There have been some strange parallels between this current series of Doctor Who and the previous one, both produced by returning show runner Russell T. Davies. Each season is planned for 8 episodes. Both season openers—Space Babies and The Robot Revolution–are brightly-coloured whimsical pieces of nonsense. Each second episode–The Devil’s Chord and Lux–feature loud over-the-top chaos god antagonists who are part of the show’s new mythology of “the pantheon”. And each third episode–Boom and The Well–are thrillers set in remote locations featuring a slightly harder science fiction edge than the material around it, and including the return of sorts of an antagonist that we learned about in Russell T. Davies’ first era as show runner.

(Continuing this trend, by all impressions, the fourth episodes–73 Yards and Lucky Day–will be a Doctor-lite story focusing on Ruby Sunday!)

But Boom was also the best episode of the show’s last season. Does The Well take this mirroring effect that far?

Spoilers ahead!

Well, there’s no way to know, of course, not yet anyway. As I write this I haven’t seen any of the episodes that have come after. But I can say pretty confidently that it’s the best episode of the season so far. But it’s also intensely frustrating. The first half of The Well, co-written by Russell T. Davies and new-to-Who Sharma Angel-Walfall, is amazing–mysterious, gripping and incredibly tense. The second half isn’t exactly bad, but it makes numerous missteps that pull you out of the story and significantly weaken the episode.

In that way, The Well also reminds me of 73 Yards, a story that I was enjoying a lot before it took a turn into undercooked nonsense. The Well doesn’t derail that badly, but it still went from being up there with one of the best things that Davies had written for the show into just another episode, with good parts and bad parts.

This is interesting, because I’d argue that the actual best thing that Davies has written for Doctor Who is Midnight from 2008, and of course it’s the mysterious “Midnight Entity” that makes a surprise return to the show in this episode (credited here as “It Has No Name.”) But ironically, it’s one the connections to Midnight are made explicit that the quality of the episode declines.

Before that, it’s all intriguing and increasingly terrifying set-up. The Doctor and Belinda find themselves with a group of space marines doing a space drop onto a planet where a mining colony has gone dark. They find the place full of dead bodies–some having been shot, some having been crushed. Plus, for added weirdness, the mirrors are all broken. And of course, as you always get in these situations, there is one survivor.

That survivor is Aliss Fenly, who happens to be deaf. The soldiers are all suspicious–how has Aliss survived when everyone else has died? And what is that Belinda seems to glimpse from time to time behind her? The realisation that the murderous threat that the characters is facing is somehow just hiding behind Aliss is genuinely chilling–the perfect sort of horrific weirdness that Doctor Who at its best excels at. And the first time that one of the hapless troopers walks fully around Aliss to see what will happen, and she is abruptly flung across the room with all his bones crushed, that’s great moment of shock.

But when it keeps happening, well, there are diminishing returns. Especially when there’s no real reason for it to keep happening. The situation is that under threat, Aliss keeps looking at one trooper, Cassio (played by Christopher Chung from Slow Horses), who keeps moving around frantically. resulting in various other troopers being directly behind Aliss and presumably seeing the creature, which seems to be its kill condition. A bunch of the soldiers die; this continues until Cassio himself is taken out.

I get the reaction of the troopers–one of the things we’ve seen before is the this entity fuels paranoia. But why would Aliss look around like this? Why keep staring at Cassio after the deaths start taking place? You think once the chaos started, she’d stop turning like that, since she knows what will result. For goodness sake, why doesn’t she just back up against a wall, or lie down or something? It’s frustrating because it wouldn’t have been hard to construct the scene differently to make it work better.

After that, the Doctor figures out a way to kick the creature off temporarily (he tricks it into seeing himself) and there’s a quick effort to escape, but unfortunately the thing winds up being Belinda. No one knows what to do, leading the leader of the troopers, Shaya Costallion (Caoilfhionn Dunne), to near-fatally shoot Belinda so the creature will go behind her instead (a thing it does), giving her the chance to sacrifice herself (she jumps back down the mineshaft that the creature came out of).

But, it’s not actually clear that this needs to be done. Nobody suggests walking back to the room where the Doctor created a reflective surface so the entity could be driven off Belinda, or getting an unsmashed mirror from their spaceship. Again, this is a problem that could have been easily fixed with just bit of work in the writing and directing; as such it’s probably a nit-pick, but it’s still one that I find undercuts the drama and tension of the scene.

