The Haunting of Villa Diodati is an episode of extremes.
On one extreme, it’s a genuinely well-constructed piece of television that is both a triumph of production and which offers a genuinely novel approach to a familiar and iconic Doctor Who villain. It’s a fairly solid concept – to a certain extent, it’s a collision of Dalek with Army of Ghosts – but with a distinct enough flavour that it stands apart from what has come before. More than that, it continues the season’s trend of offering a more proactive and decisive version of the Doctor, building on earlier episodes like Orphan 55 and Nikola Tesla’s Night of Terror.
Missing pieces.
At the same time, it feels like an episode that is stronger on concepts and production than it is on narrative execution. The big ideas all fit in place, but the underlying ideas feel just a little bit off. Most obviously, it’s an episode that leans very heavily into the mythos of the Chibnall era, its climax hinging not on any moral authority but the conservatism that informed stories like Rosa or Kerblam! This is an episode where the Doctor refuses to sacrifice a life to save the future, but not because that life has inherent value, but because that life happens to be Percy Shelley.
It’s a very strange and ill-judged narrative beat, not least because it so squarely misses the obvious pay-off to that set-up. “You know that in nine hundred years of time and space and I’ve never met anybody who wasn’t important before?” the Eleventh Doctor remarked in A Christmas Carol, an expression of the humanism at the heart of the show. In contrast, The Haunting of Villa Diodati argues that some lives are much more important than others.
Time Out.
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