Warrior's Gate
(Season 18, Dr 4 with Romana II, Adric and K9, 3-24/1/1981, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script editor: Christopher H Bidmead, writer: Stephen Gallagher, director: Paul Joyce (with Graeme Harper uncredited)
Rank: 13
'Welcome to the AAA Dr Who review website - e space edition! wasn't that last episode thrilling? Which one do I mean? I don't know - here every single episode of Dr Who from across the next 600 years have all happened already! Which makes story arcs particularly hard to wrap your head around. River Song is of course our favourite character here, living her life in a different order to everyone else. Anyway watch out for Russell T Davies' third time as showrunner in the 24th century when he's been cryogenically frozen on Telos (which is a real planet in our universe) then defrosted - what happens to Donna's great-great-great-grandchildren is a doozy! And now for some horoscopes: Leo the Lion. You will experience everything today. But then what is today? When all days are as one'
This is not, it seems safe to say, your run-of-the-mill Dr Who story. It’s a nuclear reactor in a world of run of the mills, the industrial revolution coming in to a land of farming, a whole new way of going about things. In a series that’s always danced to the beat of its own drum ‘Warrior’s Gate’ might well be the set of episodes that bangs furthest away from common time. For this programme about exploring time and space ends up in the one place it’s never properly been to before now: stuck in the middle of nowhere and no time. It’s a story about inner space, not outer space and the one story where I can tell you ‘there’s no plot and nothing happens’ and that’s actually the point of it all not just a mistake (I mean what plot there is consists of one line: The Humans are trapped and try to enslave the locals to get them home and it all goes wrong). And yes it’s more of a stagger at times than a run into groundbreaking land, but you’re not meant to be breaking speed limits when you re-invent the wheel. You can tell that author Stephen Gallagher – now quite a big name but back in 1981 near the start of his career – was a novelist before he got into television and the novelisations of this story (both of them) are particularly strong. ‘Warrior’s Gate’ has an entirely different flow to your usual Dr Who story. There’s a beauty about ‘Warrior’s Gate, a poetry, a mystery, that makes it different to the usual plots of capturing and escaping. Because in this story all of us are trapped, trying to live out our manmade rules in a timeless universe where the only escape is by going with the flow, of not trying to control life. Uniquely this story went on the air after a tweo week break during Christmas (usually the series ran straight through or took one week off) and that works nicely: part one really fits that sense of hazy timelessness in the first week of January when you’re out of school and work hasn’t got going yet and you’re briefly free of your responsibilities and deadlines and thinking to yourself ‘why isn’t life always like this? Well, for four episodes, it stays like that.
A story this different
deserves to be reviewed differently, so today I’m going to be writing about it
in the same way Gallagher allegedly wrote it, by breaking away from the
restrictions of linear time and consulting the I-Ching, the divination oracle
of Ancient China (Marco Polo probably came
across a copy – maybe he lost it in a game of backgammon with Kublai Khan?) It’s
the source of the coin-tossing the characters (mostly Adric) use in this story
to work out what to do or whether to do anything at all and let nature take its
course, a source of tapping into the infinite synchronistic wisdom of the
universe which makes all things that more or less should happen more or less at
the time they’re meant to happen (as there are an equal number of chances
between heads and tails and putting the two together, via six coin tosses,
gives you sixty-four potential outcomes (all ambiguously written to fit to any
number of circumstances). For like the
coin, which thanks to a very special special effect hovers while everyone else
continues to move, everything is up in the air, all possibilities open and no
choices yet made. It wouldn’t work for constructing any other Dr Who story but
it is highly apt for a story that’s all about giving up control and your
to-do-list, something the capitalist freighters in this story really struggle
with and even The Doctor and Romana have to learn. Instead the I Ching works by
instinct, of taking all the many possibilities that are out there and letting
the chance that runs across the universe decide things for you.
Right, here goes the
first run of coin flips…Hexagram 13 ‘Social Mechanism’: ‘Heaven reflects the
flame of clarity...success if you keep to your course’. So let’s start off with
the idea of being out of time: the Tardis has been travelling around E-space
for two stories before this one and given all the talk at length of this being
so utterly and completely unlike our own ‘N’ or normal-space it’s all been a
bit of a cop out in the other two stories to be honest. Aside from his amazing
ability to heal his own wounds Alazarian Adric really isn’t that unlike ‘us’
and his swampy home world Alzarius is normal most of the time (the rest of the
time, of course, it’s filled with the evolving marshmen of ‘Full Circle’), while the ‘ancient one’
Great Vampires living in ‘State Of Decay’
are mostly your common-or-garden vampires (except for the fact that obviously,
they’re alive and not a myth). For ‘Warrior’s Gate’, though, all rules are out
the window: the Tardis lands in a white void with no co-ordinates where things
are both close up and far away all at once and where the only building (a
gateway) seems to be working in two timezones simultaneously, dominated by a
banqueting table filled with both food and cobwebs (they probably don’t do
‘best before’ dates on this planet as it looks both really tasty and a bit
‘off’). This a world that’s based more on poetry than science (see ‘Logopolis’ in two stories’ time for our
universe’s equivalent of our own ‘Warrior’s Gate’) and yet it does follow its
own internal logic by story’s end rather than just being a load of nonsense
stung together (the way more than a few ‘normal’ Dr Who stories are if we’re
honest). This turns the whole ethos of the series on its head: in 99.6% of
stories (i.e. every one but this one) the universe is interconnected by time,
so that ripples caused in one timestream in one timezone affect everything
around them. But not here. Time both exists and doesn’t exist, so that for the
locals behind the ‘mirror’ everything has already happened and all time exists
at once, with timewaves ridden like a giant surf board. It’s a place where all
things are possible, where all things have already been.
