The Eaters of Light
| The Eaters of Light | |
|---|---|
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| Season: 10 | |
| Episode: 10 | |
Vital statistics
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| Air date | 17 June 2017 |
| Written by | Rona Munro |
| Directed by | Charles Palmer |
Episode guide
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| Previous | Next |
| The Empress of Mars | World Enough and Time |
Awh yeah man, The Eaters of Pussy. Rona's triumphant return to Doctor Who. GET HYPE, BITCHES!
Plot
You would think that the writer of the episode that killed Doctor Who would make an episode that meanders about like a classic Doctor Who serial would. You wouldn't be completely incorrect about that assumption either.
The Doctor and Bill can't agree on who knows more about what happened to the 9th Roman Legion, so they decide to find out for themselves. Bill decides to check out the river, thinking the Roman army would follow it home, while The Doctor (along with Nardie) wanders about in the exact opposite direction for some reason. Everyone gets captured- Bill has a close encounter with a ferocious beastie and probably gets raped in a cave full of Roman soldiers, while the Doctor and Nardole make popcorn with the Picts. Pictcorn.
Bill and The Romans (you make them sound like a progressive rock band) escape from their cave and meet up with the Doctor while he's done verbally beating the life out of the Pict girl who was supposed to guard the light eating monster from entering their world, but instead chose to let it loose on the invading Roman Legion.
After the Doctor beats her down a bit more for being a goddamn pudding brain, she asks the Doctor for consent, and the Picts join forces with the remainder of the 9th Legion to use magnifying glasses to guide the beast back into its cage (I'm not kidding). They succeed, and then the Doctor decides he needs to guard the cage until the sun goes out, but surprise surprise, Romans love guarding things (and Picts too apparently). They brutally murder the Doctor in a violent rage and jump into the cage with the beast until the gate to the cage collapses on itself. The Doctor regenerates into Peter Capaldi and the Diamond Age is saved.
The episode ends with Missy listening to music.
Oh and crows lots of crows.
Reception
meh, it ok 6/10 8/10 at least, at least better than Empress.
"One of the best episodes this season!"- Idiotic viewer World renowned reviewer
IF WE FIGHT LIKE ANIMALS WE DIE LIKE ANIMALS
So... why did they make two episodes with the same premise?
>imperialism fabula
>two confronting groups of people: le barbarians and le colonists
>we shouldn't fight because imperialism is bad!!
>ok
>missy sequence
>end
Reminder that, for some anons, this is their first season of Doctor Who.
At a mere 2.89 million viewers, this episode has the lowest overnight viewing figures in the entire show's history (even less than The Lie of the Land, which may I remind you got even less viewers than the previous least viewed episode of all time, Battlefield part 1). Ouchie.
Language
A central part of this episode involves the TARDIS' auto-translate feature saving the day by allowing the Latin speaking Romans to converse with the Celtic speaking Picts. While the part where the Romans and the Picts discover that they can understand each other is pretty based, there was a big point of confusion around Bill singling it out on her own 10 episodes into the series. Several things should be taken from this:
- It is highly likely that this episode was meant to appear earlier in the series and, for some reason, got pushed back.
- It's not unthinkable that Bill would've assumed all aliens she encountered spoke English, especially since very few aliens were encountered this season: The Pilot's Heather was an Earth woman; Smile took place on an Earth colony; Thin Ice took place in Victorian England; Knock Knock took place in modern-day England; Oxygen took place in an human spaceship, on which the blue alien was able to communicate with his human peers; Extremis was a simulation, though the Pope and the Vatican would know English; Pyramid involved Monks appealing to human beings to rule over them, so it's not unlikely that they would know English (also the Russian guy was a high ranking military official who definitely knew English); the same goes for Lie of the Land. Only The Empress of Mars feels out of place with this explanation, further solidifying the idea that this story was meant to appear earlier.
- If we go with the above explanation, any non-TV stories that occur with Bill and Twelve that don't involve Missy must happen before Bill realizes the auto-translate feature exists (unless they both survive the finale, in which case never-mind). Fortunately everything's non-cannon at this point, so /who/ cares?'
I have a photo to prove my case. Here it is:
