Last week's Lux was always going to be a hard act to follow, but The Well - clips from which featured prominently in the season trailers - looked like it might be the one to build on the progress being made so far.
Dark and moody alien planet with a scientific base, and a big metal hatch on the floor - all reminiscent of The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit. We also saw space troopers, responding to the disappearance of the crew of the base - which brought to mind Aliens.
Did it end up anything like either of these? Did it build on on the success of Lux?
I'm please to say that it's a big yes to both of those.
I spotted the connection to a certain David Tennant story straight away - from the trailers and DWM preview articles to be honest. It was pretty obvious that the sole survivor of the mining base was going to be possessed in some way, and not as innocent as they first appeared. When you're the sole survivor, surrounded by corpses, it's fairly standard practice that you're prime suspect.
That Aliss is deaf also gave away the reason why she might not have been affected like her colleagues, until she was the only person left. There was a definite Midnight vibe on top of the Aliens / Satan Pit feel.
What I didn't suspect was - spoiler ahead - that this would be a direct sequel to the Series 4 story.
This planet is Midnight, and the villain of the piece is the unseen entity which invaded the Crusader 50 vehicle.
This was another obvious Aliens reference, as the first sequel saw Ripley return to the planet where the Xenomorph originated, but many years later when it now has a colony base set up on it - and the newcomers have fallen foul of the earlier menace.
The Doctor and Belinda find themselves on a spaceship where they're immediately jettisoned into space to land on the planet along with a squad of troopers. They're challenged as soon as they land - but you do have to ask why this didn't happen straight away on the spaceship.
The situation is resolved with the psychic paper. We then have a wonderfully atmospheric build-up as the Doctor, Belinda and the troopers investigate - finding dead bodies (half of them shot, the other half with all their bones broken) and spotting that all the mirrors are broken.
At the centre of it all is Aliss, a deaf cook who only wants to get home to her daughter. They do give away that she's not all that she seems as we get a suspicious look on her face at one point. The emotion gets laid on a bit thick with her scenes with the Doctor, but they're setting her up as a sympathetic character who has no control over what happens to her.
It's pretty obvious that the Doctor is going to save her, and we will later see the commander of the troopers, Shaya, sacrifice herself to defeat the entity. Or so we thought...
The entity has a totally different MO this time. It still seeks to get off the planet, but no longer possesses people or spreads its influence through copying them, as we saw in Midnight. Now it simply hides behind its victim's back. If they turn their back on someone that person is killed by psychokinetic energy - which is at least something from the original outing, as we saw it rip the front off of the Crusader 50.
This is why we have two different types of death amongst the crew - the ones with the broken bones got behind the host, whilst the others were the hosts, and they were shot by others in an attempt to stop it - except the entity then jumps to the killer.
This change of MO might be explained by this being some 400,000 years after the Doctor's previous visit, so it has evolved. Thankfully they resisted letting us see what the entity looks like - just don't watch the accompanying Unleashed...
One other minor complaint I had about the scripting: Midnight has been extensively mined, denuded of all its diamonds. Surely that must have meant lots of opportunities for the entity to escape before now?
Midnight was one of those stand-alone episodes which you really thought could never be revisited, and it was a huge gamble to attempt it. It would have been a mistake to copy it too closely - small group trapped in a claustrophobic space etc., so going down the Aliens route works.
In fact, there is now scope for a further encounter - thanks to a final twist in the tale. This closing sequence also featured yet another appearance by Mrs Flood. She's beginning to be used like Susan Twist, which I think is a mistake. It was fine when she was some odd lady on the margins of the action, but now she's turning up as seemingly different characters in different time zones, so it's just looking like Susan Twist all over again.
A familiar Britney Spears track features once more, which was heard prominently in The End of the World. I'm assuming this is deliberate and is a nod to the fact that the Earth is apparently destroyed on May 24th 2025, come the penultimate episode of this series. Several times in this episode the troopers, and Aliss, claim never to have heard of the planet or the human race.
It's another very good episode, so can they maintain the improved quality as we approach the mid-point of the series? Will they be lucky and pull it off on the day? Sorry...
Next week's looks like being a Doctor-lite story. He and Belinda are in it, but it's more of a Ruby Sunday / UNIT story from what we can gather.
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