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| "Don't cry, mate. John Simm and the Cybermen are in next week's episode." |
Well, it wasn't bad and certainly maintains an acceptable level of entertainment laid down by the rest of the season. No bad acting, a straightforward plot, even some nice mockery of Game of Thrones that a septugenarian Tat Wood will have to explain in a future About Time book in between ranting about his childhood nostalgia and total disgust for you foreign wops who don't appreciate beans on toast.
But there's not much to say about it.
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| Fighting Like Animals, Dying Like Animals: ACTUAL FOOTAGE |
Even a smug "hey, it's just like Survival with the Doctor, his tomboy companion who fancies girls and a subtle Master on a barren conflict-ravaged magical world where the feral natives are combining with more civilized invaders as a greater, unexplained power consumes them both plus some talking black animals hang around being pointlessly sinister" comparison feels a waste of time.
The whole episode could have been swapped with Thin Ice for all it matters, given its Eurocentric historical status. Not bad, but for a show about to dive into season finale - and era finale - it's the most disposable and skippable episode since Fear Her. Pretty much every penultimate episode from Boomtown to Utopia to Closing Time to Nightmare in Silver have cranked things up a notch. There's no sense that things are spiraling out of control, that a final battle is upon us, that it's time to put down our dundee cake and start taking things seriously because shit just got real.
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| To think, back in 1989 the lesbian stuff was subtext! |
Eaters of Light feels rather like Ms. Munro wrote a three-part story but they only filmed the last two episodes. We miss the carnage of the slaughtered Ninth Legion and learn everything from hearsay, mainly the Doctor shouting things. This kind of worked in Survival as he was the only one who could think clearly and the werewolf-style narrative was self-explanatory. The nameless monster barely gets any explanation, or even justification. If it eats light, um, why does it have special tentacles to mummify humans? Why aren't they happy with the light of their own dimension? What does that have to do with the talking crows? Who carved the image of the TARDIS on the stone? Why does music play in the hill when it's nigh irrelevant?
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| "And why are you holding a torch for me? You're gay. Much was made of this!" |
When you think about it, Survival was crap in the terms of actually explaining itself. It didn't even name things except "Cheetah people" "Cheetah planet" and mumbled something about the power of an animal that can destroy you unless it doesn't. When the Doctor suddenly announces his cunning plan involves a hitherto unmentioned heroic sacrifice, it's borderline tedious waiting for the other characters to do it for him. There's none of the lingering consequences you'd expect from the last standalone ep in the series, like the Doctor and Clara swapping places in Forest of the Night or Clara dying in Face the Raven. Earlier in the season, it wouldn't have felt so damn throwaway. Worse, there are clearly a lot of random cuts - the Doctor refers to dialogue he hasn't heard about, Lucius has a nickname Bill knows but we don't, and obviously the stuff about the black slime made sense in an earlier draft.
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| "Is it just me, or would this work better if I was dressed like Ronald McDonald with a bubble perm and you were a wisecracking three-foot-tall CGI Emperor Penguin?" |
Although the Doctor's "we fight like animals we die like animals" speech is better written than the one in the previous episode, the fact is it's more exciting seeing redcoats and Ice Warriors about to kill each other than some face-painted wildlings and Rory Williams cosplayers. Instead of chaos unfolding in apparently real time, days pass between scenes and the threat of the villainous unnamed dragon thing remains abstract. It eats two speaking parts and is defeated by some unknown material that poisons daylight. What's more, the story resolutely stays in prehistoric Scotland and, although it definitely looks nice, the narrative needs to see what's on the other side of the gateway. Imagine Survival if there had been no scenes on the Cheetah Planet and just had characters vanish and then reappear later without explanation?
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| "THE MEDIOCRITY... IT BURNS!!!" |
(Apparently there's a whole aspect I missed with the pre-credit sequence set in a parallel timeline where the Doctor was killed off, and the bookended final scene with the TARDIS not carved into rock and the crows not calling his name refer to this alteration. Um, OK. File that along with "why people were killing themselves in Extremis" as Stuff I Needed TV Tropes To Spoon-Feed Me).
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| "And over there, if you squint, you can just make out relevance to the ongoing story arc..." |
So, yes, it's not a bad bit of Doctor Who but after the Monk trilogy dominated the middle of the season it has in turn rendered stories with more understandable threats less trivial. Yes, Martians might invade 19th Century Africa... but they won't, because it only gets one episode. The Eaters of Light might consume all life like that Genesis song... but it won't, because it only gets one episode. It's shameful that you can't disagree with Whovians that the trailer for next week was more exciting than the episode that preceded it, though even then there's a note of disappointment as we have a trailer that doesn't try to make the story interesting for new viewers. What the hell is Mondas? What's a Mondassiansybemen? Is that something to do with the blue people from Oxygen coming back? Who's Mr. Beardy and why is his yearning for a snog in any way supposed to entice me to view?
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| Bill finds herself in one of Amelia Williams' less-disturbing sexual fantasies. |
Yeah, there's no doubt that after a confident start, this season has stumbled. Hopefully it won't fall flat on its face like the last two.
So, to pad out the review... wow, I'm doing a lot of that nowadays, I'll see if I can identify those thirteen clues from the Radio Times... though they mostly appear to be hats
1) A presidential button and some dynamite from the Monk trilogy maybe?
2) The forbidden number 507... no idea
3) A copy of Northanger Abbey... um, nope, no idea what that refers to
4) Missy's hat from World Enough and Time
5) Spacehelmet from Oxygen
6) Frost fair poster from Thin Ice
7) The Landlord's tuning fork from Knock Knock
8) A Movellan handgun from The Pilot
9) An emoji from Smile
10) A Victorian spacesuit helmet from The Empress of Mars
11) A centurian's helmet and the monster-defeating crystal from The Eaters of Light
12) A triangle. Something to do with the Monk's pyramid?
13) "4.367 LY" presumably something to do with the finale?
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| Missy finds my inability to work out the answers endearingly retarded. |
Oh, Whovians was crap. You probably knew that. Shaun Micallef certainly does.
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