Doctor Who: what exactly is the monster from Midnight?

This creature dates all the way back to the time of the Tenth Doctor

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The nice thing about being a show that’s 60-plus years old is that you have tonnes of lore to pull from.

Such is often the case with Doctor Who, and especially so in this week’s episode, The Well.

In it, the Doctor and Belinda (Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu) stumble upon a mining colony on a deserted planet, seemingly located in a rather forgotten and bleak bit of space. The problem: all the miners are dead, bar one. That would be Rose Ayling-Ellis’ Aliss, who is infected with a bad case of parasitic monster.

We find out exactly what kind of monster it is about halfway through, when the Doctor connects the dots. Turns out, this planet used to be famous for its diamonds (before they all got mined) and used to be called… Midnight.

That makes the monster very likely the same one that infected David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor and the group of tourists that got stranded on a broken shuttle with him, way back in season four (the episode, handily, was called Midnight too, and it aired in 2008).

But what is it? To be honest, we don’t know an awful lot. In the first instance we saw the monster, it was invisible: it took over peoples’ bodies and started infecting others by mimicking what they said (very creepy).

In this episode, we’re led to believe it was likely uncovered once more by the miners drilling a 5km hole into the planet’s crust. We’re also told that is has learnt from its first encounter with the Doctor. No longer content with forcing other people to repeat themselves, it now likes to play games. Hence being attached to Aliss: it’s located behind her, and any person that goes behind it (and is seen doing so by another person) gets killed. It’s convoluted.

The creature, we also learn, jumps from one person to another when the first person dies, meaning it’s pretty damn hard to escape from. This is the reason that everybody on the mining base ended up dead - half the miners shot their colleagues to try and kill the creature, and the other half ended up killed by it.

We do also see glimpses of its body. Though mostly invisible, it seems to look like some kind of Predator-type alien: tall and generally scary looking.

The first time we saw it, it wasn’t even defeated. It was cast out into the void of space by a brave person who sacrificed themselves; this time around, something similar happens when one of the characters gets ‘infected’ with the monster before jumping into the well leading down into the centre of the planet.

As for what it is? The Doctor’s brief chat with the monster reveals that it “knows my name” – and imparts some other rather disturbing information.

Given that the episode ends with it seemingly having made its way on board the getaway spaceship, it’s likely we’ll be seeing more of it in future. Hell, it might even be part of the Pantheon of Discord. We’ve already met a few of them, and it’s hinted that Mrs Flood might be one of them, too.

Doctor Who is streaming now on BBC One and iPlayer

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