Doctor Who Social Club

I like Murray Gold. I feel like everyone likes Murray Gold.

But part of me was disappointed when it was announced he was returning to DW. I thought Segun Akinola's work during the Chibnall era added a unique...otherworldliness to the score. It was incredibly atmospheric (perhaps at the expense of seeming "musical"), and there are times I miss that.

The Thirteenth Doctor's Theme

At a time where the show's broadcast viewership appears to dip lower than ever before (specifically with the objectively amazing episode "Lux", and the most recent "Lucky day"), let's take this as a positive sign that the show has a larger audience on other platforms.

To what extent this correlates with streaming audiences, I can't be sure. Nor do I care to compare this subscription number to those of outrage peddling youtubers who have waged a scare campaign that the show is somehow dead.

Edited to add a link to the ratings for "Lucky day".

So I'm landlocked at home while I wait for a parcel to arrive, and I have nothing better to do than think about the most recent episode of Doctor Who. It's a dirty job, but I'm up for it!

I'd say upon a rewatch my first impression still stands — this episode being a sequel to "Midnight" is tenuous at best. But since it's spelled out in dialogue that this is the same planet and entity, let me one-up that a bit.

1. "The well" is a double sequel.

Between my first and second watches of this one, I went back and rewatched "Midnight", but also "Listen". I still think there are more elements from the latter in "The well":

CLARA: You know, sometimes we think there's something behind us. And the space under your bed is what's behind you at night. Simple as that. There's nothing to be afraid of.

(The bed creaks as someone sits on it. It sags to within inches of Clara's nose. Rupert starts breathing quickly.)

CLARA: (sotto) Who else is in this room?

RUPERT: (sotto) Nobody.

That's not a cut and dried connection, but the whole scene with whatever it is behind them in Rupert's bedroom just has more resonance with this recent episode's entity than the parroting one possessing Skye in "Midnight". So, I'll meet you halfway and propose that "The well" is also a cheeky, unofficial sequel-of-sorts to "Listen".

2. Shaya is a Doctor stand-in:

I ran as a child. I ran from the wildlands. I ran from those monsters and never looked back. And I ran across the galaxy, with one aim. To do my duty. To help. To protect. To bring hope.

That pretty much sums up the Doctor too, right? At the very least their MO when companions or other bystanders are concerned — running, and hope. "Hey, we ran, you and me. Didn't we run, Lorna?"

But what are the "monsters" Shaya talks about? Do they have to do with the implied devastation of Earth, or is it just going to be a given without further elaboration that there will always be monsters out to get human-like civilisations?

I'm hoping this will come to bear on the finale as well.

3. There is a real deep genre reference to all of the episode:

I didn't think of this myself, Bleeding Cool's writer did:

"The Well" is virtually a remake of the 1965 Italian-US-Spanish space horror movie Planet of the Vampires, directed by Mario Bava.

By '65 I'm fairly certain Doctor Who had already broken in the "base under siege" formula, but Planet of the Vampires is widely acknowledged to have inspired a more modern milestone in scifi/horror — Alien.

It also has the basic premise of a space crew landing on a barren planet to investigate the disappearence of the last people to go there. Oh, and invisible monsters. Besides, PotV is a pretty cool, atmospheric movie in its own right. Very recommended for the cinematography alone.

Bleeding Cool thinks that

the biggest visual homage and clue that the makers of "The Well" have seen Planet of the Vampires is the dark blue skintight astronaut suits they wore in the episode

but to be honest I think Bryan Singer's X-men has more of that design DNA... But wait! There was also:

4. That time the Doctor found a derelict spaceship and met actual vampires

In "State of decay" (1980) the fourth Doctor and Romana investigated a medieval castle that turned out to actually be a downed spacecraft, and buried deep beneath — not in a well, but down several stairwells as I recall — lay the king of the Great Vampires. So with a bit of finagling we might even tie a 45 years old story into the package and declare the "Midnight"/"Listen" entity one of the Great Vampires, ancient enemy of the Time Lords.

Well(!), I think I theorised that into the ground, and my parcel still hasn't arrived! Thanks for reading, I'll probably have to do some real work now.

UNIT are back and facing a deadly new threat - The Shreek!

This is a bit of the usual media package fluff that talks more about how lovely everybody else was on set, avoiding any substantial plot reveals. But we do get insights into the background of Ruby's boyfriend, and the dynamics at UNIT. And of course the name of this week's monster, "the Shreek".

For the writer and director's part, there seem to be some deliberate callbacks to classic Who stories "The five Doctors" and "The dæmons", so that's promising!

This being the rote standard interview form, everybody is asked where they'd go in the TARDIS given the chance. Speaking of classic episodes, I rather like writer Pete McTighe's response:

I would park myself on a comfy sofa in cold November 1963, and spend the next six years watching (and recording, to share with you guys) all the missing episodes of Doctor Who!

