The Eaters Of Light: Ranking - 235

   The Eaters Of Light

(Series 10, Dr 12 with Bill, 17/6/2017, showrunner: Steven Moffat, writer: Rona Munro, Director: Charles Palmer) 

Rank: 235

'Today on 'Pict Of The Pops' and running up the 2nd century pop charts its a special guest, the eater of light singing 'You Are My Sunshine' and 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star...Yummy!'

I had such high hopes for this episode, dear readers, the episode I was looking forward to like no other in the season: one of my favourite writers returning to the series after a record twenty-eight year gap! Ancient Britons at last after an even longer gap! (I still can’t believe that this most British series that ever existed only just got round to doing a story about our Celtic past fifty-four years in!) The slot near the end of the series that in many ways is my favourite: the one just before the big season finale, when the writers and actors both know their characters inside out caught just before the end of year heroics that, honestly, could go either way in modern Who. It's also a story near the end of what is by far and away the 12th Doctor's best series where most every story turned to, if not quite gold, then Dalekanium: explosive and memorable. Though it’s not perfect by any means Peter Capaldi’s third and final full year is also his most consistent, with only one mis-step (‘Oxygen’) up to now. ‘Eaters Of Light’ then has some of the best ingredients of the era - and it’s far from being the worst of Dr Who, with some really nice moments scattered across the script – but given the many things going for it this story does end up being something of a disappointment, coming out the oven half-baked, a pict-and-mix style that’s a bit of Rona’s own style, a bit of Dr Who, a bit of history book, a bit myth and legends without ever quite being all of these things properly. The result is a story that’s not horrid, just forgettable; I’ve watched this story a few times now and can still only barely remember it, even though as a historical from my favourite Capaldi year it should by rights be up there with my favourites. 

 Getting Rona Monro back again to write for the series so long after ‘Survival’ (she is, to date, the only writer from the show’s 20th century era to come back for the 21st) was really quite a feather in Dr Who’s cap. To non-fans she’s arguably the most famous writer to work on the series (as opposed to writers the series made famous like Terry Nation or writers who end up being very famous to a small cult audience, such as Ben Aaronovitch, whose ‘Rivers Of London’ series is really big to locals), with success coming in the theatre hot on the heels of writing for giant cheetahs on horseback for Who: 1991’s ‘Bold Girls’, about women from Belfast bearing grudges round a kitchen table . Nowadays she’s maybe better known for her historical dramas like the series of interconnected plays about James I, II and III. The story goes that Russell T and Steven M had both long assumed they’d never get someone of her profile to write for the series again but, by chance, had taken a rare day off from making Who to go to the Edinburgh Festival together and spotted that one of Rona’s plays was on (given the timings possibly ‘Scuttlers’, a play about Manchester gangs that’s the sort of thing that, pre-Who, would have been a cert to cast Christopher Eccleston in the lead role). Hanging around backstage they enthused about ‘Survival’ to her and what a fan they were of her work – Rona assumed they were fans, given that both men look like he stereotypical Whovian, gawky be-spectacled and enthusiastic. Eventually they admitted that, actually, they’d had rather a lot to do with bringing the show back and while they were there maybe she might find time in her busy schedule to work for the new series? Moffat never seriously expected her to say yes but, to his delight, she said she’s be glad to (and was actually a bit miffed not to be asked given her success in the years since!) Proudly announcing Rona at the read-through Moffat called her ‘one of the most distinguished playwrights in the world’ before joking that ‘the last time Rona wrote for us Dr Who went off the air for sixteen years so we’re taking a risk here guys!’ (Even so maybe it’s not much of a joke: at the time the paltry 2.89 million viewers who tuned into this story was the lowest Dr Who ever had, lower even than ‘Survival’, although a few 13th Doctor stories beat the record: ‘Legend Of The Sea Devils’ is, at the time of writing, the lowest of all at 2.2million). 