This is a series big on
the idea of karma, where you have to be careful how you to act to the people
around you in episode one because by episode four (or six or the end credits or
whatever) they’ll be the ones who’ve started a revolution over your unfair
actions and have come after you for revenge. It’s not how Dr Who normally runs
to say the least, not least because The Doctor himself likes hurling himself
into adventures and stirring things up, but it does fit with a sort of
‘timelord’ view of life, a policy of non-interference where time can’t be
re-written ‘not one line’ and the universe is best at sorting things out for
itself, if only people would let it. Usually this is a series that dabbles with
pre-destination, the idea that ideas are fixed and laid out before us
inevitably, statistically, mathematically, because of who we are and how we’re
likely to behave and that if you keep heading in one direction you’ll end up
there eventually if nothing interrupts you (often the Doctor). To some extent
the Doctor’s always warped the idea of a fixed progression of time, simply by being
a madman with a time-travelling box, but by the time the Tardis lands somewhere
he ends up becoming part of the worlds he lands in and ends up more often than
not as the outside catalyst for inevitable change that was always coming. While
‘Warrior’s Gate’ is the opposite of a story like ‘The
Space Museum’ where fate is changed by having The Doctor and friends
inspire other people they meet to action, it does fit the more Buddhist parable
stories like ‘Planet Of Spiders’ ‘Kinda’ and ‘Snakedance’. Which is interesting
because Barry Letts, at the end of his year as ‘executive producer’ overseeing
John Nathan-Turner and usually so spot on about these things, was one of the
people who said he really didn’t ‘get’ this story and suggested a lot of
changes that wouldn’t have worked. By contrast ’Warrior’s Gate’ is about free
will, how each of us have the power to shape our futures, by growing and
adapting and refusing to stick to the script laid out for us at birth, with
improvisations that can make the universe better or worse before it inevitably
returns back to the script it was always meant to follow, our civilisations
crafted from these ‘cracks’ in between caused by how we treat one another. The
‘trick’ to life, in this story at least, is not to become the passengers of our
own lives steered by other people to places we don’t want to go or even the
driver dictating where to go within a fixed point on the map that makes other
people have to change their plans with us, but to become the car itself steered
by the universe and with all roads available to us including ones that haven’t
been built yet, whilst stepping out the way when we see a car-crash coming
caused by someone else.
Right, next coin please.
Funnily enough it’s the next chapter ‘Hexagram 14: Possession’: ‘Fire in heaven
above, the image of possession in great measure. Thus the superior man curbs
evil and thereby obeys the benevolent will of Heaven’. Well, this void world is
a bit like Heaven, a land where there are no rules, no regulations, no
deadlines and no struggle for survival. It is the opposite of the early
Thatcher years this story was written against, when various economic downturns
were causing havoc to budgets in every household (and on every TV series
including Dr Who). There’s a freighter of capitalists who have come from
n-space (‘our’ space) and while we never find out if they really are Human they
certainly look it. They’re all slightly panicked, as you would be if you’d
ended up in a world like this one. Rorvik, the captain (named after American
science journalist David Rorvik), is one of those officious men who tries to
react to situations by taking control and trying to maintain discipline, adding
in more rules and regulations for his men to follow. It is, in most
circumstances, a good thing to do and why all those English polar explorers
insisted on keeping to English mealtimes even in the middle of nowhere, a bit
of normalcy away from home. But this is not the sort of world where routines
will help you. They travel in a spaceship that’s huge and run off dwarf star alloy
that’s impossibly heavy, a representative of all those clunking great
industrial machines. But what good is any of that here? When you can get
somewhere through thinking? And when even dwarf star alloy, with an impossibly heavy
mass, is so light The Doctor can carry some manacles made from it around in his
pocket with him?
Onto Hexagram 21 now
‘Biting Through’: ‘The merciless, searing judgement of lightning fulfils the
warning prophecies of distant thunder. Though unpleasant, it is best to let
justice take its course’. Let’s talk a bit about the Humans now: they’re a
mining team that’s fallen into this world by accident, their ship causing a
‘mass conversion anomaly’ in this world that’s made space and time contract due
to it being made from bits of a dense dwarf star alloy that sucks time and
space inside out. Left unchecked it will squeeze them out of existence (the
‘gravity’ of the situation being the ‘gravity’ of interfering with another
realm and impacting other people against their will) and the gateway is visibly
shrinking by episode four (great for the scene-setters who get to take a
breather compared to episode one). They try everything to fight fate, including
enslaving Biroc (who gets the ‘lion share’ of screentime, though there are
other Tharils around) to navigate their way out of this world and back into
their own, but of course this just sets off a cycle like the one from
generations past: in this world of free will no one has the power to enslave
anyone and it all goes ‘wrong’ until Romana steps in to offer help through her
own free will to allow their ship to leave.
