The Haunting Of Villa Diodati: Ranking - 112

   The Haunting Of Villa Diodati

(Series 12, Dr 13 with Graham, Ryan and Yaz, 16/2/2020, showrunner: Chris Chibnall, writers: Maxine Alderton and Chris Chibnall, director: Emma Sullivan)

Rank: 112

   'Hello I'm the Doctor and I'm here to tell you my ghost story, all about a being on the planet Sarn who was brought to life by a mad scientist and...Wait, no, oops, Mary Shelley present, forget I said that. How about this planet full of Vampires, these pale-faced eternals who can't die except for a stake being driven through their heart and...wait, no, I can't do that one either. My bad! Err…umm…How about an alien that came to life in a Victorian manor house and started collecting people while they started evolving from husks. What do you mean you don’t believe that story? At least mine really happened!'

  

 

What is this vision I see before me? Surely not a phantom, for it is form is fully formed. It actually has a beginning and an end and a middle (oh what a middle!) Forget your usual half-formed being made of ectoplasm that gets pushed and pulled out of shape, or the slight imprint of a being that is only sketched in part of the way, or the semi-ideas that haunts a story rather than fully lives it: at long last this is a Chris Chibnall story that’s fully solid and inhabited by characters that feel real. Even if it’s a story all about ghosts. Though I’m fond of ‘Rosa’, a story that couldn’t have been done as well in any other era this is the first time s Chibnall story would have been great even if it had been dropped into the middle of any other Doctor’s run. What’s more it feels like a Dr Who story – partly because we go right back to the show’s roots and the ‘godmother of scifi’ Mary Shelley with a story that tries to do for the ‘Frankenstein’ author what ‘Timelash’ tried (and failed) to do for the ‘godfather of scifi’ H G Wells,  show them that they were ‘right’ with visions of the Whoniverse that no one else from their era would possibly understand. And partly because it’s a story the show had done before, on Big Finish, where Mary Shelley even travelled with the 8th Doctor for a time. It is, if you will, the ‘Dalek’ of the Chibnall era, a story that had already proved popular on audio re-written for television to be fit the new fittings but turning out more or less the same. 

This story takes the unusual step of being both a horror and an out and out comedy - and against all odds succeeds pretty well at both, my candidate as both the scariest and funniest of the Whittaker run (at least until ‘Eve Of The Daleks’ anyway, which again mixes both; they should have tried this mixture more as it seems to work with the 13th Doctor particularly well). Writer Maxine Alderton was a newbie to the series who’d once worked on the excellent children’s series ‘The Worst Witch’ (Harry Potter with more laughs) and this was her favourite time period and, unlike a  few historicals in this era, it feels as if she really has done her homework, taking real events that happened that leave her just enough space to weave a Dr Whoy type story round. She really captures the gothic-romanticism of a meeting of friends, lovers and poets in 1816, the famous ‘holiday’ at Switzerland’s Lake Geneva when Mary Shelley, her sort-of husband Percy Shelley (very modern!), their baby, Lord Byron and a couple of friends and partners spent a particularly rainy Summer indoors telling ghost stories. This is where the first draft of ‘Frankenstein’ was written, a book which has as good a claim as any to being the first scifi story with its use of science to revive as man from the dead(see ‘The Brain Of Morbius’), so it feels only right that it should have a scifi inspiration (at least in the Whoniverse). You sense Mary Shelley would have approved of a series that was so inspired by her paying homage to her in this way, unlike some other more grounded celebrity historical figures we’ve met in this era (Rosa Parks, James I, Ada Lovelace, Nikolai Tesla, especially Thomas Edison) who would probably have  been horrified at the idea that their great gifts were all ‘inspired’ by something other-worldly. It’s a clever idea that wraps up so many legends about this meeting: not just the weather but the fact that for a short time during the meeting Percy went missing with no one quite sure where he went and the fact that so many popular stories that lasted the ages were all written in this place at this time. It also explains, perhaps, why such a prolific holiday, that led to the creation of so much art, was never tried by any of these writers again (because they were too scared of re-awakening the ghosts?) Something special clearly happened in Villa Diodati in 1816 that captured so many imaginations all at once – and that something might as well be Dr Who in origin; after all, it’s not as if any of the parties involved would have dared to write the truth down for the history books. Often when Dr Who tries to fit into historical fact it comes a cropper but this one of the few stories where there’s nothing contradictory to records of what ‘really’ happened, with the added caveat that as the events of the night were interpreted by a bunch of imaginative writers they’d have altered the facts for their readers anyway. 

