilling ideas. For better or worse, the follow-up isn’t a retread of that one-off, and doesn’t try to be. But while “The Well” starts as a bold successor to an all-time great, it ultimately ends up slipping into pale imitation.

To their credit, Russell T Davies and co-writer Sharma Walfall make a deliberate effort to avoid simply rehashing “Midnight.” The entity has been reimagined with fresh rules and visual tricks, and there’s some impressive restraint in how little we actually see of it. They even found a few inventive ways to make this entity almost as terrifying as the first time we encountered it, and there’s still some clear intent in how the mysterious alien is handled. The creature’s design is mostly left to the imagination, and director Amanda Brotchie impressively leans into a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it embodiment.

But it’s hard not to feel that this return chips away at the power of the original. “Midnight” was about fear, groupthink, and the fragility of trust, while “The Well” just awkwardly gestures toward a scary monster and calls it a day. Where “Midnight” left gaps for the imagination to fill, “The Well” feels too eager to explain, too quick to visualise the horror rather than let it haunt from the edges. For all the unease Brotchie’s direction carefully conjures, the story underneath feels disappointingly thin by comparison. The Midnight entity is no longer this terrifying enigma relying on mimicry and manipulation to sow paranoia and panic. Instead, it’s now a far more conventional monster of the week, jumping between victims in a parasitic chain in a clichéd pass-it-on setup that recalls horror flicks like It Follows or Smile. Gone is the intellectual dread, the eerie unknowability that made its first appearance unforgettable. It was a malevolent intelligence that even the Doctor couldn’t reason with or outwit, toying with language and fracturing a room using just its guile.

It shares so little resemblance to its original appearance, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that the reintroduction of one of Doctor Who’s most enigmatic villains is unnecessary at best, and actively disappointing at worst. Even taking the episode on its own merits, and putting aside the unavoidable comparisons, “The Well” still struggles to find any way to stand out. The supporting cast is painfully forgettable, the story lacks any substance beyond the Midnight reveal, and even Ncuti Gatwa feels off-tempo, his usual spark dulled by dialogue that forces a semblance of emotional catharsis from scene to scene instead of truly earning it. There are flashes of great tension and horror, but they’re trapped in a script that desperately struggles to find its footing anywhere else.