The Eaters of Light

There's a wolf out there and you're living in a house made of sticks.

We have finally arrived at the much anticipated Rona Monroe story. Ms. Monroe rather famously wrote the final classic series story Survival and was one of the most obvious candidates to come back and write for the new series (Ben Aaronovitch being the other). Unlike a lot of fandom, I didn't like Survival and the writing did play a significant factor in that as there was filler and a lot of unexplained stuff. I'll have to hope here that the more compressed time afford a better story than the last outing.

Plot Summary

The Doctor, Bill and Nardole materialize in 2nd Century Scotland to find the 9th Roman Legion which vanished without a trace. Bill heads off in one direction to find a Roman soldier while the Doctor and Nardole head off in another to find signs of settlement. Bill comes across a young woman named Kar who is offering for the dead. She sees Bill and rushes at her with a sword. Bill runs and falls into a pit where she comes across a young Roman soldier.

The Doctor and Nardole walk across to a cairn where across from it they find the remains of the Roman army. They are completely desiccated, having been robbed of all structure and covered in black slime. Fearing for Bill's safety, the Doctor and Nardole turn to leave but are captured by a band of Celts who live nearby. They take them to their meeting house to wait the Watcher.

The Roman soldier tells Bill the a group of them ran away before the battle and the rest are hiding in a nearby cave as he had come to scout the roads. They climb out of the pit after dark but are attacked by a strange glowing creature. The creature consumes the Roman and Bill runs to the cave with the other Romans. She crawls inside where is is grabbed by the soldiers just as the creature attacks her. The Romans cover the entrance with stones and pull her in. She tells them of the attack on their comrade and then passes out, a bit of black slime on her neck beginning to spread.

In the meeting house, the Doctor refutes the Celts just as Kar comes in proclaiming herself as the Watcher and the defeater of the Roman army. The Doctor scoffs at her and then creates a distraction by tossing Nardole's bag of unpopped popcorn into the fire. They run out and into the cairn where the interior door begins to open as the sun hits it. As it does, another dimension is exposed and the Doctor steps over the edge to peer in. He sees hundreds of strange creatures circling about a ball of light. One flies close to him and he leaves, shutting the door. He emerges from the cairn to find Nardole entertaining the Celts with stories, having been told that nearly two and a half days have passed despite the Doctor only being in there a few seconds.

Bill wakes from her sleep after two days with the Romans destroying the slime with sunlight. She urges their commander, Lucius, to help her go outside the cave and look for the Doctor. Her pleas become more urgent when the shaft of sunlight is blocked and they realize the creature is probing them looking for a way in. They elect to climb out and potentially die fighting rather than die underground waiting. They form up and march towards an alternate exit.

The Doctor, asking a few questions, learns that the tribe of Celts had sent a watcher in to fight every fifty or so years. Because of the difference in time, that meant the watcher would fight and die after a few minutes but would save things for several generations. Kar had instead pulled one of the creatures out to attack the Romans in a fit of rage over the slaughter and enslavement of her people. The Doctor chides her for unleashing a horror that will destroy the world for her petty revenge. He knows that the creature is weak as the sun has gone down but it will gain strength the next day. He proposes to drive it back into the rift.

The creature bursts out at the Romans, killing one of them, as they approach the exit ladder. They climb out and into the Celt meeting house before the creature can leap out after them. The Celts and Romans start shouting at each other but are caught off guard by the fact that they can understand each other via the TARDIS translation circuit. The Doctor brings Bill up to speed and then lectures both the Romans and the Celts that they have a greater danger than their own petty squabbles and must work together.

The group heads to the cairn where the group sets up with special light refactors used by the watchers. They make a lot of noise to summon the creature and it attacks just before dawn. They manage to pin the creature down using the refactors and then drive it back through the gateway as the door opens in the sunlight. The Doctor proposes to head in and fend off the creatures permanently as he has a very long lifespan and will regenerate when killed. Kar objects stating that this her task. The Romans also object, vowing revenge for their comrades and a chance to redeem their lost honor. The group holds the Doctor back and head in to the rift together.

The entrance of so many into rift causes it to destabilize and the cairn collapses with everyone rushing out to avoid the cave in. The Doctor, Bill and Nardole head back to the TARDIS with Bill being able to detect small traces of music from the pipers who entered the rift. Inside the TARDIS, they find Missy who had been watching them. She is being kept in the TARDIS now, isomorphically locked out of the controls and on maintenance duty in exchange for a bit more latitude. Missy continues to appeal to the Doctor, indicating that she has reformed but he holds her at arms length, not wanting to give in to the hope that they can be friends once again just yet.

Analysis

The reception on this story has been decidedly mixed from fans from what I can tell. I frankly enjoyed it. You can tell that Rona Monroe wrote for the classic series as this did have a very classic feel to it both in structure and it's very casual nature with regard to the overall story arc. Much like Mark Gatiss' stories, this could have been put pretty much anywhere after The Pilot and it would have worked. In fact, the fact that it took Bill until Episode Ten to cotton on to the TARDIS telepathic circuit suggests that it was probably written as an earlier in series story.

I noted above that one of my main problems with Survival was it's lack of content and how Episode Two felt like filler. There was no filler here but this story is the shortest of the series by far. It gets even shorter when you figure that the last five minutes are given over to the coda with Missy and I'd lay a decent bet that Rona Monroe did not write much if any of that part. It would seem that Ms. Monroe likes to get to the point of the story and that actually worked here.