Yes please! Just beam "Marco Polo" into my living room already 🙂

According to the VUE website, the final episode of Doctor Who Season Two, The Reality War, will be shown in UK movie theatres on 30 May 2025.

The scheduled transmission date for The Reality War is 31 May 2025 so UK theatre audiences will have the opportunity to see the Doctor Who finale a day early.

Season 15 of Doctor Who saw a substantial bounce in the overnight ratings for the third episode, rebounding from last week’s series low.

The Well aired on BBC One at 6.50pm on Saturday 26th April and received an overnight rating of 1.9 million viewers.

That’s a huge bump from last week’s episode Lux, which drew only 1.58 million viewers, marking the lowest overnight viewership ratings in the show's history.

Once again, those are only over-the-air numbers from Saturday, and pretty much confirm that word of mouth about the previous episode has made viewers return for the "appointment TV" broadcast.

This will pretty surely also bolster the streaming views of episodes 1 and 2 as people catch up on iPlayer. Simultaneously, this whole race to follow the instant and 7 day viewing numbers — and the #RIPDoctorWho prognoses often derived from them — appear more and more irrelevant as the media landscape sprints away from such onesided metrics.

Written by: Russell T Davies & Sharma Angel Walfall

Directed by: Amanda Brotchie

This is actually hilarious. Some reality defying mental acrobatics on current Doctor Who are picked up from fan forums and passed on by IGN:

Doctor Who's latest episode just called out its own leaks, despite being film two years ago. Is showrunner Russell T Davies seeding spoilers to mess with fans, or is this all part of a grand plan?

The second episode of Doctor Who's 15th season suffered a fairly substantial drop in ratings – with just 1.58 million viewers tuning in to watch Lux on BBC One last night (Saturday 19th April).

That's down from the 2 million who watched last week's season premiere The Robot Revolution and marks the lowest overnight viewership ratings in the show's history, the first time ever that the figures have dipped below 2 million.

Of course, it's worth noting that these figures don't tell the whole story, given the figure doesn't take into account anyone who watched the episode on BBC iPlayer, where it debuted at 8am on Saturday prior to its BBC One broadcast.

The consolidated ratings, which include iPlayer, devices and catch-up, will be released at a later date.

Excerpts from a speech and interview given by Mark Strickson, who played companion Vislor Turlough in the '80s:

The problem with Doctor Who is that it isn't real acting. It does get very boring actually, because by necessity it is two-dimensional acting. You can't have a depth of character because it's a comic strip. […]

When American science fiction fans watch it, they roar with laughter. I suppose it is a comedy. If you try to look logically at Doctor Who you have to look very hard.

I pick these parts out because they line up pretty well (although superficially) with the most recent episode where the Doctor is actually turned into an animated character, but particularly the last sentence feels like a harder jab at the mindset of Who fandom than the depiction of fans in "Lux".

To be fair, Strickson offers suggestions to add more character depth, following the first quoted paragraph:

You think, why can't Turlough and Tegan, or Turlough and Nyssa have a relationship of some kind? Indeed, why can't Turlough have a proper relationship with the Doctor? Why can't they talk? Why can't they sit down in the TARDIS to talk about what they're going to eat that day. I think in a sense it would be an improvement to Doctor Who if you saw a bit of their domestic life on the TARDIS. It might be a bit less action, more humour, and a bit more personal human interest.

Surely, turning Who into a kitchen sink drama in the mid-'80s would have put an end to the show sooner than actually happened 😄 But it is worth noting that a similar sort of base level interaction did sneak into the show in the form of soapier drama from 2005 onward..

Read the transcript, there are loads of entertaining anecdotes from Doctor Who production in the early 1980s!

Written by: Russell T Davies

Directed by: Amanda Brotchie

I admit it, I still browse Doctor Who reddit — using safer frontends, mind — but mostly there is no great reason to crosspost here. People going nuts over leaks or revisiting their distinct lack of enjoyment of one series or another.

This I couldn't resist reposting, though. Somebody made a rather involved defense of the show adapting to the times, including this curiosity:

During 2nd's run, and perhaps also in Hartnell's, I noticed something interesting. Rarely they'd use a sort of opera singing common in "space operas" of the day - a nod to the audience that understood this genre convention meant that they'd be watching high drama, now an obsolete thematic device.

That's... not what is meant by "space opera" at all. Try looking up "soap opera" instead 😂

I'm 85% sure this is a GPT output, with margin for it being some clueless kid instead. There are a couple other tells in the wall of text, but this was pure hallucination.

Funny thing is, nobody calls OP out for this in the comments, which proves that anything past the title is fluff.

Generally speaking, though, I agree with the poster's sentiments, if not their grasp of facts 🙂