What’s more it’s a plot that, like ‘Unicorn and The Wasp’, was based on a real mystery – the reason so many writers were stuck indoors telling stories was that 1816 was the ‘year without a Summer’. Most people in  and while the scientific explanation is the explosion of a volcano, Mt Tambaru, that sent a cloud of ash into the skies over Europe that lasted months, I’d be quite happy to buy the scifi explanation that it was all the fault of the Cybermen. Most people in Europe didn’t know why at the time and blamed all sorts of things from ghosts to phantoms to the Devil but we now know the scientific reason was that exploding volcano Mt Tampuro sent so much ash into the sky that even as far away as Indonesia it blocked out the sun for most of the world that year.  Even the word ‘volcano’ was quite new and had only been around a hundred years by this point: the idea that something so far away could cause such chaos was beyond most understanding back then. No wonder, then, that so many explanations were given and rumours flew as to what supernatural entity had caused it – and what better hole for a Dr Who plot to fill than this? Add to that legend has it that Percy Shelley really did go missing just as he does in this story and woke up with part of his memory gone, unsure of quite where he’d been – while the truth was probably more that he got drunk and got lost, whose to say he hadn’t had his brain fused with a cyberellum and been attacked by a rogue time-travelling metal man from Mondas?

More than just the inclement weather or poets with amnesia, however, it’s this era that feels so right for Who. We haven’t visited the Georgian era much in Who and when we have it’s been in Scotland or France, never England. It’s long overdue: it’s at least as interesting in a ‘they’re just like us but oh so very different’ way as the succeeding Victorian age we seem to be in every other week and yet isn’t so far ago it seems like the distant past either; the Doctor can legitimately twiddle something in this era and have the ripples still affect our own (unlike Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, the Stone age, etc). This show fits in nicely with the romanticist notion of the day, as explored by many of the writers we meet in this story, that the universe was weirder, darker and scarier than any mortal could comprehend, while the 8th Doctor practically dressed like a romantic Georgian poet to begin with. This is an age when all is possible, when science has started pinning things down so people understood how the world worked more than their predecessors but where every revelation seemed to confirm the wonders of the universe, not take away from them. It is, in so many respects, my favourite era, at least in anno domini: the sense you get from reading texts of the time is of discovery in all forms at once, not just in science but in arts. And what series ever combined the two sides of that better than Dr Who? 

