Speak to any Doctor Who fans of a certain age, and they’ll tell you that the show made them hide behind the sofa when they were kids; it’s a widely spoken cliché that you hear so much, and you have to wonder whether or not it’s true, or something that is so often repeated that people just stick to that line. I know that wherever I’ve lived, even as a kid, sofas have been positioned against a wall, so there’s no way I could have ever hidden behind them!

In any case, the point is that the ‘behind the sofa’ thing has become shorthand for the terror that Doctor Who can inflict upon its fans on occasion, with the implication being that you’d hide, but still be peeking out to watch, because it was so good to ignore regardless of your fear.

How long has it been since we’ve had a true ‘behind the sofa’ episode of Doctor Who? Sure, last year’s final two parter, despite its eventual collapse in the finale, certainly had its moments. But the true ‘behind the sofa’ episodes maintain the tension and fear throughout, and it’s in delivering this that The Well truly excels.

The Doctor and Belinda are once again having trouble getting back to Earth, and the TARDIS drops them off half a million years in the future. The duo end up accompanying a squad of soldiers investigating a loss of contact from a mining colony; what they find there fills The Doctor with sheer terror. And if you’ve been with The Doctor since its 2005 reboot, it’ll shake you to the core too.

That’s as much as I’m willing to divulge, because the callback is genuinely impressive, unforeseen and very welcome; it directly references one of the scariest episodes of the modern era.

Though there’s a concern that going back to the well (pun intended there!) to revisit an episode that has until now stood alone, and remained so impactful in part because of its singular nature and still-unexplained threat, thankfully little more light is shone on what it is, and it remains just as terrifying as before.

The tension and scares are managed masterfully throughout, and even though there’s a few moments where the concept doesn’t quite add up, with this happening during one of the most frantic action scenes it’s easy to overlook. It’s also definitely easy to forgive, given how well this episode builds up and maintains its horror.

Ncuti Gatwa and Varada Sethu are a fantastic TARDIS team, and they’re ably assisted by some fantastic performances in The Well too; Rose Ayling-Ellis is particularly impressive in her role as a desperate survivor of whatever it was that befell the mining operation (and my lips are sealed; spoilers, sweetie!). That said, it’s a strong episode with fantastic performances from the whole cast; Gatwa and Sethu are definitely notable at being really good at the proper, dramatic stuff, and the supporting players all do a great job here.

With this third episode and the two prior, this season already feels a lot more consistent in quality than last year’s; there’s some really interesting mysteries being seeded too, though it remains to be seen whether showrunner Russell T. Davies is able to stick the landing. He rarely does, but that’s not to say that he can’t, or hasn’t (2005’s Bad Wolf paid off brilliantly, for example).

On current form, it certainly feels that the show is back on track after an inconsistent previous season, so fingers crossed that it maintains this level of quality for the duration.

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