The Well

The One With… the monster that has no name knowing what the Doctor's is.

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The Doctor and Belinda find themselves stranded on the inhospitable Planet 6-7-6-7 in the distant future while using the Vindicator to pinpoint May 2025 Earth. They team up with a platoon of troopers who have been sent to investigate Colony Base 15, a mining operation that they've lost contact with. Arriving at the installation, they soon discover something is very wrong indeed... from the troopers having no knowledge of Earth to the Doctor realizing he has been on Planet 6-7-6-7 before...

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WE DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS.

• 13 Is Unlucky: The team had eleven troopers before the Doctor and Belinda joined it. Discussed by Belinda. The Human Aliens don't understand the Earth superstition since they haven't heard of Earth.
• Actionized Sequel: While still a Psychological Thriller, this episode has a lot more action than when we last saw the entity, what with the Space Marine rescue party.
• Aliens Speaking English: Sort of. While the speaking characters are presumably translated by the TARDIS, Aliss uses British Sign Language, despite being a Human Alien 500,000 years in the future who has never heard of Earth or humans. Although it's entirely possible that this is TARDIS translation too, similar to how the show previously dealt with the issue of "lip sync".
• All There in the Manual: Downplayed and subverted. For those who wanted to get more of a glimpse at the entity, the behind-the-scenes featurette shows creature performer Paul Kasey wearing a costume head for the entity in plain view. It's up to the viewer's interpretation as to whether they want to take this as the "canon" appearance of what the creature looks like, or to treat the costume as something which gives a general vibe of the creature's appearance without actually being the creature's true form.
• Always Chaotic Evil: The last time the Doctor met the Midnight entity, he naïvely tried to understand and befriend it. This time around, he has hundreds of years more experience under his belt. He pulls no punches, tries to outright kill the thing, and goes so far as to outright call it a "murderer".
• Ambiguous Ending: The story ends on the possibility that Shaya's Heroic Suicide was All for Nothing, as another crew member seems to notice something behind Mo after the Doctor has left...
• Ambiguous Situation:
  • When Cassio's incompetence starts getting several soldiers killed by the entity in short order, the entity notably throws every one of the soldiers it kills during this period specifically in Cassio's direction, nearly hitting him with their bodies each time — by contrast, when Shaya uses the entity's "game" to kill Cassio in order to stop the massacre, the entity throws Cassio's body in the opposite direction away from Shaya. Why the entity does this, what it's trying to say or do in regards to Cassio with this behavior shift, is as ambiguous as the entity's general nature.
  • Did the entity simply survive Shaya's Heroic Suicide, or did it fake moving to Shaya all along? On one hand, Belinda heard its whispers, but she and the Doctor got back on the TARDIS, which means it wasn't attached to her after Shaya shot her. It's also possible it did die, and the monster hinted at the end of the episode is another member of the same species; after all, in the scene before the entity attaches itself to Belinda, the air lock distinctly shows four entities exiting an air lock that currently contains only three people...
• Apocalyptic Log: The crew of the mining base left one to warn anyone about the creature escaping the well.
• Artistic Licence – Chemistry: Unless there is some unspecified phlebotinum filtering the air very very quickly or the Human Aliens' blood chemistry is significantly different - in reality, being that close to a giant waterfall of liquid mercury splashing all over the place (and thus producing mercury vapour droplets) would almost certainly result in some rather bad mercury poisoning for everyone in the room.
• Bavarian Fire Drill: The Doctor and Belinda land the TARDIS right in the middle of troops making a jump to an abandoned planet, so he has to use the Psychic Paper to bluff that they're superiors sent to test them. It eventually backfires, as an increasingly angry Cassio gets suspicious of the Doctor's behaviour and figures he's just a civilian.
• Bad Boss: Cassio when he asserts command and sacrifices one soldier to confirm the entity's existence, only to repeat it more before Shaya tells Aliss to turn her back on him so they can use the entity to inflict him with a Karmic Death.
• BBC Quarry: Planet 6-7-6-7, though in fairness that's because it is a quarry. All the diamonds that used to cover it have been mined out.
• Big Bad: The Midnight entity manipulates the crew of the base into killing each other, and once again seeks to escape Midnight.
• Bittersweet Ending: The Doctor kept his word and managed to get Aliss back home to her daughter. Unfortunately, the Midnight entity has still managed to slaughter everyone at the base, including a majority of the rescue team, and it (or another of its kind) may have latched onto someone aboard the ship leaving the planet... In the meantime, the Doctor and Belinda are not only no closer to getting back to Earth, but are now wondering if there's even an Earth for them to get back to (at least after May 24, 2025).
