All They Want to Do is Turn Everyone Else Into Cybermen (The Haunting of Villa Diodati)
It’s February 16th, 2020. The Weeknd is at number one with “Blinding Lights.” Dua Lipa, Saint Jhn, and Roddy Ricch also chart. It’s a pleasantly dull week—we watch some movies, I take Penn for one of his periodic botox appointments for his migraines. This whole coronavirus thing gets an official name, COVID-19. There’s news—the New Hampshire primary spells certain doom for Joe Biden, Boris Johnson does a cabinet reshuffle, but mostly it’s just boring and uneventful in ways that feel strangely surreal in hindsight.
I remember we watched Ken Russell’s Gothic as cheeky prep for this episode, which feels almost unbelievable now—imagine caring enough about the Chibnall era to bother doing that. But what was striking then and remains striking now is how pointless an effort that was. I imagine I was hoping it might give something to talk about in the review, as those were becoming increasingly tortured experiences. But of course it didn’t. That would ultimately require the Chibnall era to master aboutness, such that the larger cultural context of its nominal subject might matter to an episode.
That was simply not the world we lived in. Instead… I mean, the Chibnall era always leans a bit “visual Big Finish,” but it applies here in new and strange ways. It’s not even that Big Finish had already done this; it’s actually worse than that—Big Finish had the Doctor being the inspiration for Frankenstein in 2009 as the fourth part of The Company of Friends, then had Mary Shelley join as a companion whose first trip in the TARDIS was a Cybermen story called The Silver Turk. Here, however, as if inspired by that “man eating peas with the idea they will improve virility shovels them straight into his lap” Oblique Strategy, Chibnall just goes straight to “the Cybermen inspire Frankenstein.”
It’s not that Doctor Who has never done “celebrity historical with classic monsters” before, although Victory of the Daleks is hardly your best precedent in life. And it’s certainly does “the secret sci-fi origin of a famous bit of history” countless times. But it had never actually done this—a story in which some bit of history is inspired by an iconic Doctor Who monster. When I reviewed it I snarked about Mary Shelley turning out to have just ripped of Kit Pedler, but that gives it too much credit. This isn’t ripping off a writer who, whatever else might be said about him, at least possessed a unique vision. This is simply the replacement of vision with lore.
Much like that “what if we MCUed the Whoniverse” timeline I talked about back with Star Trek: Discovery, I have an almost violent hatred of this. Perhaps you don’t, but I doubt you’ve stuck around this place as long as you must have if you’re reading the entry on The Haunting of Villa Diodati without at least understandng where I’m coming from. Still, let’s slow down and think that critical judgment through. What exactly is the problem here? Why does this episode repulse me so much more than countless far worse episodes? Is it a bit crass? Sure, but so is Journey’s End. The new series has long since made the decision to embrace a level of pure lore spectacle that the classic series largely found either unimaginable or undesirable. What’s different here that makes it so viscerally and instinctively ghastly?
One could make a big Argument From Canon—not Looms and Faction Paradox sorts of canon, but literary, where you declare that Frankenstein is simply too good and too important to be sullied with this garbage. But that’s a terribly boring take. If you want to insist that Frankenstein is in some important sense better than Hell Bent I’m not going to try to argue with you, but I also know which one I enjoy and care about more. More to the point, the intensity with which I despise this isn’t explained by abstract principle.
But I think that instinct is still revealing. What I think jars here is the suggestion that Frankenstein’s value comes from its connection with—or even its similarity to—Doctor Who lore. There’s a garish sense that the show thinks it’s improving Frankenstein. This would feel vaguely crass coming from Moffat or Davies. From Robert Holmes it’s outright unthinkable; he’d simply blink and add another fart joke to spite whoever asked him for it. But from Chibnall… I mean, fuck, there’s a sense that the show thinks Pride and Prejudice and Zombies would be better with Cybermen, and even that feels arrogant from him.
