“There’s still hope.”
“Hope is irrelevant.”
The Well is a strange and triumphant exercise, a collection of contradictions that coheres remarkably well.
It is a chamber piece, a very basic Doctor Who story that could easily have been executed on the classic BBC budget, blown up with Disney+ money. It is a very obvious sequel to at least one beloved story from Davies’ original tenure as showrunner, and saturated with references to others, while still feeling undeniably like a produce of his second era overseeing the show. It is an exercise in nostalgia, but also a story about how that nostalgia is cursed. It is also Russell T. Davies revisiting his early work, while taking cues from Steven Moffat.
All’s well…
It shouldn’t work. The Well should collapse under its own weight. It should feel like an indulgent mess, a collection of clashing recycled imagery and iconography. However, The Well manages to strike a very careful balance between its competing priorities, allowing the individual elements to add up to more than the sum of its individual parts. It’s an episode that feels like an extension of Davies work in both The Robot Revolution and Lux, solidifying a rich thematic vein running through the first three stories of the season.
The Well is a remarkable accomplishment.
Spaced out…
Filed under: Television | Tagged: alien, continuity, creature, disney, doctor who, hard sci-fi, hard science-fiction, memory, metaphor, Midnight, ncuti gatwa, nostalgia, russell t. davies, sequel, the doctor, the well, varada sethu | 2 Comments »
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