Doctor Who Series 12: Ten Huge Questions After The Haunting Of Villa Diodati

10. Why Didn't The Psychic Paper Work?

The perfect way to avoid time-consuming introductions, the psychic paper isn’t going anywhere soon. Its ‘same-old, same-old’ limitation will continue to bug some fans, but there have been several attempts to mix things up a bit. It doesn’t always work, forcing the Doctor to muddle through for (supposedly) comic relief.

The Doctor’s suggestion that the paper is playing up because it had got wet in the rain might sound plausible to anyone who has tried operating a mobile phone in such conditions, but she’s clearly not being serious. No alternative explanation is given, so can we deduce it from previous malfunctions?

In Flatline, it fails to work when Clara tries to use it on Fenton, a community service supervisor. The Doctor says it’s because he has almost no imagination. But here we are talking about the writers of The Vampyre (Polidori), Frankenstein (Shelley) and Don Juan (Byron), whose imaginations knew no bounds.

The lack of an open-mind could have been what the twelfth Doctor was getting at with Fenton. The charge could be levelled against Byron, but only with a huge stretch. Known for his liberalism, the story doesn’t address Byron’s motivations and legacy in any depth. Besides, this doesn’t explain why none of his associates could see the writing.

It is possible that, like Shakespeare (The Shakespeare Code), Byron et al. were immune to the paper because of their superior intelligence, but the most likely explanation is the psychic disturbance in the house caused by the Cyberium and Percy Shelley.