The irony, as I noted, is that this is one of the better episodes. Maxine Alderton writes an episode with actual structure and development. The spooky bits do in fact contain spookiness. The incredulous “how did this get made” of, say, Orphan 55 or The Warble of Rambo-Brand Cola is absent here, which passes as a win these days. But that’s just not enough to justify the banal obviousness of “Frankenstein is inspired by the Cybermen.” It’s not even going with your first idea. It’s going with a talented but unimaginative fifteen-year-old’s first idea.
No, wait. Actually, “unimaginative” gets at something, in an understated way. There is a genuine sense in which this is the exact opposite of imagination. What’s going on here is not play within history in the traditional sense—it’s the overwriting of history with the branding of Doctor Who. It’s one thing for the Doctor to hang out with Ada Lovelace—it’d be quite another for Lovelace to learn computer programming from the Movellans. The former is an opportunity to comment on Lovelace, the history of computing, or any number of other things. The latter is, at the end of the day, just an opportunity to comment on Doctor Who. And even there, all it can really say is “look how similar this bit of history is to this bit of Doctor Who.”
It’s important to note that this presupposes the idea that Doctor Who is worthwhile. There’s no case being made here for the Cybermen’s compelling nature. The only setup is “oh no it’s the thing Jack warned us about!” Obviously the Cybermen are something you don’t have to bother with reintroducing every time, but it’s worth comparing to Dark Water or World Enough and Time, where the Cybermen get set up in unique and compelling configurations. Those stories offer new takes on the Cybermen, the exploration of which deepens the notion of the Cybermen as a compelling enemy. Here all we get is the Doctor claiming to have never seen a partially converted Cyberman before. Which, I suppose she can be forgiven for forgetting Attack of the Cybermen, but come on—everyone’s seen this before. This is a bog standard take on the Cybermen being done with the aesthetic justification that bog standard Cybermen stuff is intrinsically good.
I’ve already noted my rejection of this line of thought. Doctor Who is worthwhile because of what it does, not because of the iconic power of its past glories. But there’s a larger critique to make here. Because I think, at the end of the day, this is central to a word that’s come up a few times within the Chibnall era, and is probably worth attaching to it with the same sloganistic quality that “gothic” attaches to Hinchcliffe or “glam” to Letts: content.
The word, at least in this context, emerges from “content creator,” a bit of corporate-speak to describe the general category of people who put stuff on the Internet for people to consume. It emerges from the Internet’s status as a great leveler—something that converts all arts and all mediums into the common unit of bytes. But it also emerges from the increased capitalist control that leveling enables. As all art collapses into numbers on a server, all meaning collapses into numbers on a spreadsheet. (This is the accidental poetry of Spyfall, which embeds its complete collapse of meaning in a story about the omnipresence of data.) Within the streaming era, it’s a helpful metonym for the nihilistic view of quality that accompanies the shift towards franchises, or, as the same corporate suits who call it “content” inevitably call them, “properties.”
Central to this collapse is the idea that these properties—or, let’s call them what they really are, brands—have inherent value. That something can be good, or at least good enough, for no other reason than the fact that it is Doctor Who or Star Trek or DC or whatever. The plummeting box office of post-Endgame Marvel movies and repeated busts of the Disney+ series suggests that this sort of thinking will eventually face a hard confrontation with reality, but in the face of billionaire investors who believe it, that fact is largely irrelevant in the short term.
And that’s what makes The Haunting of Villa Diodati so dispiriting. It’s that this “you know what would make Frankenstein better? If he were a Cyberman” thinking—which is inseparable from the thinking “you know what would make Franenstein better? If we owned the trademark”—is the aesthetic logic of franchise-based content. Except, no, that doesn’t wash. Because, of course, I do believe that being Doctor Who is inherently worthwhile. Sure, I have a financial stake in that position of my own, but it’s also a sincere judgment of fandom. I have an emotional investment in this stuff. I have always had an emotional investment in this stuff.