The plot isn’t that far removed from this notion either, pitting the literary giants of the day whose brains were full of imagination and creativity, against their arch nemesis, a literal giant in a lone Cyberman named Asshad who is driven by logic and cold hard emotion, a half-dead poet comes to disrupt their society. They come from two very different worlds in parallel (the Cybermen having originated on Earth’s sister Planet Mondas) but have grown in very different ways, one side of love and open-ness (to the extent that Mary and Percy have what modern viewers would consider an ‘open relationship’ and Lord Byron flirts with everyone and everything) and the other seeking to control. In a lot of Cybermen stories, especially modern Cybermen stories, they’re a ‘threat’ because they want to take mankind over and that’s an end to it but here they are two opposing ways of life and while it makes for a plot even more bonkers than usual it makes aesthetic sense that the Cybermen should be defeated by the figureheads of Romanticism, the idea that life is rich and joyous and there to be embraced. The Shelleys and Byron are, if you will, the epitome of the Doctor’s anti-Cybermen speech in ‘Earthshock’ about the wonders of a ‘well prepared meal’, of life’s little enjoyments and enrichments. The Cybermen would  never understand the thrill of being scared in a safe place, by something not quite alive and not quite dead: they live in a world where the one can become the other, like binary code. They want the world to be scared of them too, because they’re a real viable threat in a way ghosts of the Imation aren’t.  It makes sense too that it’s Mary Shelley who appeals to the Cyberman’s human side, still buried deep within his metal casing or even realises that he still has one. The sight of a Cyberman quoting Percy Shelley, so daft on paper but making perfect sense within the confines of the story, is the sort of mad juxtaposition of the ordinary and extraordinary this series was made for (even if Asshad speaks in the same monotones of many of my old English teachers). The Cybermen too are a natural inspiration for ‘Frankenstein’, the story she supposedly started writing on this holiday, the fake-man who was put together through a combination of body parts and electricity to rise again. Fittingly this is a Cybermen put together through different cyber body parts found in the cupboard too rather than just being the latest design: he has a cyber helmet from ‘Nightmare In Silver’, legs from ‘Rise Of The Cybermen’ and an arm from ‘World Enough and Time’, just like Frankenstein’s monster.   More than perhaps any story in the ‘Chibnall’ era ‘The Haunting Of Villa Diodati’ feels like a rounded story that the author has laid out and worked through from beginning to end, a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces fit and where the A B and C plots complement each other.   

All five writers portrayed here are as close to their ‘real’ selves as you can be in a bit of fictionalised TV and what I particularly like is that they’re all at least semi-famous before the Tardis even turns up – it’s not another of those ‘they only became great because they met the Doctor’ tropes that have become so tiring and so, let’s face it, rude; you understand that these people aren’t just of their time but somehow beyond it. This is something a lot of Dr Who historicals struggle with (because let’s face it, you’re either meeting Royals and nobles or people who change the past in some way and so are somewhat above it – not the stinking peasants who best represent the era, by and large). Mary is curious, courageous, funny and slightly scandalous. She is most unlike the traditional idea of mothers of the day, barely noticing where her baby or estranged husband have got to. Percy is taken over for most of the episode but is sweet when he wakes up, instinctively understanding what’s going on far more than most would have been. Byron, meanwhile, is the biggest flirt seen in the series since Captain Jack and with a similar sense of impropriety. Yet all of these characters feel as if they belong to this era and this house on this day. As much as the Doctor harps on about them being ‘the most enlightened minds of their generation at the absolute zenith of their creativity’ like all the best Who historicals ‘Haunting’ delights in making them more than mere names from history books we couldn’t possibly relate to, flawed with human impulses like everyone else. Indeed, were it not for the language and dress this could easily be an episode of ‘Friends’: everyone’s in a romantic partnership pretty much but not necessarily the one they’d have chosen, love rivals as well as mates with skeletons in their closets that rattle louder than the ghosts they write about. 

The witty script spends a lot of time doing a ‘Russell T’ and having the Tardis regulars converse with the Georgians and find lots in common about life in their eras. Yaz, for instance, gets to discuss her feelings for the Doctor with one of the most notoriously ‘lose’ couples of the day, finding common ground over their need to have someone enigmatic and exciting in their lives rather than someone ‘reliable’ and how few other people ever understand that. It’s the opposite of the debate that runs throughout the Steven Moffat Amy Pond years about whether  the fun but dangerous world of the Doctor is a better fit for her than someone dependable like Rory. Ryan gets to talk about the importance of family life, something there for all eras, and Graham gets to moan about the plumbing. Even the opening gag about the psychic paper getting wet and not working shows more imagination than any other use of a long-running prop in the Chibnall era (when, by and large, the Tardis, sonic and paper tend to just do what it’s been established they can do). It is, I would say, one of the closest out of the whole of the 21st century run for what Who creator Sydney Newman envisaged for the show’s historical episodes and a desire to have them make the past come alive and seem as real as the present; original script editor David Whittaker too would have recognised this as ‘his’ show in a way he wouldn’t some of the others necessarily (including his successor Donald Tosh). Overall there’s the very Shelley/Byron conclusion that human nature never changes, it just dresses up in different clothes and that the world is a more exciting place than the rationalists give it credit (also a very Dr Who message if ever there was one).