Much of the fan problems with this story seem to be in how simple, straightforward and not tied to the overall arc this story was. I saw one commenter on-line compare it to an episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Having never bothered with that show, I can't speak to that but this story did remind me of a more classic story. The Doctor and companions arrive, they separate, they each get into trouble, they reunite, the Doctor devises a plan, the plan is achieved with a minor hitch or two, the Doctor leaves. You could apply that formula to almost any of the classic era and it fits and fans love it. Here for some reason, they complain that it makes the story fluff. I thought it worked well and in fact would probably sit down and rewatch this one before I would something like Smile or even Thin Ice.

Another problem that I think that people blew up in their heads was the fact that this story is the last one before the series finale two-parter and it had no tie-in. After Face the Raven last year and with the grand culmination of the end of the Moffat era (including the Twelfth Doctor), I think people were expecting a grand lead in and didn't get it. So it's more of a shattering of expectations than anything else. I didn't really get that myself since the coda of the story did have a lead in, although it could easily be argued that the coda was very out of place so that could have also tied in to some of the fan irritation.

Regardless, how did everyone do? Much as Survival's main focus was on Ace, this story focused heavily on Bill. Bill is much more like the Bill prior to the Monk trilogy in that she is more forceful and brash. She openly defies the Doctor by insisting she knows more about the missing 9th Legion and is much more direct in what she wants. She also has a leadership streak with others and a near worshipful devotion to the Doctor. You can't help but get the feeling that Bill was being given a bit of an Ace injection at times. In fact, if you remove Nardole, you could plug Ace and the Seventh Doctor in this story and not have to change nearly anything in the dialogue. But I thought she worked well and was enjoyable.

The one scene of Bill's that I did find a bit overdone was the discussion with the Romans on sexuality. I get the feeling that in the character draft that was given, Bill's homosexuality was listed as a character trait and that became something of a focus point. Maybe because I've read and watched so much on Rome but I thought the discussion was a bit heavy-handed. Once Lucius found out that Bill was gay, that should have been the end of it given how accepted homosexual behavior was in Rome. I doubt it would have occurred to a real Roman to point out one of his soldiers was gay or that he enjoyed trysts with both. To paraphrase Crassus in Sparticus, "some enjoy both snails and oysters".

The Doctor was enjoyable here although not given as much focus as I would have preferred. He is rather witty with a number of good lines. He has the sharp condescension towards the locals that you would expect from the Twelfth Doctor, but not without compassion as well. I rather enjoyed him slapping the various folks around like ignorant children and it helped that they all looked very young as well. Yet at the same time, like a concerned parent, you could tell that he had their best interests at heart. Just no sugar coating about how if they screwed up, they were going to hear about it.

I thought Nardole was well captured as well. He wasn't given much other than to be comic relief but he had a nice repartee with the Doctor and the comic timing between the two worked very well. The Doctor as written here would not be the type to break the tension by creating his own joke and Nardole interjected these much the same way the Fourth Doctor would undercut his own direness with some offhanded remark. I thought it a good balance even if Nardole didn't contribute much to the overall story.

The guest cast was pretty good as well. Kar and Lucius were the only notable figures as everyone else was mostly background but I thought they did well. Lucius played the boy forced into command fairly well and aside from the expository scene regarding sexuality, I thought his overall personality was very likeable. Kar also was played well as the brash young woman who does something stupid in a fit of rage and is now dealing with the consequences. I liked her interactions where she attempts to be bold but is cut down multiple times by the Doctor and then slapped back into reality when she attempts to wallow in guilt. "Time to grow up" was a nice way to put it and I thought her invoking it at the end was a reasonable balance to her character.

The villains were a bit non-descript in this story. It's actually been quite a while since there has been a story with something as a simple as a monster who is attacking and killing people and just needs to be stopped. Even when you've had that (say Oxygen or Knock, Knock) there's been some other force or backstory behind it. This is just a monster on Earth that has to be sent away and arguably the first time it's been seen since Flatline. I would have liked a little more detail on the monsters. Yes the Doctor did go into exposition mode about being like locusts with light but I still would have liked a bit more info given that if it consumes light, how does it feed on humans? A couple of lines here or there to bring it into focus would have been appreciated.

The setting and direction was quite nice. Not quite as good as we've seen from the last few stories but I would have been very hard pressed to tell you that wasn't Scotland that we were seeing. Likewise, everyone looked period and there was a fairly good use of perspective and orientation in telling the story. It made things a bit more immersive than you might have expected.

I am very curious to see how the Missy stuff works out in the end. Clearly it's being set up that she is being given more and more access. She is out of the vault and now in the TARDIS. Yes she supposedly can't leave but that's better than where she was before trapped in the vault. I liked the Missy stuff as it plays in to the overall story and I liked seeing Missy have that flash of being her normal, slightly mad self before being emotional with the music. But the Missy stuff was its own separate piece, completely unrelated to the rest of the story. The original ending was clearly the shot of the people fighting the Eaters of Light etched on the rocks outside the cairn. I actually wonder if there was more story written and those parts were cut to make room for the coda, even though I think you could have easily had both. Or was Rona Monroe told to keep the episode a certain length in anticipation of the coda being tacked on? I don't know but the last bit was not transitioned well and had a very obvious stapled on feel.

Overall, I enjoyed this story. It was not deep but it was a straightforward bit of fun closer to the old school in style. It would be an easy story to drop someone in on to get a feel for both the Twelfth Doctor and Bill. A casual bit of fun to be enjoyed at any time.

Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5