Okay, so the short version is that it was a good episode. I don't know about great, now, but certainly good. Upper tier, but not cracking the top three for me personally? It's a bit of a surprise that I was cooler on it than I expected, considering what it does. Much like last week's Can You Hear Me?, there are concepts here that personally resonate with me. Unlike the previous episode, however, the concepts don't hit me on an emotional level... per se. Instead what they do is mirror two pieces of media which are important and formative to me, and the comparison made me sit up and go "oh that's kinda clever, it's like ___" as I was watching. These comparisons will come in a moment, once I get the proverbial motor running... but I do have to say that, as nice as it is to be reminded of such important media to me, there's only a little going on beyond that. I ended up feeling like I did when Captain Jack showed up a few weeks ago; "yes good, I recognize that element, now do something with it other than reminding me of other shit I've seen.". I don't say this to imply that The Haunting Of Villa Diodati (and I almost got that first try, I only spelled it "Diodata") is an awful piece of reference porn or anything. It's absolutely not. It does what it does, and not much more beyond that, that's all. Still, I can find something here. Come on, then. Let's dig in.
It's another bit of historical fun, with Mary Shelley and Lord Byron on the stormy night where Shelley was supposed to have come up with the idea of Frankenstein. Frankenstein's a great book, I enjoyed covering it in college. I swear I remember mentioning that in another blog post or tweet or something a while ago, but I can't remember. Anyway, we have the Doctor and friends dropping in via a cute cold open of everyone getting spooked, and then... well, that's odd, history isn't quite going as it should. It's around here that all the creepy shit begins to happen, and it starts as your typical haunted house affair. Vases being thrown by invisible force, paintings falling down, goddamn bone hands trying to choke people out. You know, the typical shit. I'll say this for Villa Diodati, it definitely sets a spooky haunted house atmosphere. Doctor Who is very good at that, but it's what happens with the house itself beyond those scares that intrigues me. The house starts trapping the denizens in endless loops, stairways that lead down and back up to each other. It's a great effect, and here's where I caught my first resonant reference. One of my favorite horror novels of all time is House Of Leaves, and at the heart of its nested narrative is a story about a house that is, to use an apt phrase, bigger on the inside. It holds a massive dark labyrinth in which the walls rearrange and keep on changing. (Interestingly, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein also has a nested narrative structure. Mirroring. Fuck.) So, to see a Doctor Who story using the twisted logic of an infinitely changing house as part of the horror was really a hoot. That being said, this is where my more cynical nature took over. I was happy to see the connection, but the show had to stick the landing. There had to be a good point to why the house was this way... and, as it turns out, the point was keeping the McGuffin of the episode safe. So, you know, let's talk about Percy Shelley and the Lone Cyberman.
I want to preface all of this by saying I'm not the biggest Cyberman fan in the world. You can do a lot of good shit with the body horror aspect of them (as hammy as it was, Rise Of The Cybermen/Age Of Steel was good in this regard), but more often than not the show just treats them as stompy death robots with legacy recognition and appeal. That being said, I appreciate the attempt here to make the Lone Cyberman spookier by having him be this rusted-out, half-broken monstrosity clanking about the house. Being able to see part of his face makes him far more horrific, and the fact that he still has emotion allows him to be driven but still have anger and pettiness burning within him. He's pretty good. Then we get to the reveal, and the fact that Percy Shelley generated the spooky factor of the house to keep this metallic dumbass from getting some Cyberman tech that will let him like, go to the future and help the Cybermen win a bunch of battles. Oh god. Here's where I make a compliment sandwich and roll my eyes; not just for here, but pre-emptively for next week. I really don't care about the Cyberwars or any dumb shit like that, as it's exactly the type of shit I just said the majority of Doctor Who does. If I want big stompy death robots shooting people and getting blown up, I'll grab my Peter Davison Blu-Rays off of the shelf and watch fucking Earthshock again. More to the point, the show uses Captain Jack's earlier warning to set up... a goddamned trolley problem. Give the Lone Cyberman the Cyberium thing and let billions in the future die, or allow Percy Shelley to die and rewrite the history of planet Earth. We know damn well which choice the Doctor will make and, for reasons I'll get to, it was the right one to make. What's strange, then, is how the choice is framed; the companions argue for saving billions of lives, and the Doctor offers some bizarre waffle about the course of human history and Percy Shelley's creativity before basically blowing up on the fam. Um. What? It's a very strange beat to focus on, but it does give us an angry Jodie Whittaker in a way we've not seen up to now.
No, the Doctor eventually does give the Lone Cyberman what it wants, in order to save Percy Shelley. There's another bizarre beat where she gets the thing from him, only for the Lone Cybermen to then threaten to blow up Earth and make the Doctor give it up immediately anyway. Okay. Here's where I play my hand. I very much doubt that Maxine Alderton had this in mind when she wrote it, but personal resonance is everything. I spent yesterday writing seven thousand words about personal resonance in a show, and I still have gas in the tank so here we go. This feels, to me, like the climax to a Sailor Moon season. Specifically, Sailor Moon S. You can follow that link to my grand post on that season if you like, but the short of it is Sailor Moon being presented with a choice much like the Doctor's here; give the villain what they want and save an innocent life, or let the innocent die to thwart the villain's plan. Neither Sailor Moon nor the Doctor are willing to let an innocent life die. The needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many... and, in both cases, they are hopeful idealistic optimists. The Doctor a little less so in this case, granted; her motivation is less "everything will work out for the best if I believe" and more "Right, time to sort out the fuck-up I just forced myself into by standing true to my ideals". It's the correct choice to make, just framed in a really weird way with this Doctor's insistence on maintaining the current course of Earth history. Either way, it definitely gave me something interesting to think about in the context of this episode. That'll do it for this one. It does some neat things, and it's set us up for something with the Cybermen, for better or worse. Hoping for better, but it's probably going to be bam bam shooty Cyberwars. Like I said, it's good. Not great, but good. With that out of the way... oh god, it's all Chibnall from here on, isn't it? Okay. Hold your nose and here we go.
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