The harder Rorvik tries
to take charge on this world the more things go wrong and the closer to a
breakdown he gets. There are no profits to be made, no quotas to be upheld and
no boss to pat him on the back and give him a raise (beside, what is there to
spend a wage packet on?) Clifford Rose’s put-upon Captain Rorvik is of the
despairing old school type acting with lots of eye-rolling and sighing, as if
he’s on a Sunday school outing with a load of truculent youngsters, while his
crew bitch and moan about this all being above their pay grade. They’re the
worst of clock-watching capitalists, still working how much they get paid by
the hour even in a realm where hours are meaningless. A lot of fans laugh at
the ‘fight’ scene where Romana knocks him out armed only with a clipboard but
actually that’s perfect: it’s his need for regulations and checklists and
timesheets that’s the problem here. Rose, who usually played Nazis, decided to
base his performance on Captain Mainwaring from ‘Dad’s Army’, the stickler for
doing things by the book who can’t see the bigger picture. He’s the sort of man
who pledges allegiance to his job at work every morning and wonders why those
under him are sniggering at how seriously he takes it. Rorvik talks about
‘getting things done’ but every time he does it backfires on him, most
spectacularly at the story’s end when he blasts his spaceship out the void and
destroys it, for in this universe it’s better to let things ebb and flow
(Sanders will have a similar breakdown in ‘Kinda’).
Under him are everyone you’ve ever met at work: Kenneth Cope (in his first job
after taking a decade out to run a restaurant fed up of being typecast as the
wisecracking ghost in ‘Randall and Hopkirk Deceased’) plays Packard as an eager
second-in-command who wants the top job and wants everything to be perfect,
without seeing that in a timeless empty void there’s no such thing as a
hierarchy. Aldo and Royce (Aldo and Waldo in the draft script) are the minimum
wage workers at the bottom of the heap, fed up of their jobs and making
wisecracks at the bosses out of earshot, there purely for a wage packet that no
longer matters, acting as if they’re the kids mucking around at the back of the
Sunday school bus (they’re the two old men Waldorf and Statler lost in a world
of muppets). We’ve all worked with people like them – indeed all these
characters are ‘loosely’ based on Gallagher’s colleagues during time working at
rivals ITV! As much as they’re the comedy relief they also help ‘root’ this
story with their cynicism: they don’t believe all this airy fairy nonsense
about higher realism because they’re too busy moaning about the stupidity of
this one to see the bigger picture. In a sense they’re a microcosm of this
world and how the same rules apply to ‘our’ world in ‘n‘ space: they didn’t
want to join this mission at all and thought it was stupid but orders are
orders, while Rorvik is only here because that’s where the money is – none of
the humans are being their true selves at all and they get punished for
it. All of them are here for the ‘wrong’ reasons in fact and have things
totally upside down, living for a job that seems to hate them back. None of
them can see the unseeable, spiritual world out there, the 5D world that
doesn’t care about such 3D things as profits and timetables and shiny shoes.
Even the lunch-break is the same banquet meal enjoyed over and over again in
different timezones.
OK Hexagram 10 ‘Worrying
The Tiger’ next, which covers a lot of this story: ‘Heaven shines down on the
marsh which reflects it back imperfectly. Not perceiving you as a threat the
tiger does not bite back’ Two points to make there: one is the fact that this
story’s gateway dividing up timestreams is a whacking great mirror, one that
time-sensitives’ like the Doctor and Romana and the Tharils can pass between,
so that centuries of time can pass in the blink of an eye for anyone on the
‘other’ side. The mirrors can heal you and undo the ravages of being caught in
the time-winds of change outside, like a giant ‘re-set button’, until you go
back again when, to quote the story before this one, a ‘state of decay’ sets back in. Behind the
mirror time is working to its own steady constant of all time at once and can’t
be affected by what people do beyond its barriers: it just ‘is’ (it’s the sort
of timeless time shamans talk about in native American Indian textbooks and
hippies talk about in drug taking memoirs, where a few seconds can seem like
hours and a few hours seem like seconds; anyone whose sat through ‘Ascension Of The Cybermen/The Timeless Child’
will know how the former one feels). By entering this realm everything
that ever happened to you drops away so that you are your pure self again,
before your personality rubbed up against other people. This is, if you will,
the journey back to our soul, to the purest essence of who we are away from all
the events that shape our lives and change us, the environment that makes us
turn out a certain way by having us re-act to it, becoming happy or resentful
or proud or upset or angry or whatever.
There are no tigers in
this story but there are lions who are the local kings of the white-void
jungle. The Doctor might link to think he invented the idea of ‘wibbly wobbly
timey wimey’ but really its them: time isn’t a straight arrow for this race but
a circle that’s always in motion. They once had a great and bounteous empire
which was run by their servants, humans unlucky enough to be caught in this
mysterious world, but now they’re the slaves, used to pilot the spaceships that
land in this realm because they’re basically a great big sat-nav, able to see
their way around time in a whole extra dimension that humans cannot (as in our
world, the capitalist humans have stolen their timeless world and subverted it
to their clock-watching ends). If you will, both sides are caught in an endless
cycle of abusing each other’s rights simply because they can, a power struggle
that switches sides across time, of cause and effect and revenge that has no
end. The Thrails can, if they wish, take people through the mirror with them to
see time from another perspective and as such they and their guests aren’t tied
by linear in the same way the rest of us are (the surprisingly normal
novelisation throws in an extra detail here: it’s not that the Tharils are free
of the trappings of time so much as they can see endless possibilities
stretching before them and choose the best path to follow for all beings that
causes the least damage. Which would be ever so useful in our elections).
