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

4. What If The Host Was Someone Who Wasn't Famous?

Being a Time Lord puts you in all kinds of ethical quandaries, and the Doctor has been there more times than she’d care to admit. From the ‘do I have the right?’ of Genesis of the Daleks, to walking away when Prem is about to die in Demons of the Punjab, the Doctor is constantly placed in no win situations.

This time though, she has the added warning from Captain Jack, not that she needed it. She surely realised what was at stake as she considered giving the lone Cyberman what he wanted. The Captain Jack message, though supposedly for the Doctor, was really for her companions. It gave them the voice to tell the Doctor not to do it. The Doctor’s defence is that if the poet Shelley died, then history would be irrevocably changed, to the extent that Ryan, Yaz and Graham, or this version of them, would never have existed.

The Doctor talks about Shelley’s importance as a poet, leaving the uncomfortable thought, would she have faced the same dilemma if the butler or maid were the host of the Cyberium? Not for the first time this series, certain lives are expendible and almost stepped over (literally). It is a far cry from the Eleventh Doctor saying that he had never met anyone who wasn’t important.

The Doctor’s decision was made slightly easier by the Cyberman’s threat to destroy the Earth there and then. She was in effect saving the present by sacrificing the future. Putting off the inevitable. She hopes that she can then intervene to fix the mess she has created. One can’t help thinking about the still unexplained fate of the Time Lords, and the mess the Master has created too.