TL;DR – Today, Doctor Who took a turn into an unsettling one, and I was not quite ready for them to commit as much as they did.

Disclosure – I paid for the Disney+ service that viewed this series.

Warning – contains scenes that may cause distress.

Doctor Who Review –

When I was first introduced to Doctor Who, I was inundated with several episodes that were meant to unsettle you. Where a child in a mask could be more terrifying than the London Blitz, and where there was a ‘Silence in the Library’ incident that still lives in infamy in my family’s lore. However, it has been a long time since Doctor Who had me sitting on the edge of my chair, but they got that tonight.    

So, to set the scene, after The Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Miss Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) tried to hook an anchor into May 2025 in last week’s Lux, they have still struggled to get it to land where they want it to be. But while The Doctor is busy promising that he will get Belinda home, the TARDIS makes a landing 500,000 years in the future. They just need to get another Vindicator reading, only to find themselves immediately jumping out of a spaceship. Now, from here, we will be looking at the episode as a whole, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead. 

If you know your Doctor Who lore, then you probably were already on edge from the moment they played Britney Spears’ Toxic before landing in what was clearly a Welsh quarry, which was oddly comforting. This makes you feel slightly unsettled, which is the right feeling to have as you enter a planet where everyone is dead. The whole setup of the episode is brooding. But it is also filled with these familiar elements, like the psychic paper, which helps bring an element of familiarity, which we will get to later. This setup let both Ncuti and Varada really shine in both their respective storylines and also for the supporting cast to have a real impact.  

Most of the episode takes place in one room, as they find Aliss Fenly (Rose Ayling-Ellis) sitting alone, the only survivor of what looks like a wholesale massacre of the mining station’s population. There is this immediate tension as to whether she is a victim who has gone through a horrific trauma, or if she is the perpetrator, or maybe both. This only escalates when Bel and others start seeing something behind Aliss in the corner of their eyes. Just there in a flash, so much so that you don’t trust yourself that you’ve actually seen something. Add a bunch of soldiers clearly on edge and a Doctor who feels like something is profoundly wrong but can’t place why, and you have the building blocks for me sitting on the edge of my seat.

A lot of this episode revolves around Aliss being deaf, how all the characters interact with her given that situation, and the growing thought that she might have something to do with the massacre. To its credit, modern Doctor Who has been striving to include themes around diversity and inclusion; however, they quite often only sit at a surface level. Not so this week. How people communicate with Aliss is a core aspect of the episode, integrated into every part of the narrative, and it would not have worked as well without it. Rose Ayling-Ellis is truly fantastic in this episode and helps bring a lot of the disquiet that the setting needs.

The big reveal during the episode is that this is a sequel to the David Tennent episode Midnight. Which was a masterful touch because it is an episode that I do remember because of the performance of Tennent, but it is not as high up on the best episode list that a viewer would immediately pick it up unless they had X-tonic radiation stored away in the trivia section of their memory. But even though I didn’t pick up on the direct episode relationship until they mentioned diamonds, right from the start, something about the episode triggered as being familiar. For me, I was drawn back to The Impossible Planet, but that might have been because this episode, tonally and structurally, harked back to those earlier episodes, and it worked.            

In the end, do we recommend Doctor Who: The Well? Yes, we would. Sure, the ending is a bit messy in places, and it is time for Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) to reveal her hand. However, this might have been the best episode of the new series in a long time, and at least the best of Ncuti’s time so far. Have you watched Doctor Who yet? Let us know what you thought in the comments below.

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day.    

Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of Doctor Who
Directed by – Amanda Brotchie
Written by – Russell T Davies & Sharma Angel-Walfall
Production/Distribution Companies – BBC Studios, Badwolf & Disney+
Starring – Ncuti Gatwa & Varada Sethu with Bethany Antonia, Christopher Chung, Caoilfhionn Dunne, Rose Ayling-Ellis & Anita Dobson and Annabel Brook, Luke Rhodri, Gaz Choudhry, Gary Pillai, Frankie Lipman, Paul Kasey, Jermaine Dominique & Amy Tyger