‘Beware of the lone Cyberman. Don’t let it have what it wants.’ This fulfils the same role (and episode position) as last series’ The Witchfinders: a quintessentially Doctor Who-ish pseudo-horror where the supernatural events have a rational explanation, meaning the show can have its cake and eat it. Disembodied skeletal hands crawl the lightning-lit corridors of the Villa Diodati, space folds back in on itself trapping the villa’s occupants, a ghostly figure is glimpsed from the windows, and all the basic ingredients for Mary Shelley’s seminal work of sci-fi horror are revealed to her, because God forbid a woman can conjure these things out of her imagination.

This is the story’s weak point. Mary is meant to be the showcase figure, and this is initially positioned as a celebrity historical based around the events of the famous ghost story competition of 1816. However, her role is largely subsumed in the wider “arc” of the Doctor’s encounter with the foretold Lone Cyberman, so that she can only burble about ‘this modern Prometheus’ while Ashad laughs at her naïve attempts to reach past the Cyber and appeal to the Man, because it turns out he was a total dick even before it was replaced with a hoover attachment. This is, in fairness, a neat subversion of the usual cliches, but it means Mary contributes to this about as much as Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, did to Spyfall. You’ll have to seek out her audio adventures with the eighth Doctor (based on the evidence here, she does love a man in a terrible wig) if you want stories that centre her character.

No, the 13^th Doctor is this story’s leading lady, and Whittaker seizes on material that moves her on from goofy niceness into something much closer to the desperate arrogance of previous male versions. She dismisses Byron’s advances with a word, and finally shows the fire and blood of the last of the Time Lords as she declares she ‘will not lose anyone else to [the Cybermen]’, and then turns her ire on her own Fam’s expectation that she’ll always find a gentle solution: ‘This team structure isn’t flat. It’s mountainous, with me at the summit in the stratosphere, alone, left to choose.’ Give me this over a fortune cookie aphorism any day.

This episode’s strength is that what looked like a generic haunted house story becomes a battle of wills between a Doctor who’s rarely been this impassioned, and a Cyberman whose emotions make it more dangerous than its peers. Ashad’s declaration, ‘We are inevitable’ is one of the most chilling lines a Cyberman has ever uttered because it simply sums up the idea of parallel evolution, touched on in Rise of the Cybermen and World Enough and Time. They are the inexorable result of flesh and blood being replaced by technology: our telos, if you like. Having nearly lost all enthusiasm, this one excited me for the finale.

Next Time: Ascension of the Cybermen