Story 294: The Haunting of Villa Diodati

In which the Doctor and her companions visit the Villa Diodati in June 1816 and witness the birth of Frankenstein... 

The house, situated on the shores of Lake Geneva, has been rented by Lord Byron for the summer. He is accompanied by fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his partner Mary Godwin, physician friend John Polidori, and Mary's step-sister Claire Clairmont, who has been pursuing the poet-peer across Europe. The Shelleys have their baby son William with them.

The Doctor and her friends claim to have become lost in the storm which is raging. She is disappointed at the lack of literary innovation she witnesses, having expected more from these writers and poets. This is supposed to be the night when a ghost story competition was proposed - and event that would lead to the writing of Frankenstein as well as Polidori's The Vampyre. Shelley himself isn't present - supposedly indisposed. She tries to encourage them to devise new works, gently steering them towards the story competition.

Elsewhere in the house, strange things are happening. A ghostly figure is glimpsed and objects move by themselves. Graham goes in search of a toilet and encounters a woman and young girl who he takes to be servants. A disembodied skeletal hand scuttles about in the shadows.

Dr Polidori is stressed, supposedly through lack of sleep. He is easily irritated and at one point challenges Ryan to a duel. When he goes to fetch a pair of pistols, he is attacked by the skeletal hand.

He is saved by the others, and the hand crumbles to dust. Byron explains that he has the remains of a 15th Century soldier in the house. Both hands are found to be missing. The moving hand must have belonged to them, but the Doctor scans the bones and finds that there is nothing unusual about them.

Mary admits that Shelley saw visions of a shining figure floating on the surface of the lake before he was taken ill, and that she doesn't know where he is at the moment.

Graham sees the woman and child again as he looks after the sedated Polidori. He finds that the figures are unwilling to talk to him.

The missing hand and skull, also animated, are captured and trapped under glass.

Yaz, Ryan and Mary return to the drawing room - only to find that they keep arriving at the top of the hall stairs every time.

Graham then sees Polidori sleepwalk through a wall. The Doctor realises that there are perception filters in place, hiding the real doors and preventing them all from seeing the true layout of the villa. They can find their way to the drawing room if they concentrate and believe the walls do not exist.

Reunited, they all then witness the glowing figure out on the lake. It moves closer. The Doctor deduces that it is a traveller from the future, attempting to materialise. The odd behaviour of the house is explained partly as a means to prevent the figure from getting inside.

The figure finally breaks into the house, and the Doctor is shocked to find that it is a Cyberman - one only partially converted. It has a name - Ashad - and retains human emotion. 

The Doctor realises that this is the "Lone Cyberman" whom Captain Jack Harkness had warned her about. They flee through the house. Ashad kills Byron's valet and the baby's nursemaid - but spares the life of William.

In the cellars, Shelley is found hiding. It transpires that whilst walking by the shore of the lake he discovered a strange object composed of some fluid metallic substance - like living quicksilver. When he touched it, it was immediately absorbed into his body. Since then, he has been compelled to hide. The substance has also generated the various odd phenomena around the villa as a defence mechanism. The ghostly figure seen around the villa has been him, out of synch with his surroundings due to the substance's influence.

Ashad is relentlessly seeking it, having travelled back from the far future to obtain it.

The Doctor has attempted to appeal to Ashad's remaining humanity, pointing out that he saved the baby. He counters simply that the child will be converted when old enough, and states that he killed his own sons when they opposed the Cybermen.

The substance within Shelley is actually the Cyberium - an artificial intelligence containing all of the combined knowledge and history of the Cybermen. Were Ashad to obtain it, he would become the most powerful of Cybermen.

However, its presence within the young poet is killing him. Despite Jack's warning that the Lone Cyberman be denied what he seeks, the Doctor decides that Shelley's existence is more important to human culture. The Cybermen she will have to deal with later, but for now the Cyberium must be handed over. 

Ashad takes it into himself and departs. Shelley has been made aware of his fate through telepathic contact with the Doctor, but now rejoins his friends.

Despite being told that ghosts don't exist, Graham is left wondering about the woman and child he saw, whom no-one else did.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor determines that she must travel to the future to confront the consequences of her actions. No matter what the danger, the others agree to accompany her...

The Haunting of Villa Diodati was written by Maxine Alderton, and was first broadcast on Sunday 16th February 2020.

Alderton was one of the principal writers on rural soap Emmerdale and had also written children's series The Worst Witch, and has since contributed to All Creatures Great And Small. She will return to Doctor Who as writer of Flux: Village of the Angels, its most popular segment.

It's another celebrity-historical, after the inclusion of Ada Lovelace, Charles Babbage and Noor Inayat Khan in Spyfall, and a story revolving around inventors Tesla and Edison. Of course, the first of those characters links directly to this story as Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron. She had been born six months before the events depicted in this story.

Though she has to share the plot with a Cyberman, Byron, Polidori and Claire, the central guest figure is supposed to Mary Shelley, as parallels between her famous creation and the Cybermen have been drawn almost since the creatures from Mondas first appeared. Cybermen are basically living dead people, reanimated through science - their bodies a patchwork of organic and mechanical rather than pieces of different human cadavers.

The link had not been lost by Big Finish, who in 2011 had made Shelley a companion to the Eighth Doctor, and saving the Doctor's life through an electric shock inspired parts of Frankenstein.

Much earlier, the Gothic novel had been the inspiration for The Brain of Morbius, though perhaps more the Hammer and Universal movie cycles than the original telling.

Here, Mary comments on how Ashad appears to be composed of different bodies, and she witnesses him being revitalised by a lightning strike.

Beyond the Cyberman / Frankenstein trappings, the episode also works as a good old fashioned Gothic horror in its own right, with skeletons, disembodied hands and ghostly visions.

Cast as Mary is Gangs of London's Lili Miller. Though Mary used the name Shelley, she and Percy were not married in June 1816. He is played by Lewis Rainer, who featured in the US TV series of Dracula (which bore little relation to Bram Stoker) and also appeared in the Pride and Prejudice sequel Death Comes to Pemberley. He had previously featured in Grange Hill.

Sadly, he gets little screen time as Shelley is absent for much of the episode.

Playing Polidori is Maxim Baldry, who has been acting since childhood. I recall him as the young Caesarion, son of Cleopatra and Mark Anthony, in the second season of Rome. He has featured in cult youth drama Skins, which launched many a career, and in 2019 appeared in Russell T Davies' Years And Years.

Byron is Australian actor Jacob Collins-Levy, who has been seen in The Witcher and The White Princess. He's currently appearing in Nautilus, a version of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

Claire Clairmont is Nadia Parkes who, at time of writing, is probably better known for her relationship with Tom Holland. Acting work includes Starstruck, The Spanish Princess and Domina.

As Ashad we have Belfast-born Patrick O'Kane. He was seen as one of the First Order officers in The Last Jedi, and featured in Game of Thrones as one of the assassin Jaqen's disguised forms.

The other performances of note are Fletcher, Byron's valet, who is played by Stefan Bednarczyk; and Elise, the baby's maid, who is played by Sarah Perles.

Overall, one of the highlights of the season. Perhaps it might have been better to have made it a standalone story, however, rather than simply providing the prologue to the two-part Cyberman finale.

A celebrity-historical ghost story would have worked on its own.

Things you might like to know:

• The weather in 1816 was so terrible that it became known as "the year without a summer". The cause wasn't known at the time, but we now know that it was due to the eruption of the volcano Tambora the year before. The eruption was so massive that the amount of ash and dust blasted into the atmosphere reduced solar radiation reaching the surface of the Earth significantly - affecting the global climate.
• Shelley finally married Mary in December 1816. He was to die in July 1822 in Italy, drowning when his boat capsized in a storm off Livorno. He was 29.
• Byron died in Greece, where he was fighting for independence alongside Greek forces against those of the Ottoman Empire. He died from a fever in April 1824, aged 36.
• Claire Clairmont lived to the age of 80, dying in Florence in March 1879. Her daughter with Byron died as a child.
• John Polidori struggled to establish his authorship of The Vampyre after it had been published without his permission under Byron's name. It features the very Byronic Lord Ruthven as its protagonist. He died, aged only 25, in August 1821. Suffering depression and struggling with gambling debts, he took his own life.
• Mary Shelley lived to the age of 53, dying in London in 1851. Sadly, baby William had died from malaria in Italy, aged 3. Her surviving son, Percy, elected not to follow her wishes and have her buried alongside her parents in the Old St Pancras churchyard, where Shelley had once wooed her. Instead he had her interred in Bournemouth near his own home, arguing that he did not like the overgrown London graveyard. Shelley had been cremated on the shore where his body had washed up, and the ashes buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
• The ghost story competition at the villa took place over a number of nights - not just a single evening as suggested here.
• Patrick O'Kane's costume was composed of different Cyberman designs, including an arm from the recent Mondasian version, and other elements from Nightmare in Silver and Rise of the Cybermen. 
• The helmet, however, owes a lot to an unused 2006 concept design by Matthew Savage.
• Initial drafts had Ashad as a Cybersurgeon, seeking a device which would help him convert humans. He then became the Cyberzealot. To hide the fact that a Cyberman would be appearing in this episode, paperwork simply described the character as "C-zel". Giving him an actual name, to illustrate how his emotions had yet to be suppressed, only came late in the day.
• Artist Oliver Arkinstall-Jones has produced a wonderful retro-style Italian horror movie poster for this story, one of only a couple he has designed for NuWho episodes: