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I love the Romantics and I’m really interested in the way “Haunting” stages Thirteen’s encounter with them.
Before the cut tag, let me just say: I love this season. Jodie Whittaker is a Doctor for the ages. Everything about this season builds on the work they did in the last one and makes it better. It’s true that whatever Classic Who references are being made, I am not gettingthem. Still, it’s great to see them building more of the show mythology back in. I am attached to all three companions for their own sakes now; and maybe it’s an illusion, but I feel like I can see more of the earlier Doctors coming through Thirteen now, especially–and especially in “Haunting”–Ten.
One of the things I really appreciate about Chris Chibnall’s team is that they seem to be working hard on the historical research. “Spyfall” has a very inuitive through-line which is easy to follow even during that chaotic early period when we don’t understand what’s going on: we know this Barton guy is bad news and we know exactly why. Barton’s plan for world domination is only superficially fiction; big tech is already turning us into machines, just without the extradimensional aliens and their Silver Lady. This means that we’re not really going to be confused or thrown off by all the reveals and all the time-hopping; and THAT means that we get things like that fantastic scene at the Victorian expo where Ada Lovelace (nee Gordon) is taking on the Master with a machine gun. I love Ada in these episodes. I love the way she talks to the Doctor quite patiently and rationally about this insane place they’ve both involuntarily been disappeared into. I love the expression on her face when she sees something that would have reduced most Victorians to blithering terror and sent Charles Babbage back to the spirit case for another slug of brandy. I love her teaming up with Noor Inyat-Khan–about whom I knew nothing before watching this episode. I just looked her up to be sure I was getting the spelling right and found out she was killed at Dachau. It makes me appreciate even more that moment where Thirteen answers Noor’s question about whether the fascists win. She gives her the part of the answer that will allow Noor to keep going: no, they don’t win. But you can see in her eyes the other part of that answer: they never entirely lose, either.
I also really like the new Master. Still insane, but his intensity is a welcome change from Missy’s arch detachment. This is good, because I couldn’t stand John Sims, and Missy, after her initial rollout, became a cliche like all of Moffat’s characters I’m sorry I’ll start again. He’s engaging enough that you like watching him, and enough of a bastard that it’s really SATISFYING to see him outwitted and defeated.
Also appreciated: the way this season works in callbacks to the first 1-10 seasons of New Who. Of course, the fact that Chibnall was involved as a writer in both RTD Who and Torchwood helps here; he has a genuine attachment to these earlier seasons and he’s written for earlier Doctors and for Jack Harkness, who is BACK! And I don’t just mean back on the show, I mean that his pre-Children of Earth characterization is back. John Barrowman is clearly older now, but he still looks enough like Season 1 Jack at least in low lighting, and more important he is constantly bursting with libidinal energy, which was always the best thing about him. In Torchwood, Jack had to take himself seriously a lot of the time; that was interesting, but I’m looking forward to more of this guy. The guy who stole a ship, scooped 3 of the wrong people, tried to play it off, and went on flirting with all of them even while nanites were eating him. That, as Thirteen says, is our Jack. But I also appreciate all the continuity touches for the new companions.
So now we come to Villa Diodati, and all the care put into all of this continuity and characterization is starting to pay off. The Doctor, since “Arachnids in the UK,” has accepted the fact that Yaz, Ryan, and Graham are running into danger with her now and generally takes the POV that they’re adults and they signed up for this. Soon as she gets a whiff of the Cybermen, though, all of that changes. Thirteen has not forgotten what those bastards did to Bill, or the Battle of Canary Wharf. The prospect of them threatening her new companions immediately awakens her inner Ten. And now, shit is gonna get real. The confrontation in the basement with the Silurium-possessed Shelley–”Sometimes, this team structure isn’t flat”–that’s Ten. And I love Ten; but I also remember how all that passion and that hauntedness and that spiritual arrogance can make Ten very dangerous. Ten was the one who wiped Donna’s mind–something Thirteen does in a more controlled way with Ada and Noor, with Ada protesting all the way–because he couldn’t bear to lose her; Ten was the one who destroyed Gallifrey to save the universe (though Chibnall in general appears to agree with Moffat that “The End of Time” never actually happened); and Ten was the one who ruined Adelaide’s life by declaring that THE LAWS OF TIME ARE MINE in “Waters of Mars.”
Ten was the most brooding, the most intense, the most willing to go up against the universe armed with nothing but strength of will, the most haunted by all the loss and death. In a word, the most Byronic.
