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BBC The Eaters of Light |
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| Story No. | 299 | 
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| Production Code | Series 10, episode 10 | |
| Dates | June 17, 2017 |
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With Peter Capaldi
Written by Rona Munro Directed by Charles Palmer Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Brian Minchin. |
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|
BBC The Eaters of Light |
|
| Story No. | 299 |
|
| Production Code | Series 10, episode 10 | |
| Dates | June 17, 2017 |
|
With Peter Capaldi
Written by Rona Munro Directed by Charles Palmer Executive Producers: Steven Moffat, Brian Minchin. |
| Synopsis: Why did the Ninth Legion of Romans disappear in second-century Scotland? |
The Mists of Time by Niall Jones 14/8/24
For Doctor Who fans of a certain vintage, the name Rona Munro will conjure up images of the dull streets of suburban West London, Anthony Ainley's Master with glowing yellow cats' eyes and the Doctor and Ace walking off into the sunset. Her story, Survival, has the melancholy honour of being the final serial of the Classic Series. At the time, Munro was only around thirty years old, part of a group of young writers, including Andrew Cartmel and Ben Aaronovitch, whose early careers coincided with Doctor Who's dying days.
Since then, Munro has worked primarily in the theatre, authoring dozens of plays. The best-known of these are her James Plays, a historical trilogy about Scotland's medieval kings that was performed in an epic seven-and-a-half-hour production at the Edinburgh Festival in 2014. Given this, it's not surprising that, when Munro returned to write for the revived series of Doctor Who, becoming the first - and, thus far, only - classic writer to do so, she chose to write a historical set in her native Scotland.
On the face of it, The Eaters of Light seems fairly conventional. The formula of the Doctor and companion going back in time and solving a historical mystery has been used multiple times before, with everything from the Great Fire of London to Agatha Christie's disappearance in 1926 being attributed to aliens. Like the previous episode, Empress of Mars, however, The Eaters of Light quietly pushes the boundaries of its genre. The Eaters of Light differs from other recent historical episodes in that it embraces the slippage between history and legend and leans more towards fantasy than science-fiction.
Although the story is set mainly in the 2nd Century AD, it actually begins in the present day, with a young boy trying to discourage his sister from getting too close to a set of standing stones, named in the captions as the Devil's Cairn. He warns her that 'everyone knows there are ghosts in the hill', but she just wants to hear the music that comes from the cairn. The stones are a place of legend, their original use overlaid by nearly two millennia of stories. They are a site of fascination but also of fear, sitting sinisterly in the landscape, overlooking a town that was new when the stones were already old. Despite the markings that cover them, the stones are unreadable, their true significance lost to history. This introductory scene suggests that the episode is as interested in the ways in which the past is remembered as it is in its actual events. History itself is like a ghost, haunting the present: unknowable, enchanting and other.
When the Doctor, Bill and Nardole arrive 1,900 years earlier, they aren't interested in the stones. Instead, their trip centres around the Roman Ninth Legion, which mysteriously disappeared far to the north of Hadrian's Wall. Bill is convinced she knows what happened to them, while the Doctor has his own ideas. She tells him, 'You don't know more about the Ninth Legion than me, you don't. I read the book, I loved the book.' This is presumably a reference to Rosemary Sutcliff's classic children's novel about the legion, "The Eagle of the Ninth", further highlighting the extent to which the mystery of the past is discovered through stories. Their conversation outside the TARDIS shows the ease of their friendship, arguing and bantering good-naturedly, with Bill's enthusiasm for Roman history butting up against the Doctor's certainty that he knows everything.
Another thing that the Doctor thinks he knows is why crows talk. He comments offhandedly, 'It's a crow, all crows talk'. The only reason that they don't in the future is that 'humans just stopped having intelligent conversations with them'. In most other episodes, talking crows would be a cause for alarm, a sign that something alien is influencing the environment, or maybe even evidence that crows themselves are aliens, but here it is taken for granted. This presents the ancient past as strange and enchanted, a place that exists in the realm of folklore and legend.
The Doctor also notes that cairns were seen as doors to other worlds. It is from just such a door that the Eaters of Light, the creatures who give the episode its old-school title, come. Although they are presumed to be extraterrestrial and are given something of a scientific explanation by the Doctor, there is no serious attempt to rationalise them like the werewolf in Tooth and Claw, which the Doctor catalogues as a 'Lupin Wavelength Haemovariform'. The fact that they come from another dimension makes them otherworldly, rather than alien, and they seem to fit within the worldviews of both the Romans and the Picts. In truth, they are monsters: reptilian, vaguely dragonish creatures, with seemingly elemental powers over light. They are another element of the story that would usually be presented in a sci-fi way, but which here fits more easily into the world of legend and fantasy.
For all its fantastical elements, however, The Eaters of Light is still rooted in a plausible-seeming vision of ancient Scotland, a place just beyond the reach of the Roman Empire and located at the very edge of the known world. Early in the episode, Bill gets separated from the Doctor and Nardole and finds herself hauled up with a group of Roman soldiers, survivors from the Ninth Legion. In contrast, the Doctor and Nardole find themselves at the mercy of the local Picts. By presenting the Romans and Picts separately, before eventually bringing them together, the episode draws parallels between them, the most obvious being the warriors' extreme youth. Although Munro includes a famous critique of the Romans - 'They create a desert and call it peace', attributed to the Caledonian leader Calgacus in a work by the ancient historian Tacitus - putting it into the mouth of the Picts' leader, Ka, the episode doesn't take sides between Romans and Picts. The Doctor may find the Picts especially infuriating, but he recognises that they are essentially just frightened children.
Bill's encounter with the Romans is less confrontational; although they are initially hostile, they do save her from one of the monsters. Her time with them is revealing in two main ways. Firstly, it marks the moment when she becomes aware of the TARDIS's translation matrices. Although this happens unusually late in the series, the way in which it happens says a lot about her character. For one thing, she doesn't assume that the Romans will be able to understand her and is surprised when they do; for another, she works it out for herself, rather than being told by the Doctor, highlighting her quick wit and familiarity with sci-fi concepts. Secondly, her turning down of Lucius' interest in her on the grounds that she's 'not into men' leads into a conversation that reveals the widespread acceptance of bisexuality in the Roman world, challenging the assumption that the past was more conservative than the present. As a lesbian, Bill is, if anything, old-fashioned.
While The Eaters of Light is not an episode that necessarily stands out in Series 10 - in fact, it suffers from its position within the series, coming just before its highly memorable, ambitious, brutal finale - it is nevertheless a quietly innovative piece of Doctor Who that prefigures the move towards fantasy under Russell T Davies' current stewardship of the show. It's not especially showy, but it is well-written, well-acted and often very funny (see, in particular, the scene in which Nardole, having ingratiated himself with the locals, proceeds to tell them what really happened to the Mary Celeste). The Eaters of Light finds a gap in history and uses it as an opportunity to tell a story that is itself a legend.
We may never know what really happened to the Roman Ninth Legion. Did it involve elemental creatures from another dimension? Probably not, but you never know...