TARDIS time! We’re hopping in the big blue box with our favorite time-traveling superhero and her fam. A new season of Doctor Who has just wrapped on the BBC, and we have tons to say about it. In this episode, we’ll analyze one episode in particular of Series 12, and that’s Episode 8: The Haunting of Villa Diodati. The Doctor and her companions visit Lake Geneva in 1816 to witness one of the most famous gatherings in literary history—that dark and stormy night when Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Doctor William John Polidori, Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron were shut indoors and decided to tell ghost stories. It’s the eve that Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein, and that also helped birth the literary vampire genre. Did we mention there was a Cyberman present?
We’ll discuss the historical context of the Year Without a Summer, the psychology of horror, and the larger-than-life personalities of Lord Byron and the Shelley’s. Is the Doctor a Byronic hero? Why are the Romantics so obsessed with the titan Prometheus of Greek mythology? And how do time travel and sci-fi mix with the horror genre? All that and more in this week’s discussion.
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