Warning: contains plot spoilers for Doctor Who episode “The Well”. If they were really concentrating, fans may have got there just before the Doctor did, at the mention of an Xtonic Star. If they were really really concentrating, they could have drawn the connection even earlier, with the very first reference to Galvanic Radiation and a planet where nothing can live. What connection? The surprise that series 15 episode “The Well” takes place on the same planet as acclaimed series four episode “Midnight”, and features the same baddie – perhaps now retconned as another member of Doctor Who’s growing pantheon of gods, seeing as it survived half a million years between the Doctor’s visits, and appears to have a thing for playing games. In “The Well”, Fifteen and Belinda’s latest TARDIS “bounce” shoots them 500,000 years ahead of 1952 Miami, to the “cold, lifeless and dead” Planet 6-7-6-7. At least, that’s what it’s known as in that time; it used to go by the rather more poetic “Midnight”. In the 2008 Who episode of the same name, Midnight was where the Doctor was paralysed by a malevolent creature whose mystery he never solved. And now it’s back. The June 2008 series four episode saw Donna Noble take some time off from the TARDIS (while Catherine Tate filmed Doctor-lite adventure “Turn Left”). Donna relaxed in a leisure spa while Ten, like the beautiful nerd he is, went on a sightseeing tour of sapphire waterfalls on a planet the surface of which was made of diamond. Except, he never made it to the waterfalls because a shadowy beast attacked their Crusader shuttle and killed four people, very nearly including the Doctor. Written by Russell T Davies and directed by Alice Troughton, “Midnight” is about two kinds of evil: the faceless horror evil of the entity that possesses the tourists aboard the sightseeing shuttle, and the paranoid, protectionist evil of the passengers themselves. When the shuttle breaks down en-route and one of the group becomes ‘infected’ by the monster, the others turn on her and plan to cast her out into the planet’s deadly irradiated atmosphere. The Doctor appeals to their humanity, which makes them also turn on him. It’s only thanks to a heroic act from someone on board that the Doctor isn’t killed and forced to regenerate on the surface of Planet Midnight (and then presumably, to immediately die of radiation poisoning, regenerate again, immediately die, and so on, forever. Though while we’re thinking about this, it was the Toymaker’s use of UNIT’s Galvanic Radiation beam that caused the Doctor to bi-generate, so perhaps if he had been thrown out onto the planet’s surface, there’d now be thousands of Doctors running around, all sharing the constituent parts of a single outfit. Quite the mental image.) In “The Well”, Fifteen tells Belinda that the first time he encountered the Midnight monster, he had never been so scared in his life. That reads, remembering the look on David Tennant’s face while he was paralysed by it, and while it parroted his every word through its unfortunate host Sky Silvestry – brilliantly played by Lesley Sharp. Ten was so shaken by his encounter with the creature that when Donna playfully repeats his words in the episode’s closing scene, he earnestly asks her not to, and remains silent when she asked him what he thought the monster was and whether it was still out there. Until “The Well”, the monster from “Midnight” was a rare case of a baddie that the Doctor had never encountered before and also wasn’t able to identify. Now, showrunner Russell T Davies and “The Well” co-writer Sharma Walfall have returned to that unsolved mystery. Hundreds of thousands of years since it was last encountered, the Midnight creature appears to have evolved a physical form and the ability not just to possess and mimic, but also to hide behind its infected hosts and physically attack anybody who comes within reach. It laid waste to Colony Base 15 when their diamond mine operation awakened it, working its way through their crew and eventually attaching itself to base cook Aliss (Rose Ayling-Ellis), a deaf BSL speaker and lip reader who now has two very good reasons not to want people to turn their backs on her. Even worse than that: it’s out. Ten couldn’t tell Donna whether or not the creature was still out there after it was blown out of the shuttle in “Midnight”, but we have a hint. In the closing scene of “The Well”, it’s suggested that Trooper Mo is the creature’s new host, so wherever she goes next, it goes too. Another game-playing god unleashed? Is that why whatever’s bouncing the TARDIS around (hello Mrs Flood!) sent it back to Planet Midnight in the first place? Doctor Who continues with “Lucky Day” on Saturday May 3 on BBC One and iPlayer in the UK and on Disney+ around the world. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!