It’s not just the poets who are well written for though – Alderton understands this Tardis crew better than any other writer in the Chibnall era. She gets their mutual very 21st century brand of automatic suspicion mixed with a friendliness and desire to accept other people on their own terms. She instinctively knows that the 13th Dr is a hyperactive puppy whose desperate to be everyone’s friend but has also learned to trust the intuition that makes her bark, that Yaz is a guarded no-nonsense policewoman whose seen enough of the world to be suspicious of it but still carries the kind heart that made her want to help people in the first place, that Ryan is a young man desperate for adventure whose beginning to realise it isn’t all fun and games and that Graham is the weary dad rediscovering his zest for life after heartbreak. They feel like they belong together this week these four, rather than a quartet of strangers who have nothing to do but squabble, with some great comedy lines that sum up their characters well: Yaz joking with the Doctor about how being snogged by lord Byron might change the timelines, Ryan trying to play ‘Chopsticks’ on the piano (‘a haunting air’) happily oblivious to the fact he’s easily the worst performer in the room in an age when everyone of class knew to play really well (to be fair to him playing the piano with dyspraxia is hard because it’s hard to make both your hands work simultaneously so ‘Chopsticks’ is the perfect choice for something he would have been able to play – this is from personal experience after years of lessons by the way!), the gag ‘she must be from somewhere strange’ ‘The North?’ like the old Christopher Eccleston days but just as true now the Doctor’s picked up on the Sheffield accent, Graham forever looking for a loo that doesn’t exist yet before settling for a bedpan. I particularly love the scenes of the 13th Doctor trying to fight the Cyberman not by fighting them or outsmarting them but in a very 13th Doctor way, by being really really irritating – it’s easily Jodie Whittaker’s best work in the role up to this point (and her best until ‘Village Of The Angels’ where she gets to do this sort of thing all over again, but for longer), using her constant babble to confuse and disarm as she waits for ideas to come to her. One of her defining qutes is about how ‘step two ‘ is ‘to fix the mess I made in step one!’

It’s not just the dialogue though: everything looks so good this week, especially the Villa itself all dark and shadowy and all too plausible the sort of place where ghosts might exists and writers might be inspired to write about them. The establishing shots were filmed in Llwyn-On Reservoir in Cwntaf, Merthyr Tydfil (which sounds like an alien planet from the ‘New Adventures’ novels already) with the very ‘Ghost Light’ staircase shot on a private estate in St Nicholas Cardiff (was this a later bit of filming added when the episode was under-running? It’s sort of linked to the main plot but not a pivotal point of it so could conceivably have been added later) and the brief glimpse of the cellar filmed at Plas Machen, Bassaleg in Newport built in 1660  and so just right for the period setting. The bulk of filming was at Merthyr Mawr House in Bridgend, Glamorgan, though, which is slightly anachronistic but looks the part, a full village estate of 267 houses. Just as good are the period costumes, which are always strong on Who historicals, with the romantic poets looking natural in their slightly scruffy finery and the Tardis crew looking slightly out of sorts in theirs (especially Yaz in her striking blue bonnet): this is a rare story indeed where the Tardis crew arrive properly dressed before the story starts, though predictably it’s the Doctor who still looks slightly out of time. A word too for the special effects, always hard to do on location rather than in the confines of a TV studio but which all work well, from the shuffling skeletal hand to the ‘traveller’ ghost effect, which could have been faux Addams Family but which feel as if they’re ‘real’ more than a lot of this series’ special effects. It’s a rare Who story indeed in this era that works well whether you have the sound without the pictures or the pictures without the sound.  

Where this story falls apart badly is the ending, which forgets the romanticism for some good old fashioned Dr Who arguing and rather pushes the supporting cast to one side. First the Cyberman looms over Mary’s baby, intending to kill it, before being persuaded not to by the Doctor in a way that’s very like the end of ‘Closing Time’ (and Craig’s baby) but even more saccharine and unlikely. It’s the old ‘tram/lever’ ethics question, so loved by sociology papers, about whether it is right to interfere with fate or not – about whether you could pull a lever to make a tram run one innocent person over if it meant avoiding multiple sometimes guilty people. It’s a question Dr Who has asked many times before and generally better than this (the ‘do I have the right?’ speech from ‘Genesis Of the Daleks’ is the, well, genesis of it in the series but a lot of modern stories ask it too): both results end in death and both feel like a loss in different ways, with the Doctor agonising over her choice here. For some reason the Doctor ignores the hint given to the others by Captain Jack in ‘Fugitive Of The Judoon’, choosing to give the Cyberman ‘what it wants’ rather let it take the life of Percy Shelley. I really don’t buy  the Doctor’s argument that killing this one particular man will make more difference than usual because he’s ‘famous’ and ‘writes words that others listen to’ so he creates ‘ripples’; it’s far more in keeping with the series to spare his life because every person has ripples of their own and everyone deserves to live. Usually in Who it’s easier for the Doctor to make a moral choice of everyone dying rather than single one person out, even if they’ve already been chosen by that week’s alien nasty: Percy would have been the first to argue against her choice had he been aware enough (and Mary doesn’t put up too much of a fight: then again they were more casual acquaintances in this era than husband and wife in real life). The Doctor also never gives a reason why she ignores the advice of an old friend who fought so hard and risked his life to pass on that wisdom. The Doctor’s always had a slightly uneasy relationship with Jack from the beginning: does she not trust him? Why does Jack bother to pass on such vague information? ‘Ignore the lone Cyberman in Villa Diodati’ would have helped, or maybe‘ Go and abduct Rasputin – he’s The Master’ would surely be more use given events in the next episode. Or is it her friends’ ability to understand the message she doesn’t trust? The Doctor really turns on her friends again this week and it’s never comfortable whenever she does it: instead of worrying about the people who might lose their life this regeneration proves to be selfish once again, moaning that ‘sometimes team structure isn’t flat it’s mountainous, with me at the summit left alone, left to choose’. Jodie’s weakest suit as an actress is the moments of anger Chibnall’s scripts are always calling on her to unleash and this part sounds to me like the showrunner’s invention, the reason perhaps that he gets a co-credit this week. It’s a scene that feels badly out of place and seriously damages the good work done before it. Suddenly some of the greatest minds of their generation are just hanging round watching the Doctor and even though she’s more active this week (the mirroring of Byron’s threat to Ryan of facing him in a duel matched by her own duel with Asshad for the cyberium) it’s a clumsy end that doesn’t reflect the moral of the rest of the episode. It’s sad, too, that a story about monsters lurking and creeping shadows ends up being so bald about the plot by suddenly having a hulking great Cyberman there: it would have been better still if these Cybermen had been more like their phantom selves in ‘Army Of Ghosts’, never quite there. This is a ghost story after all – while turning it into a scifi one is par for the course for Who it usually maintains htat sense of atmosphere at least. If this part really was Chibnall’s handiwork then it shows again that he never truly understood this series or what he was trying to say with it, even while the writers he picked to write for the show clearly did. The lead in to the next story, the wretched nonsensical canon and logic-defying ‘Timeless Child’ arc, is what prevents this story from being truly great (not least because it makes you think that more logic in stories and less imagination would actually be a good thing and that the Cybermen were right). 

