A shrieking, killing nightmare erupts from an overgrown well, hidden in the grounds of an old house, Tranchard’s Folly – and Mary Shelley, the Doctor’s latest travelling companion, rescues teenage twins Finicia and Lucern from the clutches of the monster.
But a TARDIS trip in search of the origin of the horror goes terribly wrong when the Doctor, Mary and their two new friends find themselves stuck in the middle of a seventeenth century witch scare.
While the Doctor investigates the strange lights at Vetter’s Tor, and the twins go in search of an artefact from the Hecatrix Dimension, Mary confronts the secrets of her past… and her future. The truth will out: Master Kincaid, the terrible Witch-Pricker himself, commands it!
THE WITCH FROM THE WELL
After an auspicious start with “The Silver Turk,” the “relaunched” eighth Doctor and Mary Shelley continue their first trilogy with Rick Briggs’ “The Witch from the Well.” Briggs won a new writer competition that led to his entry “The Entropy Composition” in “The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories,” making “Witch” his first contribution to the main range. It avoids some of the problems that challenged his earlier story, but unfortunately other issues rear their heads, making this tale difficult to enjoy.
I’ve complained about this mistake in other Big Finish stories, and it still makes no sense to separate the Doctor and a new companion so soon into their relationship. The Doctor and Mary spend about 90% of this story apart – several hundred years apart, in fact – and while I understand that Briggs is attempting a structural duality here, it robs us of important character development. By the start of the next story, Mary will be writing of her growing attraction to the Doctor – well there’s no hint of it here! And how could there be? There isn’t any time to develop it. This could even be overcome if the separation seemed truly necessary, but the problem is compounded by Mary’s segment of the story appearing utterly unimportant. It adds almost nothing to the story, and could easily have been cut entirely, leaving the Doctor and Mary together in the past, without losing anything significant. Okay, so we wouldn’t know that Aleister Portillon (Andrew Havill) has an obsession with Lord Byron or that the Doctor possesses a biography of Mary, but so what?
In fact, the entire structure rings untrue. It’s odd enough to start the story with the Doctor repairing the TARDIS while Mary wanders around the 21st century – and while it makes sense for her to rescue people from a rampaging monster and bring them to safety in the TARDIS, what happens next is utterly bizarre. The Doctor watches the “witch” on the scanner for a while, then decides that, rather than going outside and stopping it, he’ll go back in time to find out how it was imprisoned in the first place. Guess we’re not worried about innocent people getting ripped apart, huh?
The other major problem with the story is its overreliance on technobabble. The entire conflict is explained in terms that are by definition impossible to understand – there are otic energies and lokic (?) fields and the Hexatric Dimension, there are alien races we’ve never heard of, and there are technologies we’ve never seen. This isn’t a bad thing in itself, but the problem is that the plot revolves almost entirely around these terms. The only part that doesn’t – that of the Witch-Pricker (Simon Rouse) – is excellent, and if this story was simply about the Doctor being mistaken for a witch, it would have been much better. Of course, the Doctor invites the suspicion on himself – after explicitly warning his companions to speak in ways understandable to the locals, he starts rambling on about otic energy! No wonder they try to burn him at the stake.
I understand that Briggs is trying to draw a parallel between the witch hunts of past centuries and the persecution of those with otic energy, but the thematic links are left woefully unexplored. Fortunately, Rouse helps tie the play together with an excellent performance as Kincaid. The Doctor suspects he’s a cruel sadist, but he’s surprisingly honest: he believe wholeheartedly in what he’s doing, cruel as it is. Sadly, this leads to the traditional Doctor Who cliché of the true believer struck down by the monsters as his faith fails him, but at least he gets a good portrayal. Julie Cox continues to impress as Mary, useless as her segment may have been, and Briggs thankfully refrains from hammering Frankenstein parallels into the script. There’s a Prometheus reference, though, but nobody’s perfect.
The production is first-rate, as expected. Barnaby Edwards and sound designer Steve Foxon make the two time periods sound distinct, while maintaining the similarities demanded by the script. Foxon’s score is excellent as well, a mixture of period and contemporary. Overall, “The Witch from the Well” is too disjointed to be successful. There are some fine ideas on display, but they’re obscured by poor execution and an overreliance on technobabble. For a story with so much dramatic potential, it slows to a tedious crawl far too often. A serious disappointment coming on the heels of its excellent predecessor.
Sigh.
4/10