The Androids of Tara v. The Eaters of Light
This week I’m journalling The Androids of Tara by David Fisher, the fourth story in the Fourth Doctor’s Key to Time season, first broadcast in November and December 1978, and The Eaters of Light by Rona Munro, the Twelfth Doctor story broadcast in June 2017.
I went on a long walk today. It was the first long walk through surrounding countryside that I’ve undertaken since we moved to Croydon a year and a half ago, and it gave me a chance to get a feel for the soul of the area. I enjoy a hike across country land, but I’m more familiar with the gently rolling fields and hedgeways of rural northwest Essex, where I grew up, than this grander landscape just south of London. My walk took me across Farthing Downs and the disconcertingly named Happy Valley – not much call for Catherine Cawood around here but I did pass a murder of crows (or were they rooks? Whoever they were, they were still remembering Kar) – skirting around the village of Chaldon and passing briefly along the top end of Surrey’s North Downs Way. It was a good day for it and there were plenty of fantastic panoramic views.
There was much to enjoy, but I felt a spiritual disconnect. This was not my land. It’s hard to explain, but sometimes I feel a connection to the earth beneath my feet and the trees above my head, and sometimes I feel I’m treading on the ground of a different spirit. It could be the aspects and angles of the terrain – my lands are flatter and muddier than these; or it could be the neighbourhood – while most of the countryside of southern England has been gentrified these days, I think there is still a simpler, folkier, rougher-edged nature to the communities in Essex, while these Surrey villages seem more confident and varnished. The houses are all built like fortresses, with tall gates and immaculate front lawns. It smells of security and privilege, rugby and golf, sports cars and money. Farthing Downs has an ancient track running through it, and has revealed rocks and tools in its earth, all of which date back to Neolithic times, so there are older gods lying somewhere deeper. There is a cairn, but it was built in recent years to mark the Millennium – a monument to modernism rather than the old ways.
All of this proved to be a synchronous opportunity to reflect on this week’s two Doctor Who stories, which I have found hard to link beyond the fact that both make great use of the natural settings in which their location filming took place. The Androids of Tara was filmed in and around Leeds Castle in Kent, and The Eaters of Light in the Brecon Beacons, doubling for a moor in the north of Scotland. Both stories look beautiful, but they channel very different spirits of the land.
The Androids of Tara
‘There is not a Doctor Who story with better hats.’ Thank you, Lizbeth Myles for that observation, which I picked up from the 2017 episode of the Verity! podcast which reviewed The Androids of Tara. Indeed, Tara could be the Planet of the Hats that Donna seemed so keen to visit at the end of Partners in Crime. It’s not just the hats – The Androids of Tara is a costume drama in which the costumes probably trump the drama. It looks as though designer Doreen James thoroughly enjoyed creating the threads for this story, which remains colourful and swashbucklingly stylish throughout.
The Androids of Tara, based on The Prisoner of Zenda, demonstrates that Doctor Who does not have to be science fiction, and sometimes it’s better when it’s not. As the title suggests, it contains some androids, but they could all be human doppelgangers and the story would work just as well. The soldiers are given swords with electric tips (Star Wars was huge in the UK at the time this story was made, so I suppose these are probably inspired by light sabres), but they have no real bearing on the plot. And the celestial theme of the series arc, the Key to Time, is given the absolute minimum of acknowledgement, discovered by Romana at the start of part one, confiscated, and picked up again right at the end of the adventure. It’s all there for those who want to watch The Androids of Tara with their sci-fi specs on (as an eight-year-old at the time of broadcast, I probably did), but the story is better described as a historical romance, with a few elements of science fiction pinned on around the edges – perhaps we could call it a Cyberfeudal. And it’s all the more refreshing for that.
I carefully avoided watching the coronation nonsense in the UK a couple of weeks ago so I can’t speak with authority but, from what I have picked up from the pictures, film clips and stories posted online since that ridiculous event, it seems they nicked most of their ideas from The Androids of Tara. Somebody at the palace must be a fan. Charles’ wore the same golden gown as Midge Ure – I mean, Prince Reynart’s android double, the Archbishop wore silly clothes like the Archimandrite before putting a silly crown on the new king’s head, then everyone had to swear an oath of fealty. It looks as though they have copied some of the evil-doing too: as Reynart told Romana, Grendel’s plan was to kill him then marry Romana, becoming the royal consort until the time came for him to take the throne for himself. I wonder if Camilla saw this episode in late 1978?
Seriously though, we laugh at the absurdity and villainy of all this, and at Tara’s feudal society, peasants subjugated while the upper classes live in luxury, because it’s presented as a quaint, fanciful story. Yet we live with just as much injustice and inequality, and treat an absurd ceremony such as the king’s coronation with deadly seriousness, while much of the rest of world laughs at us.
