An excavation of an old manor in England unearths an old well. Thick stone with strange lettering, but as soon as it's unearthed a screaming apparition flies out screaming and takes the life of many.
The Witch in the well is a mystery, so the Doctor, Mary Shelly and the twins Fenicia and Lucern try to unearth its origins, but in doing so, Mary finds out about truths she wasn't ready for of things she's done... And things yet to become.
And a Witch Hunt will see more people dead without reason than with.
The Witch from the Well contains examples of the following tropes:
- Black Speech: Employed by the twins at one point.
- Boomerang Bigot: The Doctor is horrified to realise that the Veraxils have become this; after centuries of being prosecuted for their use of Odic energy, the Veraxils have turned against their past use of it.
- Burn the Witch!: Initially the Doctor is supposed to be "Just" hanged to death, until he discloses more information about the true nature of the murders that had occurred, and Kincaid deems him "Too dangerous to hang" and has him burned to death instead.
- Call-Back: The Fast Return Switch brought the Doctor and Mary to 21st Century England, Tranchard's Fell.
- Mary refers to the Cybermen lading in Vienna.
- The Doctor gets called "Master" at one point to which he bluntly replies with "Doctor".
- Call-Forward: While crawling through a forest, the Doctor's coat gets caught on branches, and he muses that "next time" he'll choose a shorter jacket made of a sturdier material. He will don a shorter leather jacket for a while in his current body, and wear one full-time in his next two incarnations.
- Cold-Blooded Torture: Kincaid the Witchpricker inflicts some on the Doctor.
- Evil Laugh: The Witch has a cackle, naturally.
- Exact Words: Kincaid is good at ... "Interpreting".
- Have We Met Yet?: The Twins met the Doctor before. The fast return switch brings him to that exact moment.
- Living Ship: Mary describes the TARDIS as a "mare" that is docile in the hands of the Doctor, but bucks and basically tries to "throw off" anyone else who tries to control it without him.
- Mind Your Step: The Doctor slides down a slope, and warns the others of this.
- Older Than They Look: The twins.
- Oxymoronic Being: Odic energy is a science harvested from superstition, and any sentient being can radiate it.
- Selective Obliviousness: Kincaid constantly ignores or twists anything the Doctor says to him to support the idea that he "must" kill Agnes and the Doctor as witches, but always listens to the twins when they attempt to convince him to go along with their plans.
- Shapeshifting: The "Witch" the town is after.
- He Is Not My Boyfriend: When someone implies the Doctor is Mary's partner, before they can finish the sentence she disputes it.
- Spoiler: Mary encounters a library which, among others, contains her biography. She foregoes the chance.
- Sufficiently Advanced Alien: An alien species called Veraxils emit something called Odium energy. People around them can harness it to heal others, but this can make people think the Veraxils are magical.
- Suspect Is Hatless: The Doctor actually gets described as "The hatless gentleman".
- Take That!: The Doctor gives one to Twitter when he says at age 19, Mary's written a novel. And that the twins at age 17 "Barely wrote more than a 140 characters".
- Tap on the Head: Lucern brains a guard with a stick and, unusually so, the Doctor immediately calls him out and says that's never a good idea because it can fracture a man's skull.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Despite the Doctor's distaste for what the Veraxils have become, he accepts their aid in preparing a prison for the "witch" after trapping it in a well (the prison requires certain runes to be carved in stone and the Doctor's screwdriver is the only tool capable of carving those runes with the necessary precision in this time).
- Title Drop:Fenicia: The WitchThe Doctor: The Witch?Fenicia: The Witch from the Well!
- Unobtanium: Galligrum, which is a Gallifreyan mineral which looks like gold and glows in the dark when you shake it.
- We Are as Mayflies: The Doctor mentions that aliens are capable of living far longer than humans, and thinks the Witch in the Well is one of these.
- Wham Line: "I have no twins..?"
- Witch Hunt: The Doctor thinks the Witch in the Well was a victim of one of these, and then finds himself stuck in one.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: The concept behind Odic energy.