But ultimately that’s not a refutation so much as an explanation. The reason this makes me so angry is precisely because I’m emotionally invested in it. I have watched and read countless amounts of shit for the sole reason that it was Doctor Who, and I’m going to do so again, for reasons that go far beyond getting paid. But there’s a difference between this sort of thing and Underworld or Timelash. (And for what it’s worth, this difference also explains why I’m so vehemently averse to so much of Big Finish.) Those were incredibly bad pieces of television that I watched because they were Doctor Who. They were even quite hard to write about. But at no point did they feel like they were deliberately taking advantage of the fact that I would watch them purely because they were Doctor Who. They didn’t use my unequivocal love of this stupid fucking show against me.
This does. I don’t think it means to. I think it’s just incompetent television made by other people who unequivocally love Doctor Who. But at the end of the day, in the streaming economy, the difference between that and a deliberate grifter is a matter of abstracted morality. Certainly fanboy hacks have repeatedly proven to be the useful idiots of corporations looking to solve what they view as the problem of talented writers being in a position to make demands. No, Chris Chibnall—who largely seems like a perfectly nice man—isn’t being so cynical as to make deliberately bad television. He’s not Robert Holmes. But that fact doesn’t make the bad television that he’s made any less cynical in its values. It doesn’t make it less obnoxious to see an episode that really does seem to think “Frankenstein but Cybermen” is enough—that you’ve done the work as soon as you’ve come up with that premise and now have something of sufficient weight to set up your season finale.
Speaking of which, just one more story of this season. And hey, it’s not like he can do any worse than The Battle of Ru Paul’s Ab Roller, right?
August 20, 2024 @ 6:17 am
I did like a lot of the “haunted house” storytelling in the first half, and I remember more of this episode than many of the others from this era, so that’s good. However, the cyberman content felt very uninteresting, some of the dialogue was eyerolling, and I was irritated that a story allegedly about Mary Shelley spent so much time bigging up Percy as the important one and ended with Byron reading one of his poems. Give me the Big Finish version any day – even though I was mildly irritated at the “famous creator was actually inspired by Doctor Who” trope there, at least it made Mary the central character and told a couple of coherent, self-contained stories (though the ones after The Silver Turk were not so successful).
August 20, 2024 @ 10:43 am
Yeah, I’d likewise put The Silver Turk way ahead of Villa Diodati.
August 20, 2024 @ 6:45 am
Another point in “this is what passes for fine these days” (putting aside from the way the plot craters massively in the back half with the trolley problem and finale setup) – there’s a delightful sequence in which all the exposition about our Romantic Poet characters is delivered while they’re all dancing a quadrille, and you suddenly realise with a jolt that this is the most elegant exposition the show has had since Moffat left, natural and wittily leaping from one pairing to the next like gossip and entertaining to watch because it’s quite kinetic and constantly moving. It’s really not that groundbreaking or anything, it’s the meat & drink of a thousand period dramas, but in the deep dark wilderness year of 2020 it felt like manna from heaven.
August 20, 2024 @ 8:48 am
I’m a huge fan of Frankenstein movies, and I’m as guilty of watching terrible films just because they had Frankenstein in them as I am for watching Twin Dilemma just because it’s Dr Who. Of all the episodes in this season, this is the one where I should have just shrugged and said ‘that’ll do.’ But honestly, for ‘classic Who monster meets Frankenstein,’ the bit in ‘The Chase’ was better. Even Terry Nation understood that you could pull a short visual gag out of the idea, and not much more.
August 20, 2024 @ 9:37 am
I thought it was superficially engaging at least. I was angry and got angrier as I understood where it was going. Also, by the time I watched this, I had recently listened to the Submitted for the Approval of the Midnight Pals podcast, so this take on Mary Shelley as… whatever this was and Percy Shelley as the tortured poet whose loss would spell the end of history was actively upsetting compared to the Midnight Pals’ “Mary is a violent goth; Percy is an insufferable simp” portrayal. But the wandering around a haunted house whose very architecture is lying to you was pretty cool.
I have a big soft spot for the cybermen. But one thing that infuriates me in the new series is when they show up as this overwhelming and implacable force. I’ve always enjoyed the cybermen most when the show acknowledges that they’re kind of rubbish and are only here because the rights situation is easier than with the Daleks. So the “lone cyberman” who is the only survivor after a war they lost, and is only half a cyberman himself, is a compelling idea. On the other hand, the cyberiad, this nano-macguffin of Cyber-origin that grants the weilder basically infinite power… Is not. This is way above the cyberman pay-scale. Should’ve been something the cybermen had stolen, not just the magical cyber-cloud-backup.
(To my mind, the cybermen should be scary not because they are powerful but because they are inevitable; they’re always desperate, on the edge of extinction, massively outclassed by the properly scary existential threats, but somehow they always keep showing up. And I love the idea of weaving the obviously incompatable list of cyberman stories into a coherent narrative, but not as much as I love the through-line in the Capaldi-era Cyberman stories that the cybermen aren’t their history but their telos. That they can crop up any time humans decide to reject their humanity in the name of survival, without any need to tie back to Mondas)
August 25, 2024 @ 3:13 am
I just hate stories where the Cybermen get all emotional. I hated the idea that the Cybermen would want “Revenge” in the Tom Baker era. I hated how they would “gloat” to Peter Davison and Colin Baker. I hated how they got into a childish exchange with the Daleks in “Doomsday” that was one step removed from “Yo Mama” jokes. And I hated how this stupid half-Cyberman spent all his scenes frothing in anger. “Age of Steel” and “World Enough And Time” were easily teh two best takes on the Cyberman because they shared the them of “Cybermen are emotionless because otherwise they would be screaming in pain and horror.”
August 20, 2024 @ 10:11 am
I’m still disappointed that “The Lore Doctor” never stuck as a moniker for Jo Martin’s Doctor.
August 20, 2024 @ 10:41 am
that or “The Lore-bius Doctor”
August 20, 2024 @ 10:26 am
One of the distinctive hallmarks of the Moffat era was the way he created “good” versions of the classic monsters and villains. Obvious low-hanging examples include rehabilitating Missy, or the Paternoster Gang. Amidst stories about peacefully settling Zygons on Earth, we got “good” Daleks (Rusty and Oswin), “good” Cybermen (Handles, Bill, and a Cyberman living peacefully on Me’s trap street), and even for good measure a scene of the Doctor taking sides with the Silence to defend Trenzalore.
Then Chibnall shows up and hastily unmakes all of that. (I was disoriented watching Dan Starkey in Flux as an unredeemable Sontaran bastard).
In light of that, Lone Cyberman Ashad seemed like a pointed reversal of all the times in previous Who stories that a human’s humanity overrode the Cyber conditioning (Yvonne Hartman, Craig Owens, Bill, etc etc). Here we get a Cyberman with its human bits literally exposed, but instead of that making it more human, it becomes more inhuman.
If anyone had wanted to, there’s a potent metaphor there you could go to town with. So many ugly rightwing figures seem to come from the same mold, where they seem to be repulsed by some aspect of their own humanity and seek to destroy it in others (Clarence Thomas as beneficiary of affirmative action; Nick Fuentes lifted up by DEI programs as a Latino youth, etc).
Davros was a brilliant character in part because the show’s creators realized the value of having a Dalek-aligned character who could more easily participate in dialogue scenes—and we were treated to dialogue between the Doctor and Davros that was just on fire. Here we get a chance for the Doctor to have meaningful conversations with a Cyberman who has the self-awareness to contextualize his hatred—and it goes nowhere.
In the end it’s just Cybermen are bad, here’s a bad Cyberman who’s extra bad.
August 20, 2024 @ 12:15 pm
One thing I will never forgive this episode for is the Cyberiad. Not the thing itself but the fact that its name is one of the vanishingly few Stanisław Lem references in “Doctor Who” and it happens in this shitty fucking episode.
August 20, 2024 @ 6:19 pm
Pretty sure it’s also referenced in Nightmare in Silver, to make things even worse.