Which leads on nicely to Hexagram
7 ‘The Judgement’: ‘The army needs perseverance and a strong man. Good fortune
without blame’. Which isn’t strictly what happens here but never mind. ‘Warrior’s
Gate’ is also a tale of colonial conquest. Note how the freighter staff are
whiter than white (Cope was so famous for his pale skin that’s partly why he
was cast as a wisecracking ghost) and that’s unusual for the post-Star Trek era
when practically all futuristic stories in Who feature a mixed cast. ‘Warrior’s
Gate’ also features a local race, the Tharils, time sensitive lions (no really)
who have been enslaved because they understand this world better than the
humanoids do. They’re used to riding the timewinds like surfers and existing in
a place without time. They’re the slaves from Africa who couldn’t compete with
the colonialism of their invaders and were treated poorly for being ‘stupid’
and ‘like animals’, even though their instinct and understanding of a universe
outside the material world made their colonisers scared, even when they held
all the power. The Tharils are used in much the same way, to navigate this
world and find more time-slaves, even though they see beyond this tiny world
and can’t understand the fascination of money and power when their world
provides everything they need already. It’s not quite that simple though (when
is it ever in this story?!): The Tharils (‘Tharls in the original script,
before mega fan and consultant Ian Levine pointed out how much this sounded
like ‘Thals’) have, in the past, been
the masters and much like ‘The Ark’ treated
their slaves so poorly that the tables were turned, but instead of learning
from it the Human slaves do worse to them in a perpetuating cycle. The Tharils
are also lions, the symbol of the British empire, with Britain now at the
bottom of the heap and being used to do the donkeywork for everyone else’s
bidding. The theme of this story: we never learn and time is doomed to go round
in cycles until we do.
A quick word too from
Hexagram 1, right back at the beginning, ‘The Creative’: ‘The creative works
sublime success furthering through perseverance’. Are the Tharils creatives?
They used to be revered by their people, seen as something special, with their
abilities to think outside the box and go inwards. But such is the state of society that things
have been turned upside down and now people only care for wage packets and
profit margins. But those things won’t last – not like the ability to go within
and grapple with the questions of humanity and seeing the longer picture the
way the Tharils do. They’re time sensitive not because they run to the clock
the way the Humans do but because they know that time as a concept is an
illusion made by man to get stuff done. And there is way more to life than
getting stuff done. Most of the time creatives have to live in ‘their universe’
of wage packets and food and shelter but here the Humans are in ’their’ world, the
mysterious other that connects us all and exists outside us. All shelter is
provided, the food comes round again and people should be free to do what they
like, until invading conquerors come along.
Talking of creatives, everyone
always quotes Lewis Carroll for this story given that part of it takes place
‘through a looking glass’ and The Doctor compares the ever-moving Biroc Tharil
to a ‘Cheshire Cat’. But (Hexagram 48 ‘The Well’: ‘The town may be changed, but
the well cannot be changed. It neither increases or decreases’) the mirrors in
this story don’t really work like that (as a separate universe in parallel to
ours) but something scarier. You can never truly see yourself. The best you can
do is see a reflection of yourself and that’s still not the same. Most of this
story takes place behind a mirror, which works to different rules. Any damage
you cause to yourself can be repaired but the minute you go back to the ‘real’
world it stops working again. That’s also why machines, even K9, don’t function
properly here: there are no reference points to make and no conclusions to
draw. To get past the mirror, though, you have to confront yourself and your
smaller place in the universe, leaving your ego in check at the door. That’s
why the Humans, with their petty squabbles, have such problems getting through.
There’s none of that in Lewis Carroll where the mirror is more of a grotesque
distortion and exaggeration of our own world, with all the manmade social
niceties taken out, so that people do things because they’re naturally likely
to do them without regard to social norms or what other people think of them.
Actually the author based it on Jean Cocteau films he enjoyed (‘La Belle et la
Bette’ (Beauty and the Beast where he looks a bit like a lion, set in a castle)
and ‘Orpheus’ (where a man falls in love with death and ends up in a colourless
world living in slow motion, much like what begins to happen from episode three
of this story). Even more than that though, this is Narnia, the CS Lewis books
about a magical land that runs at a different speed and is a spiritual place
where all the materalistic concerns don’t apply (especially the best book, the
prequel ‘The Magician’s Nephew’ where Narnia is created by Azlan the lion). Ot
the masterpiece that is Michael Ende’s ‘Neverending Story’ – especially the
original book (the film isn’t out at this point) where Fantasia exists outside
Earth time linked by a gateway to nowhere (much like this one) and where the
enemy is ‘the nothing’ (much like this one). The Tharils are very much Falkor
the dragon too, a combination of ‘mystical other’ and ‘transportation’.
Although sadly there are no rockmen or racing snails in this set of episodes.
So there is precedence here, even if ‘warrior’s gate’s source materials aren’t
the usual ones of ‘Quatermass’ ‘Star Wars’ ‘Star Trek’ ‘Blake’s 7’ ‘Pathfinders
In Space’ ‘The Invaders’ ‘The Tomorrow People’ and (more recently) Buffy The
Vampire Slayer.
