Doctor Who Series 12: Ten Huge Questions After The Haunting Of Villa Diodati
As the series nears its epic conclusion, here are all the talking points from the latest episode.
It seems no time at all that we were chewing the fat over Spyfall and wondering where the series would take us. Now, with just the two-part finale to go, we are almost at the end. It has been a mixed bag, but overall this has been a significant improvement on series 11. Jodie Whittaker is the Doctor, and she has made the part her own.
In its efforts to be different from the Capaldi years, series 11 presented the Doctor as irritatingly friendly and far from alien. Thankfully, the TARDIS fam have finally worked out that whilst she is a friend, the best of friends, the Doctor is dangerous and there are facets of her life, her experiences and her personality that put them at great risk. They have stuck with it and are now standing by her side, ready to face an army of Cybermen. That’s because of who they are, not because of what the Doctor has made them.
After last week’s change of pace, the lead-in to the finale was a frenetic, all action affair. It started off gently enough, a possible haunted house and some lovely interactions with Byron and co, but once the Cyberman was revealed things sped to their inevitable conclusion, leaving little room for character development. But that’s okay. This was brilliant entertainment, gripping, scary and intriguing, with some delightful humour added to the mix.
Best of all for the Doctor Who fan, we were left with questions. Plenty of them.
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.