Doctor Who Series 12: Ten Huge Questions After The Haunting Of Villa Diodati
9. Is It A Coincidence That The Doctor Recently Met Ada?
This is the first time Lord Byron has been depicted on-screen in Doctor Who, but there are numerous references in officially licensed books and audios. The Doctor, especially in his eighth incarnation, has sometimes been described as a Byronic hero, so it was interesting to see how the two would get on when they finally met. The answer is not very well.
The Doctor isn’t having any of Byron’s crude advances, and unlike Nikola Tesla, no attempt is made to show any commonality between them. This feels like a missed opportunity to explore the nature of the Doctor’s hero status, especially in a story when her judgement is called into question. We could surmise that Bryon is too close to the Doctor for comfort - that his over-confidence, his rebelliousness, his power to manipulate others and gain a following, and his self-destructive tendencies all touch a nerve.
His only legitimate daughter, Ada, by contrast, is a person the Doctor is happy to praise and breaking another one of her rules, she is eager to tell Bryon she has met her. Two members of the same family in two totally unconnected stories? It feels like too much of a coincidence. Perhaps the Doctor’s meeting with Ada piqued her curiosity to go to Villa Diadota, but her main motivation appears to be Mary Godwin (Shelley) and Frankenstein.
Could the stories be connected in some way, in which case is the Master still pulling strings behind the scenes?