Given her calibre Moffat didn’t do his usual thing and hand out an idea of his from an overall view of how the series was shaping up and instead let Rona choose her own idea. Understandably she went with history: she was a real buff, having studied history just down the road from their chance meeting, at Edinburgh University and her brother is, indeed, a respected archaeologist who loved sharing his exciting new finds with his sister. One of the things that excited Rona most was mysteries that historians had never been able to solve and one of her favourite from her childhood was in a book she’s read, ‘The Eagle Of The Ninth’ (1954) by author Rosemary Sutcliff about a missing Roman legion who had disappeared from records without trace after being posted in Aberdeen. The Munros had grown up in the area and spent a lot of their childhood running around wondering if they could work the mystery out themselves and sensing the past calling to them (just like the girl in the rather odd opening scene of this story sensing ghosts). Nobody officially knows what happened to the 5000 soldiers who made up the 9th: they’re there on records in AD43 but they’re all gone by 117 AD: The Romans were meticulous record-keepers and list pretty much every other legion with very few casualties, give or take the legions posted to the notorious border with England where ‘border reivers’ fought the Romans harder than anyone (a far more entertaining story than ‘Braveheart’). Historians long wondered if there’s simply been a more-successful-than-normal ambush but if so you’d think there would be a local folk tale about ‘the day we snuffed out a whole Roman legion’ and possibly some songs. The truth is probably more prosaic (the most likely theory is that the legion was recalled for some reason and sent off to fight another battle in another country whose records were lost somewhere along the way), but there is at least a Dr Who sized mystery to ask what happened to them. 

 So far so good: it’s what happens with that mystery that’s a bit odd. One of Munro’s great talents is finding links with the past and the present, of making past historical events seem relevant to the time her plays are written (which is what makes her such a great Who writer). She thought that Dr Who was so successful because it was part of the same tradition as Celts and Picts (the name given over to the Scottish back then – the idea of what Scotland consists of changed by the decade so it’s not quite what we think of as Scotland today but it’s basically the same as now, give or take the bits that kept changing hands like Carlisle) gathered round a campfire trading stories in the dark and decided to write that into her story. While Ancient Britons were a more irreligious lot than most European settlements, like everyone else they feared that the sun might just choose not to come up one morning and leave them in perennial darkness (especially in Scotland where the sun can feel like a distant memory in Winter). So Rona invented a monster that would play on those fears, an alien who fed off light (it’s plausible, too, that even though she always claimed not to be much of a Who writer then or now she tuned in to see ‘Ghostlight’ the story before ‘Survival’ where an alien called Light takes over a Victorian mansion). Which is a nice idea, but Rona’s heart is not in the monster, which is sketched in more vaguely than almost any other monster in the series and doesn’t even get a ‘proper’ name. Rona’s heart, you sense, just isn’t in it (she’s far more interested in people) which means that instead of being a big ferocious threat that gobbles up humans and can destroy the world we just see a few glimpses. 

The designers, not having much description to go on, sensibly turn it into a sort of armour-plated tortoise, recalling the Roman legion formation where soldiers would raise their shields and walk together (the ‘real’ threat Britons would have been scared of back then), even though Rona’s idea was to make it or like a ‘kelpie’, a creature from Scottish myth that’s a sort of overlarge carnivorous seahorse. Given that they only take one warrior per generation they're not exactly the biggest threat the Doctor's ever faced either (a plot that’s been in Who a few times since ‘The Krotons’ – and if a story is leaning on that story for plots too heavily that’s not a good sign, fond of it as I am), plus that’s daft: why does one single soldier defeat it once a generation? How could that possibly help it in evolutionary terms? Does it not like snacking between meals and doesn’t have much of an appetite? Even though its used to eating stars not people? And why does the Doctor effectively try to kill it (or at least sacrifice himself, then let other people sacrifice themselves) when its worst crime is that its just a bit hungry? He’s usually better at monsters with pure motives like this: you think he’d take them in the Tardis (after having fun squeezing it through the doors) and taking it to a sun round a planet like Frontios that doesn’t ‘need’ the sun (back in the days when it was full of underground Tractators rather than human colonists). Plus eating stars is the sort of silly B movie plot that would get rejected by any other writer. I mean how? What cutlery does it use? Doesn’t it get indigestion? How does it go to the loo? How could it possibly evolved in evolutionary terms where eating an impossibly large fuel source and converting light to fuel needed to live possibly be a sensible natural thing? Why hasn’t it simply eaten everything in the sky already every time it gets the munchies? The methodology of this alien is all over the place. It doesn’t help that, because of the way the story is set up, the vast majority of it happens in the pitch dark so we can barely see what’s happening, except for occasional scenes of bright sunshine (it’s a peculiarity that a lot of the worst Who stories from the 20th century are shot too brightly so they lose all atmosphere – ‘Warriors Of The Deep’ is a particular example – while a lot of the 21st century ones are too dark to see anything). It’s the sort of thing that, had this been any writer more junior than Moffat, he’d have praised to the hilt then asked them to go away and think of something more filmatic for television – only of course he feels he can’t do that with Rona (whose TV credits are pretty thin on the ground: an episode of Casualty, would you believe, and a few standalone dramas).

