Doctor Who Series 10 First Impressions: Episode 10 (The Eaters Of Light)

I don't have an easy summary for this one beyond "it's fine" so let's just launch on into it.

It's okay, everyone. I speak glowing tentacle.

This is one of the ones this year I was a little excited for, considering the pedigree of the writer. Rona Munro wrote the final story of classic Doctor Who, Survival, and that's one which I quite like. After a long writing career she came back to Doctor Who for this. I don't know anything about her writing career other than writing a 28 year-old story that capped off old Doctor Who, so I've no clue how her style evolved or anything. Aside from one similar shot, this episode has nary a thing to do with Survival so we're going to ignore it for the time being. Instead we'll just plunge on in to... The Eaters Of Light.

Even that's really difficult to do, because for me the strengths of this episode are the little moments and concepts and whatnot. I guess we can start with the concept; a real historical mystery regarding what happened to the 9th Roman Legion in Scotland and why they mysteriously disappeared. It's a nice starting point, as it gives you that perfect pseudo-historical edge to combine "real thing that happened" with "it happened because of sci-fi bullshit". So the answer is that they all got killed by an alien Komodo Dragon from another dimension that sucks the light out of you. Okay. The aforementioned similiar shot comes in the few times we get MONSTER VISION in this episode, as Survival did the same thing. Just to get that out of the way. Things also get rather trad again, much like they did last week; the Doctor and Bill immediately split up and they each encounter one of the two factions who are at war with each other. Sure, Bill isn't captured immediately like the Doctor and Nardole are, but it's still very trad classic Doctor Who vibes that I get from it. Though Bill bungles into it by encountering a screaming Scottish girl with a sword chasing her through the woods, so that's something.


Let's chat a bit about those factions, I suppose. You have the remnants of the 9th Legion who Bill hides out in a cave with for 30 minutes, and the Scottish folks who are being invaded by the 9th Legion whose leader let out the alien Komodo Dragon thing to deal with them but bit off more than she could chew by doing so. That's... a sentence. Doctor Who is at least giving me something sort of new with that, so points there. The 9th Legion really doesn't do too much in that cave, other than chat with Bill. There's also the bit where they're all some degree of LGBT so that's nice! I'm sure the historians who got in a huff last week about a black soldier in Victorian times are all in a huff about this inaccuracy in a story with an alien Komodo Dragon. The Scottish folks... well gee, the Doctor really talks down to them in this one. I did like his speech about his patience shattering into a billion pieces, and his popcorn distraction, but his general tone made me feel like we were writing for Series 8 again. Just a bit off. Just a bit. Oh yes, and then there's the resolution. Let's... get into that.


So the Scottish folks and the Romans meet up and they're all mad at each other, but now they can actually understand one another because of the TARDIS's telepathic auto-translating thing. That got namechecked earlier when Bill's realizing she can talk to a Roman soldier (and "it even does lip sync!" is a lovely reaction we haven't gotten before) so we have some precedent. It's a nice little message about understanding each other and realizing that they're all in this monster mess together. We did have a bit earlier where the Scottish leader girl, Carr, had a speech about how bad the Romans were. It's more surface-level critique on invading and conquering armies, much like we had last week. It's functionally correct but there's no real interesting twist or moral stand taken with it beyond "that's a bad thing". I did like the Doctor saying "okay kids, listen up" because it brought me back to my very old Series 8 reading of Clara as a teacher, before all this mirror bullshit. He learned! Good on him! So then everyone works together to stop the monster and send it back into its interdimensional rift (which is another cool idea I didn't mention) and the Doctor gets ready to sacrifice himself to fight in the rift for all his regenerations and save the Earth. Except... working together! Carr and the 9th Legion go in instead, and somehow this makes everything okay and they presumably spend their lives fighting in that weird portal where a second to them is days for us, so they'll be fighting for thousands of years to us. Okay. The crows (who, as it turns out, can talk) will honor Carr forever by going CARR CARR CARR instead of talking and that's why crows make the noise they do. That's... nice? I like that.


Oh hey, Missy's back! She was in the TARDIS all along and there's this one bit near the end where she does a single tear at hearing the music of the Scottish folk as they go into battle. She's trying to be good but the Doctor doesn't know if he can trust her or not. And that's The Eaters Of Light. It's fine. It has some good moments and is not a horrible episode, but I have to say that it's not going to top my rankings for Series 10. Still, I'll take "fine" over some of the other misfires we've had this year. I don't need to go into THAT again. We're only two away from the end, though. Wow. Only three episodes of the Capaldi era remain. 150 minutes of televised Steven Moffat era are left. Everything is going to change very quickly, and things are likely going to ramp up if these last two are a connected two parter... which they might be, considering what we're bringing in next time. Buckle up, kids. We're in for a ride.


Next time: Missy and Mondas.