YMMV / Doctor Who S38E8 "The Haunting of Villa Diodati"

• Complete Monster: Ashad, the Lone Cyberman, also in the following two episodes, is a vicious fanatic for the Cybermen; motivated by his own self-hatred for being human, he proudly abandoned his humanity to be converted. His conversion incomplete, he lacks the absence of emotion shown by the other Cybermen, ironically being the vilest of them all. He also killed all of his children after they joined a resistance force to oppose the Cybermen. Convinced it is his destiny to lead the Cybermen to victory, Ashad traveled back in time to 1816 Villa Diodati in search of the collective knowledge of the Cybermen, the Cyberium. Killing two people and almost converting an infant, rejecting him purely for being "weak", Ashad then began to open a portal that would tear reality itself apart until the Doctor gave him the Cyberium. Returning to his own time, Ashad led the Cybermen in hunting down the few human survivors of the Cyber Wars. Despising organic life, Ashad forcibly and painfully removed the organic components from his loyal Cybermen as they scream, and used the Cyberium to forge the Death Particle, a weapon capable of wiping out all life on an entire planet. Ashad's ultimate plan is to kill all organic life throughout the universe, leaving only the Cybermen to rule beneath him after he removed his own biological parts.
• Evil Is Cool: Ashad quickly gained this reputation thanks to his creepy, half cyber-formed design and unhinged personality. Bonus points for being an emotional Cyberman that makes sense thanks to his incomplete conversion.
• Genius Bonus:
  • Ryan urges Mary Shelley to keep on writing, and she comments that she doesn't think she'll ever be as good a writer as her parents. That comment is not elaborated in any way, but viewers familiar with Shelley's biography will know that both her parents were indeed renowned writers: her mother was the early feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and her father the novelist and political theorist William Godwin.
  • A dark example: Ashad says he spared William Shelley because he's "sickly and weak". Only three years after the episode takes place, in 1819, he would die from malaria.
  • Mary Shelley also wrote a novel in which most of humanity is wiped out, except for a few survivors, which is remarkably similar to the situation in the next episode.
• I Knew It!: This episode confirmed both that Thirteen was still feeling the trauma over being Twelve, and the "flat team structure" wasn't exactly true, theories fans had since early on.
• Les Yay: When talking to Claire Clairmont, Yaz compares her relationship with the Doctor to Claire's relationship with Lord Byron. When Claire complains that just asking Byron how he feels about her won't help because "his answers only increase the enigma," Yaz's response is she knows "someone like that."
• Retroactive Recognition: Max Baldry was previously looked after by Mr. Bean.

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