• Bloodier and Gorier: While still staying family friendly by not showing any injuries or faces, while exploring the mining colony, multiple corpses are seen, with even the Doctor commenting that every bone in the bodies of the entity victims have been broken. The deaths shown in the episode are also brutal, with troopers being flung across the room and breaking their bones, and one shot of a trooper being flung into a wall head-first, then his corpse falling to the ground.
• The Bus Came Back: After waiting 400,000 years in-universe and 17 years out, the entity from Midnight has returned to terrorise the Doctor once more.
• Call-Back:
  • This isn't the first time Fifteen has foiled an Eldritch abomination by reflecting their own power back at them: Sutekh's Death Wave was undone in a similar fashion at the end of the previous series.
  • Once again, the Doctor and Belinda dress for their adventure by running into the depths of the TARDIS before appearing through another doorway in new outfits.
  • This is not Britney Spears' ''Toxic'''s first time on Doctor Who.
  • An eldritch abomination from the latter half of the revival's fourth series is hiding behind someone's back, and can only be fleetingly glimpsed.
  • The creature seems to be just visible out of the corner of the eye.
  • Much like Thirteen in ''It Takes You Away'', the Doctor attempts to use a person's disability to smuggle information to his companion without them knowing. However, Aliss quickly calls him out on this, pointing out that she can lip read.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": The soldiers refer to the facility as a mine for "Carbon 46", with them not clarifying that it's another name for diamonds until much later down the line, which helps make The Reveal hit that much harder.
• Cassandra Truth: The troopers naturally find it hard to believe that the Doctor fought the monster 400,000 years ago. This was actually the last straw for Cassio, who immediately mutinies and takes matters into his own hands.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The mercury pipe feeding the well turns out to be key to freeing Aliss Fenly from the grip of the entity.
  • Shaya's precision marksmanship is used to get the entity to move from Belinda to Shaya herself.
  • It's possible to use a speech-to-text device that someone else is wearing. Shaya exploits this function to get Aliss to turn around and send the creature after Cassio.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: How the Midnight entity chooses to kill its victims this time if their compatriots don't shoot them first, violently throwing them around like a ragdoll.
• Darker and Edgier: Similar to its predecessor story, this story is quite a bit darker and scarier than the average Doctor Who episode, being more violent, featuring elements of strong Psychological Horror, and the companion being shot in the heart.
• Disability Aid Loss: Exploited by most characters, who frequently turn off their "subtitle holograms" to obfuscate their words from Aliss, who is deaf. She can still lip-read, though.
• Disability Immunity: The entity whispers to its hosts and drives them homicidally insane, forcing others to kill them in self-defence, at which point it possesses the killer instead. Aliss is the only exception, with the Doctor theorising that her deafness meant that she couldn't hear the whispering.
• Dolled-Up Installment: Behind the scenes, this was not originally written as a "Midnight" sequel, which is why the creature's abilities are different. Russell T Davies's writing credit is presumably for adapting it to fit with his episode.
• The Dreaded: When the Doctor discovers that the being he is dealing with is the Midnight Entity, he becomes deathly serious and afraid in a way not even the Daleks can muster as it still remains the one Eldritch Abomination he never could discover an answer about and almost died after being rendered entirely helpless to its power, even after several eternities and regenerations of time to ponder on what it could have been, he's no closer to actually confronting the entity on its terms and can only work within its rules that have completely changed since the last time he dealt with it as to not completely fall apart in its presence.
• Dug Too Deep: Digging for mercury on the burnt-out remains of a planet utterly hostile to all living things, the miners woke up something they shouldn't have, and it killed them all.
• Eldritch Abomination: The Midnight entity is, again, incomprehensible, unstoppable and driving people mad.
• Enhance Button: The Doctor's sonic screwdriver acts as one when viewing the base's camera footage.
• Face Death with Dignity: Shaya sets a new high bar via falling into the Well to imprison the Midnight entity once again. Unfortunately, it might have been all for nought in the end.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Mere moments before the Wham Line listed below, Shaya refers to Planet 6-7-6-7's star as previously being "Xtonic", a term which has only showed up in one previous context. In fact, for some viewers, this was the true Wham Line, as there is only one reason that term would be brought up in an episode...