Then there’s ‘Hexagram
54’: A Loveless Marriage :‘The superior person passing trials in the light of
eternal truths. Any action will prove unfortunate – nothing furthers’. That
sounds like the Doctor in this story: he keeps trying to do what he normally
does in ‘n-space’, namely explore, investigate, instigate and solve, but this
isn’t a world of cause and effect that works like that any longer. He’s
basically an onlooker in this story, watching from behind a ‘mirror’ while the
people around him (including Romana and K9) change this world. He feels he’s
trapped, but he isn’t really, he’s just too used to being the ‘other’ side
where things get done. The most the Doctor does all story is accidentally
re-set things by lifting up a fallen goblet early on (and even that won’t make
sense in the story till episode four, by which point most people had forgotten
he’d done it). It’s not just the Doctor either. To be honest Biroc, the Tharil
at the heart of this story, could have escaped fate having come across the
Tardis in part one rather than part four for all the difference it makes to the
‘plot’. Everyone gets to where they need to be when they want to get there, not
when the usual ‘rules’ of how storytelling should work. Only at the end does
Gallagher put his coins away and stop letting fate dictate the plot (although
it’s a sad consequence of the re-writes that script editor Christopher H
Bidmead got bored of them and took them out).
Moving on, we hit
‘Hexagram 61 ‘Inner Truth’: ‘The gentle wind ripples the lake’s surface, the
superior person finds common ground between points of contention – you may
cross to the far shore, great fortune awaits if you stay on course’. Not quite
sure what that means but let’s talk about Romana next: how lucky that Gallagher
was writing when there was a second timelord on board the Tardis because
otherwise this story wouldn’t have ‘worked’ anywhere near as well with a Human
companion stuck facing the same capitalist issues as the freighter crew here.
Romana ‘gets’ this world far more easily than the Doctor for whatever reason (Because
she’s younger? Because she’s less set in her ways? Because she’s a girl? Though is so it’s all
very different from where she started in ‘The Ribos Operation’ as a by-the-book
stickler only a fraction less pedantic than Rorvik. Then again that was a whole
regeneration ago). She has fun gently mocking the humans who don’t understand
that the usual rules of this world don’t apply, treats Biroc as a natural part
of the landscape after a bit of cliffhanger screaming and basically
investigates and challenges this world on its own terms, from all angles at
once, while the Doctor pouts behind a mirror. It’s no surprise that Romana
leaves in this story in order to help the Humans navigate their way back home
without the need to enslave poor Tharils, taking K9 Mark III with her, because
she feels like she ‘belongs’ in this world and has outgrown anything the Dr can
teach her now, her apprenticeship over the ‘Key To Time’ long since past. A
lot of people don’t like it (including Lalla Ward, who wanted something more
‘dramatic’) but this is a worthy end for Romana, who has proven that she can
think like The Doctor and has served her apprenticeship (with shades of Clara’s
arc to come). The Tharils give her a readymade way to explore the universe
without the use of a Tardis and it’s certainly preferable to the expected
option, which is to have her go back and be big on Gallifrey (the original plan,
part of Christopher Priest’s abandoned script ‘Sealed Orders’ which ended the
e-space trilogy with a trip to Gallifrey. A ot of Warrior’s Gate’s criticism of
capitalism and competitiveness comes from the awkwardness he felt as his script
was dangled in front of Priest’s in case it didn’t work out, even though the
two writers were friends). It is a little too obviously added in at the end
though and does rather contradict the rest of the story (it’s the biggest
decision Romana has made in her life and comes after a story all about not
making decisions. Although at least it’s preferable to being the ‘slave’ she
was when the timelords sent her to assist the Doctor without fully telling her
what was going on. Lalla, who was having a rotten time, makes the most of one last
great opportunity to shine, showing how far Romana has come (her relationship
with Tom Baker was at another low ebb, and both of them refused to attend her
own leaving do, which was rather awkward for poor Matthew Waterhouse who did
go, so the news the pair were getting married right before this story aired was
a shock to many. Including them). It’s right that she leaves in this story, but
not the way she does it, so suddenly as if on a whim in one brief scene at the
end.
It’s perhaps less of a
fitting exit for poor K9, who’s unique in this era for a companion who was
given their marching orders rather than asking to leave (John Nathan-Turner,
worried that a dog wasn’t quite the adult look he was after, had been itching
to let the canine computer go since he joined at the start of the season but as
John Leeson was under contract for the voice figured he might as well use him).
The poor thing is very badly treated here though: he needs orders to function,
but in a universe where control is an illusion there is no one to give them to
him. As a purely logic and mathematics based creature he doesn’t belong in this
world and basically gets in the way, seen as how JNT and his critics always saw
them following characters around like a lost puppy and getting in the way.
There’s a fun scene where Aldo and Waldo (sorry, Royce. Why did they change
that name?) kick him out their spaceship as if he was a real dog but it’s sad
watching him all alone as The Doctor, Romana
and Adric all pass through the mirror to a world of inner consciousness and he
gets left behind like a stray. Lesson especially hated it, complaining that
‘they stuck K9 behind a mirror and forgot about him that’s what you do with the phone bill!’ It’s
only right and proper he should live on with K9, though the Doctor really does
seem in no end of hurry to get rid of him and you have to wonder what sort of
life he has trapped forever in e-space (as his parts won’t work in n-space.
Although the entire Big Finish ‘Gallifrey’ series spin-off and a mention in
this story of how spare ‘wafer’ parts miraculously fit him suggests he’ll be
okay).
