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?…

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It’s February 9th, 2020. The Weeknd is at number one with “Blinding Lights.” Lewis Capaldi, Billie Eilish, and Harry Styles also chart. I’m settling into life back home. My wife recovers from the flu, which we all manage to avoid. Penn and I have sessions on our thigh tattoos, part of a local artist’s project to do a tarot deck in tattoos. He was getting the Sun, me the Devil. My wife had Death and the World. In the background, it becomes clear to anyone who’s watching that this coronavirus situation is going irrevocably out of control as hotspot after hotspot inexorably expands.

The day this airs, I go over to Alex and Meredith’s to run the first and, as it happens, last session of a Changeling the Dreaming game set in Manchester in 1987; Penn plays a gay social worker named Terrence, and the first session cliffhanger is a faerie publicly executing Margaret Thatcher for her failures as a leader. Presumably after we get back I download and watch Can You Hear Me?, about which there simply are not two thousand words worth of things to say.…

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It’s February 2nd, 2020. Peter Capaldi’s second cousin is at number one with “Before You Go.” The Weeknd, Dua Lipa, and Billy Eilish also chart. I, meanwhile, am on a plane back to New York after a whirlwind of a week in which Penn and I galavanted about London. I can’t even remember everything we did—the Tate Modern, the British Museum, Hampton Court, St. Paul’s. Tourist shit. I remember the slow background drip of this news story coming out of China—what looks like a redux of SARS or bird flu. It doesn’t seem very interesting. Brexit happens while we’re there, and like the coronavirus has no tangible impact on the day to day experience of life or place. Our final day there is the canonical best day of my life—the morning is spent at the Tate Britain looking at Blake paintings—we’d briefly seen the exhibition the night before, but only had about an hour in the gallery, so went back and spent the three hours it deserved, successfully blagging our way in for free despite the fact that the exhibit is sold out that day. Then we spend the afternoon and evening with Kieron Gillen, culminating in dinner at a fancy Indian place.

That was also my wife’s birthday. I, obviously, missed it, having planned the trip to coincide with an event at the Tate that was hosted by John Higgs, who was the first critic to cite TARDIS Eruditorum in a book. My wife—also a big fan of Kieron’s, and for that matter of Brian Catling, who was on the panel at the Tate—stayed home, visited her parents, and got the flu. That was her choice—I invited her, and she said she didn’t want to spend the money. But it still happened; I ditched my wife on her birthday to go have the canonical best day of my life with my other partner. I mention this precisely because it makes me look unsympathetic. I‘m not above reproach. Don’t ever think this is the sort of story where I’m above reproach.

Anyway, I finally watch this back in Connecticut. Possibly the next day. I don’t really remember. Like a lot of Doctor Who in this era, it doesn’t make much of an impression on me one way or the other. I’ll tell you who it apparently does make an impression on, though—this fellow named “Tibère” who wrote a big long blog post praising it. Tibère was a pen name for a guy who existed in what might dispassionately be called leftist Doctor Who fandom and more egotistically called the greater orbit of my work. They ran a site called Downtime where a ton of my more engaged readers were routinely doing some phenomenal stuff, and published a book on the Whittaker era with longtime friend of the blog James Wylder’s Arcbeatle Press. To the extent that I knew them they seemed a decent enough sort, but I couldn’t honestly say they’d made more of an impression on me than “the gay French one who was doing a podcast with my daughter,” at least until it emerged that they’d been emotionally abusing and sexually harassing a ton of people, my daughter included.…

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It’s January 12^th, 2020. Stormzy, Ed Sheeran, and Burna Boy are at number one with “Own It,” while Lewis Capaldi, Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber, Billie Eilish, Harry Styles, and The Weeknd also chart. The family has been busy—we’d spent the late fall looking for a place to rent for all four of us, and in the early weeks of 2020 secure it and work on signing a lease, with a move-in date at the beginning of April. Life’s a busy blur of social engagements and planning, and Doctor Who is little more than my career obligation—the thing I have to find space on Sundays to deal with. In this case, it happens at Skulls, where the only television space involves us pulling kitchen chairs into a small bedroom if we want to get four people to watch it. We do so this week. Nobody enjoys it.

And of course, why should they? To say that this episode appears to have production problems is an understatement. It’s the ultimate “Chaos in Cardiff” production, such a self-evident shambles that they blatantly did not actually have the monster costumes on set for the bulk of it, having to shoot the bulk of confrontations with them as a shot-reverse-shot with the reverse just being a flash of a couple of them hissing in a dark room. It’s embarrassing like Underworld or Timelash is embarrassing—a colossal basic failure of television production. Which is, of course, no surprise. Like we said, last week all meaning collapsed as the show simply went into a long term nervous breakdown. 

This week, then, it’s not even much of a surprise when time itself breaks. That is, ultimately, the only way to understand this episode. The fact that this cannot easily be reconciled with The Mysterious Planet (an episode that, being a corrupted Matrix visualization, arguably has no inherent continuity implications in the first place) is easy enough to get around given that the Doctor explicitly declares this to only be one possible future. The problem is just that, well, the Doctor explicitly declares this to only be one possible future.

It’s not, obviously, that the idea of possible futures is new to Doctor Who. Time can famously be rewritten, and Kill the Moon explicitly introduced the idea that seemingly major events in history and future history were explicitly unfixed points. Nevertheless, the idea that there is a relatively singular timeline has clearly been the default. There are multiple instances in which the TARDIS has repeatedly visited broadly coherent notions of the future, including instances that span vast stretches of the Doctor’s subjective timeline. Put simply, if the sort of relationship with the future that Orphan 55 is suggesting were in play, it would be much more remarkable that the Doctor should encounter Alpha Centauri in both The Curse of Peladon and The Empress of Mars than the Doctor ever suggests. The timeline clearly has comparatively malleable bits, and you can certainly argue that it’s undergone massive revision over time, but there’s still generally supposed to be one of it.…

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