So Thirteen goes Byronic Hero on us–and then actual George Gordon Lord Byron falls in love with her. HOW AWESOME IS THAT? Yet also awkward, given that Byron is chilling here at the Villa Diodati mere months after finally ending a disastrous marriage to Ada Lovelace’s mother. Ada Gordon is an infant at this moment in time; but Thirteen just went rollicking through history with the adult Ada, and now here’s Ada’s disastrous dad trying to chat her up. No wonder Thirteen feels socially awkward. She must regularly find herself in social situations way more complicated than any we ever encounter.
So Maxine Alderton, who wrote this episode, clearly knows more about the Romantics than the classic story about how Frankenstein got written. I had to look up the poem that Byron is reading from at the conclusion of the episode; like (apparently) many Googlers, I assumed it would be in Canto III of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which he says he’s working on, but in fact it’s from a poem he wrote in 1816 called “Darkness.” It begins with the words “I had a dream.” This is par for the course for both generations of British Romantic poets, and that’s one thing I think this episode really gets about them: they were visionaries. Visionaries as in they were focused on the utopian dream of a better future; and visionaries as in they often present themselves, in their poetry, as having actually had visions which they will now commit to paper. They were, as Mulder would say, open to extreme possibilities–in fact, they dedicated much of their creative lives to imagining extreme possibilities. So if you were going to choose a place to hide a piece of super-advanced technology which will appear to most humans as magic, but which also looks like quicksilver and gives its possessor apocalyptic visions, of course you’d give it to Percy Shelley.
When it came down to Shelley or the universe, my first thought was, “Oh no–has he written ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ yet?” And then, “Of course not, the Peterloo Massacre was in 1819.” Assuming the Doctor knows that, when she weighs the consequences, she’s also weighing the fact that Shelley’s “Mask of Anarchy” (another dream/vision poem) imagined a strategy of massive nonviolent resistance which would go on to inspire Gandhi and in turn Martin Luther King Jr., and through him the civil rights movement including Rosa Parks, whose history they were so careful to safeguard in “Rosa.” Again, assuming the Doctor knows this, that is part of the subtext of her warning about how sacrificing Percy Shelley in 1816 could mean “no more you.” Shelley, for all his other faults, was an enemy of tyranny and a champion of liberty and someone who imagined alternatives compellingly enough to inspire people to challenge oppression. His radicalism is inseparable from his poetry and both of them helped create the Britain Yaz, Ryan, and Graham were born into. In “Defence of Poetry,” Shelley calls poets “the unacknolwedged legislators of the world.” Well, by saving Shelley at some unspecified potentially horrible cost to the future, Thirteen is acknowledging them.
So I’m with her all the way when it comes to saving the poet. But she has to make that choice fearing that in saving her companions’ past, she’s sacrificing their future. In keeping with its position in the series arc, this episode ends with a really interestingly ambiguous moment. The weather has sorted itself, the sun is finally out, everything looks beautiful, and Byron is reading fresh lyrics to his fellow-Romantics on the grass outside Lake Geneva. We are of course meant to assume that the “she” he’s talking about is the Doctor, and that this (like, we are meant to assume from “The Shakespeare Code,” Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnets) is a love poem dedicated to the One That Got Away.
If you look at the rest of “Darkness,” however, the following things become clear: 1) This ‘dream’ is in fact an apocalyptic vision of the end, not just of humanity, but of the universe itself. 2) The main conceit is that the stars, sun, and moon have gone out, and humanity perishes in darkness–slowly, and with a lot of cannibalism. 3) Right before the passage Byron is reading, the last of humanity expires when two mortal enemies meet in a desecrated church and simultaneously die upon beholding each other’s “hideousness.” 4) The actual referent for “she” in that last line is Darkness itself. As in, darkness and the universe are now one and the same.
So this ain’t exactly “She Walks in Beauty.” This is a very stark warning about the possible consequences of the Doctor’s intervention–delivered in the kind of idyllic natural setting that we more typically think of when we imagine Romantic poetry. It is, you should pardon the expression, an UNBELIEVABLY dark poem. And it is also a love letter to the Doctor. And that’s what I mean when I say that this episode connects Thirteen with Ten. In Season 11, the team met Idiot With A Blue Box Doctor. This season they’re getting to know Destroyer Of Worlds Doctor. And after “Ascension”–and WTF EVER is going on with Brendan’s weird Quiet-Man-Esque (fake?) backstory–I have never been more interested to see what’s going to happen next.