Doctor Who - THE EATERS OF LIGHT (S10E10) Review: Insert Chlorophyll joke here

A classic writer returns with an elegant episode, albeit one that lacks a significant punch

It’s hard to really focus on Rona Munro’s The Eaters of Light given how closely it is positioned to the horror-show fireworks-nightmare of a finale that follows closely behind it. Two masters? Mondasian Cybermen? The beginning of the end of Capaldi’s tenure? How can we not get excited about that? It’s a shame, really because the awkward positioning of TEOL is really the biggest flaw to its name. Coming so close to a headline-smashing finale with little to no lead up into it robs the episode of some of its urgency – doubly so when the episode seems to belong earlier in the run, not near the end. But TEOL is actually an incredibly thoughtful and considered episode, with just enough fantastical touches to keep it from sagging into tedium. It’s the sort of episode that, in years time, we’ll probably look at with a bit more gravitas, as both Capaldi’s last standalone episode and a comfortably good one at that.

SPOILERS AND ALL THAT

TEOL finds the Doctor, Bill and Nardole in Roman-era Scotland on the hunt for the mysterious Ninth Legion – a legion of Roman Soldiers who mysteriously disappeared without a trace. Whilst there, they discover the remnants of the legion, a mysterious group of people dedicated to guarding a peculiar ‘gate’, a monster that drains people’s bodies of sunlight, disintegrating them completely and a cairn on a hilltop that seems to lead to the end of the world.

This is pretty much the description we had before the episode aired and it was notable in how very unhelpful it was. For all the details it offered, it seemed to be holding something back. That cairn leading to the end of the world suggested something utterly grand and cosmic, possibly with its fair share of time-twisting, ala the way Hide hurtled throughout history or the way Listen went both backwards and forwards in time to serve its narrative. Whilst those kind of elements are present, the biggest surprise of TEOL is how underplayed they are. That cosmic element manifests in the episode’s sacrificial conclusion and there’s a bit of timey-wimeyness in the way the portal distorts a person’s temporal relations, but they aren’t so much a part of the episode’s structure and rather just ingredients that the character’s have to contend with. For the most part, the description I offered in the previous paragraph is about what we get. This is a very straightforward episode.

It’s also a much slower episode than we’re used to in this show. Usually this gets bandied about as an automatic positive, leading people to throw around buzzphrases like ‘the episode has time to breathe’ that generally don’t actually say much about what is going on. But…this really is that episode that slows down enough to give all its elements their due course. Very early on, Bill and the Doctor separate for the majority of the episode, meaning their interactions mostly happen with new faces. Props to Munro for some pretty great use of secondary characters in the episode – one of the biggest challenges in writing a Doctor Who episode tends to be introducing a character and finishing their story over the course of usually one episode, whilst making the episode revolve mostly around the Doctor and company. It’s to TEOL’s credit, then, that the supporting cast is as well drawn out as it is. Even some of the background extras get stuff to do – check out the way Bill’s conversation about sexuality ropes the background cast into the mix.

Thematically speaking, I couldn’t help but get some The Girl Who Died vibes from this one. It seems that Capaldi’s Doctor has very little time for old-earth societies whose honorous values lead them to blindly fight aliens and get themselves killed. The Doctor chastises Carr seemingly more harshly than he did the Vikings back in Series 9 which gives us some A+ ‘oh ffs’ material from Capaldi. “That was the sound of my patience shattering…" Oh dear.

TEOL also seems to be repeating some of the material from last week, what with the two groups of people pointlessly fighting each other and the Doctor stuck in the middle*, though with some key differences. The main one is that this week manages the material better, with the episode’s final act handling the thematics way more elegantly than the Empress of Mars did. The second is that whilst The Empress of Mars seemed concerned with analysing the two groups in regards to the bloodlust present in them and the soldierly respect needed to diffuse the conflict, TEOL examines the conflict from more complex angles. The Gatekeepers fight out of fear of the Roman machine butchering innocents and the Ninth legion want to avoid being viewed as cowardly. Put the two together with the TARDIS/Doctor’s translation matrix and what do they sound like? Children. TEOL is far more empathetic in its approach than Empress and is all the more affecting for it.

Changing focus slightly, the focus on the translation matrix**, as well as Bill’s shocked response to it did bring to my attentions the idea that TEOL actually belongs earlier in the run. Bill’s late understanding of the translation isn’t itself wrong (just a bit unusual) but it does highlight some ways in which the episode might have belonged earlier in the run. The translation stuff is one part, but there’s also the way characters still refer to the vault in a weirdly cryptic manner, as well as how Nardole seems a little bit blasé about Bill’s safety given all the time they’ve spent together. It all points to an episode that perhaps the producers weren’t quite sure what to do with? It seems to belong at the beginning of the run, but it’s a bit too boggy and poetic to reasonably appeal to newcomers who aren’t quite accustomed to the show’s storytelling variety and there doesn’t seem to be a way to shift any of the other early episodes to the end in any convincing manner. Perhaps this is why it’s awkwardly positioned at the end of the series, before arguably one the show’s biggest ever finales?

Boggy and poetic might be the first words that come to mind when I think of TEOL, but there’s enough little touches to keep the episode from being a bit of a grind. The previously mentioned conversation about sexuality is one of them, but I’m a big fan of the use of the crows in the episode. Shortly after watching it, I was walking about and a crow (or something similar) flew past, ‘Carr’-ing and I pretty much immediately thought of TEOL. Mission accomplished on that front, then, it seems.

TEOL is a weird one. Very good in its own right, yet lacks to punch of an episode like Thin Ice to really tie everything together. I occassionally think back to Vampires of Venice with regards to episodes like this – ones that are fairly modest in their narrative pyrotechnics but are the bread and butter that comprise much of Doctor Who’s DNA. I always consider Vampires to be a stellar example of these episodes – nothing too fancy, but always good for a rewatch. I’m not sure if TEOL inspires as much enthusiasm in me as that episode, but on its own, slightly obscure, terms, I’ll more than happily stand in its corner.

Verdict:

★★★★

Who knows whether time sings TEOL’s praises or simply inspires people to shrug. As it stands, this was confident, if slightly underwhelming, Doctor Who and good way to round off Capaldi’s standalone ventures on the show.

---

*How long before the writers pull some Yojimbo/A Fistful of Dollars shit and have the Doctor manipulate the two groups against each other to save others caught in the middle? Has this already been done? Am I missing an obvious example here? It’s just the Doctor as Samurai seems a weirdly appealing idea to examine for an episode.

**Can I ask some stuff about the translation matrix? Has it been previously established that the Doctor’s presence is what enables the translation to kick in? I always thought it was just the TARDIS that enabled that.

Also, I didn’t really talk much about the monster because there isn’t really much to say about it. There’s a neat idea at work, but the creature lacks the motivation and interesting design work that really sell its uniqueness effectively.

#DoctorWho