Doctor Who season 12 episode 8 preview: “The Haunting of Villa Diodati”

Doctor Who season 12 continues with “The Haunting of Villa Diodati”, in which Team TARDIS indulges in a round of ghost stories…with Lord Byron and Mary Shelley herself.

Doctor Who season 12 continues this week, with what appears to be a period ghost story involving several of the English language’s most well known writers: Lord Byron and Mary Shelley.

Another trip back to the past feels a bit strange, following the events of recent episodes, which include everything from literal nightmare fuel to the introduction of a new and heretofore unknown Doctor. Is it really the time to pop back and revisit the visit to Switzerland that inspired Shelley to write her famous novel?

Apparently?

It seems obvious that Doctor Who is holding its proverbial cards close to its chest on such season-spanning issues as the Ruth Doctor, the Timeless Child and the destruction of Gallifrey until we get to the finale itself. But the downside of that plan is that it makes an episode such as “The Haunting of Villa Diodati” feel like a filler installment before we ever get a chance to see it, as though we’re all just waiting for the Cyberman and some answers to come along.

And Mary Shelley deserves more than that.

At the very least, the official synopsis seems pretty straightforward, for once, which might mean the episode itself is, too. (Or not. This is Doctor Who, after all.) It rather implies that this hour will likely land firmly in the space of the pseudo-historicals showrunner Chris Chibnall seems to like to tell so much.

"The Doctor and her gang arrive at the Villa Diodati at Lake Geneva in 1816 on the night that inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The plan is to spend the evening soaking up the atmos in the presence of some literary greats, but the ghosts are all too real, and the Doctor is forced into a decision of earth-shattering proportions."

But, then again, Doctor Who hasn’t really told a straight ghost story in a while, so in a way this kind of makes sense.

And, also, there’s the fact that Shelley is awesome, and so much of her story is subsumed into the fact that she wrote Frankenstein. Which, don’t get me wrong, is a tremendous novel – as that she wrote it when she was just 18. But there was so much more to her and her life, so here’s hoping that’s what Who choses to dig into this week, in spite of the fact that our story is set around the novel’s creation.

The trailer doesn’t tell us much, other than there’s haunting type things going on.

Unfortunately, too, half the trailer seems to be about hyping the big two-part finale headed our way in a week, which leaves this episode in a strange kind of limbo, promotionally speaking.

So, we’ll just have to see what happens, yeah?

Doctor Who continues Sunday at 8pm ET on BBC America.