The Well

Chapter the 341st, well, well, well - what's going on 'ere then? An Aliens homage with a twist.

Plot:

[A relatively recent story of the streaming era, so beware of spoilers ahead.] Approximately 500,000 years in the future above a planet designated 6-7-6-7; the Doctor and Belinda leave the TARDIS to immediately find themselves on a craft in orbit surrounded by space troopers suiting up. The Doctor and Bel do the same, before they are ejected to freefall down to the planet's surface. The craft has to make a slow descent and it will be hours before the TARDIS is accessible. The Doctor and Bel inveigle themselves in the party using the psychic paper, and they all investigate a mining colony on the planet where contact has been lost. They find only one survivor, Aliss Fenly. Some entity came out of the colony's 5-mile deep well. It can only be seen in brief glimpses behind each host it settled on, one by one, making them homicidal. When each host was killed, it attached itself to the killer, and has finally ended up attached to Aliss with everyone else dead. Tempers fray, and second in command Cassio orders a trooper to do a 360 degree walk around Aliss. As soon as the trooper is directly behind Aliss based on an observer's POV, they are flung upwards by unseen forces, smashing back down to the ground, dead. As Cassio stumbles around in the aftermath, he inadvertently lines up more and more troopers who suffer the same fate. Shaya kills Cassio to stop the carnage. The Doctor discovers that 6-7-6-7 used to be called Midnight, and the entity is the same one he encountered there before. He sets up a reflecting surface behind Aliss causing the entity to leave her. Everyone makes to escape, but the airlock can only take half the party at a time. While waiting, Bel is taken by the entity. Sharp shooting by Shaya leaves Bel close to death without killing her outright. The entity moves on to Shaya, and she runs to the well and jumps down it, killing herself. Bel recovers in the TARDIS, and she and the Doctor leave. But the entity seems to have come aboard the trooper's craft and attached itself to one of them...

Context:

Watched on my own from a disc in the increasingly inaccurately named Season Two Blu-Ray box set one evening in November 2025. (Given that the era of Disney+ seasons is officially over, will the next season of Doctor Who restart the numbering again? Only time - and contractual wrangling - will tell.) 

Milestone watch: I've been blogging new and classic Doctor Who stories in random order since 2015, and I'm now approaching the point where I catch up. This is the penultimate story to be covered from the latest season of Doctor Who (at time of writing), leaving only the two-part finale to be blogged from Ncuti Gatwa's second run. Beyond that, the blog has notched up 13 Doctors' televisual eras (Doctors 1-4, 6-14), and 39 out of the 41 seasons have been completed to date (classic seasons 1-18, 20-26, and new series 1-14). Of the 892 episodes of Doctor Who from An Unearthly Child up to The Reality War, six now remain.

First Time Round:

One doesn't have to be on social media to fall foul of spoilers. As mentioned a few times before on the blog, I make one exception to my general rule of not consuming any social media or news online: I occasionally google 'Doctor Who' just in case there's any news I wouldn't want to miss out on regarding my favourite TV show. As I'll go into in more in the Deeper Thoughts section below, there's always some news online on any day about the programme; although, most of it is not really news, and a lot of it is clickbait. Around the broadcast of new stories, a lot of it is speculation. I should know better, but couldn't resist clicking on some links the day before The Well aired, and an online article (by someone who, to be fair to them, hadn't seen the episode yet) accurately extrapolated from the known evidence and blew the major twist of the episode. I wish I'd gone in knowing none of that. I watched on the Saturday this landed on the BBC iplayer, 26th April 2025, early afternoon (around 2pm, if memory serves), accompanied by the middle child (boy of 16, 15 at the time). I did not give anything away to him, and he was pleasantly surprised to see a sequel to the story Midnight. His reaction wasn't as big as when he heard Lux's laugh for the first time in the previous week's episode, mind.