One element that gets forgotten, too, is the Doctor’s desperate need to get everyone back on track by writing their ghosts stories because her arrival has disrupted them. Typical writers – any excuse to get distracted (if this was the modern day they’d be checking their emails and their social media to avid writing! Erm, not that done that ever, honest). I mean, what happens after the Cyberman’s defeated exactly? The Doctor walks off to act on what’s just happened, warning her friends to keep out of it (even though she knows they’ll come – goodness knows why to be honest, given the way she’s just treated them). What do the poets do exactly? Given the timelines presumably they all go back in and shut the doors, maybe step over the dead body of their poor butler (the only person actually harmed by the Cybermen as it turns out) and start writing ‘Frankenstein’ and the like. Percy especially has just had his brain fused with a Cyberman’s: by rights if he ever picked up a pen again he would be writing cold hard logical poems not his most human  and expressive works (had the Doctor reversed the polarity of his brain’s neutron flow and given him an ‘emotions boost’ it would explain so much more about his career from hereon in). I know writers are a weird bunch but they need therapy right there not fiction; had the Doctor implored them to keep writing once she’s gone, because the rest of the universe depends on them then it would make more sense but she doesn’t – by and large she rather forgets they’re there. If I was in their shoes I wouldn’t both writing fiction again after finding out how much stranger the ‘real world’ is. And yet apparently everything goes back to normal. Or at least the Doctor stills knows enough about Frankenstein to still crack jokes about it from time to time (in ‘real life’ the storytelling goes on for three nights rather than the one planned here: so maybe they take the night off and regroup?) 

 I’m not sure I fully invest in the cyberium plot element too. I mean, how did it end up here? Fair enough that Percy Shelley should pick it up on one of his solitary walks as far as it goes – if anyone’s going to pick up a strange alien substance it’s going to be a curiosity-driven romantic poet – but how come it came to Earth at all? And what are the odds of it being picked up by someone famous? Who just happens to be on holiday with four other people who are more or less as famous? It’s the sort of coincidence that really needs to be nailed down, explained by something in the plot, but nothing: we all assumed at the time that we were going to get all the answers about why this all really happened the following week when the Cybermen return en masse except...we don’t. Not really. Villa Diodati and the people in it are never mentioned again in the series and this plot strand is just tidied back in the box and forgotten about. It’s such a shame because ‘Frankenstein’ itself is such a tightly plotted story: all the elements are there with no superfluous elements and lots of Who style mirroring going on from the beginning to end. Mary Shelley would, you expect, have written this plot arc in much better if she’d been around to write for Chibnall’s series – and I suspect she’s have added a lighter touch to this element too. 

I also find it incredibly odd that this particular Doctor meets two different members of one family in two otherwise un-connected stories when she has the whole of the universe to travel in (Ada Lovelace being lord Byron’s very different daughter as met in ‘Spyfall’ at the start of the year: either script could have had great fun playing on his worries that she’ll turn into a logical Cyberman only interested in science not romance and literature; instead she’s not even mentioned except by the Doctor). One other minor thing too: in real life Lord Byron, the creator of some of the most perfect prose about the heights that humanity can reach, was born with a limp. Alderton seems to have overlooked this in her research which is a shame, not least because the Cybermen could have had a great gag about ‘hey. Let me fix that for you…I’ve got a spare leg somewhere, you won’t feel a thing..’ Debating where the Human body and mind begins and ends with Byron, of all people, is a discussion I’d have loved to have seen. Also the idea that the cyberium has done something to the weather is raised then dropped, but it would have been so easy to tie this in to some great Cyber-masterplan: it was their whole driving rationale behind the weather control in their second ever appearance in ‘The Moonbase’ after all and the lightning strike at the heart of Frankenstein caused by a Frankenstein-like monster would have been the icing on the cake. You would have thought, with all that cyber-technology, the cyberium would be more than just a dull grey blob too. Perhaps the amount of times the Doctor’s defeated them down the years means there have been some cyber budget cuts? 

