Generally very good, but the morality of the Chibnall era is beginning to irritate me.
One of my biggest complaints of this era of Doctor Who is its incoherent morality. This is most obviously manifested in how it characterises the Doctor. From deciding that it's somehow fundamentally better to let the spiders in Arachnids in the UK suffocate to death rather than shooting them, to her lecturing Graham for wanting to kill Tim Shaw in The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos despite planting DNA bombs in him earlier in the season, the Doctor demonstrates an overly simplistic and pretty warped worldview. Time and time again, this Doctor has been shown to be a pacifist in the broadest and most literal interpretation of the word, but without any thought or reference to the situations unfolding around her. I'm not sure any of these moments are deliberately designed to make the Doctor look either hypocritical or, if I'm being uncharitable, just ridiculously naive, but that's the message that's communicated.
At the same time, the show's politics is pretty murky to say the least. Both Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat clearly have left-leaning politics and that bled through into their themes. Remember when the Doctor basically ended capitalism in Oxygen? I'd be much more hard pressed to say for certain what position the politics in the Chibnall era comes from. Instead of actively fighting and destroying systems of oppression, the Doctor appears at best mildly disinterested and at worst actively complicit in these systems (hello, Kerblam!). The show's morality is fundamentally muddled.
This bring us to the major, but far from fatal, flaw of The Haunting of Villa Diodati. Its ending is total garbage. It poses a ridiculous moral dilemma, the premise of which has no business in Doctor Who. Long gone is the Doctor's quietly understated and character defining pronouncement from A Christmas Carol that "in 900 years of time and space, I've never met anyone who wasn't important." Instead, we are told that the Doctor has to sacrifice the future to the Cybermen because history cannot possibly survive without...Percy Shelley. And it frames its argument in precisely those terms. This is not the Doctor proclaiming that she refuses to view moral choices as a numbers game, and that she has to do the most good she can with whatever the situation is at that moment, but instead that she has to save Shelley because he is a person she deems fundamentally important. This is not the moral position we can or should expect from the Doctor. The trolley problem has always been an entirely fatuous thought experiment posing as a moral dilemma and here it's used to undermine the Doctor's character and doesn't make any sense at all. The reality is of course that Percy Shelley is a minor historical figure, certainly compared to his (sort of) wife, Mary Shelley, but the episode doesn't actually seem that interested in Mary. She's basically just there to be inspired to write Frankenstein because of the Cybermen, an idea Big Finish has done before and done much better.
But while the content of the resolution is bad, it does elicit a terrific performance from Jodie Whittaker. She finally breaks from the "flat team structure" that she has insisted on for the best part of two seasons and declares that sometimes these decisions are hers alone. It's the kind of material that was so badly missing from her characterisation in Series 11. But it's more than made up for here and Jodie Whittaker totally owns the moment. There's been so little conflict between this Doctor and her companions, it feels like this has been building for some time. If some or all of the companions leave at the end of the season, we may look back at this as the beginning of the characters moving apart.
I much prefer the first half of this story, before the appearance of the Lone Cyberman. I get that a lot of this material is just stalling until the (very expected) reveal of the returning monster, but it's atmospheric and effective storytelling nonetheless. It's packed full of horror tropes like the severed skeleton hand creeping across the floor that are deployed to maximum impact. There are nice moments of comedy to balance out the scares as well, including Graham's relief that he's been given some food while not twigging that he's talking to a couple of ghosts and Dr Polidori campily challenging Ryan to a duel for no particular reason. The perception filter that has altered the layout of the house in order to trap all of the characters inside is a great little conceit as well, and adds some effective additional layers on to the mystery.
The episode falters somewhat when the Cyberman appears and becomes a pretty standard sci-fi runaround. Its plan is basically weird technobabble; something about a shimmering ball of silver energy and the Doctor assuming the role of "The Guardian" means the Cybermen can now conquer the future of the human race. If you say so I suppose. The Cyberman itself gets some effective moments, including one particularly chilling scene where Mary tries to reach out with kindness, only for the moment to be snatched away when it's revealed the Cyberman murdered his own children when they attempted to join the resistance. It's all very nasty, which is exactly what the Cybermen should be like. But these are just a few stray moments in a plot that feels like it's run out of steam.
The Cyberman design itself is good but I wish it had leaned further into the body horror in the way that Death in Heaven did with Danny's conversion. Here it feels a lot more like a man wearing armour rather than having been partially cyber-converted. Maxine Alderton is playing with some interesting ideas in her portrayal of the Cyberman, namely that he is a zealot who wanted to be converted as opposed to being forced into it, either through coercion or in order to survive. This is a concept that the show hasn't really played with before and feels like it has some mileage. It would have been good to explore this idea a little further and I'm hopeful that the finale will do so.
Despite my reservations, there is a lot to recommend The Haunting of Villa Diodati. As a horror story, it works very well indeed. As a setup for the finale designed to build excitement, it also works well. As a Cyberman story, it's a bit more hit and miss, and I just cannot connect to the moral dilemma at the resolution because I fundamentally reject its premise. It's still one of the strongest episodes of the season, as much because its flaws are a lot more interesting than the ones we've seen in many previous stories, and it builds some decent momentum as we head into the final two episodes.
Random musings
- "Save the poet, save the universe." Heroes references in Doctor Who. Just no.
- "I won't lose anyone else to that!" proclaims the Doctor, immediately evoking memories of Bill Potts. A reference to the Capaldi era? Don't do yourself an injury Chibnall.
- If the series finale tries to retroactively make out that Yaz has been in love with the Doctor (or even worse, The Master) this whole time, I will flipping lose my shit.
- Despite my cautious excitement, I'm getting such The Battle of Ranskoor Av Kolos vibes from the finale trailers, I think I might need to go and lie down.
Rating
8/10
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