Reaction:

A couple of potentially contentious views: I much prefer Alien to Aliens, and the most important parts of that 1979 film are the parts not designed by H. R. Giger. The grounded reality of the Nostromo and its crew are what make the weird visuals and rules of the Xenomorph work. The crew are not aloof or elite space people, they're ordinary schmos like you and me, and are depicted doing their jobs with verisimilitude before all hell breaks loose. The script bases them not on astronauts, and certainly not on heroes of sci-fi stories gone by, but on truckers - that for me is the spark of genius that made the film so impactful. The space marines of Aliens don't behave like real marines, and they're not based on such people: the Aliens script builds those characters out of a specific idea of a soldier, rather than a reality, depicting for satirical and allegorical reasons a troop of arrogant grunts out of their depth (taking its cues from the Vietnam war). The problem, though, is believability: make the ordinary characters too unbelievable and the alien happenings are not thrown into sharp enough relief. These are only minor issues in the Aliens script, and the film is made and shot so well that it manages to be almost as good as the original, even for a doubter like me. Later films in the franchise moved too far away from this basis (who the hell understands or associates with any of the characters in Prometheus?!) and subsequently the films have been less notable, despite any amount of fancy visuals they might include. The troop in The Well meanwhile are inspired not by real troops, and not by a satirical idea of real troops, but instead by the characters of Aliens (I don't think this can be denied given that one uses the phrase "Nuke this site from orbit" during the Who story).

The risk is that its characters are abstractions of abstractions. It's not the first Aliens homage in Doctor Who, won't likely be the last, and the story at least goes all in (a rescue party going to visit a colony on a planet where contact's been lost, and it turns out everyone's been killed by alien forces bar one sole survivor - it's ringing a lot of bells). It is also stunningly well put together with great visuals, great costumes, great sets - it's the first time that Doctor Who's riffed on Aliens and what's ended up on screen is as visually exciting as the inspiration. Does it manage to have sufficient grounding based on character, though? Largely yes, and the key reason for that is Aliss Fenly as played by Rose Ayling-Ellis. A little bit of backstory for troop leader Shaya (including childhood flashback) or casting a charismatic actor like Christopher Chung to breathe life into the one-note character of Cassio, as he is on the page, is all very well, and everyone's performances are perfectly good; Ayling-Ellis is the essential ingredient, though. The character as written is beautifully ordinary in the style of the Nostromo crew, describing her thankless job as a cook, heating up ready meals for the colonists. Ayling-Ellis is a bright, mesmeric presence on screen, her movements and expressions adeptly projecting emotion - a lot of vulnerability, but also moments of toughness, shiftiness and guilt. The character's deafness becomes key to the plot (the entity drives people to violence with whispering, but she cannot hear this) which is nice, though it's even nicer when the casting of disabled actors is unconnected to the plot (another member of the cast has a prosthetic leg, but this is irrelevant to the story and not commented upon, which I think is a good thing).

The Well is of course not just a homage to a sequel, but also a sequel in its own right. The revelation that the Doctor is on the planet Midnight, where the 2008 story of the same name took place, is seeded in effectively (there are some subtle and less than subtle music cues harking back to the early days of the new series in the score). The scene where the penny drops for the Doctor is impactful and dramatic, and was no doubt a hit with all long-term viewers. It's odd that the way the entity operates in The Well, though with some similarities (it's an invisible and unknowable presence, only seen in brief flashes that might be a trick of the light), is very different to how it operated in Midnight. In the earlier story it could steal someone's voice and leave them immobile and powerless. One wonders why it doesn't do that again, as that would be more effective than just throwing people into the air. The Doctor suggests that the creature's just playing some sort of sick game, but he's only able to say that because the entity hasn't nicked his voice. It's been hundreds of thousands of years, so maybe it's lost that power - best not to think too much about it. The same advice probably goes for the method the Doctor uses to get the entity to leave Aliss. The reflection of the creature acts the same as the entity being behind itself, meaning it is thrown into the air? Is that what the suggestion is? Does that work? First time round, this is done at such speed that it doesn't cause confusion. That's testament to Amanda Brotchie's dynamic direction; she also makes the manoeuvring look perfectly natural, getting characters into the positions around Aliss they need to be in to set up the explosive action later - that can't have been easy.

