My second-favorite Ken Russell film,
after the one-of-a-kind cinematic nightmare that is The Devils,
is 1986's Gothic: a hallucinatory and
psychologically-subjective imagined version of the famous weekend
spent by Mary Shelley (Natasha Richardson), Percy Shelley (Julian
Sands), Lord Byron (Gabriel Byrne), Claire Clairmont (Miriam Cyr),
and John Polidori (Timothy Spall) at Byron's Villa Diodati, when they
challenged each other to delve into their deepest fears and spin
those fears into ghost stories, ultimately creating the seeds of the
idea that would become Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In
Russell's film, the opiate-intoxicated, hedonistic artists become
convinced that the occult ritual they perform to set the mood for
their ghost stories actually worked, and they are being haunted by a
demon that is materializing their greatest fears, although the film
itself leaves it entirely up to the viewer to decide if anything
supernatural is actually happening, or if the writers are merely
being tormented by their own drug-amplified inner demons. Though
Russell's transgressive, bombastic style is certainly not for
everyone, the film is a pretty definitive supernatural-fiction
account of one of literary history's most famous parties (and for
those who are interested, my review of the film and its blu-ray can
be read here). So naturally I was very excited and intrigued to learn
that Doctor Who was going to take their own shot at
fictionalizing that same weekend, once again pitting the real-life
literary figures against a supernatural entity right out of their own
stories. While it is a given that the Doctor Who version of
the tale is a good deal less debaucherous and R-rated than the Ken
Russell version, these collisions of sci-fi/horror and historical
fiction are one of the things that this series does best, and the
possibilities are tantalizing. This season already gave us one very
good historical episode with Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror,
and the Whittaker era had one of its best episodes ever with last
season's historical Demons of the Punjab; does The Haunting
of Villa Diodati continue the streak?
And
yes, the episode certainly recalls Ken Russell's Gothic.
Not in a way that feels derivative of Russell's film – this is
quite different in the ways that matter, and is very much telling its
own take on the story – but if Alderton is a fan of the film and
was inspired by it, I would not be in the least surprised. It has a
similar approach to the idea of the famous literary figures
encountering real-life spirits rather than just imaginary ones, and
the way it uses the atmosphere of the house sometimes feels similar
(though that could just be a coincidence, since both clearly draw on
Old Dark House tropes). Both versions of the story also dismantle the
myth of these writers as great literary masters who need to be put on
pedestals, and portray them as decidedly human hard-partying
twentysomethings, with Byron in particular being portrayed in both
cases as his era's version of a rock-star, with all the decadence
that entails. It could just be that both scripts were written from a
similar sensibility towards the real events, but at any rate I was
surprised that the episode had a good deal more in common with Gothic
than I expected. That never felt
distracting, though, and the episode never felt stuck in the film's
shadow because it handles the material very well in its own right,
and interjects The Doctor and company into the events in a way that
really works. In particular Jacob Collins-Levy's Lord Byron steals
the show, giving a charismatic and mischievous, if dickish and
shamelessly self-serving, performance as the famously mercurial and
hedonistic poet. While clearly a narcissist and not a great guy to be
romantically involved with, Collins-Leavy's performance, like Gabriel
Byrne's before him, captures what an intoxicating, effortlessly
charming person Lord Byron likely was (at least on the surface). He
and The Doctor have great chemistry, and the predictable dynamic of
him wanting to seduce The Doctor and her having none of his attempts
works very well.
The
Doctor also gets some fantastic material in this episode, as the
darkness and uncertainty that has been brewing in her since her
encounters with The Master and Ruth starts to boil to the surface.
Her inquisitive-adventurer persona melts away at a few points, and we
see glimpses of the sometimes-angry, sometimes-egocentric old soul
portrayed so well by Peter Capaldi and David Tennant, and Whittaker
handles it brilliantly. This episode sets her up for a fascinating
arc in the upcoming season finale, and very much challenges the
status quo of her TARDIS team.
Much
like last week's Can You Hear Me?
however, The Haunting of Villa Diodati would
have really benefited from being a two-parter rather than a single
episode. This isn't necessarily a criticism; everything in this
episode works very well, and does work as a self-contained whole as
presented, especially if you already have some knowledge of the
literary figures involved. But between the sci-fi/horror storyline it
is telling and the tantalizing possibilities of The Doctor and her
friends getting to hang out with such a powerhouse of creativity and
larger-than-life personalities, there is so much going on here that
it could easily expand and take up more room to breathe if it had it,
and probably be better. Elements of the plot move very quickly just
because they need to due to the time constraints, and with such a
large cast of historical figures, Byron, Mary Shelley, and Percy
Shelley don't all get the opportunity to be as well-developed as they
could be. Both of the Shelleys in particular get a bit neglected in
the character-development department, with Byron getting the most
narrative attention. There is a moment in the middle of the episode
that easily could have been a break between part one and part two,
and had it been structured that way the sci-fi plot could have
expanded and been more fleshed out in certain areas, and these
fascinating personalities could have gotten more time and
exploration. Still, what is here is very good; I just wish there was
more of it.
Small
gripes about runtime aside, The Haunting of Villa Diodati
is an excellent episode. It uses
the historical context and real-life characters very well, and it
balances sci-fi and horror deftly, with excellent atmosphere and some
great Gothic horror imagery. It definitely stands as one of this
season's, and thus the Jodie Whittaker era's, better episodes. As the
last standalone episode of the season before the two-part season
finale, this does an excellent job of ending the show's
business-as-usual on a high note, and getting the audience ready for
something big to come.
Score:
- Christopher S. Jordan
Share this review!