 Rona, too, doesn’t quite get the regular characters (again, I wouldn’t like to be in Moffat’s shoes ‘correcting’ her writing). The Doctor alternates between being enthusiastic and sulky; not that unusual for him I know but the way other stories pitch it he tends to be naturally a bit grumpy until something captures his imagination and he enthuses about it endlessly. Rona seems to have got the memo the wrong way round: she writes the 12th Doctor as being like his younger 10th or 11th self, rushing around gushing with enthusiasm, then making his first instinct to ‘give up’ when things get a bit hard. Nardole wasn’t in the script till late on (originally it was thought Matt Lucas could only spare a few days filming here and there cross the year, but then another project fell through and he had more time on his hands so Moffat slotted him into more scripts where he could, particularly the later ones) and he suddenly starts sounding like the Doctor, more assertive and less like his usual comedy relief, as if Moffat – inserting his lines - is trying to cover up this fact without treading on Rona’s toes. It’s Bill whose the biggest change though: she’s gone from being a loveable hands-on doofus resembling Sarah Jane to a reluctant whinging traveller of the Peri persuasion. The script separates them both early on so Capaldi and Pearl Mackie don't get to play off each other the way they're used to and while that's not uncommon in Dr Who single episodes it's a real problem here with the time-travel element having to juggle the fact that they're experiencing things at different speeds. 

 Bill seems uncharacteristically unfazed by the Doctor not turning up for two whole days to rescue her, all while having nothing to eat (you think she’d be hallucinating about being back in the uni canteen for a start). She suddenly thinks to ask now, eleven adventures in, why people in the past can understand her and what language she sounds like she’s peaking to them (this feels like an issue Rona raised, with Moffat patiently explaining about the Tardis translator circuits), with a tedious ‘explanation’ that goes on too long and if we needed to have it at all (companions can learn these things offscreen after all) should have come in ‘Smile’, Bill’s first trip away from home. We know Bill’s smarter than she lets on, that she hung around the Doctor’s lectures in ‘The Pilot’ because she genuinely likes learning but could never afford it, ending up the working class dinner lady looking after students who don’t want to learn. But the Doctor’s lectures were (at least as pitched to the students before he inevitably goes off track) about science; she’s never shown the slightest interest in history despite spending so much of her time inside a time machine and is always much more thrilled to be in space in the future than in the past. Until now she’s always been a passenger following the Doctor (because to her, more than any other companion since Susan, he’s a father figure she doesn’t question). Suddenly she’s suggesting their trips back in time and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of ancient Rome to rival only Rona’s. Where has that been lurking all this time? It’s also utterly wrong for her age group: Bill is meant to be a few years younger than me – close enough to have been taught the same standard British history curriculum after all – and I can tell you for absolute certainty that no kid, not even the sort likely to be interested in history, like the Romans. We just studied it too many times: twice in primary school (for a year chances are), once again in secondary school, another term in the run up to GCSEs…There is so much fascinating history to learn about out there, ours and other countries’, that the blooming Romans just kept getting in the way. Had Bill gained a love of all things Picts (in her desperate need to ‘fit in’ and feel British) it might have made more sense but Romans? Ugh. For my generation we see that words and collectively think ‘oh no, not them again’. Once again it’s as if Rona quickly read the series notes cobbled together when Moffat wrote ‘The Pilot’ but doesn’t know about the subtle changes that have taken place across series ten as he was writing and re-editing it and Moffat doesn’t feel comfortable insisting on those changes being made. 

