TV Review | Doctor Who: “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” by Maxine Alderton

There are certain points in space and time apparently designed to entice the Doctor like a moth to the flame. That famous night by Lake Geneva rumoured to have inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one such point; so attractive, so irresistible, so completely Doctor Who that the Time Lord has now gatecrashed it three times and in two different bodies, but never more exhilaratingly than in Maxine Alderton’s gorgeously gothic masterpiece, “The Haunting of Villa Diodati”.

This episode’s atmosphere is so rich and moody that it’s palpable. Emma Sullivan’s claustrophobic direction is nothing short of exquisite, and it’s difficult to believe that Alderton (Emmerdale, The Worst Witch) has never written for Who before. Her script sizzles with electric dialogue that’s redolent of Russell T Davies at the height of his powers (“Nobody mention Frankenstein. Nobody interfere. Nobody snog Byron…”), and, just like RTD, its superficial mirth often belies something much more profound. From an off-the-cuff “Tuesday” to an anguished tirade about her gang’s “mountainous team structure”, Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor has never sounded more thoroughly Doctorish than she does here. It’s Whittaker’s greatest performance in the role since “Resolution”, if not altogether, and that’s largely down to the quality of the material that she’s gifted. The synopsis’s promise of a “decision of earth-shattering proportions” wasn’t mere hyperbole, it seems, and Whittaker ekes every ounce of indignant fury that she can out of the Doctor’s impossible predicament. She’s staggering here.

Similar could be said of Bradley Walsh, Tosin Cole and Mandip Gill. Each of their characters is assigned a clear role within the plot, and they are roles that advance their ongoing personal stories. Pairing Yas with Claire Clairmont, for instance, offers Yas some distressing insight into her situation aboard the TARDIS, and it does so in a way that feels natural – at no point is Yas’s ear violated. Ryan, meanwhile, finds himself the subject of an exceedingly well-crafted cautionary tale in which his modern sense of mockery incenses Maxim Baldry’s pugilistic Polidori. His granddad fares even better still, the sole subject of a haunting that, rather beautifully, isn’t resolved or even explained by the episode’s dénouement.

Alderton’s masterful handling of the TARDIS crew extends to the distinguished occupants of the Villa Diodati too, one of whom many Doctor Who fans are already well-acquainted with: the soon-to-be Mary Shelley, who was introduced in Big Finish’s 2009 audio anthology The Company of Friends as a travelling companion of Paul McGann’s eighth Doctor. Originally played by Julie Cox (Broadchurch), Big Finish’s venturesome take on Mary was a delightful foil for McGann’s visually Byronic Doctor. “The Haunting of Villa Diodati”, however, sees newcomer Lili Miller present a very different version of Mary for TV. This Mary is altogether more grounded than her predecessor in the audio medium; she has that credible sense of weary mundanity that made her fellow literary greats like Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare so very convincing in Doctor Who. “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” focuses less on overt Frankenstein-esque set pieces and more on Mary’s worries for her infant son and “indisposed” not-quite husband, yet to exactly the same end.

“And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of aid from them - She was the Universe.”

This episode’s portrayal of Lord Byron (Jacob Collins-Levy) is far more predictable than its Mary, but it’s even bit as entertaining nonetheless. Having the famous lothario besotted with the Doctor was an inspired move on Alderton’s part, allowing the writer to make a valid point in keeping with the era’s woke agenda yet in a much more understated – and much more humorous – way than is typically the case. What I especially like about Byron’s role here is that, despite having his advances spurned by the Doctor, which in turn leads directly to Miss Clairmont finally washing her hands of him, the episode culminates in his touching reading of “Darkness” - a poem that, if we didn’t know better, we’d swear he actually wrote about the Doc.

Perhaps Alderton’s greatest triumph is reserved for her narrative itself, which initially plays upon the expected haunted-house tropes only to completely subvert expectations at the half-way mark. Despite Captain Jack’s warning in “Fugitive of the Judoon”, the last thing that I expected was for the lone Cyberman he spoke of to show up this week, although in retrospect I probably should have done as it fits so very… excellently. I’d thought the series had utterly exhausted the Cybermen during Peter Capaldi’s time as the Doctor, but Patrick O'Kane’s “modern Prometheus” is something else entirely. His emotion, something usually anathema to his kind, lends him a violent, unstable quality that makes him a bona fide terror. There’s something horribly unsettling about being able to see part of his raging face; flesh merging with plastic and steel. I have no idea where Chris Chibnall is going with the Cyber race, but one thing’s for sure – it’s new and exciting territory.