Hexagram 57 next ‘The
Penetrating Wind’: ‘Small, persistent, focussed effort brings success’. That
can only be the time winds, currents of time that blow across this void the
same way our winds do on Earth, a continuously moving, billowing active thing
that’s invisible but tangible, which the Tharils can ride across like a bunch
of hairy surfing dudes. Humans, of course, and even the Doctor a little bit are
land-lubbers who drown in this world, trying to lead their lives by going from
A roads to B roads instead of bobbing with the currents. Time isn’t linear:
this is a world where nothing is fixed so a walk to the gateway seems to take
forever one moment and no time at all the next. Only the Tharils can navigate a
world where all times happen at once and the Humans think they can enslave them
to be pilots of their ship. But how can your slave be the pilot if he’s the one
‘choosing’ where you’re going? The usual rules don’t apply. ‘There’s no moment to yourself on this ship’
moans Aldo (or is it Royce? You’re meant to be unable to tell the apart) but
that’s the thing about e-space: you have all the time and space you need, because that’s
all that is: everything else is a manmade construct that’s only temporary, an
illusion in one particular period that has nothing to do with living.
Though it’s not a perfect
fit next here’s Hexagram 52 ‘Keeping Still’: Keeping his back still so that he
no longer feels his body he goes into his courtyard and does not see his
people. No blame’. The other people who live on this world are Gundans, giant
robots, who are also not confined to linear time the way mortals are. Alas
they’re the one bit of this story we don’t get to see much of, without any
specific thing in the script to do and no real sense of how they got here, even
though they’re responsible for most of the memorable moments, such as the
clunking suit of armour following the Dr round an abandoned castle. They’re the
ones who attacked the Tharils in the first place but, their ‘action’ in the
story completed, they’re left gathering dust in the banqueting hall. They apparently
started off stronger than the Tharils and over-powering them time has rusted
them over and made them easy to defeat – is this a comment that like most
empires they have a sell by date when they stop being as effective, compared to
the timelessness of inner wisdom? But how do robots even work in a place that’s
navigated by instinct and intuition?
Moving swiftly on to Hexagram
37 ‘People In The Home’: ‘Injury on the outside naturally means turning back
towards the home, and so people in the home follows.’ which is also how the
story ends. The humans stop using bits of outer space that was meant to exist
outside time for their own uses and jettison it when they leave, while Romana
leaves with them of her own free will; nobody enslaves anyone else. Only by
being their true selves do these people make it back to where they should be
without further damage.
Alas the I-Ching was
created several millennia before television so there’s no chapter for one last
point, which might be the most important one of all: ‘Warrior’s Gate’ looks
nothing like any other Dr Who story. While most of the story is set in a giant
white void with a whacking great gatepost in the middle rising out of nowhere,
with the banqueting hall the only ‘normal’ set most fans would understand at
first glance, the story makes good use of letting the Tharils and by the end
the Dr and Romana let loose in the timewinds, dancing in a blur of movement and
colour across still pictures in black and white. It’s a most excellent effect,
especially for 1981, and while they could probably make it less obviously a
digital effect in this day and age somehow even that works: this is a universe
of people who end up in a world that doesn’t work to their own rules, inserted
into something that doesn’t fit them, a universe that’s based on different
rules of colour and motion to our own. As clever as the non-plot is, as brave
as the techniques are, as strong as the performances by all the cast are in a
story that doesn’t half ask a lot of everyone is, it’s the look of ‘Warrior’s
Gate’ that’s most memorable, like a flip-book of photographs that only make
sense as a moving world when the pages are turned. The filming in Powys Castle,
Welshpool, used simply as a backdrop and filmed in black-and-white with the
cast stepping inside in colour, wouldn’t work in any other story but it’s perfect
for this one, as if a fairytale book has come to life (as well as being more ‘hip’
to modern fashions than any story since Jo started talking about edible fungus
in ‘The Green Death’. By this
point Dr Who took so long to record it was always half a step behind trends but
not here: this is a ‘new romantic’ story exactly like what kids were thinking
and wearing. Next week ‘The Keeper Of Traken’
even more so). This is a world you want to get lost in and it’s a shame when
this story ends because it feels as if there was so much more here to find out. It
would be a pity if this very different Dr Who story had ended up as just
another routine set: this world looks impressively different to normal, which
helps sell the fact that it works differently too. Note the way the TV studio’s
actual ceiling becomes part of the actual set: as natural a part of this
artificial world as any other (usually you only see the ‘real’ ceiling when something’s
gone wrong – like a cameraman tripping over a Zarbi for instance: you’re meant,
as a viewer, to think that the world you’re gawping is bigger than the camera
lens and has no restrictions of any kind. You even see the stps leading to the
control room at one point). It helps, too, that so much of this story is told
through a hand-held-camera, right there in the action with weird close ups of
faces and with some gorgeous panning shots where we actually follow the actors
across sets, adding to the illusion that this place is both ‘real’ and yet
works differently to normal. The director, Paul Joyce, got into big trouble for
this (the lighting director, John Dixon, threatened to walk out (arguing both
that it wasn’t safe and that it broke union rules) and most fans just assume it’s
a mistake anyway, but I love it; in a story that’s all about reminding you how
small your petty boundaries and limitations are who’s to say a white timeless
void doesn’t have gantries and ceilings?
