This article contains spoilers for the “Doctor Who” episode “The Well.”
The latest episode of “Doctor Who” conjures a feeling of dread that has been missing from the show recently. Called “The Well” and written by the showrunner Russell T Davies, along with Sharma Angel-Walfall, it is gripping and eerie, featuring a monster even the Doctor struggles to understand — despite the fact that he has faced it before.
Set half a million years in the future on an inhospitable planet called 6-7-6-7, “The Well” sees the Doctor join a squadron of soldiers investigating a mining operation that has lost contact with base.
The operation’s only survivor is a cook, Aliss (Rose Ayling-Ellis). But it’s strange: People keep thinking they see something move behind her, though clearly nothing is there. The thing behind Aliss has no face, no physical form, not even a name. It’s more the idea of a monster — and only once before has such an unseen villain featured on “Doctor Who.”
At the episode’s climax, the reveal comes that some 400,000 years earlier, Planet 6-7-6-7 was called Midnight.
That name alone will be enough to delight “Doctor Who” fans. “Midnight” is a 2008 episode, created by Davies and starring David Tennant. Seventeen years later, fans still regard it as one of the show’s best — and most frightening — episodes.
But just what makes “Midnight” so terrifying? Here’s everything you need to know.
What happened in ’Midnight?’
In “Midnight,” the Doctor heads out on a bus tour across the deadly but beautiful diamond-covered planet of the same name, where intense radiation means nothing can survive. But then a loud noise bangs on the outside of the vehicle, sending the ragtag group of tourists on board into a panic.
An unseen entity seems to enter the bus, where it possesses a passenger, Sky (Lesley Sharp), and makes her repeat the words of the other travelers. Learning as it repeats, the thing inside Sky soon begins to speak in unison with the people it is mimicking, terrifying the other passengers.
They want Sky thrown off the bus so that the radiation outside will vaporize her, but then the Doctor seems to come under the control of the same strange force. It is only when Sky has convinced the tour group that they should dispose of the Doctor instead of her that the tour group’s leader (Rakie Ayola) realizes that Sky has stolen the Doctor’s voice and that she is controlling him.
The tour leader sacrifices herself by dragging Sky outside, where they both die. But whatever has possessed her endured the radiation on Midnight before — so it is probably still at large.
What is the monster from ‘Midnight?’
Fans have been speculating about the monster from “Midnight” for years on Reddit and other message boards, where it became known as “the Midnight Entity.”
Very little is known about it. In fact, the only proof we have that the monster exists at all comes from a “Doctor Who” spinoff web series called “Captain Jack’s Monster Files,” which ran from 2008 to 2010.
In that series, the monster is described by Captain Jack, a character played by John Barrowman, as a creature with a physical form “that can eat its way into the brain and take over the speech of its host.”
It seems to have learned a lesson from “Midnight.” The monster in “The Well” no longer regurgitates words, but stands directly behind the person it has latched onto, so that others can feel its presence but only rarely catch a glimpse. It whispers in the ears of those it possesses, causing them to violently turn on each other, just as they did on “Midnight.”
Why do fans love ‘Midnight’ so much?
“Doctor Who” fans can get bogged down in complex lore — but the appeal of “Midnight” is its simplicity.
The episode was created to inexpensively fill a gap in the 2008 season with a story largely set in one place — a device that TV executives call “a bottle episode.” Davies has said that he struggled with the script. “If you’re not devoted, hooked, and scared, and passionate, it just reads like a bunch of boring people stuck in a box,” he explained in his book “The Writer’s Tale: The Final Chapter.”
Davies has said that he wrote the script for “Midnight” in just three days, yet its elevation of a seemingly basic conceit — a monster that nobody can see — makes it electrifying. It’s also an acting master class. Sharp displays remarkable dexterity as Sky, and when she speaks in unison with the other cast members, it is fast-paced and technically perfect.
But it is Tennant’s performance — one of his best — that really made the episode so beloved. The Doctor is a known smart aleck, though here he is on the back foot. His lack of control and fear of the monster make the episode and the monster utterly horrifying.
“Midnight” ends as an unsolved mystery, whereas “Doctor Who” episodes usually tie everything up in a bow at the 45-minute mark. The monster, we must presume, is still out there. “The Well” ends like this, too, when it seems that there is something lurking over a soldier’s shoulder. The final shot of her petrified colleague’s face, seeing but not knowing what she’s seeing, leaves open the possibility that this sinister villain will return again.
