Warrior's Gate: Ranking - 13

 

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 DW story. It’s a nuclear reactor in a world of mills, a whole new way of going about things, as this programme about exploring time and space and monsters end up stuck in the middle of nowhere and no time. And yes its more of a stagger at times than a run, but you’re not meant to be breaking speed limits when you invent the wheel. 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. A story this different deserves to be reviewed differently, so today I’m going to be writing about it in the same way author Stephen 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. Right, 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 its all been a bit of a cop out 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 Alazrius is normal most of the time (the rest of the time, of course, its filled with evolving marshmen), 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 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’ DW stories are if we’re honest). This turns the whole ethos of DW 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. 

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. 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. To some extent the Dr’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. 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. 

Which leads on nicely to ‘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 Dr in this story: he keeps trying to do what he normally does in ‘n-space’, namely 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’ (or perhaps a looking glass might be a better term – like Lewis Carroll’s two Alice In Wonderland’ stories this world is a grotesque distortion and exaggeration of our own with all the manmade social niceities 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) while the people around him (including Romana and K9) change this world. The most the Dr does is accidentally re-set things by lifting up a fallen wineglass 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 Dr either. To be honest Biroc, the Tharil at the heart of this story (a time-travelling lion...no seriously) 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 top get there, not when the usual ‘rules’ of how storytelling should work. OK Hexagram 10 ‘Worrying The Tiger’ next: ‘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 Dr 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’ (its 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 ‘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 Dr 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: its 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 ur elections). 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’. Let’s talk about Romana: how lucky that Gallagher was writing when there was a second timelord on board the Tardis because otherwise this story wouldn’t have ‘worked’. Romana ‘gets’ this world far more easily than the Dr for whatever reason (because she’s younger?) 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 Dr 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. 

She’s more world smart than he is, unlike the university graduate of ‘The Ribos Operation’, whose sympathetic to where she lands rather than bound by rules of how things should be. This is a worthy end for Romana – perhaps less so for K9 who as a purely logic and mathematics based creature belongs in this world even less than the Dr does and doesn’t get to do very much. 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 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. They’re a pretty fun lot as supporting cast humans in DW stories go: 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. In a story that’s all airy fairy Kenneth Cope’s Packard (the latter in suitably ghostly 1960s hit ‘Randall and Hopkirk Deceased’) and David Kincaid’s Lane are deliciously cynical and biting, 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). 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. 

They also lead nicely into 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 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. 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 Dr 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. Though its not a perfect fit 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, 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 (though they started off stronger than the Tharils and over-powering them time has rusted them over and made them easy to defeat – like most empires they have a sell by date when they stop being as effective). 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 DW 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. 

It would be a pity if this very different DW 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 too 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, s a viewer, to think that the world you’re gawping is bigger than the camera lens and has no restrictions of any kind. The director got into big trouble for this and most fans just assume its a mistake but I love it; in a story that’s all about reminding you how small your petty boundaries and limitations are whose to say a white timeless void doesn’t have gantries and ceilings? Many people, including those on set, have been critical of director Paul Joyce for not understanding how then-modern TV like DW was made, with tales of delays and impracticalities – in most stories that would be true. But if anything this makes him the perfect arty director for ‘warrior’s gate’, a story that’s not meant to be restricted by mere things like deadlines and camera plans) 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, its 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. It’s a world you want to get lost in and its a shame when this story ends because it feels as if there was so much more here to find out. 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. It might not fit in with any other DW story, indeed it might break the rules of practically every other story, but it works: its 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 ahead of you. It’s a very funny take on ideas about fate and destiny that are deeply serious and done with great care (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 DW, big and vast and packed with props). Best of all e-space is finally every bit as weird 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 ‘works’. There was nothing quite like it on TV in Britain then or now, but then that’s OK: ‘Warrior’s Gate’ is all about what exists outside time and space and in a series that likes to bend the rules this one delights in breaking all of them at once. 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).

+ The timewinds sound effect is one of my favourite in all of DW: 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.

- As fitting as it is that Romana leaves in this story, the way she leaves feels rushed and perfunctory. She’s been with the Dr, across her two regenerations, for seventeen stories and 72 episodes now (if you include the unfinished ‘Shada’; only Sarah Jane and Jamie were in more) so we feel we’ve got to know her really well. She’s become the Dr’s best friend (off screen as well as on!) and grown from being his junior assistant fresh out of Gallifrey university made to work with the Dr to keep him on the straight and narrow to a rebel every bit as proactive and committed to righting wrongs as he is. While the reason she leaves is pure Romana (helping people in need) we need a great long goodbye speech about how they’ve grown up alongside each other and instead Romana just drops it on the Dr that she’s ‘not coming’ at the last minute. I know there’s a bit of a time-limit and all but still you think in a technically timeless universe there would be more time to be emotional than this – Tom Baker improvises a sweet ‘you were the noblest Romana of them all’ as he stands forlornly in the Tardis watching her leave on the scanner, but there’s nothing said to her face. K9, whose been at least mentioned in a whopping 94 episodes(even if he was in bits being repaired in some of them), doesn’t even get that much and there’s no actual reason for Romana to take a dog with her who really belongs to the Dr other than ‘she’s lonely’ and ‘the new producer thinks a robotic dog is stupid’ ((in voice actor John Leeson’s words ‘They stuck K9 behind a mirror and forgot about him – that’s what you do with the phonebill, not your best friend!’)