 That is all understandable and not really a surprise: Rona’s got hit West End plays to cope with, she doesn’t have time to be watching the rushes of ten half-completed episodes. What’s more of a surprise, though, is how little worldbuilding there is, something she’s normally so good at. This is, so far, our only journey back to the 2nd century - we've been a few hundred years either side a few times but never here - and it's such a fascinating period, as the Roman empire start to disappear and leave the Celtic picts back to fend for themselves, effectively going back to rural living after the urban sprawl of the Roman way of life. It’s one of the most interesting periods of British history there is (way way way more than Romans or Victorians) as a bunch of peace-loving farmers, who mostly kept to themselves, suddenly band together for the first time to keep out an invading force so much bigger, tougher, brutal, equipped and experiences than they are. They really shouldn’t have stood a chance and clearly ‘lose’ over a period of centuries, but they still gave the Romans hell rather than rolling over and to the end (when the Romans pull out in AD383) were still giving their conquerors headaches. Unfortunately we seem to spend a lot more time with the Romans than we ever do the picts (and while Romans are always interesting they have enough DW stories of their own) and way more time with a light-eating locust from outer space, who might technically be new to Who but feels like something we've had a quadzillion times before. The emphasis in the wrong place in other words. There’s no sense in this story about what it’s really like to live in Ancient Scotland. The pict teenagers we meet in this story could be the last stragglers of a great tribe, some kids who have gone off exploring on their own for the first time, rebels who couldn’t stand Pict culture and ran away Doctor style or their tribe’s last desperate chance of finding resources – the script never quite pins it down. Their first reaction on seeing Romans isn’t a natural ‘aaagh, run!’ or an Asterix/Boadacea style ‘we can take them fellers’ but an ‘oh, hello’. These two are natural enemies, especially in the wilds of Scotland: The Romans weren’t neighbours but invaders, they plundered all the resources for their homeland, massacred anyone who stood up to them and considered the picts the same way most people do animals: nothing to concern them if they keep out the way, people to kill without a second glance if they become annoying or get in the way. The picts, who see their freedom as their birthright, ought to kill them where they stand as soon as look at them (or at least talk about doing that if they’re too chicken); instead they feel like a bunch of teenagers hanging out round the shops. ‘I’m bored ‘ ‘Yeah I’m bored too’ ‘Wanna hang?’ ‘’Pose – not like there’s anything better to do’. 

 The Romans, meanwhile, are on a job to uphold the glory of Rome, recruits who’ve been through years, maybe decades, of torturous training to be flash troops who think as one and seize these backward colonies I the name of their glorious empire. In modern day terms they’re like the hardened troops of the SAS. They don’t look it do they? We’ve seen Romans on their turf before, in ‘The Romans’, ‘Fires of Pompeii’ ‘The Pandroica Opens’ and ‘The War Games’ but this is first time we’ve seen what they did to Britain, where they’re the invaders not the locals. At a time when immigration was such a political hot potato its good to be reminded that we were once the barbarians a big civilised empire didn’t like. But there’s no sense of outrage mixed with awe at the Romans coming over here, taking our jobs, forcing us to pay taxes, ordering us to bathe, cleaning up our water, giving us a rudimentary healthcare system, inventing roads to help us get from A to B quicker, etc etc. Of how the Romans both made life harder and easier all in one go, leading to a debate about whether it’s worth giving up your freedom to live longer and not die young from some awful disease which is the ‘real’ debate at the heart of the 2nd century. There’s no urgency in this story either, for a tribe who would have been as taut as a string, constantly on alert and expecting a Roman ambush all the time, even when an alien whose eating the sun and stars (and why do they know this as, clearly, it hasn’t eaten the sun yet) pops its head out to say hello. The only person who looks scared the whole story is Bill and she’s far more used to danger than either Picts or Romans are. The ending where the Picts and Romans agree to team up with each other to take down the alien threat is also laughably twee - that would be a little like North and South Korea or even Ukraine and Russia suddenly working with each other today, all hostilities gone. I mean, we haven't fully forgiven France for the Napoleonic wars yet. 

 All that said where Rona excels is in the same place as ‘Survival’. This is a similar teenage coming of age tale about finding your ‘tribe’ (even when it doesn’t look how you were taught it would) and taming your wild inner beastie – there are no big cats and no feminist metaphors (which is a shame: Rona had such a distinct voice last time and as a scifi series made in the 1960s Who is naturally a male-dominated vision, despite having a woman as its first producer – we need that contrasting voice) but there is the shared sense of a group of teenagers struggling to find their place in the world common to a lot of Rona’s work. The Picts and Romans have more in common than they have apart: they’re both away from home, battling over the odds, struggling for, well, survival. They both are recognisably like modern teenagers too, with their warpaint that looks like tattoos, that sense of burgeoning freedom and independence tinged with fear or being trapped and having to be responsible for themselves. The celebrated scene where Bill is captured by the Romans and awkwardly raises the fact that she’s a lesbian not expecting them to get it, only to be laughed at for being ‘backwards’ because ore Romans are bisexual (taking their cues from most of their emperors) and where homosexuality is common, is hilarious (and true!) You could put any of these people down in 21st century Britain and they’d (mostly) fit in. the idea of the past being so close to the present and future is very Dr Who and proof that Rona didn’t just write for this series, in 1989 or 2016, for the money or career opportunities; she did it because she ‘got’ what this series was all about. It’s an interesting twist on the ‘usual’ Historical I wish Who would try more: in David Whittaker’s time, when the Tardis went into the past every other story, it was an alien world utterly unlike the present. In the modern series historicals tend to be set round a celebrity historical character everybody knows. But this is neither: it’s the past as being like now, only without electricity or shops, because humanity never really changes and teenagers then and now have more in common than teenagers and adults of any era. 