Gallagher got both lucky
and unlucky when arty director Paul Joyce was cast to do this story, Lucky because
he’s clearly coming from a similar place, constantly inventing new ways of
doing things and doing things another director would never dream of (just look
at how Gallagher’s other Who script, ‘Terminus’,
ended up thanks to a director in Mary Ridge who just shot it like every other
Who story). He also did ‘extra’ things most directors didn’t do, such as holding
extra production meetings and hiring a conceptual artists for diagrams so
everyone in every department was one the same page (some, like the lighting
department, hated it; others like set designers and model makers loved it
because they had a chance for more input and Matt Irvine’s models of both the
freighter and the gateway are amongst his best work, the camera studying them
in loving detail rather than hiding them behind dry ice as per so often in this
era). Unlucky because it created so many extra difficulties for the show, which
ended up running very behind time (with assistant director Graeme Harper taking
over great chunks to speed things up – he’ll still be in the director’s chair occasionally
as late as ‘Waters Of Mars’ in 2009; an
actual strike, in the carpentry department this time, slowed things down
further). Joyce was even sacked for a tense hour – something that never
happened during an actual episode anywhere else in this book – officially for
being so far behind time; unofficially because Joyce, who’d just quit smoking,
asked JNT if he’d stop smoking next to him. The two never worked together
again. Many people, including those on set, have been critical of director Paul
Joyce for not understanding how then-modern TV like Dr Who was made, with tales
of delays and impracticalities – in most stories that would be true. But if
anything this makes him the perfect director for ‘Warrior’s Gate’, a story
that’s not meant to be restricted by mere things like deadlines and camera
plans. It’s meant to be instinctive, feeling made up as it goes along and for
his part Joyce complained that the restrictions were people forever looking at
their watch as the most important factor, BBC men trained the BBC way so hard
that they’d lost all imagination and creativity. In other words the making of
this story was like a microcosm of the story itself, one the director seems to
have understood better than most. Even if that sometimes makes for awkward
television, with occasional rushed scenes and more line fluffs than usual. It’s
a sad fact, too, that a lot of story (particularly the second half) was
re-written by Bidmead and Joyce between them to ‘have it make more sense’, a
daft thing to do to a story like this as their hastily joined on endings don’t
so much plug a gap as cover over holes that aren’t actually there (adding
scientific explanations to a story like this one is just wrong and Gallagher
was quite miffed. The MZ stuff, for instance, is all Bidmead, named after the computer
he was doing re-writes on – the first time anyone in the Dr Who office used a
computer, not a typewriter). The regulars were especially critical of the Tardis
scenes where they talk amongst themselves, but these are so painfully poor and
feeble compared to everything else you can’t help but think the original can’t
possibly have been this bad. The Tharil costumes don’t exactly look like a
noble advanced race either, more a bargain budget secondhand furry costume that’s
seen better days. The title too is one of those that’s meaningless: there are
no warriors here. ‘Slave trader gate’ would be more accurate, although Gallagher
already had the perfect working title ‘Dream time’ (based on the aboriginal
word for a state of being outside time or space; it’s no coincidence that, looking
into this, Bidmead decides to have an Australian as the next companion and in
the Mara stories that came after Tegan will face her own ‘dream time’ much like this one). There’s also the
notorious rubber axe that, by accident, glances off Tom Baker’s back without
him even noticing!
Still, that’s not bad
innings for a story made in 1981. Which brings us to the final point, Chapter
24, the I Ching Hexagram that became a track on Pink Floyd’s debut album ‘Piper
At the Gates Of Dawn’: ‘A movement is accomplished in six stages and the
seventh brings return, coming and going without error, action brings good
fortune’. ‘Warrior’s Gate’ is a success. At it’s best this story is the most
intelligent in the Who canon and expects a lot from its audience without ever
dumbing down; at its worst it’s lots of fun watching some really smart people
running rings around unlikeable people (although this is a story intelligent
enough to see them as victims too, rather than monsters and with some sympathy for
them). Only ‘Ghostlight’ ‘Kinda’ and ‘Snakedance’
cuts it close for intellectualism and even then ‘Warrior’s Gate’ might just
have the edge. A lot of fans say this story is ‘empty’ and it is, but for me
that’s a good thing: rather than an action packed story of people running round
in circles this one is more of a meditative space. Typical you might say: this
is the first Dr Who story to carry subtitles on first transmission, on the old much-missed
Ceefax system, and yet it’s a story where the actual plot matters less than
ever before. Things happen because they’re meant to happen, not because people
make them happen or because things usually happen a certain way in a Dr Who
story. More than anything else it’s eerie, part of a trilogy of stories where
the undefeatable, impenetrable 4th Doctor actually starts to look
fragile. It might not fit in with any other Dr Who story, indeed it might break
the rules of practically every other story, but it works: it’s packed full of
symbolism for people like me to pontificate about, features a whole string of
memorable images if you don’t care for that sort of thing and even if you hate
it then Packard and Lane probably get there with a funny insult about how weird
it all is ahead of you. It’s the perfect mix of being away with the fairies and
being dark and gritty (unlike most spaceship sets that look new this one is
beaten up and secondhand – literally, as it used to be the Vogon constructor
fleet in the TV version of ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’), covered in graffiti
(‘Kliroy was here’. Sadly no ‘wot, no plot?