Another moment that didn't cause problems first time round, but puzzles me after this watch, is the horror movie coda where the entity looks to have escaped with the surviving troops onto their craft. There is a lingering shot as people escape of the airlock's display indicating four people are inside, when there are only three we can see (Aliss and the two troopers with her). The set up of the airlock's capacity and this indicator have been done so carefully that this must be significant. The clear hint is that the entity is in there with them; if that's the case, though, then it can't still be with the Doctor's, party, attaching itself to Bel. The only explanation that fits is that there is more than one entity, but that undermines the story as a whole. Driving out the entity from Aliss to save her, and Shaya's self sacrifice to save Bel and destroy the creature - all of that was pointless because another entity was just waiting to slip into the airlock when nobody was looking. I don't care for that reading, though I do appreciate that there being more than one adversary this time fits neatly with the homage: it truly makes The Well the Aliens to Midnight's Alien. The arc plot moments don't intrude too much to upset the homage either, just a few intriguing moments where nobody in this future period has heard of Earth or the human race. It's nice to see the developing dynamic between the Doctor and Bel too. Early on, the Doctor makes a promise to Bel, despite her protestations that he can't guarantee any such thing, that "I will meet your mum and dad, and I will make your dad laugh, and your mum can whistle at my behind". It's a nice line, but the rest of the season came and went, and Ncuti bowed out without doing any of that. Perhaps he would have if the finale had gone head as originally scripted, but that's another story (of another story).

Connectivity:

The Well and Utopia / The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords both see the Doctor on a craft hovering above a planet's surface, surrounded by people with guns; both stories are structured around the return of an enemy of the Doctor last featured in a story over a decade earlier - the Master returned in 2007, 11 years after his last appearance; the entity on the planet Midnight first turned up in 2008, a whopping 17 years before The Well in 2025.

Deeper Thoughts:

Back for Good? Whatever he said, whatever he did, he didn't mean it. I'm talking, of course, not of Gary Barlow but Robert Shearman. The writer of Dalek, and many other marvellous things both for Doctor Who and elsewhere (see here for more details), was quoted in Doctor Who Magazine in the autumn of 2025 saying that the show was "probably as dead as we've ever known it". This sparked the predictable raft of online articles with clickbait headlines suggesting he was putting the boot in, or knew something we didn't. Jane Tranter from Bad Wolf Studios, an exec on the Doctor Who episodes broadcast since 2023, even got drawn in. She called the comment "really rude... and really untrue". One can't blame Tranter too much as she was presumably presented with Shearman's quote out of context. One can blame the so-called journalists involved, though, as his views had been misrepresented. He was talking only about the capacity for producing extended universe narratives when the show is off air. The context of his comments was an interview about his 2025 novelisations of a couple of his acclaimed Big Finish audios. Those stories were originally created in the so-called wilderness era, and one of them - The Chimes of Midnight - featured the current incumbent Doctor of the time, Paul McGann. His point was that when the show was off air in the early 1990s, Sylvester McCoy's Doctor was still the Doctor; as such, original stories could be written for him that moved the overall Doctor Who story forward; in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the same was true of McGann. Following The Reality War in 2025, until any new Doctor Who got made again, there was the unknown quantity of the Doctor - or possibly not even the Doctor - as played by Billie Piper. Nobody knew what that would be like, and so nobody could move the story forward. Any stories written in that period would of necessity be backward-looking.

