Surprise! Doctor Who’s Most Terrifying Monster Is Back, And Creepier Than Ever
Why are you repeating?
Doctor Who is never wanting for wildly unusual sci-fi monsters, from the B-movie camp of its iconic Daleks, to the creepy eldritch horror of the Weeping Angels. But over the course of its 62-year run, Doctor Who has discovered that the scariest monsters are the ones we can’t see. It’s not just because those are the cheapest monsters a low-budget sci-fi show can afford (though that certainly helps), it’s because there’s nothing scarier than what we can imagine.
And easily the scariest monster to come out of Doctor Who was one that was so mysterious and unknowable that it didn’t even appear onscreen, or earn a name: the Midnight entity. And 17 years after it was first introduced, it’s just made a surprising return.
Warning! Spoilers for Doctor Who Season 2 Episode 3, “The Well,” ahead.
What is the Midnight Entity?
The Midnight planet, whose beautiful surface hid something sinister.
Introduced in the Russell T Davies-penned episode “Midnight,” which aired in 2008, the mysterious entity inhabits the resort planet Midnight, whose surface is said to resemble diamonds, thanks to the lethal radiation that makes it impossible for any living being to survive there without protection. But this entity can.
However, just because it can doesn’t mean it wants to stay there, and the entity comes out of hiding to attack the shuttle transporting the 10th Doctor (David Tennant) and a handful of other tourists, in hopes of supposedly escaping the planet. Once it damages the shuttle, it possesses one of the passengers and drives the other passengers paranoid by repeating everything they say. But the Doctor realizes that the entity’s repeating tactic is part of its sinister power: it essentially absorbs the life force of the passengers by repeating and syncing with their speech — eventually honing in on the Doctor and robbing him of his ability to speak. The group only defeats it by throwing the possessed passenger, Skye, out of the shuttle to be doused in lethal radiation.
The Doctor possessed by the Midnight entity.
But even throughout all of that, we never see the entity’s actual physical form, if it has one. It’s only spotted by characters, who can barely describe what they’ve seen. It was an economical idea for an episode that was written on a budget to replace another, but it inadvertently created the most terrifying concept for a monster: if a creature without physical form has all that power, what can it do with one? After “Midnight” aired and the Doctor left the planet with the entity still supposedly trapped there, it seemed like we’d never find out. Until now.
Doctor Who’s “The Well” Twist, Explained
The 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) is shocked to discover that he’s back on Midnight.
In the latest episode of Doctor Who Season 2 (of the Disney+ era), “The Well,” the 15th Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) and Belinda Chandra (Varada Sethu) find themselves stranded on the inhospitable Planet 6-7-6-7, which houses a mining colony in the far future. At least, it used to. The TARDIS materializes on the ship transporting a platoon of troopers to the planet for a rescue mission after the colony, which had mysteriously gone dark. Joining the mission in order to plant the Doctor’s homing device on the surface of the planet, the group finds the mining station littered with bodies of the crew, all slaughtered mysteriously — except for one survivor, the colony’s deaf cook Aliss (Rose Ayling-Ellis). Frightened and as confused as the troop, Aliss seems perfectly harmless... until people try to walk behind her.
It starts when Belinda thinks she spots something behind Aliss — a shadow which frightens her, though she can’t explain why. Then the other soldiers start to see something behind her, and alarmed, one of them moves behind Aliss, only to be thrown violently against the wall. Meanwhile, the Doctor learns that the mining colony was digging deep into the core of the planet — and something had emerged from the well. This entity then possessed the colonists, until one by one they murdered each other — the entity hopping from one body until it got to Aliss. Alarmed by the description that the surface of the planet was once made of diamonds, he questions the troop leader Shaya (Caoilfhionn Dunne) what the planet used to be called, and learns its original name: “Midnight.”
The Doctor, Belinda, and the rescue troop on the surface of the planet.
That’s right, “The Well” is a surprise sequel to “Midnight,” set 400,000 years after the events of the 2008 episode. The entity has survived all this time, and still wants to escape — though this time, it’s acquired some new powers. Apparently, instead of possessing and paralyzing its victims while it absorbs the speech of surrounding people, it now sits invisible behind its victim, only to slaughter anyone who gets behind them, aka at the “midnight” location on the clock. It still has its powers of paranoia, whispering in its victims' ears to turn them against each other, but Aliss was immune to that, as a deaf person. But it’s much more active in how it hops from victim to victim, possessing Belinda after the Doctor frees Aliss from it, forcing Shaya to shoot Belinda and sacrifice herself. But by the episode’s end, it seems like Shaya’s sacrifice might have been all for naught...
It’s a clever way to bring back one of Doctor Who’s most abstract monsters, and the script, co-penned by Davies and Sharma Angel-Walfall, borrows a trick from another story that brought back an impossibly cosmic monster: "The Time of Angels" and "Flesh and Stone." Steven Moffat’s Season 5 two-parter brought back the Weeping Angels in an adventure that was like the Aliens to “Blink’s” Alien — an action-packed blockbuster that upped the stakes and gave the monsters a few new powers. “The Well” does the same, even structuring its story around a rescue mission right out of James Cameron’s Aliens, and giving the Midnight Entity a little power boost that allows the soldiers something to shoot at. Could this mean that the Midnight Entity will be the next Weeping Angels, with Davies bringing them back in new adventures that test the limits of its cosmic terror? Maybe, maybe not, but the ending of “The Well” certainly hints that the entity is not done racking up its body count.