In almost forty seasons of television, “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” stands out as one of just a handful of episodes that gets everything right. Its characterisation is superb, it balances humour and horror exquisitely and, whilst its twists and turns will probably floor you, they work so perfectly that you are left feeling the story couldn’t really have gone any other way. Light on laudanum and high on heart and horror, this episode is 2020’s instant classic. A must.

Doctor Who airs on Sunday evenings on BBC 1 and is available to stream for the foreseeable future on BBC iPlayer. A season pass comprising all ten episodes of the season in 1080p HD and bonus material is also available from iTunes for £20.99, with episodes typically becoming available the day after their transmission on BBC 1. A Blu-ray steelbook is also available to pre-order from Amazon for £49.99.

The events of “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” take place at the exact same time and in the exact same location as the two eighth Doctors’ first and last respective meetings with Mary Shelley in “Mary’s Story” (The Company of Friends, 2009). At the end of that story, Mary joined the younger of the eighth Doctors for at least a hat trick of adventures in the TARDIS, while the elder eighth Doctor returned to wherever and whenever he came from – very probably the early days of the Last Great Time War. However, Mary does not recognise the Doctor in this episode, and the Doctor does not appear to be familiar with Mary either. Neither is particularly surprising given the apparent state of the Doctor’s memory (she may have an entire lifetime missing, compared to which a forgotten companion is trivial), the Doctor’s change of appearance (and gender), and of course the crucial fact that “Mary’s Story” and “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” are apparently contemporaneous.

The simplest explanation is that “Mary’s Story” and “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” are not contemporaneous at all. One or both of these spatio-temporal locations may not be what it seems, or the two might exist in competing versions of reality. There’s a popular theory that the eighth Doctor’s life is split across a number of parallel universes, with his respective adventures in different media each taking place in completely separate continuities. Whilst this is certainly the cleanest solution to this particular continuity conundrum, I prefer to take a more holistic approach when it comes to interpreting the Doctor’s long and complicated life, and it seems that I’m not the only one. The Company of Friends collection, which introduced Mary, was the first official Doctor Who release to bring together the eighth Doctor’s friends from his previously unconnected appearances in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip; the Virgin New Adventures; and the long-running BBC Books line.

Above: Breaking the media barrier... Continuity-confounding companions Bernice Summerfield,
Fitz Kreiner, Izzy Sinclair and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

For those with my passion for keeping the Doctor singular, a much more interesting idea presents itself when we consider that in taking her gang to a point in space and time that she had already visited before (twice and at the same time…), the Doctor created / exacerbated a vulnerable point. Moreover, if the elder eighth Doctor in “Mary’s Story” was indeed injured in the Last Great Time War, as is heavily implied by the dialogue, then the ensuing wibbly-wobbliness of events is only compounded. The more recent Eighth Doctor: Time War series from Big Finish has shown us time shifting around the Doctor and his friends as the war rages, erasing one companion and repeatedly rewriting the history of another, so such things have a clear precedent. It’s perfectly feasible that the moment the TARDIS materialised by Lake Geneva, the Doctor unravelled the events of not only “Mary’s Story”, but also all of her subsequent adventures with Mary.

Of course, this begs the obvious question as to why the Doctor would do such a thing simply to “soak up the atmos in the presence of some literary greats”, but from the Doc’s point of view, her travels with Mary were millennia ago, and as I’ve already mentioned, her memory is far from elephantine. This theory does leaves us with the poser of how the elder of the eighth Doctors recovered from his vitreous time infection without Shelley’s lightning bolt, though – unless of course he still did, and those events that now never happened still stand from the Doctor’s unique perspective as she’s a Time Lord, and resistant, if not immune, to shifts in her personal timeline. It’s hardly watertight, but it’ll do me.