This is what online coverage of Doctor Who can be like. As mentioned above in the First Time Round section, one can find new articles online on any particular day about Doctor Who; it's very like other big franchises such as Star Trek or Star Wars in that regard. Even if there's nothing to write about, people are still writing, and more negative content tends to get more hits. It's therefore not surprising that some slightly poorly chosen words by Shearman caused a brouhaha; after all, the official news that Doctor Who was coming back even without the co-production partnership with Disney+, and that there would be a Christmas special in 2026 (see here) - which one would have thought on balance was a largely positive story - was met with mainly negative headlines. The many articles going into detail about what a terrible decision the Mouse House had made in the first place suffered from what is known as outcome bias: the quality of a decision being judged solely on its outcome, rather than the situation at the time the decision was made and the process involved in making the decision then. (An aside: there's a great book called Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke covering outcome bias, amongst other things; I'd thoroughly recommend giving it a read.) Reasonable, even-handed coverage of this topic can be found in a podcast episode of Marina Hyde and Richard Osman's The Rest is Entertainment (a youtube video of which can be found here). In summary, they propose that Who is an intellectual property with bags of potential (which I'd say was clearly indicated by it getting the same level of fervent internet coverage as those bigger franchises mentioned earlier), so - even though it didn't work out - the original Disney+ decision makes sense and made sense at the time. This means there's every reason to be optimistic about a new co-production partner being found, if one hasn't been already. The BBC must think this, or they wouldn't be announcing the show's 2026 comeback.

The 'Disney+ should have known better' style stories at least had a smidgen of honesty somewhere in the mix. The other main type of story that emerged in reaction to the comeback announcement were about Doctor Who's failing UK ratings. By whatever metrics are important to them, Disney+ didn't feel that Who had done the business. This was extended in some online article writers' minds to the show being a failure for the BBC too. These articles quote the show's ratings, but always fall foul of two mistakes / inaccuracies. First, they never include figures for specials, which do much better than episodes of a series like The Well. Specials don't tend to be streamed in advance and usually get scheduling and publicity such that less committed audience members find and watch them, showing that there's an audience that won't necessarily seek out regular episodes urgently after broadcast, but who could still watch them and find them entertaining later (this is a good thing). Second, they ignore the context that audiences of Doctor Who, in common with those of every other TV show, have gradually reduced every year as audiences have fragmented. Doctor Who having that 'long tail' of later discoverability, though, gives it advantages over other shows. Doctor Who was in the top ten of Christmas Day programmes in 2024, and compares favourably to others in that same list: it has longevity and adaptability built in (Gavin and Stacey can only do so many reunion shows, it's linked very specifically to one cast and writing team), it has massive franchise and merchandising potential (quite a bit more than Call the Midwife, say); it has significant appeal beyond a specific time or territory (unlike Eastenders, for example). Put simply: the Beeb would not be bringing the show back - and certainly wouldn't be bringing it back at Christmas - if it wasn't valuable to them.

Further proof of this was the announcement that The War Between the Land and the Sea will be shown in the UK during the run up to Christmas 2025 (the official site's item is here including a quote from Russell T Davies calling the spin-off series a "Christmas treat"). Disney+ haven't confirmed when the series will be shown outside of the UK, and given they have ended the relationship there's a small possibility, I suppose, that it may never get shown at all. But the BBC are hot for it. For UK fans, it will be a Whoniverse stop-gap during the 17 months that Doctor Who is off air between the series in which The Well featured and the 2026 Christmas special (17 months is too long to wait, bring back the Doctor - or at least the Doctor's extended universe - don't hesitate!). This all means the show will continue with a festive presence as well as having at least one episode shown in every calendar year since its return in 2005. And, just maybe, it could indicate that Doctor Who is back for good, and that nothing can stop it (except if a certain orange grifter successfully sues the BBC, then all bets are off!). These are positive things to report on (aside from the orange grifter). If they're generating negative content, there's clearly some other agenda involved. For fans, this is likely to be summed up in three words: Russell must go. Some people haven't enjoyed Davies's second run as Doctor Who showrunner - they are desperate for any hint that he's screwed up (but he really hasn't, and will no doubt stop being involved in the show at a time of his own choosing). For non-fans writing for certain publications / platforms, it's a different three words: abolish the BBC. There's also something more insidious, likely coming from those same publications / platforms - but fans aren't necessarily immune either - about wanting things that are 'woke' to do badly (stemming from a fear or hatred of diversity). Resist this nonsense and celebrate. Doctor Who is no longer as as dead as we've ever known it - it's back, back, back!

In Summary:

Good casting and direction turn what could have been a little bit too much like an Aliens rip-off into something a bit more special.