 The 9th legion of the Imperial Roman Army really did disappear without trace and that's a plot ripe for a Dr Who story if ever there was one. The themes of ordinary people struggling against an upper class group of Romans who, well, roam around their homeland has a lot of parallels with the modern age and is a salient reminder that the people our politicians look down on used to conquer us easy-peasy one-two-threesy. The effects of the gate the warriors walk through is great: very scifi and clearly where most of the budget went this episode (it certainly didn’t go on the lighting). There's another of those parallel time subplots, which despite having had lots of them by now somehow never gets old (age being relative to the time dimension you're travelling in and what Dr Who story you saw recently, of course) which - seemingly more by coincidence than design – nicely sets up the season finale to come so Moffat doesn’t have to waste precious scenes trying to explain a spaceship where time passes at different speeds (is this part Moffat’s idea in fact/ It does feel rather plastered on and seems much more like his natural ‘Time Traveller’s Wife’ style that has time as a main character in his stories although that said Rona’s a good mimic – she might have picked that angle up herself by dipping in and out of series nine to see how the style of Who had changed since she last wrote for the show). As ever with BBC historicals it all looks amazing and that's more impressive than usual given that there isn't exactly a constant stock and off-the-peg outfits ready for the 2nd century. We might be in Wales rather than Scotland (Cwm Cadlan quarry at Penderyn and Fforest Fawr Country Park, Tongwynlais, near Caerphilly) but the setting just ‘feels’ right and the location shooting is very generous with very few bits and pieces done inside a studio so you really get the feel of the great outdoors. The warpaint might look like modern tattoos but that’s all authentic and carefully researched too (it was designed to both make the wearers feel part of a unified ‘gang’ and to be terrifying and scare people off in battle. Actually that works for both past and present).The result is a visual feast full of campfires, cloaks, war paint, tattoos, silly headgear...Actually it really resembles nothing so much as Ormskirk on a Friday night in 2023. 

 Like ‘Survival’ the story centres round an animal, this time a crow. Only they’re an incidental detail this time, not the main thrust of the plot and this part doesn’t feel as if it quite fits. We’ve had some pretty major revelations about our world randomly thrown away in the middle of episodes across the 12th Doctor era (the moon as an alien’s egg being the most notorious) and here’s another one. I’m not sure I entirely buy the idea that crows don’t talk to humans because they’ve been sulking for 2000 years, while the fact that the crows are saying ‘Kaw!’ rather than ‘Cor!’, to remind humanity about the sacrifice made by the brave ancient Brit who gave her life battling the eater of light alien seems like a case of naming a warrior after a plotpoint to me rather than the other way around (‘Kaw’ is not a natural Pictish name: Breth, Constantin, Denbecan, Taran: basically real names from the 2nd century sound like the sort of thing Terry Nation would have invented. ‘Kaw’ just doesn’t fit. It’s too scifi. Plus you’d have thought that ‘Kaw’, the metal crow in ‘The Infinite Quest’ would have mentioned something to the Doctor about being there when his brethren got their name. 