August 21, 2024 @ 4:06 am
It’s the Cyberium, here; the Cyberiad is in Nightmare in Silver.
August 21, 2024 @ 5:38 am
You’re right, I stand corrected. That’s not much better, unfortunately, given the recent developments.
August 20, 2024 @ 12:35 pm
Always unfortunate to think that this era nosedived to the point where something that’s (about a third) charming-enough runaround through genre tropes is the highlight. It’s like if we said “Oh man, Tooth and Claw? One of the best Tennant stories.” or “The Capaldi era was a bit uneven, thank god we got some bright spots like Time Heist!”
August 20, 2024 @ 1:17 pm
I think about this all the time – the mid-season Gatiss episode suddenly being the best the show can do..! Astonishing how little the show worked for these years. I remember sitting down to watch The Star Beast and thinking “oh, basic competence is back!”
August 20, 2024 @ 3:58 pm
“But at no point did they feel like they were deliberately taking advantage of the fact that I would watch them purely because they were Doctor Who.” This seems to reach kernel of what went wrong in Chibnall’s approach to the show, one reason why he thinks that photos of the cast on nearly-featureless soundstages are going to get audiences excited. He seems to love Doctor Who so much for itself that nothing more than Doctor Who plots and events are necessary to make good Doctor Who. He’s unable even to tell good Doctor Who from bad, what makes it good, and what makes it bad. It reminds me of George’s terrible pitch to NBC.
“But why am I watching it?”
“Because it’s on TV!”
“Not yet.”
It’s because he thinks that just being Doctor Who is enough to be loved that all he needs to do is straightforward, superficially surface Doctor Who. Davies and Moffatt understand that the “The whole planet is at stake!” trope is part of the window dressing to tell a freaky story about characters that you come to love as personalities (Tennant’s Doctor and Rose) or to make a political or social point (Dot and Bubble, Midnight) or to develop a new riff on the characters and story forms we’ve seen before (Rogue). In an era where we all acknowledge the full history of the show as its heritage, you can’t tell a generic story like those mediocre base-under-siege stories of Troughton’s second year (which even then, were pretty mediocre). But Chibnall doesn’t seem to see how a show with such a long tradition can’t get away with telling such simple stories as were part of that tradition’s earliest years.
The reference to Timelash is appropriate for seeing Chibnall as the qlippothic showrunner. Doctor Who becomes content empty of substance and meaning as it’s run by someone who has such an uncritical love for the empty shape of Doctor Who that he genuinely thinks it improves the works and artistic heritage of Mary and Percy Shelley (or H. G. Wells) to say that the origin of their art was Doctor Who. And in the next episode, he literally makes Doctor Who into its own progenitor, an alpha and omega of Gallifrey and the whole in-universe possibility of the Doctor themself. It becomes everything as it empties to nothingness.
August 20, 2024 @ 4:23 pm
I would suggest that the obscure Spanish take on that fateful holiday, Remando al Viento/Rowing with the Wind (which I wrote about here: http://wrestlingemily.blogspot.com/2022/11/timelords-of-terror-astonishing-climax.html ) would be less of a tonal whiplash than going from Russell to Chibnall, but I think as bad as that film is it probably still beats this episode because at least Hugh Grant is visible having fun playing Byron.
August 21, 2024 @ 2:29 am
“The irony, as I noted, is that this is one of the better episodes.”
It’s pretty much the last Chibnall story to be any good, isn’t it? Grading on a curve.
August 23, 2024 @ 10:00 am
I’d rank it below the next year’s ‘Eve of the Daleks’, but that’s just about it, I’d say.
August 21, 2024 @ 3:28 am
Glad to see Ken Russell’s Gothic get a shoutout. It’s the greatest music video of all time, except for the fact that it’s a movie.
August 21, 2024 @ 7:28 am
There is one thing I particularly despise about this episode, which represents this era’s lack of joined-up thinking, behind-the-scenes chaos, or both. (What makes me even more flummoxed about it is that I haven’t seen anyone else pick this up, but maybe I’m wrong.)
