Hello, dear listener, and welcome back to 500 Year Diary, the only
Doctor Who podcast that has fun plays games, I think we're
learning.
I'm Nathan.
I'm Peter.
I'm Simon, and I'm Stephen.
It's been nearly 17 years since the Crusade of 50 Bus took its
passengers on that unfortunate detour on the Diamond Planet of
Midnight, and tonight the Doctor Who audience is back here again
just one day before tuning into the 1st episode of the current
season of 500-year diary.
But why are we back on the planet Midnight in 2025?
And why are we encountering this featureless malevolence one more
time?
Let's see if we can work out the answers to these questions as we
discuss the well.
This was an unexpected one, and we are doing this 11th episode of
our 2nd coming season because suddenly out of nowhere came a
sequel to midnight in this most recent season of Doctor Who.
So let's start by talking about how we feel about midnight
itself.
Stephen.
I can't believe it's almost 17 years.
That's the 1st thing I'll say.
That is unbelievable.
And when you mentioned that my heart kind of sank in many ways.
I've probably only watched it once or twice since, and the reason
for that is I don't want the magic of it to wear off, but there's
still this sort of visceral gut punch that I had from that story
because it's not necessarily Doctor Who and the midnight menace
it's Doctor Who and the boss full of very ordinary people doing
very ordinary things under very extraordinary circumstances and
conditions.
Um, which when you're 8 sounds like a great idea for a Doctor Who
story.
When you're 18, you think that's the most terrible idea for a
Doctor Who story.
Perhaps when you're 28 when I watched it, I just thought this is
brilliant.
So yeah, it remains for me one of the highlights of new who, and I
think it's the type of story that you could only do in the new
series.
Classic who I don't think has that emotional vocabulary and syntax
to be able to tell that kind of story, but in 2000, on say nine.
Uh, it has such a visceral impact and as much on the not where
you're as on the Wii, I think.
It's a work of genius.
I'm very fond of it because I think it showed that new Doctor Who
could do things which classic Doctor Who did.
And so it's the 1st time in the new series that we get that kind
of contained claustrophobic drama.
And I think the fact that Doctor Who, with all of its budget and
its, you know, wider special effects, vocabulary, as you put it
Stephen, in the new series, could then just bring it down.
It's basically a set of characters in a room.
And the fact that Russell wrote that midnights at the 11th hour
basically, to fill the slot for another script that fell through
proves that both the new series and Russell could do that kind of
intense everyone in a room drama, and I loved it.
No, I really liked it at the time.
I mean, I actually watched it again yesterday in preparation for
this.
I hadn't hadn't seen it for quite a number of years.
I tend not to revisit new series episodes in the same way that I
revisit classic series episodes.
It's a one act play.
It is the kind of thing that the original series didn't and
couldn't do.
It's one of the things that I like to say, is the new series at
its best, is when it's not trying to mimic a classic series 4
passer and squish it into 50 minutes or 45 minutes.
It's when it's trying to tell a proper short story.
And this is that feeling where it's all just a sort of a
continuous, more or less, a continuous set of action that carries
us through.
And I think it does tonely get the show absolutely right in a way
that unfortunately some of the rest of his stuff doesn't.
Yeah, I love it.
I do broadly agree with you, but I would say that it has an
antecedent in the original series, which is the horror fang role.
Yeah.
That's true.
Yes, that's true actually.
It's just an ordinary group of people under pressure from some
external force.
I think that's absolutely right.
But the ordinariness of them is much more salient, I think, in
this, because in the grand tradition of the new series, they're
just dressed in kind of 21st century clothing and they are kind of
identifiable.
And I think it, particularly it's Biff and is it Val?
Yeah, who are super awful people. and start talking about
immigrants and things as well.
And it is people under pressure from something unknown, something
they're unable to identify, and our 1st instinct is for all of us
to turn on each other.
And so it isn't about the midnight entity, particularly.
It is just about what people are like when we're put in a
difficult situation.
And for me too, it comes in the middle of what is, I think, the
strongest run of episodes of Doctor Who in the history of the show
the new series for me.
Yeah, yeah.
That run from Unicorn and the Wasp through to Journey's End, I
think, is as good as Doctor Who has ever been.
And also, I think the moment in that episode, which is the real
gut punch for me, is not when everyone turns out to be awful, which
they do.
It's when the one person who's been kind of influenced by the
doctor on his side, which is Colin Morgan's character, suddenly
turns, and the doctor just looks at him with this heartbreak on
his face and says, oh, no, not you too.
Yeah.
I also think too, that the monster is incredibly good as well.
So we only see it through the character of Skysorvestry, which is
just an incredible performance.
Russell had had her before remember in the 2nd coming, where she
plays Judas.
Yes, right.
Yeah, opposite Christopher Eccleston's Jesus.
Jesus.
It's funny that because now Russell does that in the same phrase
well.
He goes, Christopher Eccleston.
Oh, Jesus.
But it's so imitable.
It's one of those things that we always talk about where the
villain is something that you can imitate in the playground.
And this villain, which is just learning.
So it is kind of positioned as a child, something that's learning
how to interact, that's learning language, does the thing that
irritating children do, which is repeat everything that you say?
And then that's turned into being made creepy.
At 1st it's annoying.
And then it goes beyond annoying.
Yeah, yeah.
It takes a few minutes to do that.
And what it does, of course, is it takes the thing that David
Tennant's doctor is the most famous for.
The thing that he spots in himself in the Christmas invasion, that
he's gobby.
You know, he never ever stops talking.
And that's his superpower and it gets taken away from him here.
I think it's amazingly good and just too stellar central
performances from those 2 leads.
She brings an amazing performance tick to it, which makes it very
otherworldly with those strange darting birdlike movements.
Yes, she does.
That really positions as something weird and unknowable.
I also love how it's essentially the tenant doctors or the 10th
doctors hubris that undoes him.
You know, he says, because I'm clever.
And that's where the story turns for me.
I think that's where everyone starts to turn on him.
And of course, there's, you know, something wonderfully Greek
about that.
You know, that's the cleverest man in the room, he's the cleverest
man in the room, but because of that, and because he says that
that's kind of his undoing.
Yes, traditionally, we are used to a situation where the doctor
you know, is the cleverest person there and so everybody just
defers to him.
He just carries the authority.
And, you know, there might be something about who put you in
charge at some point, but really, you know, the ground swell is
with him.
And it was so, it's so fascinating to have that be the stop where
it's like, well, no, who put you in charge and and you're just an
arrogant so-and-so and we're not going to pay attention to you.
Why should we?
Maybe it's because Donna's not there.
Maybe Madonna's not there.
It's basically...
Or just a companion figure anyway.
Yes, yeah.
I think too, because there's a diverse group of people on board
the bus.
So you've got beer who's wearing chinos and has a goatee and stuff
and kind of reads is very middle class and kind of conservative.
And then you have a professor, you know, with a young assistant
who you kind of think, well, he's going to be more likely to
listen to the doctor as a sort of fellow scientist and a fellow
intellectual.
And of course, he also turns on the doctrine.
So does she.
It's when D turns on him.
I think that's the worst thing because she's so sweet and they had
been getting on so well.
And she's kind of the last person that you would expect to do
that.
It's, uh, it's a bit of a gut punch and it, it really, I made some
crack about it being a bus full of daily mail readers.
And I was really just thinking that that's, that's val and beef
but everyone on that bus turns on the doctor eventually.
