Doctor Who: "The Eaters of Light" Review

“The Eaters of Light” marks an interesting milestone for Doctor Who: the first time the revived series has used a writer from the classic series. Rona Munro contributed the final serial of the original run, Survival, a story often held up as being a template for Russell T Davies’ revival. (NB: Wikipedia goes by the rules that serials should be in italics, but single episodes should be in quote marks. There’s a bit of trivia for you.)

One immediate thing the two stories have in common is that they both open atypically for their era. Survival, in accordance with Ace’s character development, takes the unprecedented step (at the time) of bringing the companion back home and using it as the basis for the story. You can all too easily see the parallels between Ace in Perivale and Rose in London.

“The Eaters of Light”, however, is a ‘pseudohistorical’ story: a story that takes place in Earth’s past but includes sci-fi elements, and an idea which the show has been using on a regular basis since 1965. Most of the new series stories in this vein, however, bring up the sci-fi element very quickly. In “The Unicorn and the Wasp”, we knew the killer was an alien right from the pre-titles sequence; ditto “The Shakespeare Code”, “Victory of the Daleks” or “A Town Called Mercy” (to name but a few). “Eaters” feels like it does something very different: there’s a good ten or so minutes at the start where it’s not apparent at all that there’s anything extra-terrestrial about the story (beyond the fact that the Doctor and company have travelled in time, obviously). Even when the alien menace does make itself apparent there’s a lot of screentime where, for want of a better word, the two elements are being kept separate. It feels like an unusual approach; the beginning in particular doesn’t feel too far off some of the ‘pure historical’ stories that were phased out of the original series after 1966.

One aspect of the episode that seems to benefit from this is character work. Or maybe Rona Munro is just really good at writing three-dimensional guest characters. Mark Gatiss at least tried last week, even if the results weren’t always successful, but far too often this series it has felt like the writers don’t much care about giving anyone apart from the regulars any depth at all. That’s not a problem in the slightest here: the whole cast feel like real people in a way they haven’t for quite a while, and from this series “Oxygen” is the only episode which comes even close to matching this episode on this very important front. Scenes like Bill and the Romans discussing sexuality, or the Doctor’s interactions with Kar, or Bill bringing the two factions together, put this episode in a league of its own.

What else is there to say? Charles Palmer directs beautifully, to the point that you’re baffled as to why it took a decade for the show to book him again. The story itself is fairly simple (as with last week), but it moves at a fair clip, and it has such lovely heart and, dare I say it, meaning. Coming to such a well-rounded, likeable story as this after the turgid Monk trilogy is a revelation. I was able to appreciate “Empress of Mars” for what it was – not groundbreaking, but a welcome change – but this is just something else.

So, yeah: This is a really good episode. It actively tries new things, and carries them off well. It utilises all the regulars well (every time Matt Lucas actually has something to do, I get a bit sad that there’s been so many times this series he’s been sidelined). The character development is really welcome, and – just to end the review on a bit of a downer – it’s a shame that that feels so unusual for this era of the show. The final scenes, as the Legion and Kar sacrifice themselves, feel moving in a way that last week's revelation of the Colonel's cowardice, or anything anyone did in "The Pyramid at the End of the World", simply didn't, because the characters ring so true. But overall, great stuff.