The episode refers to Ashad as a ‘partially converted’ Cyberman, but the Cyberman costume they put Patrick O’Kane in is rusted, beaten up, and broken, plainly suggesting, to me at least, that he is, in fact, a fully converted Cyberman who has been so terribly battered in the Cyber-wars that a portion of his face-plate has broken off.
It’s a great costume, but its appearance runs completely counter to what the script tells me about the character. It seems like the costume dept. didn’t get the memo – or at least got a different memo from the one the character required.
I just don’t get it. It’s one of many things this era screws up, but to me, it just seems so obvious there was some interdepartmental miscommunication about what the character actually is, and I just don’t understand how nobody could have picked this up during pre-production.
August 21, 2024 @ 5:24 pm
Ashad also has the Mondasian-style arm… so are we to believe all Cybermen have that underneath whichever style of metallic shell they get? Because when I watched it, I instead assumed this was a Cyberman who had gone through the wars, hence the broken and rusted helmet, and the odd arm was something botched together out of spare parts, so to speak.
August 25, 2024 @ 3:22 am
Could be worse. The last time Chibs addressed the possibility of a “partially-converted Cyberman,” it was the titular (no pun intended) “Cyberwoman” from Torchwood. Which answered the burning question of “What would a Sexy Cyberman Halloween Costume look like?”
September 4, 2024 @ 6:04 am
I always assumed the broken looking bits were scrap parts added by him manually in attempts to continue his conversion? Might be something that contradicts that tho idk
August 21, 2024 @ 11:49 pm
I mean, one way of framing this story is “it’d be good if the parts that Chibnall probably added to fit into his season ending weren’t here,” but I think the broader condemnation of this story is that it would be much better if it were NOT an episode of Doctor Who. Extract the fam, the Doctor, and anything to do with Cybermen, and the haunting and character work would be effective and move in interesting directions; either Mary S. herself would fulfill much of the function of Thirteen in investigating the mystery, with help from the others, and it would even work to have Percy at the center of the haunt activity (and be a nice switch from the “pre-teen/teenaged girl focus” tendency of the genre).
And I guess, in a sense, I didn’t hate this episode at the time because I couldn’t see it as an episode of Doctor Who. The Lone Cyberman appears and is so clearly grafted onto the story, and the end episode drama with the Doctor’s “difficult decision” is so poorly handled that I couldn’t see even Thirteen making a decision like this one. Weighing Percy’s life in the balance, maybe, but the Cyber-maguffin seems clearly enough to possess intelligence and to NOT WANT to be united with the Cyberman, so this is sacrificing an alien nano-intelligence AND endangering the world to save Percy.
Even there, the Doctor has a space to say “Here’s what I am going to do. I am going to give you this resource, and then I will stop you from using it.” It should be Thirteen’s defining moment, her Flatline speech.
I don’t know at this stage of the series what character Chibnall thinks he is writing. I mean, Jo Martin is obviously playing the Doctor, even if she’s a scary “despite the rhetoric about the War Doctor he never really seems to not deserve the name like I maybe didn’t at some stage” kind of hardened Doctor who has only just cast off the worst parts of herself. For the little she has to do, her character is still more interesting than what Whittaker is given to work with. It makes sense that “The Doctor”TM meeting “The Last Cyberman”TM (action figure sold separately) just isn’t going to play like it should.
And El’s point about “content” is spot on. Like all the historical figures Chibnall includes in his stories–especially historical women–the point of them is their presence. They rarely get to do much, and they rarely seem to matter at all. For all of the franchise talk of both RTD eras, RTD really just wants as much Who-related stuff out there in order to do something with it, to tell stories of a particular sort; it’s the series that get spun off under Chibnall that manage that story focus most poorly. I still don’t know what Chibnall wanted. It’s like RTD wanted all the action figures so he could tell stories with them, and Chibnall just wants the action figures to have them. Even his best episodes strangely disconnect the interesting stuff he’s doing from the “action figure” stuff: Power of Three has the Shakri, of course, but even the central conceit of the story looks like something you might be able to buy in the shops later. That it’s an empty box that’s trying to figure out how to kill you most efficiently manages to deliver a powerful message, but I’m not sure it’s a message Chibnall intends.