 The ending, which is definitely by Moffat, also feels out of place with Missy not only out the vault but sitting round the Tardis watching events on the scanner like she’s ‘us’ . It was actually intended for the end of ‘Empress If Mars’ before that story over-ran and this one under-ran, causing a last minute switch in the running order. It would have made more sense attached to that episode though: for starters it turns out that it was Missy’s intervention that brought everyone home from Mars, something we have to wait a full week and another story to find out here. The ‘who could possibly be in the vault that the Doctor needs to stand guard over?’ plot element is by far the weakest of Moffat’s many, usually carefully orchestrated series arcs. The surprise at seeing Missy was more ‘but that’s really obvious –we thought there’d be a twist!’ rather than ;’wow, it’s here!’ Missy doesn’t really need to be here at all this year: yes it’s fun when (spoilers) she starts flirting with and then shooting herself and there’s a great scene at the start of the next story where she role-plays at being the Doctor, but in plot terms the fact she’s been kept in a vault never amounts to anything (so the Doctor’s meant to be her jailor until she can prove her worth okay, but what makes her suddenly think she has? Why isn’t he more horrified that she got out? Or if he secretly wanted her to get out so he could test her for old time’s sake and to feel less alone, why not leave the vault ‘accidentally’ open a bit to test her earlier? The whole series arc of him staying put in one place at a university is making less and less sense). Frankly we could have cut it altogether and put it at the start of ‘The World Enough and Time’, especially as two of the best lines in ‘Eaters Of Light’ ended up on the cutting room floor (the very Moffat-sounding joke that Nardole is ‘allerhgic to swords, spears, daggers, any pointy metal things actually’ and the Doctor’s speech that ‘there are places in the universe like deserts of darkness, endless stretches of space with no living stars, nothing but black desolation and nobody knows why…’ which would have made the eater of light far scarier by having us at least hear about the things it’s done in the past). 

 ‘Eaters Of Light’ isn’t bad, then, but it feels like the story that got away: a writer of that calibre, in an era this strong, with a plot this good and Dr Whoy ought to be a lot more memorable than this. If all of Dr Who was episodes told round the campfire this is the one nobody would be asking to hear again, not when there are better more impactful stories to remember (‘Survival’ being one of them). There's a lot to admire and keep you watching and it’s made with love, but nothing quite gels. To pict this one apart, these characters never quite feel real or multi-dimensional: usually when that happens in modern Who I blame the 50minute episode format which doesn’t allow for as much space as normal but that story has far more characters running around and only lasted 25 minutes longer (less, actually, with cliffhangers and recaps). The dialogue has a couple of crackers in it (although the best line ‘Their work is robbery, slaughter, plunder. They do this work and they call it 'empire'. They make deserts and they call it 'peace’ is stolen wholesale from Calgacus, an actual Pict general). The setting would be wonderful, had they used it more and fleshed it in with detail instead of it being noises-off. The alien would have been a nice idea had it appeared in a ‘New Adventures’ book so we didn’t have to see it realised on screen and where it didn’t feel quite so odd that an alien with this much power and ability to chomp on stars simply appeared in a routine historical without changing the course of the series. I’m amazed, actually, that this one is a book, Rona taking time out of her busy schedule to turn it into print a full thirty-two years after her novelisation of ‘Survival’ – not just because she’s more known for writing plays than books but because unlike almost every other novelisation of the modern series it isn’t being written to correct something visual the TV version got ‘wrong’ so much as expand on the themes and characters (which it does, but not spectacularly so). It would help if we had more than five minutes not in the pitch black. As a distinctly underwhelmed Missy exclaims: ‘Is that really up to your bleeding heart liberal standards?’ There are plenty worse stories than this in Dr Who, but maybe none that had quite this much going for them, as if all the possibilities got eaten away by a giant space monster. And it should have been so much more: after all it’s not every day the Doctor’s companion turns up in the woods yesterday and finds ‘their’ picts nicked. 

 POSITIVES + That middle scene again, as it’s by far the best one here despite being allegedly added at the last minute: One great example of the closeness between then and now is when Lucias the Roman admits to having the hots for Bill and she has to tell him that she bats for the other tribe, as it were. She assumes an ancient Roman won't understand what being a lesbian is, but he tells her of course he does - but isn't she sweet for being old-fashioned and thinking he doesn't. Bill was a great breath of fresh air for the series, allowing them to touch on all sorts of issues of acceptance but in a much subtler way than most of the Chibnall era managed and Pearl Mackie really sells this scene with her best ‘flabbergasted’ expression. 

 NEGATIVES – We’ve got Picts! We’ve got Romans! We’ve got a hungry alien! Coming at the end of a particularly wordy series this story is sure to be full on action, right? Erm no: we see some warriors entering a fog but we don’t actually see any battles and the two natural enemies in this story doesn’t even get to have a skirmish. While I’m all for Who sorting things out through discussion and not always needing a fight in there somewhere this story is crying out for one. Right up to the end you think somebody’s finally going to do something and then…it all just peters out. To think they went to all that trouble to slap on some war-paint and then forgot to have a war! 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘Shhh. Does everybody hear that? Do you know what that sound was? That was the sound of my patience shattering into a billion little pieces!’ 

 Previous ‘Empress Of Mars’ next ‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’