Series 10 has, like most of Steven Moffat’s series, put forward a group of episodes with a very strong connecting sense of purpose and tone. Series 10 is like an odd blend of the adventure of the Doctor/ Donna series with wide-eyed Bill; the wacky adventures of the Eleventh Doctor with Nardole’s slapstick gags and the darkness which has dominated Capaldi’s tenure. After the moody space-opera of Clara Oswald it has been nice to take a breather with down-to-earth Bill and it has been pleasant to see a bit of humour from the Twelfth Doctor who started off so aggressive and severe. Series 10 has also felt, to me like a bit of a “greatest hits” album. As a long-time obsessive who gnaws on each episode until I’ve experienced every bit of flavor it has to offer I saw repeated ideas in almost every story. This wasn’t necessarily to their detriment as the ideas were often reworked and re-contextualized so that they still felt fresh. With The Eaters of Light, the last stand-alone adventure for the Twelfth Doctor before his Christmas departure - I didn’t see any repeated ideas but I felt a return to the tone of some of my absolute favorite Doctor Who.
The tail-end of Matt Smith’s premier series was glorious. Whilst I’m not overly fond of Silurian two-part story The Hungry Earth/ Cold Blood I did love the location of the rain-spattered, British countryside. The isolated Welsh village and its family of inhabitants brought a sense of innocence to the show and grounded it in old-fashioned BBC programming. Vincent and the Doctor followed and it is one of the most unexpected, mournful and beautiful scripts to grace Moffat’s writing desk (although, reportedly he had a strong influence in the final drafts). And then we see Romans at Stone Henge.
Scottish writer Rona Munro brings a similarly home-cooked feel to this spin on the mystery of the Ninth Roman Legion - an army which marched off into Scotland, off the edge of the known world and vanished, never to return. Munro begins the episode with a little girl in waterproofs, running in the Aberdeen countryside, racing to hear the sound of music in the standing stones. Despite her brother’s trepidation she approaches the stones, a crow squawks Doctor and we see the TARDIS engraved in a Pictish pattern. Already she is setting us up for a campfire story - half fantasy and half truth. This story will stretch belief way back to a time before recordings, a time when anything could have happened. It’s a personal story for everyone which is nestled in childhood and family holidays in countryside cottages where rain batters the windows and The Doctor is at its heart.
Munro’s script isn’t flashy, it doesn’t rely on gimmicks or high concepts. Like Thin Ice before it is just relies on compelling storytelling and simple, believable, lovable characters. It sounds a little puerile to say but the female touch has been welcome in this series of Who. In contrast to The Empress of Mars, another story which featured armed forces far from home and far out of their depth, the side characters are simple but entirely believable. Once again the Doctor and Bill are split up but this time they spend the majority of the story apart from each other, meeting people and learning about the situation. The episode isn’t filled with twists and turns, instead taking a simple premise and exploring it from multiple angles. In fact, the majority of the story has happened by the time the TARDIS lands. Kar, a Pictish warrior woman and the defender of a rift in time which connects a hoard of light-eaters to our reality saw the Ninth Roman Legion march over her land, slaughter her people and, in desperation released the 1st century equivalent of a nuclear bomb on her enemies. The Doctor is only there for clean-up duties.
Part of the beauty of the script is how mournful and reflective it is. Survivors from both the Pictish and Roman groups are connected by their youth and the extreme losses they have suffered. It is a wise choice to place Bill and the Doctor into the separate camps of these mortal enemies because it gives them a chance to do what the Doctor and his friends do best which is find the points of common humanity the people they meet. By the end of the episode the youthful supporting characters seem to have lived and breathed in a tangible world and we, the audience care for them both equally.
It’s a week for the companions as Bill and Nardole are doing what they do best here. The early days of The Doctor and Bill’s relationship is brought back to the foreground as the reason they have come to this time and place is to give the student a chance to challenge her professor’s theories. Bill is intelligent and enthusiastic and it’s endearing to see the TARDIS being used as nothing more than the tool with which to settle an educational wager. Nardole stands out in the middle of the episode. Munro jumps forward in time two days, for reasons of exposition and as a clever means to add some depth to the world and its peoples. Nardole lives out those two days in real time and when the Doctor reunites with him he has fully ingratiated himself and integrated with the Pictish people. Nardole is a character who never quite found the definition of other part-time TARDIS fliers like Jack or Rory who seemed to represent opposing ends of the masculinity scale but here his purpose is made clear. Nardole is affable, he’s nice to be around. People like him and he likes them, they make each other feel better. It’s simple but it works, he doesn’t need to be anything more.
For all of my gushing it’s not a perfect script. Some of the exposition is very clunkily delivered and I don’t quite understand why The Doctor decides to be quite so nasty to Kar. It seems their conversations boil down to a lot of baseless personal attacks, it’s a bit unnecessary. The script also fails to convincingly explain itself out of the problems it introduces. For example, The Doctor decides that it’s pointless to send another human into the rift to fend off the monsters, electing himself as the natural replacement because he just keeps living. It’s a nice addition to this Doctor’s character who seems to throw himself into situations with dire consequences as a hobby. In Oxygen, the loss of his sight is entirely his fault, in Extremis he decided to potentially sacrifice the eyesight of all his future regenerations so he can read a book and it looks as though this reckless character trait is the thing that will set him on the course to regeneration in the coming weeks. Within The Eaters of Light, however it is never properly explained why it is that sacrificing five Romans and three Picts is a natural alternative to sacrificing an immortal. Surely it will only take an extra few moments for the “locusts” to kill off the extra people and then we’re back to square one. The apocalypse is only delayed for a couple more centuries.
Logical inconsistencies aside, the frustrating imperfectness of this episode is not a deal-breaker as it successfully establishes a living, breathing world and pays pathos to it in 42 minutes (with a good five minutes at the end put aside for Missy shenanigans.) Its themes of young people being forced into adulthood through tragic loss speaks to the entire Capaldi era, making this an excellent choice for his final, stand-alone outing. Despite being the “oldest” Doctor he has always balanced his severity with a teenager-like sense of rebellion and recklessness. If his playing the guitar in his bedroom (TARDIS console room) wasn’t clue enough, his trademark hoodie and sunglasses should go some way to filling in the blanks. Capaldi’s Doctor, from his opening episode when he looks at a door, say “not me” then proceeds to jump out a window until his violent and extreme reaction to the death of Clara - putting himself through millenia of torture just to keep a secret from the Time Lords. His first series was set around the location of Coal Hill, a high school whilst his second mirrored the mad adventures of a gap year shared between friends. His third has brought him back to earth in a University in Bristol. The Twelfth Doctor’s has been a coming of age story. His is the first regeneration in a brand new cycle and this story is coming to an end.
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