Oh well. We got 90% of the way to having a great story this week and that’s still a lot closer than I’d dared to hope after such a run of duff stories in a row across series twelve, the weakest in sixty years in so many ways. I’m still haunted by ‘Haunting Of Villa Diodati’ and how close it nearly came to being a modern classic, not just because it feels like traditional DW again but done in a new and refreshing way, or even for getting the basics of storytelling right for once, but because it made it feel as if this series was finally going to make the most of all the many things going for it, correct the occasional mistakes that kept dragging the other episodes down and get everything right from hereon in. It won’t happen – the following ‘Timeless Child’ two-parter is the show’s nadir in so so many ways – but that feeling of promise, that for a week made me feel this show could do anything again and do it well, is still more than enough to let me think of this story fondly. It’s a story that walks in beauty, as Byron would have put it, even if it ends up in ugly place. It’s ‘music when soft voices die’ until those voices return from the dead and start shouting, as Percy Shelley would say (‘electric!’ Mary Shelley would have called it… even though the lightning storm, so close to what gives her monster life in ‘Frankenstein’, is oddly enough not directly related to the plot the way it is in the Big Finish versions of the Doctor’s adventures with Mary). If you ignore the last quarter hour, though, there is still so much to love about this story which succeeds as a historical, as a ghost story and as drama-comedy indeed; it’s just as part of the series arc it falls over.  

POSITIVES + For a while there it looks as if this is going to be a proper ghost story in a proper haunted house and everything. Believe it or not we’ve never had one of those in Dr Who before – the closest till now have been ‘Hide’ (which turned out to be two loved-up aliens from another dimension) ‘Day Of The Daleks’ (which turned out to be time travellers from an alternate version of Earth’s future) and ‘Ghost Light’ (which turned out to be a cataloguing alien). This one is arguably the closest to being a ghost story all the way through without turning into something else more science based; even when the Cybermen arrives he’s as close to a ‘ghost' as anyone in the Dr Who universe, a one-time Human who died.  Graham even meets a ‘real’ ghost not connected to the main plot (though we naturally assume that it is), a red herring that puts off the scent and has the Doctor, known supernatural sceptic, declare that there might be such things as ghosts after all. If you’ve come to this story from any of the other three (or ‘The Daemons’) then that’s quite a change of heart. 

NEGATIVES - While most of the regulars raise their game this week to match Lili Miller, whose excellent as Mary Shelley, some of the other performances are more...gothic horror than gothic romance. Percy Shelley should be full of mystery and romance, a complex tortured soul driven by things his imagination stirred up that he doesn’t understand but feel compelled by and yet he mostly comes across as a hopeless drunk. John Polidari is, in so many ways, the most interesting character here and to me the best writer of the quintet (he wrote the world’s first vampire story called ‘Vampyre’, and it’s a lot better than ‘Dracula’ that came out shortly after and stole its thunder) but he’s nothing like as interesting on screen as he was in real life and mostly stuck to the crowd scenes. Byron, meanwhile, is played as a pure caricature, not even close to as complex and fascinating as he was in reality – the sign of a great DW historical of old was that they sent you running to the library to look people up, but only Mary Shelley makes you want to do that this week. Normally I’d just blame the script but actually there’s a lot of gothic layers there for actors to, erm, get their teeth into if you read the scripts, it just comes over all flat from the delivery. Unusually the regulars act everyone off the screen.