The Androids of Tara is a busy story for K9. He gets a lot to do in this one, trundling for miles across the Taran countryside, stunning soldiers for entering his personal space, punting across Grendel’s moat with the Doctor and assisting him with a bit of breaking and entering. The good guys couldn’t have succeeded in foiling Grendel’s plans without K9, but he ends the story in undignified manner, left to drift across the moat while the Doctor laughs at him from the castle battlements. No wonder robots don’t trust humans and find them hard to talk to.
By the way, the story opened with the Doctor and K9 too, playing chess in the TARDIS console room. Is it my imagination, but did a lot of the stories of this era start in much the same way? It feels like a familiar trope. I’ll have to watch out for that one.
The Doctor himself seems especially relaxed in this one, determined not to allow a local squabble on a small planet spoil his plans for a nice holiday. We see him fishing, drinking, fencing, playing the fool and generally pretending that he neither knows nor cares about what is going one. Then he springs to life as the swashbuckling hero in the final episode, easily defeating Grendel with a casual display of expert swordsmanship. I remember finding this all quite reassuring as a boy – the Doctor’s laid back, humorous approach to life while we knew all along that he was always the most skilled and powerful person in the room. I do think this loucheness must be incredibly irritating to his regular companions though. Genuinely, imagine having to live or work with someone who was like this all the time – it would drive me crazy. No wonder this incarnation of Romana always looks so wearied by his antics.
The Eaters of Light
Following The Androids of Tara with The Eaters of Light forces an impression of turning a corner from one landscape to someplace much darker and forbidding of tone. There are plenty of gags and humorous set-ups in The Eaters of Light but they don’t detract from the heavy soulfulness of this atmospheric episode.
There are some stunning shots of bleak Brecon Beacons vista masquerading as an ancient Aberdonian moorland. This is a story about what might be described today as a thin place – a location in our world where one feels closer to the heavenly realms, to the beyond. In a stone cairn on this moor there is a gateway to another dimension, and if one visits the site today, and touches one of the standing stones marking the entrance to the old cairn, one can occasionally hear music from the past celebrating Kar and the remnants of the Ninth Legion who stand guard for our world against the next. I really like this story – more so with each rewatching.
If the Randomiser had given me the story immediately before The Androids of Tara – The Stones of Blood, also by David Fisher – to watch alongside this one, the connections would have been a lot more obvious. I was just reading a short article by Kenneth Brophy in the latest edition of Hellebore magazine, noting the apparent popularity in British television drama since the 1970s (he highlights The Stones of Blood, Children of the Stones and The Quatermass Conclusion) of the idea that pagan and neolithic standing stones were linked to aliens, probably inspired, says Brophy, by the writings of T. C. Lethbridge who suggested that actual stone settlements in the UK were originally purposed as flight path markers for UFOs. I guess they are an important part of the unique British landscape that has inspired and informed fantastical storytelling – folk stories and songs, fairy tales through to modern day science fiction, fantasy and horror – for centuries, and they seem perfect for Doctor Who. I can think of their use only in The Stones of Blood, The Eaters of Light and The Pandorica Opens, however – are there any I’ve missed?
The Eaters of Light makes good viewing for Saturday evening family television, and this should surely be the aim of every episode of Doctor Who. It’s self-contained, with no continuity baggage (apart from the scenes at the end in the TARDIS with Missy, but these don’t really have anything to do with the adventure itself – they are tacked on, rather like the Key to Time elements of The Androids of Tara), entertaining and accessible without being at all simplistic. Rona Munro introduces us to an engaging cast of characters: the Pictish girl Kar, mourning and honouring her mum and dad, and the group of children she leads, and young centurion Lucius, at the head of the small band of teenage boys representing the Roman Ninth Legion, who call him Grandad because he’s the oldest of them at 19. It’s a world of children who have lost their parents, learning to face their fears in order to survive – ‘Who isn’t scared?,’ the Doctor asks Kar. ‘But you’ve still got to face your beast anyway.’ ‘If you come with me, I can’t promise that you won’t all die,’ Bill tells Lucius. ‘But I can promise you this. You won’t all die in a hole in the ground.’ It’s all really, really tough coming of age stuff, but the sort of life-defining challenges – in the world or within ourselves – that we can all relate to, or will have to face at some point in our futures.
This is an especially good story for Bill, who chooses her own path away from the Doctor right from the start, and really demonstrates her own strength and capabilities in helping the Roman boys. It’s so much better than the dismal journey she followed in the last of her stories that I watched, The Lie of the Land. In that one she was going in the opposite direction from the off, searching for the Doctor – only to be ridiculed, belittled and subjected to an alien brain-fry once she found him.
The Doctor seems very laid back about Bill having been missing for days. ‘Well, if she’s there, we’re saving her. If she’s not, she’s safe already. Trust me, this is not my first rodeo.’ Which doesn’t quite add up; is the Doctor normally so blasé about their companions’ safety? There’s a sense in this story that he knows his time with Bill is nearly over. She has matured, found self-confidence, independence. That petty argument they have at the beginning of the episode was a bit like the sort of row a parent has more frequently with their child when the latter reaches the point of being ready to leave home.
But there’s something else going on with the Doctor. He’s too keen, almost desperate, to give his life over to becoming the guardian of the gate – an eternity battling demons from another dimension instead of travelling space and time. It’s out of character; the Doctor has tried to sacrifice himself before, giving up his life or his freedom for the sake of the many or even the few, but here he seems almost too keen to walk through that portal. This is a story about facing one’s fears, but ultimately it’s the Doctor who seems to be running away from his. What is he so scared of? Is it Missy, whom he has allowed to roam free in his TARDIS, trusting that her redemption is honest and true?
This short section with Missy at the end of The Eaters of Light is understated but one of the most surprising in the history of the show. ‘You understand the universe,’ the Doctor tells her, ‘you see it and you grasp it, but you've never learned to hear the music.’ I’m not sure whether it was intended, but to my mind there is an allusion here to the Doctor’s story of his childhood encounter with a hermit, described in The Time Monster which I watched last week – the moment from which he didn’t just see the universe, he learned to see its colours. Missy cries when he tells her this, which suggests to us that, just maybe, she feels convicted of her sins, that she may really be a reformed character. Could this be true? It’s said that it’s not possible for a true sociopath, a narcissist as Missy/the Master undoubtedly is, to change, that they’re hollow inside. The Doctor has chosen to trust her, but it’s clear that he doesn’t really know if he should. At this point in the series arc, we just don’t know either.
I think this is part of what the Doctor is fearful of, and making him want to flee the very universe. There’s a sense in this foreboding story that he know something bad is on the way. He says describes the task of Kar and the Ninth Legion beyond the dimensional gateway as ‘holding back the dark’, which is what he wishes he had the power to do. The next adventure, World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls, will see the death of Bill and the events that will trigger his own next regeneration. It will be one of the grimmest stories we have seen. Perhaps this is what the bird that warned him of ‘Dark! Dark! Dark!’ was really crowing about.
Connections
The novelisations of The Androids of Tara and The Eaters of Light were both released by BBC Books in the summer of 2022, and have given me helpful insights into the authors’ ideas for the backgrounds of many of the characters. The treks across second-century Europe of the boys of the Ninth Legion are captivatingly described by Munro in The Eaters of Light book, and in The Androids of Tara (the novelisation actually based on Fisher’s 2012 audiobook) we find much world-building, explanations of Tara’s perverse socio-economic structure and Horrible Histories-style pen portraits of many of Grendel’s ghastly Gracht predecessors.
Based on the television version alone, it’s been difficult to make two many connections between the two stories. As noted above, both make a great deal of the British countryside – they are a pair of very green, outdoorsy stories – but, like the differences I feel between the rural landscapes of Surrey and Essex, each has its own spiritual feel. The manicured grounds of Taran barons and lords are pretty but rather too ordered and tamed, while the rough moors of the north of Scotland appear to be more of a challenge for their poor inhabitants to survive.
In the opening scenes of both stories, the Doctor’s companions Romana and Bill head off on their own quests, exploring local woods, and are tracked by a growling beast (through whose eyes we watch them before they launch their attack).
Bill, in The Eaters of Light, and the Doctor, in The Androids of Tara, are both held at swordpoint early in each story, by people that they go on to befriend (Simon and Zadek respectively).
Both stories feature a battle in a dark tunnel. The Doctor, Zadek, Farrah and George the android are attacked by Grendel’s guards in the old plague tunnels beneath the Taran royal palace. The Doctor, Bill, Nardole, the Picts and the Romans lure and attack the light-eating beast in the entrance tunnel of the cairn.
The Androids of Tara: Doctor: ‘Well, K9, what would happen if I connect the carbon circuit to the silicon circuit? How long would they last?’ K9: ‘Three hours nine minutes and ten point seven seconds, approximately.’
The Eaters of Light: Doctor: ‘I was in there for two days?’ Nardole: ‘And eight hours, five minutes, and …’
It’s not a great parallel, I realise, but I am stretching to find much between these two stories. Both moments show a similarity between K9 and Nardole, and their function in the series. They are there to correct the Doctor, to provide easy answers when needed, and both happen to be a little bit irritating, most of the time.
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