2,940 words, 16 minutes read time.
My plan to review every episode of the current series was almost derailed by season 4, episode 4, Lucky Day. Never before has an episode of Doctor Who, and possibly an episode of any long-running television series, offended me on such a scale politically that I’ve finished it wanting to stop watching any future episodes, entirely and forever. I got over it sufficiently to watch episode five, The Story and the Engine, but that doesn’t mean I like Lucky Day any better. I’ll come to that shortly.
The Well, season 2, episode 3
Firstly, I need to catch up with the episode that immediately preceded it.
The consensus seems to be that this was one of the strongest, if not the strongest episode of the series, and possibly of the RTD 2 era so far. I’d go along with that. For once, Davies, with co-writer Sharma Angel-Walfall, put together a cohesive story that held my attention, and a consistent tone and atmosphere, more or less throughout.
The decision to make this a sequel to 2008’s Midnight, which I gather was not Walfall’s original intention, gave the story a wider context, making it bigger than it would otherwise have been. But it also invited comparison, and one that will only serve to confirm to viewers that, despite a marked improvement this season, the show has still fallen far below the standard of its glory days in terms of quality.
Positives
Gatwa continued his improvement and embodied the character of the Doctor for more of this episode than for any other. For the story to work, we had to believe that this was recognisably the same character as Tennant’s Tenth, on a deeper level than could be achieved through a flashback to Midnight, though inevitably, we got that too. Gatwa just about pulled it off.
Varada Sethru’s Belinda is becoming more of a believable companion with believable reactions, though the fear she displays here doesn’t fit with the blasé way she accepted being kidnapped and taken to an alien world by giant robots in episode one. That’s not Varada’s fault. It’s just an inconsistency of characterisation, and that’s down to the writers, particularly to Davies. She and Ncuti do at least show a bit more chemistry together than Ncuti and Millie Gibson’s Ruby managed in the last season.
The episode was also elevated by the performances of two of the supporting actors, Rose Ayling-Ellis as Aliss and Caoilfhionn Dunne as Shaya.
Ellis in particular was excellent as Aliss, and her real-life deafness was made good use of in the plot, rather than being simply another ‘representation’ tool.
Unlike most anything else in RTD 2, The Well presented a cohesive story and making Aliss the focal point, sitting alone, away from the space station soldiers and the Doctor and Belinda worked in building up the tension, with her disability adding vulnerability and believability to the character and the situation. The use of sign language and the character’s desperate appeal for the other characters not to turn their backs when speaking was a point worth making, from which some viewers might learn something and maybe adapt their behaviour in a real-world interaction, rather than being yet another pointless virtue signal.
Dunne’s Shaya was given some characterisation, and we were introduced to skills she possessed, shooting and running, that were important to the plot resolution, and she did a good job with the material she was given. However, suddenly giving her a back-story in flashback about one minute before her climatic act of self-sacrifice was another example of the lazy, rushed, disjointed writing we’ve come to expect.
Mrs Flood made her now customary appearance at the end of the episode. For once, she wasn’t nodding and winking at us through the fourth wall, but dressed as a proper Science Fiction character, possibly from Star Trek Next Generation, with an appropriate Science Fiction backdrop. She was asking the surviving soldiers on the base about the Doctor and his ‘Vindicator’ gadget.
It was at this point, watching last Saturday afternoon, that I had a moment of realisation and solved the riddle of who is Mrs Flood, the question that’s been exercising the collective mind of the nation since her first appearance in The Church on Ruby Road seventeen months ago.
She’s Susan the Doctor’s granddaughter!
I won’t go into how I arrived at this conclusion, because I’m much less sure now than I was on first watch, and so many other rumours, concerning both her and Belinda are now running riot throughout the ranks of fandom. It’s still a possibility, though one I hope won’t be realised. I’ve been campaigning for the return of Susan since the triumphant rebirth of the show in 2005, but it would be wrong on every level to do this without giving Carole Ann-Ford, the real Susan, 1963-4, and The Five Doctors anniversary special, 1983, a valedictory bow; and I hate to think what the modern incarnation of RTD would do to the character.
All that needs to be said in this context, is that at least the ‘Who is Mrs Flood?’ story arc is giving me a reason to continue watching.
Negatives
This was the first of four episodes this season to feature a name other than Davies on the writing credits, and, as I’ve already said, RTD has acknowledged that the sequel idea did not come from co-writer Angel-Walfall. With a bit of between-the-lines intuition, I’d guess that Davies took this writer’s original story idea, decided it had a Midnight vibe, and decided to revisit one of his best loved stories, ultimately making the episode much more his work than hers.
That might be jump, but the whole sequel idea did seem tacked on, rather than either planned or arising organically from the story.
Without the Midnight link, with a few changes, we would have had a serviceable, old-fashioned ‘Base under siege’ type episode that stood or fell on its own merits, and would have avoided the risk of comparison.
This was better paced than either Robot Revolution or Lux, doing a decent job of building tension, especially around the Aliss character. But, as usual, the ending was rushed, and the resolution unsatisfactory.
Or, perhaps ill-judged might be more exact than unsatisfactory. The strong possibility that the entity survived Shaya’s attempt to kill it by leaping to her own death down the well once the unseen antagonist had attached itself to her, suggested that Shaya’s heroism had been in vain, a suggestion that I thought we could have done without.
The selfless heroism that’s been a feature of the show since the beginning has been in short supply in recent years, and whether Shaya’s self-sacrifice was of value or not, it should be pointed out that, once again it was not the Doctor who saved the day, a lack which has been a big problem with Gatwa’s Doctor from the beginning. The central character has never been a ‘superhero’ in the conventional sense. But he (or she) does need to be a hero.
There were many plot-holes, but I’ll mention in this context only those concerning the way the entity was defeated, if indeed it was. Firstly, it was established that these events took place 400,000 years after the events of its parent episode. What reason do we have to believe that something as simple as a long plunge would destroy it? For that matter, what reason was there to believe that we were dealing with a single ‘entity’ and not a whole colony of them, especially as we were dealing with something that was invisible to the human (or quasi-human) eye?
Having praised (a bit) the two lead characters and the two main supporting actors, this was quite a big cast, most of whom had no function other than being killed by being hurled against the wall by the power of the entity, and it didn’t seem believable that this was sufficient to kill all of them, given their heavily padded suits and helmets. It was very predictable that the only white male with a reasonably significant role would turn out to some be a ‘wrong un’ to some degree. Sure enough, it was he who attempted to lead a mutiny against Shaya, an act for which he received his just deserts, though it seemed that his actions weren’t entirely unjustifiable if thought of in purely military terms.
I’ll mention just two more things. The episode began right after the events of Lux, with the Doctor and Belinda still dressed in their 1952 outfits. I like that, as it’s a callback to the very earliest days of the show when Hartnell and co. would often go straight from one adventure to another. But, it now seems to have become a ‘thing’ that the two disappear into the Tardis wardrobe, accompanied by either time-appropriate or cheesy music (Brittney Spears’ Toxic this week, a song that also used in season one 2.0, episode two, The End of The World with Ninth Doctor Christopher Eccleston way back in 2006, which may or may not be significant) after first getting all excited about the prospect of playing dress-up. I hate this, and here it was completely out of step with the tone of the rest of the episode. It was made all the worse by the Tardis supplying them with the exact same black shiny space suits as the soldiers they were about to meet on the space station.
Here, with every character bar Aliss (who looked a bit too West Earth 2025 than was necessary) dressed uniformly, the Doctor’s continuing lack of a distinctive costume was even more glaring than normal.
Having said the use of a deaf actor/character worked in serving the plot, and while there was less virtue-signalling here than we’ve grown accustomed to, there were two glaringly stark examples of it related to Ellis/Aliss’ deafness.
The first of these was when Aliss was told that Belinda was a nurse, but was unable to sign. Aliss came back with, ‘A nurse who can’t sign, I thought that was against the law?’ It doesn’t seem a very hopeful vision of the future, 500,000 years in the future, that a species who transverse space, and mine a planet for its diamonds can’t also develop cure for deafness. It also doesn’t seem a very practical use of resources to force nurses to learn what is essentially a foreign, non-verbal language which they will rarely use, thus likely requiring regular refresher courses.
The other ‘moment’ was when the Doctor was signing with Aliss and the dodgy, would-be-mutinous white male soldier barked ‘No private conversations!’ This seemed fair enough, for a soldier, in a dangerous situation, who’d found himself in the company of three individuals, the Doctor, Belinda and Aliss, who he’d never met. But the Doctor thought differently, explaining, to the other characters and to us at home, that ‘Even in the future, people get paranoid when people sign.’
Do they, really?
I thought that RTD, and/or his ‘co-writer’ missed a trick here. ‘People still get paranoid when people talk to each other in a foreign language’
would have worked much better, if they must virtue-signal, because it contains at least a grain of truth, and would have emphasised the point that sign languages arecomplex languages in their own right, and not just people waving their arms around and hoping for the best.
These things might seem like nitpicking or ‘hating’ on the show. But if you’re going to make political points, then they should at least be thought through. More importantly, it’s bad writing, not serving the plot, and immediately taking you out of the story. I know I’m not alone in rolling my eyes and thinking ‘Here we go again’ at such moments.