Most annoyingly of all is the end-of-episode reveal that maybe the monster escaped after all and made it back to the ship hiding behind trooper Mo Gilliben. It’s an out-of-nowhere twist that reminds one of the most contrived horror-movie endings, which are not set up well and don’t add anything to the story except to provide a darker ending. Was Costallion’s sacrifice meaningless? Are Aliss and the rest of the crew just going to die anyway? What’s the point?

Actually, another complaint–what was the point of connecting this story to Midnight at all? The reveal is extremely well done, but the episode as it play out is not strengthened by this link. The entity doesn’t function or behave at all in the same way as it did before, and nothing about the Doctor’s prior encounters informs him in how he deals with it here. So it’s something that is exciting as a fan in a bit of a flash-in-the-pan sort of way, but it doesn’t make the story better. It doesn’t make the story worse either, thankfully, but I’d argue it does threaten to weaken Midnight a bit by making the peril there a little less enigmatic. At least, though, we didn’t see or hear the thing clearly; I was grateful for that.

But even with those complaints, The Well is a good episode. The problems take it down a peg or two, and are aggravating because they were so unnecessary and easily avoidable, but there is a lot to like here in terms of the atmosphere, the thrills and the scares. I wish the initial hopes that it was going to be nigh-perfect had come to pass, but I’m happy with what we got. The episode looked good, and Ncuti Gatwa and Verada Sethu did solid work with their characters. Gatwa did his Doctor-crying thing again, but this time it was because he was scared rather than sad, so that was nice.

Actually, since this was the best episode of the season to date, and Lux was better than The Robot Revolution, that means each episode so far was better than the one before. That’s a great trajectory for the season to be on–maybe it will keep it up! I kind of doubt it, but until I see Lucky Day, I’ll hold out hope.

Other Thoughts

• I’ve read numerous comparisons between the Midnight Entity and the “Not-Things” from Wild Blue Yonder, but I think you could also speculate about links between this episode’s threat and the theoretical beings from Listen, who were perfectly evolved to hide. Maybe the entity does escape in this episode, eventually travels back in time, and relaxes a whole lot to become the thing that we sort of saw in Listen.

• The season mystery arc about why the Doctor is unable to get Belinda back home continues here, most interestingly be the revelation that the people in the far future here have never heard of earth. It has been half a million years, so that’s a little less impacting than it could have been (in spite of the Doctor’ statement that there’s always a human race). But still, it’s a nice way of building the mystery.

• You know what else there always seems to be? Toxic by Britney Spears. The were playing that as the earth died in The End of the World way back in 2005, and we here it again here. Doctor Who loves Toxic.

• It’s nice that the show included a deaf character in Aliss, and cast a deaf actress in Rose Ayling-Ellis. It’s kind of interesting that in the future, they accommodate deaf people by having people walk around with their personal subtitle generators, and that nurses learn sign language.

But the social-justice point that the show is making goes on for one or two lines of dialogue too long, I’d say. The Doctor muttering, “It doesn’t matter the year–singing still makes some people paranoid” is stupid. Maybe it’s all the dead bodies around everywhere that are making people paranoid? I wouldn’t be happy if a stranger was basically talking in code to the only survivor of this death-planet either.

• Should the TARDIS have somehow been translating sign language?

• What the heck is going on with Mrs. Flood? She shows up here as a superior officer that one of the troopers is talking to on a screen, very excited to here that the Doctor is using his “vindicator” (the Vortex Indicator that the Doctor pulled out to try to hone in on Belinda’s home-time). I’m curious about it all, but why did the producers think that the thing to do this season was to have an older lady appearing in random places wherever the TARDIS lands? Isn’t that precisely what the show did last season with the Sutekh-avatars played by Susan Twist? Why do it again? I’m curious where they are going with Mrs. Flood of course, but I can’t think of a single possibility that would make all these cameo appearances interesting or worthwhile. What I mean is, if she doesn’t appear again until the season finale, I feel like that would be just as interesting from a story perspective if as if she continued to show up, but less annoying.

I hope I’m wrong of course (ie I hope that it somehow becomes really interesting), but I’m doubtful.