Or space and time coordinates?’) and scuffed floors. It’s the script that
shines though, a very funny take on ideas about fate and destiny that are
deeply serious and done with great care without over-stretching the budget (this
story saves on the quantity of sets to deliver quality instead – the banqueting
hall especially is one of the best sets in all of Dr Who, big and vast and
packed with props). Best of all e-space is finally every bit as weird and
surreal as we were led to believe – and not in a half-hearted kind of a way but
in a way that challenges everything we thought we knew about how stories like
this one ‘work’. There was nothing quite like ‘Warrior’s Gate’ on TV anywhere in
Britain, then or now, but then that’s OK: this is a story all about what exists
outside time and space after all and in a series that likes to bend the rules
this one delights in breaking all of them at once. Brilliantly brave, endlessly
fascinating, gloriously introverted and thoughtful where most stories and noisy
and full of action, the best word for ‘Warrior’s Gate’ is memorable, even if it’s
hard to say what actually happens. Superb – and all the more so for pretty much
coming out of nowhere, in a season that’s mostly been running on auto-pilot
(and not the timeless Tharil kind).
POSITIVES + The
timewinds sound effect is one of my favourite in all of Dr Who: the radiophonic
workshop didn’t tend to have as much fun with DW in the 1970s and 1980s as they
did in the 1960s (they were disbanded before the series revival) but this sound
effect is superb: sort of like an alien wind chime merged with alien distortion
effects and echo that perfectly mirror the story’s theme of how people impact
other people in the way the ‘chimes’ knock up against each other causing
different notes to form but without breaking the overall stable ‘chord’ of
sound. ‘Kinda’ and ‘Snakedance’ build on this idea too, but ‘Warrior’s Gate’
got there first.
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The
Choice’ and ‘The Search’ (1999) are a pair of stories that kicked off yet
another BBV semi-official series using old actors from Dr Who playing their
characters without ever quite being allowed to refer to them as such, on audio
only this time. ‘Adventures In A Pocket Universe’ only got as far as its first
two instalments (plus a very belated third ‘B.E.S. Begins’ in 2022) and was
rather overshadowed by Big Finish’s range which tended to have more budget and
more official links with the Dr Who name. At the time, though, it was so
exciting to hear Lalla Ward back as ‘The Mistress’ aka Romana II alongside John
Leeson as K9 (a newer model according to the front cover, a sort of cross
between ‘our’ one and the ‘Australian’ series one to come, a character which
technically wasn’t owned by the BBC and was easier to get permission for!) back
together for the first time in eighteen years. It’s a very Dr Who story:
travelling back from e-space (not that they can call it that) the pair meet an
Emperor named Lukor who appears to be really kind, generous and welcoming but
his empire is built on the work of some ill-treated cavemen who worship him and
his kind as Gods and work themselves to death for them. Clearly Romana’s not
going to put up with any of that nonsense and gets to show just how many life
lessons she’s learned at The Doctor’s side! The pair escape, but their damaged
spaceship needs repairing and they can’t just salvage parts, given that they
need to be compatible with e-space (or whatever we’re calling it this week).
They eventually get going after locating something called a ‘Dyson Sphere’,
which sounds dangerously like the attachment to a vacuum cleaner, before
hitching a lift with some shady archaeologists from the planet Herta. Worth
seeking out but these two sets go for quite a lot of money these days so be
warned: it’s good but it’s not that good you should mortgage your house to hear
it.
Stephen Gallagher was always unhappy with his
original Target novelisation of ‘Warrior’s Gate’ (published under his ‘writer’s
name’ John Lydecker) which came out as more or less the same as all the others
(after JNT complained the book was too different to the TV version and it would
confuse viewers) and was delighted to be given the chance to write a whole new
version started from scratch with nearly double the word count in 2023.
Gallagher removed a lot of Christopher H Bidmead and Eric Saward’s alterations
to make a more lyrical and flowing but less naturally Dr Whoy book. Even
compared to the TV version this one is like one of JMW Turner’s later
paintings: a white void of nothingness that dominates everything, even though
it would be wrong to say it’s empty as up close there’s a lot going on. There
are no action scenes as per usual for the Target books – things unfold. There
are no big debates – mere philosophical discussion. There are no big dramatic
conclusions – things naturally work their way out and unravel in their own
time. It’s a more natural and less forced read than the original but it sticks
out amongst the collection even more than this story did on TV, breaking all
the rules of a Dr Who book – not least the fact that a Target book has to match
up in any way to what was seen on TV (it’s up to you if that’s a good thing or
a bad). It’s great that both editions exist as at times they seem like two
totally different books; the re-write just about has the edge but both are
worth reading in different ways.
Even more interesting than the book itself, though,
are two extra short stories included in the same volume. ‘The Ring Of Kairos’
(previously published in the e-book series ‘Beyond The Doctor’ in 2019) follows
Romana and Laszlo as they ride the time winds together, as equals rather than
mistress and slave, when they come across the Sluagh, a warrior race of aliens
who want to take over the gateway. They get mixed up with an adventure in the
American Civil War and a soldier named Joshua whose in the n-space equivalent
of where the pair are in e-space. There’s also ‘The Little Book Of Fate’ which
features Romana’s reunion with The Doctor – the 8th Doctor! He’s
heard a scream and traces it to a circus on Earth where a number of beings from
e-space have broken through and being treated as exhibits. At first your
natural assumption is to think that the Humans are being naughty and doing
something cruel, but really (spoilers) it’s a cover to find a safe haven for
time refugees. Neither story adds that much to the world or their characters
but they’re both worth reading and a nice ‘DVD extra’ style addition to the
book.
Previous ‘State
Of Decay’
next ‘The Keeper Of Traken’
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