Conclusion
The Well is not some great return to form, but it is a reasonable episode with the positives outweighing the negatives. It was the best of the last two series’ so far, but not top-drawer. It’s probably too late to turn around the fortunes of this season, and I don’t have confidence that Davies can even maintain or build on the mild impetus provided this episode. But I’m still enjoying the ride, wherever it might lead.
Lucky Day
Season 2, episode 4
Or, at least I was enjoying the ride.
Rarely has anything on television made me as angry as the diatribe by the ‘Doctor’ in support of authority and ‘expert’ monopoly of the control and dissemination of information. The co-opting of this iconic character as a propaganda mouthpiece for the elitist politics of showrunner Russell T Davies and episode writer Roger McTighe (the man behind the almost equally vile Kerblam! In the Chibnall/Whittaker era) is a disgrace, and one from which the show does not deserve to survive under its current management and ‘creative’ team. I’ve committed myself to watching and reviewing the remainder of this current season, but I will now do so reluctantly and I won’t watch further than that unless, and at a minimum, Davies steps down or is removed from his current position.
It would be pointless to go through the numerous plot holes and the amazing coincidences which kept the ‘story’ moving. It would also be pointless to mention the weak, lazy characterisations and their confused motivations. Pointless, because the story only had one reason exist, and that was to tell the viewers what to think.
The politics of the episode can be summarised as, ‘Trust Authority!’, ‘Only listen to approved sources of information!’, ‘Anyone who says differently is your enemy!’
Positives
The first twenty minutes or so are soapy and confused, but at least there was the return of Mille Gibson’s Ruby to enjoy and, as usual, Mille did as much as an actor can do given such a sub-standard script.
Visually, the episode is good, in places, and the alien, the Shreek, looked like a good, old-fashioned Doctor Who. It was criminally wasted here.
The idea of the general public questioning the existence and funding of Unitis not a bad one. But you have to do more with it than use it as a flimsy pretext for an attack on ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘Far Right grifters.’
I’ll leave for another time the many reasons that Unit and its leader Kate Lethbridge-Stewart have increasingly become a joke in the modern show. I’ll also put aside the confused world-building which has made the relationship between the human race and life beyond the Earth unclear: How many times is it now that our collective memory of the many alien invasions we’ve faced been wiped? We’re certainly a long way from the diverse and colourful universe Davies introduced us to during his first time as showrunner between 2005-9.
Negatives
It’s a small issue, given this much wider context, to ask why we needed another ‘Doctor-lite’ episode in a run of a mere eight episodes, as indeed it is to question why we should invest any interest in the ‘Get Belinda home’ story-arc when we are fed an episode in which Varada Sethru’s character barely appears.
These are valid issues, but such things disappear beyond the horizon once the politics of the episode become obvious, and especially when Gatwa finally re-appears close to the end, to hammer home this narrative for all he’s worth.
This character has battled the Daleks and their evil space-Hitler creator Davros, the Cybermen, the Master, the Sontarans, the Silence, the Great Intelligence, Sutekh and many other would-be destroyers of the human race/conquerors of the universe. But never, in the sixty-two-year history of the show have we seen him as moved to anger as he is by Conrad Clark, a human podcaster in England, Earth, 2025.
This character, well-acted by Jonah Hauer-King, who could have been a decent Doctor in another, almost certainly better universe,, if we can look at such things in a purely technical manner, separate from the heavy-handed, exclisionay politics on display.
But the character is nothing more than a cipher a representation of all that RTD, McTighe and everybody else involved with the show hate, which amounts to any of us that thinks or speaks outside their ‘in-group’ mindset.
On a meta level, following one of the themes of Lux, this ‘out-group’ enemy most definitely includes fans critical of the current direction of the show.
The climatic scene when the pseudo-Doctor transports Conrad to the Tardis, or materialises it around him, or whatever, is akin to the Time Lord appearing in the universe of the great John Carpenter film They Live and angrily snatching away and grounding underfoot the glasses that enabled people to see through the surface messaging that surrounded them, to the real nature of those with the wealth and the power.
In other words, the Doctor became an enemy of the people.
What made it worse was how petty, meanspirited and spiteful it was, with the Doctor railing against the ‘noise’ of people asking questions and putting forth alternative viewpoints online: ‘You exhaust me!’ he spat out, before outlining the future that awaited Conrad, one of dying alone and broken at the age of forty-nine.
So, this is the Doctor, is it, travelling forward through time to watch a puny human being die, and then back again to gloat about it to his face?
This was truly hateful writing, indicative of the real nature of Davies’ oh so kind and liberal politics.
It was a novel and strange experience to find myself rooting for the supposed villain of the piece as he pushed back against the Doctor at the end.
The worst episode ever, wrong on every level.
Anthony C Green May, 2025
Picture credit: By https://www.instagram.com/bbcdoctorwho/p/DHyBku8OAtV/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79334790
