Rumor: Doctor Who dipping back into horror next season

The latest season of Doctor Who — the first with Jodie Whittaker in the lead role — kept things relatively tame when it came to scares. There are certainly unnerving episodes like “Kerblam!,” but no straight-up horror until “Resolution,” which featured a Dalek scout taking control of humans.

But that’s apparently all going to change for an episode in series 12, according to a report from the Mirror. Reportedly, the attack will be two-pronged. First, Mary Shelley, the author of the seminal science fiction story Frankenstein, is set to appear. The Cybermen are supposedly the villains.

If you can’t see the connection between the writer of a story where a new being is forcibly formed out of human body parts and villains who forcibly create new beings out of humans (and others), then let us and the Mirror spell it out for you: the conceit is that Shelley will get the idea for Frankenstein based on her encounter with the Cybermen.

Here’s the other thing that could pop up in the episode: Frankenstein‘s origins are inextricably tied up with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, themselves great wordsmiths. The lot of them were friends, and Byron challenged all of them to write a ghost story while they were cooped up at his villa in 1816, known as the Year Without A Summer, which is an appropriately spooky time to set an episode of Doctor Who. However, It’s possible that the Doctor Who episode will feature a slightly younger Mary, which would allow it avoid casting actors as Byron and Percy, fun as that would be.

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But if the episode is set during 1816, the show can probably come up with some explanation as to how the Cybermen may have caused the eruption that led to a year of particularly cool and dreary weather. Cybermen emerging from the mist and rain and cold to try and make more Cybermen sounds appropriately scary to us.

In fact, the Mirror quotes a source as saying, “This new run is much scarier than Jodie’s first year and will ­definitely put the frighteners on fans.” It doesn’t sound like this is the only scary episode, then. Could even the Judoon become more horrifying in this upcoming season of Doctor Who? We’ll have to wait until 2020 to find out.

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