Skip to content

Doctor Who S12 • Episode 8

The Haunting of Villa Diodati

76% 1,397 votes

Reviews and links from the Community

Review of The Haunting of Villa Diodati by dema1020

It's stylish enough, and even a little substantive for the standards of Chibnall. In spite of others liking it I don't really get much out of this episode. It's fine. Unusually coherent for a 13th Doctor episode, but still kind of pointless. Ashad has some of the biggest build-up of any Doctor Who villain ever and it really feels like it doesn't amount to anything. He's just going to get tossed away in a couple of episodes. Who cares?

It reminds me a lot of some of the stuff we've heard about what production was like during this era. Rushed, to the point that scripts were delaying filming - and the writing shows for it in stuff like this. I bet people could watch this and be disengaged enough and unable to follow things to the extent they would have no idea Frankenstein's writer was involved in the story at all!

Review last edited on 12-05-24

Review of The Haunting of Villa Diodati by RoseBomb

The good Chibnall-era episode, with sharp writing, humour and wit. With an honestly impressive ability to juggle characters and have them all be fleshed out, with added characterization for Thirteen (that genuinely makes me excited to listen to her inevitable Big Finish audios, providing they use this as a template as to how to do Thirteen right). With mood, atmosphere and stakes.
Similar in ways to a couple of my favourite stories from Doctor Who, Like The Impossible Astronaut/Day of the Moon for the haunted house vibes of the second part, similar to The Chimes of Midnight for being about a house where weird stuff takes place filled with fleshed-out cooky characters and similar to Master for it being a story completely carried by the character-work.

Altogether, it is just brilliant writing, and It was a breath of fresh air to those of us who dreaded every new episode of Who after realizing that it had lost everything we held dear about it.
It was clearly an overwhelming success for those who didn't like Chibnall Who (like myself) as I heard several people say she should be the next showrunner, which I personally think is a bit far for a completely new writer to the show with one great episode and nothing else, but I certainly get the gratitude.
9/10

Review last edited on 2-05-24

Community Ratings


Trakt.tv

Votes: 990
Average rating: 74%

TARDIS Guide

Votes: 276
Average rating: 76%

The Time Scales

Votes: 131
Average rating: 79%


We are no longer linking to The Time Scales, due to comments by the owner. Apologies for the inconvenience!

(Updates coming soon:)

Add the last X members who rated it here

Add number of Favs, and who they are, here

Signal Strength: 50%

What's this?