• Flashback: When the Doctor realizes this is Midnight and states he's been here before, footage from that episode (Ten interacting with the possessed Sky) is replayed. This has the benefit of reminding old Doctor Who viewers which episode "The Well" is a sequel to and establishing the broad strokes for newer viewers who missed the Tenth Doctor era.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Prior to the episode's airing, the title reveal had the detail of a digital clock hitting midnight before being covered by a bunker door.
  • A very subtle one for only the most eagle-eyed viewers of the episodes from over a decade prior. Planet 6767 is stated to be bathed in "galvanic radiation" which kills anything and can leave a lingering contamination on what it touches. Apart from the incident with the Toymaker, the only other time that the term "galvanic radiation" was used in Doctor Who was a "blink and you'll miss it" moment back in "Midnight", when Professor Hobbes briefly described the Xtonic sunlight as a raw form of galvanic radiation.
  • Even before the exact identity of the threat is made clear, the true threat of the episode is hinted at by the circumstances. A small group of people trapped on a planet that seemingly has no life due to being bathed in absolutely deadly radiation, and a couple of them catch split-second glimpses of a dark thing? Where have we seen that before...?
  • After the Doctor and Belinda remove their armor, Cassio admonishes them because it's against regulation. Towards the end, the time it takes the Doctor and Belinda to put their armor back on helps the Midnight entity to catch up to the rest of the group, though the delayed airlock certainly doesn't help.
  • When the Doctor hugs Aliss (and therefore is looking at the space behind her,) he gets a quizzical look on his face, almost as if he can sense something is there.
• For the Evulz: Once again, the Midnight entity torments a group of people into madness and death for no discernible reason. The Doctor wholly believes after how his last experience with the creature ended, possibly due to seeing into its mind when it stole his voice, that it torments others in the ways it does in large part just because it gets a kick out of it.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Shortly after the airlock door closes behind Aliss and two troopers, the screen shows that there are actually four life forms inside.
• Godzilla Threshold: Shaya shoots Belinda in the heart to get the entity to latch on to her, acknowledging that even if her aim is true and the shot doesn't outright kill her, she'll only have the slimmest chance of survival. Thankfully, due to futuristic medicine and the TARDIS, she gets better.
• Heroic Suicide: Shaya kills herself by throwing herself into the well after the entity latches on to her. Unfortunately, the entity might well have escaped and latched onto someone else anyway.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Mrs. Flood shows up outside the 21st century again, this time as a superior in the Foundation the characters of the week work for. She confirms from Mo a sighting of the Doctor's Vindicator, apparently quite interested in seeing it in action for reasons unrevealed.
• Human Aliens: Aliss, the miners, and the troopers. Similar to "Dot and Bubble" from last series, they appear to have blue Alien Blood from their injuries. However, while it's assumed that they are descendants of humans, the Doctor and Belinda learn that they have no idea what Earth is or know of any of its superstitions, which they are unnerved by. It's not a case of Future Imperfect either.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Shaya says as much about tricking Cassio into being killed, what with his seizing authority from her and getting several troops killed to confirm the entity's existence.
• Immediate Sequel: The episode follows on right from the previous, with the Doctor and Belinda not having changed outfits.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Shaya is an excellent shot. When Belinda becomes the host of the Midnight entity, Shaya shoots her in the millimeters-wide spot in her chest that would have the entity latch onto her while avoiding Belinda's heart.
• In Spite of a Nail: It's heavily implied that the future seen in this episode, unlike in "Midnight", is an alternate Bad Future where the Earth died in 2025 and thus humanity perished before it could ever take to the stars in full. Despite this, the diamond planet was still named Midnight in this timeline.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Cassio's mutiny, though very poorly executed, stemmed from valid concerns. Aliss was the sole survivor of a massacre that left everyone else in the mining colony dead, while she displayed only minor injuries. He was right to be wary of his commander ignoring the increasingly odd behaviour from the Doctor, which culminates in the Doctor's outlandish claim that he visited Midnight 400,000 years prior.
• Jump Scare: One that is genuinely startling because of how sudden it is, with absolutely no indication that one might be coming. When Belinda is talking to one of the troopers about the fact that she’s never heard of Earth or humanity, she turns to look at Aliss only for one hell of a Scare Chord to play as she glimpses something behind her for less than a split-second.
• Kick the Dog: Cassio makes a point to turn his subtitle hologram back on as he gives the "shoot to kill" order to the troops standing near Aliss, for seemingly no other reason than just to make clear to Aliss that he has no qualms about having her killed, or even killing her himself.
• Leitmotif: "Midnight" makes an appropriate return in this episode, utilized while the Doctor runs through corridors towards Aliss and the rest of the group just after the reveal, and most times when the Midnight Entity is dropping bodies.
• Logical Weakness: The creature violently kills anything that moves behind its host's back while someone else is looking at the host from the front. So if there's a reflective surface squarely behind the host's back while you're looking at their front, then the entity will automatically attack itself from its reflection appearing behind the host. The entity's already aware of this weakness and broke the mirrors of the mine to avoid it, but it's foiled when the Doctor cause a makeshift waterfall of mercury.
• Mundanger: Alongside the terror of a creature that kills suddenly and horrifically with no apparent motive, there's also the danger of soldiers getting increasingly panicked over the whole situation.
• The Nameless: The entity, just like in its last outing, is only referred to with descriptors like "the thing behind Aliss' back", with the Doctor even saying that it has no name and no identity. Somewhat creepily, the credits only call it "IT HAS NO NAME".
• Never Speak Ill of the Dead: Despite Cassio leading a mutiny against Shaya and getting most of their platoon needlessly killed, Mo recommends he receive recognition because "he tried his best" under the circumstances when she makes her report on the mission.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • While the entity from Midnight does display some new abilities, we the audience learn precious little about it that its first outing didn't already tell us. The Doctor appears to learn something from its whispers, but the audience never hears it.
  • We're also never given an explanation as to why the entity's rules have changed since the last time it was encountered. Then again, the entity is largely indicated to be doing what it does because it enjoys it and for no other reason, so it may very well be like the Toymaker, where the only rules it is bound by are the rules of the game it is playing at the time, but unlike the Toymaker it doesn't let anyone else know what game it is playing.
• Oh, Crap!: A glorious one when the Doctor realizes what planet they are on.
• OOC Is Serious Business: The literal second that the Doctor realizes what entity he is exactly dealing with, he drops almost all of his usually whimsical characteristics he's been known for in this incarnation or across all of his prior lives as the Doctor is rendered as scared as the rest of them with barely any answers on how to stop it. When Shaya allows the Midnight Entity to kill Cassio after he recklessly gets several of their team killed trying to get behind Aliss, the Doctor doesn't call her out for her decision and just curls up in shame understanding he probably would have made the same call knowing how dangerous this thing is from past experience by describing what it turns them into with it's presence.
• Poor Communication Kills: A justified variation. The Leisure Palace Company did abandon Midnight as per Ten's recommendation. The problem is that this was 400,000 years ago. Between the passage of time, the death of Midnight's sun, and cosmic upheaval, those old warnings have since been long lost and/or forgotten. So, Colony Base 15 had no idea they were setting up shop on a prohibited planet hosting a Sealed Evil in a Can until they accidentally opened the can.
• Psychological Horror: As you would expect when the Midnight entity is about.
• Ret-Gone: No one aside from the main characters remembers Earth. The Doctor indicates that it's abnormal and not the result of Future Imperfect. The situation is too dire to discuss this during the episode, but Belinda briefly panics about it in the ending.
• Sadistic Choice: The entity forces one on its hosts and everyone around them: each host eventually either a) kills anyone who walks behind them or b) drives those around them to attempt to murder them. If they choose the latter, they become possessed themselves. Forcing the entity to release its host only works temporarily before it latches onto someone again, and killing oneself instead when possessed seems like a valid option, but even this might not be enough.
• Sequel Episode: To "Midnight", with the return of the titular planet and the Midnight entity.
• Shout-Out:
  • Many to Star Trek. The space marines wear jumpsuits under their armour with blocks of black and blue on the shoulders that look very similar to the uniforms in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The ending reveals that their leader's costume is colour-coded red, just like that series' captains. It's mentioned in the dialogue that they serve a "Foundation", which could be a reference to the Asimov books, but is probably just a Federation soundalike. The chevron logo on the armored vests' chests even looks like an upside-down Starfleet delta. The Doctor also says "Where light has not gone before", referencing the franchise's famous catchphrase "Where no man/no one has gone before".
• The Spook: The viewer doesn't learn anything more about what the entity is. Even though it displays different powers and a different logic behind its behaviour than last time, the change is never addressed, and the difference actually makes it more difficult to figure out what the hell it is. We do actually see part of it on-screen this time, but only through split-second partially-obscured glimpses; aside from the fact that it does apparently have a physical form, we're no closer to answers.
• Stealth Sequel: This episode's status as a Sequel Episode to "Midnight" isn't revealed until halfway through, with the reveal itself resolving the mystery of what happened to the mining base which drives the first half of the episode.
• Taught by Experience: Zigzagged with the Doctor once he realizes what's actually going on and what planet this is. Having encountered the Midnight entity before, the Doctor knows now what they’re up against and what didn't work last time (on top of having hundreds of additional years' experience under his belt thanks to his subsequent incarnations). On the other hand, the Midnight entity remains one of the most dangerous and abnormal lifeforms the Doctor's ever encountered; all that additional experience can only compensate up to a point, especially since the entity itself uses a very different set of abilities than the last time the Doctor dealt with it.
• There Is Another: Ambiguous but implied. When Alyss Fenly and two soldiers get into the lift leaving the planet, the camera pointedly lingers on the bio-scanner registering four passengers inside the lift — and this is before the entity explicitly catches up to the remaining people outside the lift and latches onto one of them. Between that and the Ambiguous Ending's suggestion that the entity escaped the planet with the survivors anyway, it seems there's more than one of the entity after all.
• Title Drop:
  • The Doctor watches security footage before almost everyone on the base was killed.
    Base Commander: It's behind you! From the well! It came out of the well!
  • Later, Aliss says the same thing thing about the creature.
    Aliss: Something came out of the well. That's what they said. It came out of the well.
• Too Dumb to Live: Cassio, upon hearing that the Midnight entity kills anyone who gets behind it, repeatedly tries to circle around its current host to get behind them, and as he does so, multiple people end up killed by said entity in exactly the way he was warned would happen before finally being shot to stop him. Only one or even two deaths would have been enough to confirm that the rules are accurate to even a person of average intelligence to stop what they were doing. His continued attempts, in spite of literally seeing half the squad die in exactly the way he was warned would happen, to try and get behind said host where he himself would only end up dying in the exact same way if he succeeded would only have gotten everyone in the room killed if he hadn't been shot first. He actively ignored the warnings from the only survivor of the incident as well as the evidence presented to his own eyes for no justifiable reason, and even the paranoia-inducing whispers of the entity cannot excuse his actions as anything other than blatant stupidity, as there was nothing to be gained by trying to stand behind an unarmed woman making no effort to try and escape.
• The Un-Reveal: The cinematography deliberately keeps the true form of the Midnight entity a mystery to preserve the horror of the original story. The audience only see a dark shape in the shadows but can't make out a definite form. All we can infer, from the Doctor's and the doomed soldiers' reactions to looking at the thing, is that it is very unpleasant to look at.
• Wham Line:
  • This exchange between the Doctor and Shaya reveals to the audience and the Doctor that everyone is in great danger.
    Shaya: The entire surface of this planet was once made out of diamonds.
    The Doctor: What? What is this planet called?
    Shaya: 6-7-6-7.
    The Doctor: The old name. 400,000 years ago, what was the planet called?
    Shaya: It was called Midnight.
  • When the Doctor looks behind Aliss' back to talk to the Midnight entity, it whispers something to him that rattles him to his core:
    The Doctor: It knows my name.
• Wham Shot: The survivors of the mission are reporting to Mrs. Flood at the end, who once again reveals that she's outside 21st century Earth (hell, outside of Earth in general).
• Whole-Plot Reference: An Actionized Sequel to a psychological horror story, where the protagonist and a new team of elite soldiers return to the same desolate planet years later (which was a much shorter time for the protagonist than everyone else), and they gradually find after arriving that the same monster from before has wiped out the rustic new colony that was established in the intervening years since the first story, leaving only one female survivor, and then the monsters start targeting the new arrivals. Multiple characters also suggest dealing with the creature by nuking the site from orbit. Basically, this episode is a "Midnight" equivalent to Aliens.
• You Are Number Six: Troopers 5, 6, 7, 9 and 10 aren't named at all. Not even in the script.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Zig-Zagged by the entity itself. While it does have a comprehensible form, which both the Doctor and the soldiers it kills look at and are universally horrified by, it's obscured from the audience and even, to some extent, from most of the characters during the story's runtime. The behind-the-scenes featurette shows creature performer Paul Kasey in a costume with a round, black, vaguely insectoid head, but this probably isn't meant to be the "canon" appearance of the entity, since so much effort is put into obscuring its appearance onscreen. It's more likely designed in such a way as to create a bulky, black shape designed to freak the viewer out when seen for a split second.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: The entity latches onto the person who kills its host. Possibly Subverted if it actually faked a transference from a mortally wounded Belinda to Shaya and instead latched onto Mo with none aware until after the Doctor and Belinda left.

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