BEST QUOTE: ‘Words matter! One death, one ripple, and history will change in a blink. The future will not be the world you know. The world you came from, the world you were created in won't exist, so neither will you. It's not just his life at stake. It's yours’. 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: In one of the rare but funner contradictions between the main series and the spin-off ranges Mary Shelley spends ‘Villa Diadati’ without once saying ‘wait, didn’t we do this before? I used to know a Doctor, but he was a short but cute guy with a scouse accent. I travelled around the universe with him in a blue box…just like the one outside!’ Because, believe it or not (and I still don’t quite believe it even though I’ve heard them) Mary Shelley was a companion of the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann, for a string of stories. Her first appearance is the closest to ‘Villa Diodati’ and is practically the same tale bar the Cybermen, part of the ‘The Company Of Friends’ audio anthology (2009) about the 8th Doctor having one-off companions mentioned in the spin-off books and comics rather than his regular Big Finish companions. It had long been teased that this Doctor knew Mary, the godmother of scifi, well and ‘Mary’s Story’, written by Jonathan Morris, is again set at the Villa Diodati in 1816 as Shelley and friends tell ghost stories. They’re interrupted by a knock at the door –a man called Dr Frankenstein who talks incoherently about a ‘volcano’ and ‘the year without a summer’, then  collapses and dies. Percy Shelley tries to revive him with electricity, which causes him to revive but go beserk, the assembled throng chasing him to his blue box in the woods where he reveals himself to be the 8th Doctor. Or at any rate he’s partly the 8th Doctor…he’s also been infected by an alien monster and is about to kill them all! The ending to this story is absolutely bonkers and makes you wonder why it doesn’t happen all the time (spoilers: a younger version of the 8th Doctor gets a distress call and turns up to put things right with his sonic). Most of the assembled guests are scared but Mary is fascinated and the Doctor invites her on board the Tardis as his companion. Julie Cox is an excellent Mary in all these adventures, not that different from how she is on TV, with the same sense of curiosity and heart. 

It took two years to find out what happened next in a run of three stories that saw Mary Shelley travel with the 8th Doctor full time. Marc Platt’s ‘The Silver Turk’ is #153 in the Big Finish main range and seems to be the inspiration for the ‘other’ half of ‘Villa Diodati’, with the appearance of a lone Cybermen, an exhibit at the World’s Fair in Vienna in 1873 (so some 22 years after Mary died in real life). He’s where the legend about a chess-playing automaton that was famous in 19th century Europe came from (and which was the starting point for ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’), only this one plays the piano too (and the sound of a Cybermen playing Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’ is one of the dafter Who moments out there). The Doctor tries to evacuate the hall and with the help of a knife Mary has with her, does something clever to its circuits. Mary proves herself as a companion by realising its not scary but ‘in pain’, a concept it doesn’t even understand, ready for an oddly sweet conclusion that once again features the lightning strike at the heart of ‘Frankenstein’. No wonder Mary Shelley got so many ideas for her story…she stole all of it from the Doctor! Arguably the best of the quartet – certainly it’s the more memorable.

‘The Witch From The Well’ (#154) follows on directly, a more sciencey story from writer Rick Briggs that has a creature from the ‘Hecatrix Dimension’ bury itself down a well, Erato-style. The locals assume it’s a witch and Mary, rather than the Doctor, saves local children from its clutches. The story has a strong start but soon gets out of hand, with lots of mad running around and a ‘flux imp’ (!) along for the ride. 

‘Army Of Death’ (#155) by Jason Arnopp then wraps up Mary’s brief stay in The Tardis with her first trip to an alien world: Zelonia. It’s a very Star Trek story this one, about twin cities at war pitched from peace into war by the death of one ruler and the need to find a path somewhere down the middle. The story is more remembered by the fact that the Doctor finally stops flirting and openly admits to having the hots for Mary – not really a surprise, given that this is the most tactile of all Doctors, but it does feel a bit odd! Mary never gets a proper farewell scene, instead jotting down some ideas in her diary for when she gets home.

Mary’s first Who appearance of all ,though, was in the comics, specifically ‘The Creative Spark’ published in the ‘Battles In Time’ series in 2008. A rowdy, colourful affair – like the rest of the series – it has the 10th Doctor visiting Villa Diaodati during a lightning strike this time, this one caused by an alien artefact,  an elemental intensifier, buried in the woods. An alien named ZZarik was trying to use it to cross dimensions and travel across the vast reaches of space but it developed a technical fault. Instead he’s rescued by the Doctor and, on a break with tradition, rather than tries to eat him he apologises for being such bother. Mary is lurking in the woods, taking it all in for her future book. Silly but fun. 

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