And that's kind of the heartbreaking thing, that given sufficient
pressure and fear that we all just start turning on each other.
Even the guardian readers.
I can fully believe the Midnight Creature is a daily Mail
columnist.
But it's interesting because with David Trouton's professor
character.
I mean, you do often get a scientist in Doctor Who, who is
distrustful, the doctor doesn't believe him, because I know best.
I've been studying this all my life.
Exactly, exactly.
Inclusive access. of Professor Stalman, actually.
I was thinking of Professor Windsor.
There are so many.
But he does play, he does fulfil that role, but he also fulfils
the role quite elegantly of comic relief.
Because he's the, you know, the upright kind of professor who's
probably had tenure that little bit too long and is only focussed
on one particular aspect.
And, you know, the last paper he published was 20 years ago and so
on.
And so he sort of oozes that, but it doesn't take that over the
top.
Yeah, it's these people who are in positions where they're meant
to be open-minded, but are actually incredibly more.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So, one of the things that this episode, The Well Does, is It
Positions Itself, is a sequel to Midnight, and the obvious 1st
thing that basically everyone said was, it's not as good as
midnight.
Now, it's not a comparison that had to be made, although maybe it
was inevitable.
It's inevitable to be made.
But it didn't have to be made.
Like, this didn't have to position itself as a sequel to
Midnight.
But I guess the similarities between it and midnight were enough
that that comparison was going to be made.
At the risk of splitting hairs, sequel is not necessarily the
right word.
It's not like seeds of death is a sequel to the Ice Wars.
It's the return of the alien, the midnight creature, whatever you
want to call it.
Or is it?
I would actually argue, I don't know whether it is the return of
the midnight creature, but we can come to that.
You know, the obvious thing to say is that very little of Doctor
Who actually manages to be better than midnight.
I would contend.
And so, oh, come on.
Well, you know, maybe Revenge of the Cyberman part two.
It's very top tier.
Yeah, of the Rani.
So that was kind of, you know, that was sort of more or less
inevitable.
What I said on 2 gab on the 2nd great and bountiful human empire
was that it was kind of a mood piece, I think.
In a way, this is this era's version of something that we've been
doing ever since the new series came back, perhaps starting with
the Impossible Planet.
I think the simplest explanation for why the well exists and what
it is, is that we'd reached that stage in the season, where we
needed a midnight style story.
And that's happened like all throughout the new series.
And so you would go back to last series, for example, and you
reach that stage of the season where you want a moody atmospheric
piece like 73 yards.
So it makes sense that if you're doing that kind of story, why not
just do a sequel or something which refers to one of the most
successful iterations of that story?
See, it seems to me that what happens in the Impossible Planet is
something that's only available to a Doctor Who that's aware of
things like, say, alien or event horizon, where you have a kind of
science fiction horror, where in the classic series, when we went
to the future, and when we had people with guns, and I'm thinking
say, the sabred era, we're always fighting rubber monsters or
robots or, you know, cybermen or Daleks or Silurians.
We're not fighting the devil or a disembodied malevolence or
something like that, that this is a new thing that the new series
kind of has to itself.
And, you know, I'm thinking about things after that, like, 42, like
sleep no more while blue yonder in its own way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. oxygen.
Yeah.
That this is a different thing, that this is a kind of mashup of 2
genres of horror and science fiction.
I wonder how much of that is to do with the fact that I remember
Russell's original concern when he brought the series back was
that he didn't want the general audience to feel it was people
shooting at rubber monsters or whatever.
Which is one of the reasons why I think the 1st series was so it
was completely set on earth, basically, apart from a space
station.
And I think when he does go offworld in the form of something like
New Earth and then the Impossible Planet, you're trying to take
the traditional Dr. Hillemans away because he's worried that they
will appear stupid.
Whereas that's basically what the original series was.
You know, right, from the 2nd story where you go to Scaro and the
Daleks.
It's completely unreal, unnatural.
There's nothing sort of sensible about this. which I think is
great, but I think maybe trying to use almost like mythological
elements to the futuristic stories.
Is he trying to ground it a bit more?
I think there's 2 things there.
One, Russell's version of the future is something that he doesn't
want to see people in coveralls and uniforms and that kind of
thing.
He wants it space genics.
He wants it to be recognisably people as they are now.
And so to get something where you make it even more unknowable and
weird and that vein of Doc II.
It's always when he pushes it out, it's always the bounds of the
natural universe or going beyond to something that's really weird
and other, almost to differentiate that from being a humanity in
the galaxy as we know it.
I also think, speaking of Impossible Planet, that Matt Jones, who
wrote those 2 episodes, is the 1st one to say, right, what we need
to do something really weird and unsettling in New Doctor Who is
to go back to that model from the Hinchcliffe years of an ancient
evil awakening, which is what the Impossible Planner is, and
that's really what midnight is as well, even if it's not by so
many words.
And this, I think.
In Wild Blue Yonder, we're at the very edge of the known universe
just next to where underworld is happening, I imagine.
In the well we're half a 1000000 years into the future, in the
impossible planet, it's called the impossible planet after the
fact that it's a planet in orbit around a black hole.
So again, you know, like the ultimate kind of liminal space, I
think.
And so... something like waters of Mars, that kind of ancient evil
that unknowable evil under the surface reawakening.
Yeah, yeah.
And I mean, the striking thing, I think, that everyone says about
the impossible planet.
We've done a few bases under siege this season.
The impossible planet, I think, does what is maybe the best base
under siege.
Magnificent.
Certainly.
Yeah, certainly the best of the new series, but maybe the best
one.
I think it's great now.
You know, just at all.
Because it has such identifiable characters.
You come away from that knowing the names of all of those people.
We've talked already this season about the death of Scooty
Minister, the way that that hits.
A lot of people get killed in the impossible planet.
And each death means something, but the 1st death means something
really quite particular, I think.
At the risk of getting onto my hobby horse, I think one of the
other reasons that the Impossible Planet 2 part is so successful
is because it most closely apes the structure of a classic series
4 parter insofar as the fact that you've got 90 minutes of story
there.
So you can actually get to know the cast.
You can have enough cast that it feels like there's a range of
people there and you can have them, you know, killed off one by
one in that very classic series.
Yeah, you split up the doctor and rose so that they're leading
different plot strands, you go from place to place.
Yeah, and unlike what so many of the later multi-episode stories
of the new series do, it doesn't basically just have a 2nd episode
which is essentially just a sequel to the 1st episode. as actually
a 90 minute drama, which is sliced in half with a nice upwell of
tension and drama and a cliffhanger, a proper actual cliffhanger.
I think that's one of the other reasons that works so well.
Yeah, I think you've hit the nail on the head there, Simon.
It is about the characters.
The fact that in one line, you know, did she ever forgive you, we
understand exactly what Mr. Jefferson is about and, you know, his
death hits so much harder for it.
And I think that's maybe one of the great strengths of Russell in
his 1st era, where we have these characters that come, you know
that are sketched out almost in a thumbnail fashion, but in a way
that's recognisable.
And maybe that's not always there.
And I think in this episode, in particular, you know, there are
troopers who are given numbers rather than names and there's
probably only two, maybe 3 that we get to know to some degree.
And maybe that is a bit of a contrast between something like
midnight or the impossible planet and the Satan pit and something
like the well.
A base under siege always lives and dies by its characters.
So I can't help comparing it to something like the rebel flesh
where every character is utterly forgettable. and is basically
defined by one performance or character tick.
Whereas in this, I did feel like we got to know quite a lot of
those soldiers, even though they were always doing their work
things.
And the one I'm thinking of in particular.
I mean, Christopher Chung's character is very good, but he plays a
role which is kind of has happened.
Yeah, it's happened like I can think an Empress of Mars.
There's an exactly same character who fulfils that function, but
Mo, I thought, was really, really effective in just being kind of
a regular character with a performance that brought a lot to it
which distinguished her from the others.
And I think Shire is absolutely extraordinary.
So she's Keelan Dunn.
I don't think I've seen her in anything before, but she brings so
much humanity to that role.
And there's a bit at the very beginning of the episode where she
says hope is irrelevant.
And then Cassio, which is Christopher Chung's character, kind of
looks at her in horror and you sort of think, oh, okay, she's
going to be the hard bitten one who doesn't care about anyone.
Transigent based.
Yeah, she's going to be terrible.
And just you watch the warmth between her and Shooty in that
performance all the way through.
And the way that they connect with one another.
And then it turns out that her last line at the very end, you know
she's remembering being a girl on Lombardia and running through
the sort of burning thing past giant dinosaur skulls, which
awesome.
She says that what she's always striven to do is to do her duty
and her duty is to bring hope and hope.
Again, that's Russell back to being able to sketch in a character
really very briefly in just a few moments and being able to trust
a really incredible actor, I think, to bring that character to
life.
I think she's really great.
And what's unexpected about her is that there's a moment of humour
where they're all in the room with the well, and the doctor says
something to her, I can't quite remember the line, and you expect
her to come back with her with a sort of hardbitten, intransigent
base commander line, and she comes back with a moment of humour
and you think, oh, okay, you're not who I thought you were going
to be.
Yes, that's kind of the turning point.
She does look at him with sort of considerable warmth, I think.
Like she's really, really quite great.
I mean, she's the MVP event.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think that's really added to as well because in between those 2
moments of, you know, hope is relevant and then, you know, she
brings hope at the end.
There's a turn and it's Cassio and he says to her, hope is
irrelevant.
He's quoting her and undermining her authority, which, again, just
sort of gives us that extra layer around this character to sort of
say, well, actually, she says this as perhaps an transient base
commander or a hardened space bitch, but actually there's
something deeper underneath and we get to see that throughout
through the humour, as you say, but also that last moment, which I
think is beautifully done.
You know, there's that sort of wonderful voiceover.
We get the flashback to her, you know, running through the
wildlands.
I think it is.
I just think it's superb and then ultimately to sacrifice
glorious.
And because you do see the vulnerability in her performance, the
moment when she chooses to kill Cassio, because obviously he's
threats to the expedition, is actually quite heartfelt, like you
feel sorry for.
Well, you feel the fact that she didn't really want to do this, but
she had to.
I want to just divert for a 2nd and talk about that scene because
I think that that's an incredible scene.
Because we have Hanno, who is the 1st person to die, Christopher
Chung sends her around behind Alice and then she's hurled up into
the air.
And again, it's this incredible thing too, the simplicity of how
they're killed that they are just hurled up into the air and we
get that line.
Is it the doctor who says it?
Look, it looks like he broke his neck.
Oh, it looks like he broke everything when he finds one of the
bodies on the base.
And so they're just killed by being hurled into the air and
smashed.
And it like, that's so visceral and so real.
It's not the usual sort of Doctor Who, you know, being shot in the
stomach and clutching your neck and boring yourself gradually to
the ground.
It's a proper kind of Israel thing.
And 4 people are just killed one after the other. very effective.
Incredible.
And it's so well done because the director, and it's Amanda
Branchi who did Lux, and she has the people fly up into the air
after we see either Chung or the character themselves occluded by
Alice in the middle.
And so selling that idea, it's this brilliant idea that if you are
behind Alice, you'll be killed, but behind is determined by the
subjectivity of the observer.
So everyone else is looking at the ground, the doctor tells
everyone to look at the ground.
And so it's where Chung is looking.
And so as he moves around, he's hurling these people into the air
himself.
And so Shire has to kill him.
He's milling about in panic and confusion.
Everyone he's sealed dies.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And it's just done so quickly and then suddenly the rest of the
scene is done with just bodies scattered around the room.
It's really something there's 6 dead people in that room at the
end of the scene.
It's amazing.
Amanda brought you is one of these gold directors for Doctor Who
who can successfully pull up different styles of episodes.
So Lux and the Well are quite different and I think both equally
successful in their production.
And I really appreciate this.
Those very high shots what she has of that room with Alice in the
middle, where it's almost like the characters are on a clock
face.
You can see them ranged around her.
That's very effective.
In fact, it's the same because we give Belinda the job of
explaining what's happening.
She works out what's happening before the doctor does.
And so she explains about, you know, you move behind it and and
you die and she's got the little nuts and she's putting them on
the ground.
And then once she explains that and the doctor says it happens at
midnight, then we get the shot from above, showing us the space.
Yeah, yeah, the clock face, that circular, and it's reinforced by
the fact that Alice is sitting in the middle of a circular shape
on the ground in a circular room.
I think, too, that Rose Ailing Ellis is pretty incredible in this
as well.
A friend of mine at work had actually hopes that she would be the
doctor's companion in season one before Millie Gibson was
announced because she was aware of her.
Yeah, they're actually, they're slightly parallel in their careers
Millie and Rose.
But I will just say we probably aren't aware of it, but Rose
Ailing Ellis is a huge star in Britain because not only did she
have a breakout role in EastEnders for 3 years, where she was
loaded for her performance.
She also won strictly come dancing.
Really?
That is a shortcut to incredible thing in written, like you are
known to the person in the street.
And so to get her for this role.
She's also lauded for her stage work, Simon, she's a Lawrence
Olivier nominee.
Yeah.
So to get her for this role was a big get.
She is interviewed in the unleashed, which is something that I've
never really watched, but she was talking about how excited she
was doing her 1st science fiction thing.
You know, she'd done lots of just sort of normal stuff and now he
or she is in space, you know, and there's monsters and stuff.
But in office EastEnders.
She is so vulnerable and so, but then there are moments, you know
because she knows what happened.
She knows what they've deduced.
She knows what happens to it, how it passes from one person to
another, you know, how it got to be behind her.
All of that sort of thing.
She knows all of that.
But she's concealing it and she makes it clear to the audience.
I think that she's concealing something.
But in spite of that, we don't hate her.
We never dislike her.
And the stuff about her daughter and things.
You know all of that just works incredibly well.
She wants to go home.
It's an incredible performance, I think, you know, that line about
you think I'm a special idiot.
I'm just the last.
And, you know, the fact that she's deaf as an actor, but also as a
character basically saves her in the sense that, you know, she
can't hear the whispering.
But to go back to that scene, the way that it's choreographed, I
think you're absolutely spot on Nathan, but the thing that sold it
for me as to why this shouldn't have been, say, for instance, the
Mara, an evil that couldn't see itself when you have the mercury
falling behind it, or something like the angels, where, you know
where they, upon the 2nd appearance, at least they break the necks
of their victims.
The thing that sold it for me was that line.
If this was a clock phase, you would die at midnight.
And I just think that's perfect.
That's more than enough right there to justify the reuse of this
monster and the reinterpretation of it.
Because, as you said before, assignment, it's not the same
qualities or the same MO as the Midnight Monster that we see that
it has no name.
He has evolved.
And that's okay.
And I think the reason why I think I absolutely brought into it
was that moment, was that scene beautifully choreographed
incredibly played. you know, Alice is a character.
It's unbelievably sympathetic, but that line about if it was a
clock face, you would be dead at midnight just was like sold right
there.
I can never hear the word midnight in reference to Doctor Who
without thinking of nighter.
Midnight general.
The order specifies.
A claim that I want to make is that this is, perhaps, maybe even
more than Time of Angels, Doctor Who doing aliens to a previous
alien.
So remember Alien is the creature set loose on just normal kind of
working people?
They're just normal people.
They're identifiable.
They're eating Chinese food, you know, they're slacking off, all
of that sort of thing.
They're just kind of ordinary people.
They're not quite the people that we have in the Crusade of 50, but
they're ordinary people.
And now we have them against troops.
So we have troops coming down and the scale of it is greater.
And in fact, them doing the dropship thing and landing on a base
that has been ravaged by the aliens is very, very similar to
aliens, I think.
And so while there are characters among the troops.
I think that giving them numbers is entirely there just to get the
final thing to work.
So the number of people on the left.
Yeah.
That's right.
So that we're always aware how many people there are.
Because we keep having that dialogue, don't we?
Belinda says you were 11 people and then the doctor and I came
along to make it 13.
We have some discussion of how there's 7 people left, including
Alice.
Like we're always given the number of people that they're are, and
the troopers have numbers to remind us to kind of count them.
In the closing credits, just about all of them in the great
Russell T. Davis tradition, have 1st and last names.
So Russell always says that when he creates parts, in order to
make them look bigger in an actor's resume.
It gives them all last names.
And we played with that in Lux, where the fan character said they
were the sort of people that didn't get last names.
And then they do have last names in the closing credits.
Look, closing credits isn't full of man in restaurants.
Yeah, yeah.
But what about poor old Paul Casey?
It has no name.
Paul Casey is credited as it has no name.
It's brilliant.
Which also is what they were going to call Salvix before.
You know, so they all have names.
There's Kai, there's Cassio, there's Hanno, there's Shire, like
they do have names, although not all of them are in dialogue.
I also mentioned in the 2nd great and bountiful Human Empire.
It's, is it Gaz Chaudhary?
The guy who plays the guy who seconds Christopher Chung's red coat
is, in fact, a former Paralympian playing, he's a basketballer.
And so he's sort of reasonably famous and I didn't see it the 1st
time I was watching, but he has a prosthetic.
Yeah, yeah, he's got a prosthetic lady.
The only time I saw it was when he was killed.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But you do see him walking in sort of full, like, you know, you
see his whole body walking just before that.
And I think he's extraordinarily good as well and also kind of
well drawn.
I think, too, Russell has learned, like the way that we got the
characters given names and those names are used in dialogue and we
know everyone's name in the impossible planet, that's one thing
that you can do, but if you have a diverse enough cast, you can
just rely on the actors to distinguish the characters from each
other, even if you don't learn the names, I think.
And also sidebar, a lot of it depends on the companion's
relationship to these characters to kind of define them.
And Belinda has a great role in this episode.
I'm so grateful that Varada's reaction is the one that we get to
signal what the creature does because her 1st reaction when she
just sees something move behind Alice is extraordinary.
Like it absolutely punches up the drama.
I'm so glad she's the one who gets to do it first.
And she's the one, I think, who gives Mo the chance to become a
character whom we get to know as well, just because of the
relationship between the 2 of them.
I have to confess that I did freeze frame, that 1st moment that
Belinda notices something behind Alice and there is a very hokey
looking monster.
We just see for a second.
I almost, I was considering posting it to the FDA thread, but I
didn't want to ruin it for everyone.
Because it's really important, I think, that this doesn't ruin the
midnight creature.
I mean, it's not possible for this episode to change a frame of
midnight, no matter what it does.
It can't change midnight.
Midnight remains, you know, as good as it ever was.
But it would have been possible to kind of stuff, this aren't in
all sorts of ways.
And it manages not to do that, but it does manage to reveal more
of the monster.
So the monster does, in fact, appear in our field of vision a
couple of times.
Because in midnight, and I didn't bother rewinding it and
rewatching the bit over and over again, but when either the driver
or the engineer says, there was something out there.
I'm not convinced that we ever actually see a flash of anything on
screen.
It's hard because there's the glistening of the diamonds and so
on.
Yeah, I was pretty sure no, there's no movement that we actually
see in the same way that we do see something here. very, very well
done.
And actually, can I just say, I think the most effective moment in
the entire episode and the one that I absolutely loved and we get
a great reaction out of shoots at this moment is when they're
being chased by the creature out of their chamber and they're
heading back to the lift and the doctor and Belinda are lagging
behind and the doctor says, I have to see it and you just get a
point of viewshot of the camera creeping around the corner cut to
absolute horror on the doctor and Belinda's face as they turn and
run.
It's the most effective moment in the episode.
A lesson for Pennant Robertson Warriors for Deep.
I cannot imagine Janet Fielding being here. would you tell you
about that?
Do you know what I think is kind of the the real reason that we
have the midnight creature back is the moment where the doctor
moves right up to Alice's face and says, I'm not talking to you
Alice, I'm talking to the creature behind you and it recognises
him and he recognises it.
And so the fact that they have a history together, which wouldn't
have been possible, actually gives it a little bit more weight
that they know each other.
And so the doctor's reaction to it isn't that it's been
responsible for all of these deaths here, but that he knows what
it does to people and he remembers it from before.
Does he already know that he's on midnight at that point?
Yeah, by that point he does.
Yeah.
He finds out in the well chamber and then goes back to them.
Right.
Okay.
Look, I don't read that from that sequence that that's what's
happening.
And I sort of question the need for it to be a sequel to Midnight
or having the same creature.
I mean, what I think is evident to me at least is that this idea
was done, the script was written and then the midnight aspect was
in some respects added on in a redraft.
I don't know whether that's the case, but it just feels that way
to me.
No, that's not necessarily a bad thing.
That happens all the time throughout this series and many other.
But I don't know, is that the impression you guys get?
I think it's certainly absolutely what happened because this has a
dual writing credit and Russell gets a credit.
And in fact, we do know this because originally it was meant to be
divine Nigerian spirits called, I think, the Orisha, if I'm
pronouncing that correctly, and there was concern about cultural
sensitivity around featuring those spirits.
And so Russell just said, it's very like the midnight creature
let's have the midnight creature.
I mean, there is a moment where the doctor calls it old friend at
one point.
Yeah.
So he does recognise it.
And so I think just that relationship, I think one of the reasons
why we have recurring monsters in Doctor Who, because the doctor
knows who they are.
There are plenty of other reasons as well.
And it changes the nature of the doctorates.
Why returning monsters are by their nature something to be excited
about because the doctor knows them and knows that they're evil.
The doctor generally, as a character, gives opponents, villains
the benefits of the doubt until they are proven to be absolutely
malevolent.
He knows that the midnight creature, when the Daleks turn up, he
never gives them the benefit of the doubt.
He knows they're going to do something evil and wicked.
And it's the same with this creature.
It immediately raises the stakes because he knows that this is a
creature that wants to kill.
And so power of the daleks and snake dance, both put the doctor in
the position of having to convince people who are otherwise not
worried about something, that something terrible is happening.
Now, everyone here is pretty convinced that terrible things
happen.
Yes, exactly.
So from that point of view, I'm not convinced that that adds to
this episode in particular.
And so that's why I kind of question whether it was necessary to
make it the midnight creature because I wasn't sure whether it's
also that thing where they're worried that, oh, will people say, oh
this is just like that episode?
midnight 17 years ago.
And go, oh, that's a cop out that's cheap.
And is it kind of a covering their tracks by saying, oh, well
actually it is the same creature or at least it's sort of an
evolution of it.
I'm still not convinced that that's even necessary for this
because I think it is different enough.
The aspects of its behaviour are different enough that you could
just have it as a standalone.
Not saying it's terrible.
It doesn't ruin midnight or anything like that for me.
I'm just observing that I don't think it's actually necessary.
I don't think the sequel aspect of it adds to this episode.
I do think that that scene where rose and shooty up just face to
face and the doctor's reaction, you know, like I don't think that
we could have had it quite as emotional as that if it was some
other different creature.
And I do think too, if you bring it back, you don't want it to be
doing the same tricks that it was doing in midnight.
Like it would have been intolerable if it was like going back to a
mining base where everyone's talking at the same time.
But en masse, amazingly.
Can I say too, and I don't know whether I said this in too, gab
but one of the pleasures of this is seeing what this kind of
future is like when it's realised in 2025 as opposed to 2006.
The detail of the sets, I think, is incredible.
That night shoot in a quarry is very similar to the night shoot, I
think, in the Satan pit, but the...
Still well, the most effective locations doctor is ever mounted.
Yeah, but I mean, I think that this looks even better than that.
Like, it is pretty incredible.
And even just those little kind of the crew quarters, which were
only in for one little scene, they're so detailed and they're so
kind of interestingly designed.
Well, standard definition versus 4K. Well, yes, there's that.
And that's what actually struck me when watching Midnight.
It's like watching a classic series story.
Like it's kind of like, 0 my god, this looks so cheap.
I would never have thought what I was watching.
Watching the original Rosslier now compares to watching now on DVD
and watching that on the HS.
Exactly.
I've had the experience of school kids talking to me about having
seen really old Doctor Who when the special effects were terrible
and they were talking about the empty child.
Please kill me.
Did you then go and show them?
There is something about the unknowability of the Midnight Monster
but something that I think is lacking in the well compared to
midnight.
It's not a huge issue, but it's little issue because I think it's
a wider issue for the series. is that Russell has a tendency to
not give monsters a human mouthpiece.
And so it goes all the way back to Rose, where the doctor is
standing there remonstrating with the nesting consciousness, which
is just there.
Basically, it's bubbles in a pit going, whereas what made the
spearhead from space so amazing was that you had Channing as the
mouthpiece for the nestings.
I think midnight really hit that on the heads by having Sky
Sylvestry, who is this really weird, enigmatic and kind of
unknowable force, but in human form.
And I think that's what we're lacking here.
You don't get any kind of interaction with the creature, which
would elevate.
And that is its own thing.
I like the fact that that makes it mysterious, but I always like a
human, villainous face on the monster.
Because the midnight creature does actually talk to us, doesn't
it?
Like, it's not just saying what the doctor says.
It's not just repeating.
There is a point where she takes over and starts saying things
that are inspired by the monster.
So we do actually see that.
And, you know, there's a real constraint on this where you can't
reveal too much about the monster.
You really can't.
But I think you're right.
And the one other example, apart from Channing that occurs to me
is Angel Bob.
Like, one of the things about the angels is that we never hear
from them.
They're completely unknowable to us.
They're utterly irrational.
They're they're strange.
You know, they're, you know, there's even a possibility that
they're just sort of images from the human mind.
But then they're given a voice and, you know, it's Moffatt.
It's a beautifully written and utterly terrifying voice.
I mean, Angel Bob is really quite frightening, I think, and
doesn't take away from the angels kind of.
It plays completely against what the angels are because it's this
innocent young voice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So that can be done, can't it?
Yeah, I think there isn't space for it here.
We know that it whispers, but we don't get to hear what it says.
It's clearly saying something that's driving people mad, but we
don't get to hear it.
So it has a voice.
But even that scene where Belinda hears a, um, we can barely hear
it.
It's barely there in the mix.
And for a 2nd I thought that she hadn't heard it and that Shire
had just run off for no reason and hurled herself down the well
which would have been bleak even for Russell, I think.
But we do see it behind her for a second.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But yes, yeah, it doesn't have a voice.
I think you're right.
I don't think that's such a bad thing in this particular story.
And the reason I say that is I think because it really plays into
an ambiguity around what happens to this monster as well as, you
know, what is this monster?
We have that great sort of, you know, climax where the airlock
shows four, but there's actually 3 people in there and it's like
oh, well, has it now escaped?
And I only picked this up on reviewing, by the way, hasn't now
escaped.
And that's obviously perhaps, you know, one of the explanations
for why it has escaped in that last coder.
But then, you know, we do see it in the room with the doctor and
Mo and Shire, and Belinda hears it, whispering, as you say
Nathan.
So it's here with us.
And I love that ambiguity.
Are there 2 of them?
Is it a quantum state kind of being?
Who knows?
Who cares?
The fact is that we kind of get it both ways.
We have this incredible denouement.
We're shire, you know, takes this responsibility and plunges into
the well, but we have, you know, a potential for a 3rd story
whether that's back on the planet midnight, which is unlikely, or
somewhere in space.
Like, I just love that it opens up that possibility and it can
only do so by virtue of the fact that we don't have, you know, a
communion with the, with the voice of the monster, that it just
sort of exists out there and we don't exactly know where or how or
why. that's great.
But that's a typical thing.
We don't need to have a sequel to that necessarily.
It's just one of those nice loose ends that sometimes these things
have, that it's not all wrapped up nicely in a bow.
Although that is the way we get from aliens to alien 3, is that
the alien escapes with us.
No, no, no.
But it does do the sort of same thing.
I think also the fact that it's behind Mo in that final scene.
She's obviously the one that has to be behind because she's the
last remaining kind of talking character at the end of it, but she
was down on the planet when it went up in the lift.
And so how did it get to her?
So all of that stuff is inexplicable.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
And then it sort of goes to her. don't know.
Yeah, we don't know.
It's also that old horror movie trope of the monster that won't
die.
You know, every time you think it's dead.
It comes back to life.
There doesn't seem to be any conclusive way of ridding yourself of
this creature.
And I think that's scary.
Yeah.
We talked very briefly about some possible reasons why we keep
bringing Doctor Who Monsters back over the 60 something years that
the show's been running.
What do you think we've learned?
I've learned that this would have been better with Ice Warriors.
I always think things should have pteraleptils in them.
I think it's just a reality of any long-running genre thing is
that where there, I mean, it doesn't have to be Doctor Who doesn't
have to be Star Trek. it can be Agatha Christie.
Anything where you've got similar stories being told one after the
other, inevitably lends itself to some of those villains, villains
particularly more so than sympathetic characters, villains
returning, because as you've said before, it provides a shorthand
it allows you to get straight into the story, perhaps a bit
quicker.
It's something that you can put on a press release, dare I say?
It's something you can put on a radio times cover.
It's something you can put in the ad.
And it also means that you don't get.
Criticism, as I was trying to allude to before, with something
being, oh, this is just the same as blah.
You can you can say, well, it is the same as blah.
So, you know, we don't have to come up with something new.
I think it's inevitable.
There's also the fact that there's only so many good ideas and
good visuals out there as a series goes on for year after year and
then decade after decade.
And if you've had a story, which was popular, went down well and
had a good monster outfit, then use it again.
Going back to what I think we were saying in Seeds of Death, which
was, you know, it didn't need to be the Ice Warriors.
It could have been anything.
It could be the cyberman, it could have been a yeti.
It's just whatever monster suit they had in the cupboard.
Yes, that's absolutely true.
But in that kind of thing, when they're doing that kind of sequel
well, that kind of return of a monster, it's kind of more like
Batman, where, or this, this week it's the Joker, and next week
it's the penguin and the following week it's whatever other
strange, stupid things that Batman fights.
And so what you're doing is you just cycle through those.
And that's, I think, what the series was doing at that point.
Yeah, it's what the Troutson era does.
Well, exactly. that sort of season 6 kind of and beyond.
But in this instance, though, with the well, it's one of the
examples where they've decided to bring something back because it
just seemed like a good idea at the time with the script they had
as a result of a change, as you were suggesting before, Peter that
they needed to make, and this was just kind of an easy logical fix
and why not?
And I'm not necessarily against that.
That's a really interesting point, Simon.
I think there's 2 aspects to this.
Firstly, rewards longtime viewers.
So it sort of builds a sort of dedicated fan base and we have the
return of a monster that's something to look forward to, even if
it might be something like revenge of the site, and then we kind
of look forward to it, anticipated, because it's a returning
monster.
It doesn't matter about the quality of the story.
I always look forward to and anticipate revenge of the Sidemen.
I also think that it's largely due to the fact that we kind of
live in this post-marvel EU world now where there is this sort of
expectation that there will be old monsters.
Or as you say, Simon, you know, you know, the joke will turn up
again in a couple of weeks' time and then it'll be the penguin, et
cetera, et cetera.
That's kind of the cultural landscape that we live in.
There is a question that arises from that for me, though, and is
this the right approach to take for Doctor Who?
And, you know, there's a number of things that sort of occurred to
me.
Also, I was watching this and I was grappling with exactly that
question, Simon.
Like, should this actually have been the midnight monster and, you
know, on a personal level, I thought it worked for me, but there
are those larger questions of, are we mining the past?
I'll be going back to the well, ha ha, too often, perhaps.
And it's something that is born of, I guess, you know, the
Universe, at least in Britain, is all on the, is it ivy or the
iPlayer or whatever it is over there.
You know, we've got TARDIS Wakia, you know, on our fingertips on
our phone.
So if we don't know something, we don't have to sort of scour, you
know, libraries, textbooks, and whatever else to find it, we can
just, we can just find out immediately.
There's a sort of immediacy around what the, not just, you know
knew who is or knew who is, but you know, all of who, going back
to 1963 at our, at our fingertips.
And I just wonder, this approach that RTD has taken in his 2nd era
which relies much more so on, you know, recognisable returning
characters and monsters, et cetera.
At the expense of, I would probably suggest that kind of paired
back really sort of minimalist approach to continuity there you
took, particularly in those 1st 2 or 3 years.
You know, is it the right way to do it?
And I don't know what the right answer is, but I remember a few
years ago watching Wednesday, or I think it was on Netflix, and
being absolutely charmed by it, because it kind of, in some way
sort of set a template in the same way that Buffy did for me for
what Doctor Who could be going forward in a streaming sort of
era.
But all the lessons that I took away from it were effectively, the
lessons that I think RTD used in his 1st era, not necessarily any
2nd era, where it's character led, rather than sort of gimmick led
or perhaps, you know, returning monsters led, that there's a short
sharp seasoned arc, I guess, that pays off at the resolution, and
that there might potentially actually be years between these
series as we're finding with Wednesday, and we might find with
Doctor Who as well.
And I just want to ask that question perhaps of you, gents, and we
may not necessarily have an answer for it, but is this the right
model, the RTD 2 model as opposed to the RTD one model for taking
Doctor Who forward?
I don't know the answer to that.
I think the show has a really ambiguous kind of relationship with
its own past, and you can see it particularly in series one, where
although there are references to things, and although the Daleks
are introduced, the show is very, very conscious of not being law
heavy in a way that's likely to put ordinary viewers off.
And then when it becomes a big hit, they kind of drop that a
little bit.
But remember that of the 2 full shooty series, apart from this
it's only the finales that have recurring elements and episodes
one to 6 are all new things.
We don't see the Daleks in this era.
We don't see the cybermen, we don't see the Santarans.
No terreleptols.
In fact, we are...
The classic series elements, like Omega, the Rani, and Sutec are
things that the new series hasn't done before.
And remember, too, that Chibnall's 1st season was touted as one
that had no recurring elements as well.
There was a real sort of feeling that it was necessary to get away
from that sort of law heavy thing.
And then you think about the Moffat era, and the Moffat era does
have sort of time lords and dialects and cybermen and all of those
things in them.
But apart from just a few exceptions, like it never really has a
satisfactory kind of dalek story.
There are Daleks in other stories.
There's asylum of the Daleks, I guess, and victory of the Daleks
neither of which I think is sort of super highly regarded, although
I quite like asylum of the Daleks, actually.
But there are daleks elsewhere.
And there's A Sontara, and there's no Sontara, and stories in the
era, but there's a Sontara.
There's, you know, eventually there's a Silurian character.
So he doesn't do a Siderian story after the 1st one.
Oh, dinosaurs on a spaceship.
Not really.
No.
Yeah.
So he makes them a part of the world that the show takes place in
rather than a thing that we bring back periodically to have a
story about.
And so the idea that the monsters have to come back and that we
have to have a regular sort of sea devil story or something is not
something that's necessarily a given in all of the eras of Doctor
Who.
When you think about the Hinchcliffe era.
After season 12, it just goes and does its own thing, I think.
And the Williams era as a rule.
Yeah, yeah.
I think there's a thing about universe building.
Doctor Who did that accidentally and haphazardly in the original
series, at least up until the 1980s, because it was building a
universe only by virtue of the fact that it was running for so
long, and it was the one character leading you through.
I think it got universe building wrong in the 80s when it started
to take its cue from Doctor Who magazine articles, plotting the
various encounters with the Daleks and, you know, where the TARDIS
landed and all that kind of stuff.
It wasn't building a universe, it was just bringing monsters back
in radically different stories.
I think Doctor Who is still not particularly suited to universe
building.
One of my least favourite parts of the new series is the doctor
being widely known across the universe, one of my favourite parts
of the classic series, is the fact that he was just a stranger who
would turn up and no one would know him.
Only the Daleks would know him because they'd encountered him
before.
And I think the new series is leaning in more to universe building
but doesn't do it particularly successfully because I don't think
the format of the series is built for that.
It's not Star Wars or Star Trek or any of those.
At least not the Marvel MCU, where it's happening in a well
defined space, in a universe with a similar set of characters.
I think it's Moffat that actually blows that up.
I think that Russell very definitely does create a universe with a
coherent set of encounters between the doctor and Daleks, you know
all of which happen in chronological order.
And then Moffatt comes along and blows up the universe at the end
of his 1st series.
And like essentially isn't interested in that at all.
And I think that's one of the reasons why that's so much more
successful for me because it reflects how the original show was.
I think just trying to expand sort of extensive what you were
saying, Stephen, and what you guys have been saying for a start
whether you have a monster coming back or not is not whether a
story or an episode is good.
That is often completely independent.
So there is nothing wrong with bringing things back and there is
nothing wrong with just doing new stuff.
And there's nothing wrong with doing new stuff which has
similarities and echo stuff that we've done before.
That's an inevitability.
I think my problem with the 2 Russell eras of the new series.
Um, but particularly the 2nd one is not that Sou Tech comes back
per se.
It's sort of how it's done.
I almost feel like there's a finite universe that's being
created.
The universe gets smaller when Russell's in charge.
When Moffatt was in charge and Cheapnell fraud all his faults.
The universe seemed to be more infinite.
The other thing that I think is odd, which is not about monsters
coming back per se, which is what Russell does.
The 2nd go round, which he was trying desperately to avoid, the
1st go round, was to throw in all of the Doctor Who law in what is
I know it's mostly just supposed to be throw away dialogue.
But it's very, very odd.
Why at the beginning of this episode?
Does Belinda need to even ask and wonder about whether they'll
speak English outside there?
It's just kind of throwing a lantern on a kind of a conceit that
of course, when we landed on an alien planet, everyone can
understand what we're saying because it's a television show and we
need to be able to understand what they're saying.
Do you know what I mean?
And that's just one example of what I'm meaning.
Or a repeat of pyramids of Mars in between the season finale last
year.
It was a very strange thing for me to have to sort of go back to a
1970 something episode for the wider audience to sort of
understand who Soutek was.
I think maybe if it was an RTD one story, we probably would have
had that seated a little bit better and we would have had just
enough, I guess, to know about who Sutek is.
And the classic example for me is the Satan pet, that is Su Tech
in the pit there for me, and you don't need to have the rest of
the gump to go with it.
I think that there is an acceleration that's happening, Doctor Who
storytelling, and that it happens between the 2 era, the 2 Russell
era, and Russell kind of leaps into it, and it largely happens in
the Moffatt era.
And that, along with the reduced episode count, means that those
things aren't kind of seeded through.
So I actually think that both of the arcs in the RTD 2 era are
like Moffatt arcs in the sense that they're mostly about our
regular characters.
Moffatt's arcs aren't about bad wolf or the master or Mr. Saxon or
anything like that.
They're about our regulars.
And Russell takes that from him.
And so, and so we do have these things that introduce new elements
and Russell's always done that.
We've talked about this over and over again.
Daleks in series one, Cyberman in series 2, the master in series
three, Davros and the Son Torrance in series four.
So he's always giving the new audience some of the law that we as
classic series people have.
So this isn't that different from that.
But I do think, you know, like the objections that people to have
is the way that they get brought back, I think.
I can't imagine Russell bringing back Omega in the 1st of his
eras.
And the reason is that Omega needs detailed explanations for the
audience.
And once you start getting into it, you realise that it sounds a
bit ridiculous to the public, which is why he didn't do it, oh, so
Omega was a lost time, Lord, and, you know, like the 1980s, you
even get some of the law wrong, he was banished by the time, no, no
he wasn't.
He impossible by sacrifice.
And so it is like the 80s, isn't it?
Exactly.
And so once you're having to explain who this villain is and his
connection to the doctor and why he's important as opposed to just
bringing them back because they are important in the public
consciousness, I think you're starting to lose people.
Yes, compare how, I mean, even though I don't think it's a
particularly good story, but compare how the Sontarians are
brought back in series four, they're just kind of there.
They just are, there's not a requirement for you to go back and
take a short course to understand what the hell's going on.
To be fair, he does bring wrestle on back at the end of his 1st
era.
An equally terrible episode.
Yes, exactly.
Exactly, exactly.
Just please.
I think again, it's not whether you bring these things back, it's
how it's done.
And I wonder whether in this streaming platform era, the best way
to do that is to have sort of like a 3 episode story about Omega
and the time lords and that's something that you have, kind of
like, again, MCU, right?
You have these extended universe characters that sort of have
their own short series.
People are familiar with them, then they move on, and then they
bring them back together in the movies and everybody understands
who they are, because there was actually time to explore who they
were in another text.
I actually think Doctor Who is, is unfortunately at the moment
trapped between 2 styles of television, uh, because I don't know
if any of us watch anything that's broadcast on freeware
television, not at all.
No, right?
Everything we watch is streaming.
We watch it when we want, how we want it. you're going to follow a
series and this is what I think most people are like out there.
If you're going to follow a series, you watch it all, right?
I think Doctor Who is still, to some extent, being made as if it's
a broadcast thing where it's on once a week and you're supposed to
stand and watch it.
Whilst at the same time, understanding that we live in a streaming
world as well, and I think that when it finally sheds the need, and
it was, I thought it was going to shed that with this new RTD 2
era, but I don't think it has.
I think we're still living in this half and half existence.
And I think you'd be able to tell more complex stories and the
show would actually be overall a lot more engaging if it embraced
the understanding that we are in a streaming world now where we
watch it all or we don't watch it at all.
The oddity is that flux got, I think, the format, right?
But the quality of the storytelling.
It was a debacle in other ways, but absolutely.
I think it didn't fulfil the promise of what it could have been.
Which is a step in the right direction.
Exactly.
And then we reach it from that because of the fact that it was a
debacco.
And that's unfortunate.
It learnt the wrong lesson.
But it was a good idea.
It does manage to have 2 completely standalone episodes in the
middle of that, which might be the best 2 episodes, I think.
But telling a coherent story over 6 episodes.
I do think that these 8 episodes series have done that to some
degree.
And I do think that, you know, having a destination.
We've got May the 24th and we learn a little bit more about May
the 24th and then we get to go back to Earth and see what's
happening on Earth with unit and Ruby and stuff like that.
Like, I think that's actually quite a good arc that still permits
individual story.
So I don't think that's that's so bad.
I do think that the, you know, starting every episode, talking
about the vindicator.
It reminds me a little bit of series 6 where every episode we
start by talking about how Amy is or isn't pregnant.
You know, like, which is obviously from a time before streaming.
But I mean, you know, like streaming shows don't all drop at
once.
They do on Netflix, but they don't generally.
But you mean you would watch it.
Everyone watches it or doesn't watch.
You watch it.
You don't miss it.
Unless you give up after episode three, you decide. this isn't for
me.
But what you're saying is you don't you don't miss episode 4
because you were at the theatre that night.
You know what I mean?
And or because the video recorder is fine.
You know what I mean?
It's...
I'm very triggered about snake dance episode one when you'd
say...
I'm very triggered about Revelation of the Daleks episode by the
25 minute...
It was Vengeance on Fire...
It took me years to see that episode.
But my point being that Russell, with what you're saying with the
vindicator and with, you know, the heading towards May the 24th
and all that sort of stuff, is still reminiscent of the series
arcs that we've had in the Moffat era and in the original RTD one
era, even though, yes, they work differently, but they're still
like, it's not exactly the key to time either, where each story is
about something, which is leading us to this climax.
Having Mrs. Flood appear at the end of each episode does not an
arc make for me.
It just makes a kind of a gimmick for me.
And I think that's what it's difficult for me to describe what I
want the series to do because I'm not saying I want it to be like
an 8 episode long story, which is all of a sudden.
I'm not saying that at all.
And I'm not saying that they all should be self-contained either.
I suppose what I'm saying is, you know, we've just been praising
the Impossible Planet earlier about how brilliant it was.
And for me, the longer format of story, doing them over 2 episodes
3 even, and not because they're episodes that run into each other
but because they're actually telling one whole story, is a better
model and which you can do, given the fact that people are
streaming it and watching it all or nothing anyway.
So I'm in question.
If a monoid had a period in another episode, would that for you an
arc make?
No, that was VR.
I'll have the winner if I'm going to have an arc.
Well, that's all the time we have for this week and for this
season.
We'll be back later in the year for season three of 500 year diary
The Colour of Monsters.
In the meantime, you can find us wherever you get your podcasts
and you can keep up with us on our website, 500yearDiary.com, where
you'll find our social media links, as well as links to all of our
other podcasts, including our other Doctor Who podcasts, Flight
through Entirety, and the 2nd great and bountiful Human Empire.
Until next time, always leave them wanting more.
Thank you very much for listening and good night.
Good night.
Until then, be seeing you.
That was 500 Year Diary starring Nathan Bottomley, Stephen B, Simon
Moore, and Peter Griffiths.
The theme was composed by Cameron Lamb.
This episode, behind her, was recorded on the 15th of June 2025
and released on the 5th of July.
Thank you to everyone who joined us on the sofa for the 2nd season
of 500-year diary, Adam Richard, Jeremy Radick, Mark McManus, Kate
Orman, Hannah Cooper, Pete Lambert, and Stephen B, and we'll see
you all later in the year.
I...
Have you got an ad?
No, I think I've got an ad.
I always have an out.
Not the awesome out that we have this week.
No, no, no, well, nothing's good.
If I can just sort of get a bit more to talk about the episode
itself of the well, a bit more.
The thing that I think it does really, well, and interestingly, is
that impressive opening where they basically land somewhere and
then jump out.
Like to a sky typing.
Yes, that's, that's great for, and again, this is kind of goes
back to what I was saying about the fact that that's made for a
free to wear television thing where we've got to capture them
capture the audience in the 1st couple of minutes or we've lost
them where they'll go and turn the channel to something else
right?
Maybe.
I don't know.
Maybe that's what it kind of wrecks off for me.
But then when we land on the planet, when we arrive on the actual
planet.
There's this very long, painful for me series of exposition, with
the help of the psychic paper, which I just wish went the way of
canine kind of thing.
It's like it's just a cheat to get the doctor involved.
There's so many more...
Burned up by a ptero lectol.
That would be that exact sonic screwdriver.
Thank you.
It feels incredibly inelegant the way things kind of then unfold
from there for the next 5 minutes or so where you get all this
exposition in a way which is very ugly.
And I think you could learn as they're getting up to when they
meet Alice.
There's all sorts of opportunities for the doctor and Belinda, and
therefore the audience, to find out where we are, why are we here
what are these people doing, et cetera, et cetera.
And yes, you need some kind of mechanism to make sure that they
don't just want to arrest the doctor and bell lender because
they're, you know, they didn't come down with us.
But it's just inelegant.
I think, though, that it does give us some decent gags and stuff
and it gives Belinda the chance to be smart.
But they're sort of cheap gags.
Or gags or gags, you know, like, I don't think they're terrible
gags.
I think they're pretty fun.
And I also think too, you know, the way that this thing is
structured is it's got to show us the sets.
It's got to build up the atmosphere.
We get to find dead bodies.
We get to find kind of trashed quarters and stuff like that.
So we get to gradually learn what sort of disaster has unfolded
here.
And so like I'm not quite sure what you mean by...
There's, there's all the stuff that, uh, where, when they, as soon
as they've kind of landed feet 1st on the, on the planet that
there's a kind of this interrogation scene going on.
And all that, in everything that you just described, all of that
sequence could be told in all, during all those other sequences as
well.
If there was just a little bit more care, I think, done in, in
that, it's kind of like, oh, there, I understand.
The storytelling's not told on the run.
We're given an info dump and then they go, and then they move in.
And then they move in, which is, I think, for me, a floor with a
lot of the RTD 2 era, and particularly in that finale is that you
get this kind of these needs for info dumps.
And they can be info dumps about stuff that you don't even
necessarily need to know.
You certainly don't need to know right now.
It's kind of, I mean, is there that much information delivered in
that scene?
Like we discovered that it's a mercury mining thing?
Is there anything else very much that we're told about?
Why we can't leave immediately.
I just feel that it could be done better.
Yeah, it doesn't seem to be a lot of information though.
And a lot of stuff is conveyed visually by getting us to look
across at the. also this stupid sort of awkward way of the doctor
and Belinda pretending to be, you know, inspectors or whatever the
hell they are.
And it's just, it's just, it's a gag that I've seen too many times
before.
They do it a lot.
It's a gag that kind of worked at 1st couple of times with a
psychic paper and now that is what's feeling repetitive.
I think, though, that that might be the 1st use of the psychic
paper by Shooty.
Oh, he was health and safety gin and tonic division in the church
on Ruby Road.
Sounds like that would be more something the Rani would be.
I will say that one of the things that I really appreciate about
this episode, and I liked the 1st time I saw it, and I liked it
more the 2nd time I saw it, which is not a model for the shoot era
for me in general, is that I appreciate its slow burn.
It's really nice that in an era of not just in Doctor 2, but in
wider television, of frenetic storytelling, where you're bouncing
from one thing to another really quickly.
You've got expedited exposition coming out.
You've got to pick things up quickly.
I loved the fact that it just took it slowly.
There's not very much in it.
It's a little bit like what you said, Simon, about midnight.
Basically, what happens is we arrive.
We find out what's going on.
We get that disastrous scene where Cassio takes over and has all
those people killed and then we bolt, you know, we defeat the
thing and then we leave.
There's very, very little action and a lot of time is just given, I
think, to atmosphere.
And yeah, so I think it does basically what midnight does, because
it doesn't have a complex premise.
And because in a sense, this is something that we've seen a lot of
times before.
It's like the shorthand that you get from having a Dalek story.
You know, you don't have to explain the Dalek's motivations or why
they've got egg whisks or...
Like, you know all that stuff.
So in a way, I think it manages to, you know, whereas, whereas
something like the finale where we spend a lot of time explaining
who Omega is, only for him to come out and just eat her and then
go back in.
And that's kind of it.
Yeah, yeah.
That seemed like a lot of expositions.
For what was that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Oh, no, no, I'll certainly pay this as far as atmosphere and broad
structure.
I'm just kind of saying where things can be done better.
And I think that that opening five, 7 minutes, whatever it is, is
I, and the sequence that we've already had in the TARDIS with a
costume change, which is not the sort of thing that I, I'm a
particular fan of doing it in that kind of goodies, magic cupboard
kind of way.
Um, but...
Favourite things about the new era.
Putting that to one side.
I think everything you said, Peter, is absolutely correct, but
from that point from about 5 or 6 or 7, whatever it is, minutes in
then I think it knows what it's doing.
It's that 1st bit where it's a bit kind of how are we going to get
this started?
How are we going to get into this?
And midnight does that so much more elegantly with them. almost
like, let's get all of this out of the way, so then we can have
that. can have the episode we want and I don't think it's done.
I think it just feels to me clumsy compared to the way we get into
midnight where, you know, Donna's lying by the pool, the doctor's
calling is saying, oh, come, come, you must come.
That's shot.
Remember where Iran is boarding, boarding the bus behind him.
He's on a public phone.
It's awesome It's a way.
See, that's a much more elegant way of getting us into the story
as quickly as we can because we've only got 45 minutes, whereas I
think the, well, unfortunately, because of other reasons, it has
to do all this other rubbish first, which I think gets in the
way.
Well, I think we should wind up because I have to just say
wealth.
Finish the I have to finish.
I have to finish time in the Rani.
Yes.
And let's get talking about the well out of the way so that we can
talk about the time arrived.