(Also, did Chibnall actually kill a third of all humanity in The Power of Three and it just never came up again? Flux presaged?)
August 22, 2024 @ 7:56 am
I think technically it was probably closer to a sixth of humanity? He gave a third of humanity heart attacks; statistically, about half of them would likely survive. They very cavalierly act like surviving a heart attack is NBD though.
August 22, 2024 @ 3:11 am
you’re picking such lovely screencaps (and making good caption jokes) for these episodes, it almost makes them look like fun watchable TV lol ._.
August 23, 2024 @ 7:51 pm
Uncontroversial take, but I think this episode is probably one of the few in the Chib era that actually leverages the ensemble well. You’d think that they’d have nailed that down earlier than episode 19, but I can’t think of episodes better than this one w.r.t making the group actually feel like real people with a real friendship. They have a dynamic, it develops through the episode, they have a common goal but a bunch of different individual takes on it, and each character gets a moment to shine. Graham is leveraged to service the comedic haunted house bit pretty well, Ryan gets to argue Percy Shelley should die (probably his most interesting moment, like ever), Yaz gets to do some puzzle solving, the Doctor gets hit on by Lord Byron. All pretty decent stuff. This episode is just mechanically competent in a way other episodes of this era rarely are (ex: ITYA, DOP, to an extent EveOTD). It’s a really tepid high, though.
Also, a lot of people cite “Sometimes this team structure isn’t flat. It’s mountainous, with me at the summit, in the stratosphere alone, left to choose” as one of 13’s best Doctor-y moments, and I gotta say, I really disagree with that minor internet consensus. It was really kinda dull in its final execution, imo. The defense of Whitaker’s performance as “good actor bad material” really fails when she completely fails to add gravitas to even an insanely over-the-top line like this. This is a line where the Doctor is meant to be verbally overpowering her team and arrogantly putting herself in charge as a moral authority, but Whitaker STILL reads it like she has no control over the situation. The emotional register of her performance almost never goes beyond “apologetic.” The line itself is kinda neat, but the delivery and the context of it leave so much to be desired.
August 26, 2024 @ 2:45 am
It’s also a bad performance because she has a single method of conveying anger, which is to the break! Her sentence! Up into! Chunks! Which she yells! It’s incredibly one-note, without reaching the kind of delirious over-acting of Tennant, where intensity makes up for the predictability.
August 25, 2024 @ 3:31 am
Three quick points:
“Here all we get is the Doctor claiming to have never seen a partially converted Cyberman before. Which, I suppose she can be forgiven for forgetting Attack of the Cybermen.” Hell, she also forgot “Closing Time” which had the Doctor interrupting Craig’s conversion just before it was completed and that was only, what, five seasons earlier? Then again, I’m pretty sure Chibs neer watched any episodes of NuWho other than the ones he wrote.
I think “Save the Poet, Save the Universe” is possibly the worst line in DW history because it was so obviously cribbed from S1 of Heroes, a show that had lost what little cultural relevance it had by 2008 at at the latest. I literally screamed in disgust at that line at what a hack Chibnall was to have allowed it in.
This episode annoyed me so much that I couldn’t bring myself to read this review until now, so I figure comments will be dead and no one will even see this.
August 25, 2024 @ 1:23 pm
I mean, imagine starting from the idea “The life of this poet is a keystone of the timeline and all of earth history will collapse if he dies” and then using it on PERCY SHELLEY.
August 25, 2024 @ 6:35 pm
He influenced Tolstoy and Tolstoy influenced Gandhi and Gandhi influenced MLK, so it’s not the stupidest move, but it still feels inordinately bathetic.