Warriors' Gate

Chapter The 195th, which features at least three lions and an escape to victory.

Plot:

The Doctor, Romana, K9 and Adric, trying to escape the e-space micro universe, find themselves in a white void whose only landmark is the frontage of a ruined building with a working door. It's called the Warriors' Gate, even though it isn't a gate, it's clearly a door. Also trapped there is a spaceship of human slavers, and their 'cargo' of leonine time-sensitives - the Tharils. One of the Tharils, Biroc, had been forced to act as navigator through the space-time vortex, and brought the ship deliberately to this place. Escaping, he took control of the TARDIS and brought it there too. The Doctor realises that the void's zero coordinates mean it is the point where one can go from e-space (negative coordinates) to his home universe of Gallifrey and Earth, n-space (positive coordinates). In order to keep the rest of the Tharils from escaping, the slave ship is made of super-dense dwarf-star alloy, the gravitational effect of which makes the void contract exponentially, putting everyone at risk.

The crews of both ships explore the area piecing all this backstory together. The Doctor manages to go through a mirror within the building beyond the gate / door and sees it in the past: the Tharils back then were the callous overlords until the people rose up and sent Gundan robots to attack and enslave them. Biroc tells the Doctor that he just needs to do nothing to escape. The captain of the Slave ship Rorvik has a mad plan to back-blast the ship's engines into the mirror, but this just destroys the ship. The crew are presumably killed, but the Tharils escape through the broken hull. Romana decides out of nowhere to stay with the Tharils to help them free their enslaved people throughout the galaxy. She takes K9 with her. The Doctor and Adric say goodbye to them, and escape in the TARDIS to n-space.

Context:

I scoured my overloaded shelves of Doctor Who discs to dig out the DVD of Warriors' Gate, and put the box by the player waiting for an opportunity to watch it. Before that moment came, after it had sat there for a day or two, I realised that I had Warriors' Gate on Blu-ray as part of the season 18 box set, and so got that down instead. Perhaps I should be selling all my old DVDs once they've come out on a superior medium, to avoid such confusion in future and save some space. I know a lot of people have made a little bit of pocket money from doing just this, but I just can't bring myself to at the moment. There's too much sentiment in every box and cover. The same thing happened during the long crossover period of VHS to DVD; I could have made a reasonable sum getting rid of tapes before they were released on DVD, knowing full well they would eventually come out on disc, but I decided against it. I still keep a folder of the sleeves for old time's sake, even though the tapes themselves have been consigned to the chronologically-arranged shelving unit in the sky. Anyway, when I finally got round to watching, I viewed an episode a day now and then over the course of about a week, culminating with the final episode on the 11th July, the day of the UEFA European men's football championship final (more on that anon). I was on my ownsome for the most part, though middle child (boy of 11) did wander in at one point, saw Adric on screen and said "It's him, it's... thingy. Didn't he die later?" Spoilers son, spoilers!

First Time Round:

My earliest memory of this story was seeing a clip as part of an item where Mat Irvine demonstrated the model effects work. This was on the UK Saturday morning kids' show Multi-Coloured Swap Shop, and must presumably have been shown in early 1981 around the time of Warriors' Gate's broadcast. I watched Swap Shop religiously in those days, but not Doctor Who. I wouldn't start watching the adventures of Gallifrey's finest for another 10 months, when a series of repeats was shown on BBC2 that got me hooked on the programme in time for Peter Davison's debut run at the start of 1982. About a decade later, I was coming to the end of my first year at Durham university; it was the year in which my fan friend David, mentioned many times before on blog posts here, was graduating. As something of a parting gift - though as you'll know if you've read those other blog entries we stayed in touch and are still watching Doctor Who together to this day - he gave me a number of his tapes of old stories to copy. I spent a good few hours with two VCRs linked together (neither of which were mine, so I must have required the beneficence of other parties too), copying from tape to tape many stories from Doctor Who's past that I hadn't yet seen. Warriors' Gate was one of that batch. Despite a crackly noise throughout that was added by dodgy tracking, I still enjoyed watching it thereafter. It would be another five years or so later, towards the end of 1997, when I got the less crackly version released by BBC video.

Reaction:

In keeping with the reverse coordinates of the E-Space trilogy which it concludes, Warriors' Gate is something of a Bizarro-world Doctor Who story. It's much more common for a story in the programme's long history to have a solid enough script that shines through any flaws in the execution. Warriors' Gate is the reverse. It's a beautifully well-made production, far better and more original visually than anything that had come before, even those earlier stories of the 1980/81 season that were trying hard in that department. This overpowers any difficulties with the script, and - boy! - are there difficulties with the script. They're not the obvious Doctor Who ones though. It doesn't have unactable characters or dialogue - it's got a great cast all performing well. It's not that there isn't much incident (stuff happens, not a huge amount of stuff, but there is some); it's not that it doesn't make sense (though it doesn't in places). I suppose the main problem is trying to work out whether the gnomic and impenetrable aspects of the narrative are deliberate or accidental, before one can work out whether they are appropriate or not. In the end, fathoming that out is too much of a cognitive load, and one's brain just capitulates and enjoys the spectacle. I think this makes it unique in the Doctor Who canon: it's not just a Doctor Who art film, which arguably had been attempted before in the 1980/81 series, it's a successful Doctor Who art film, slippery and defying categorisation.

Covering the story for the blog, I am going to have to decide on my own categorisation: accidental masterpiece, finely-tuned visual experience, or just a mess? I may be biased, though, by knowledge that another viewer of the story might not have: the interviews and articles over the last 40 years about the making of the story, and specifically the too many people who intervened in the scripting. Credited writer Stephen Gallagher has gone on record as being unhappy with the changes made by script editor Christopher Bidmead and director Paul Joyce. There were notes from executive producer Barry Letts to be incorporated too. The final scripts, though, with no time left to develop them further, did not satisfy Letts or producer John Nathan-Turner as they had rendered the story too confusing. My speculation is a lot of (maybe too much?) material was cut (Gallagher's original scripts were reported as being overlong). An example of a possible symptom of this is towards the end when Romana tells the Doctor she's leaving and Biroc chips in on behalf of the Tharils with "And we need a time lord." What? What for? Since when? Why haven't you mentioned this before? Why would you need a time lord? Doesn't your race have the ability to, you know, travel in time? Aren't you the least likely people to ever need a time lord??!! There's a brief exchange shortly afterwards to try and resolve all these uncertainties, where Romana talks about a plan to integrate the Tharils power with her time technology, but it's too little too late happening as it does in the dying moments of the final episode.

Maybe Gallagher's original longer scripts did not have more build up to this, or clarification of exactly how Romana was going to help free the enslaved Tharils, as that subplot was imposed by a regular cast member leaving so might be expected to be the script editor's responsibility. It seems a good bet, though, that his original scripts would have had more plot about the Doctor and friends helping to free the enslaved Tharils from the ship. Gallagher, after all, presents a classic Doctor Who set up: slavers being nasty to an alien race come into contact with the Doctor. The classic Doctor Who plot that would ensue practically writes itself: the Doctor and friends help to free the Tharils. In the finished show they just don't. They don't help at all; instead, they investigate -  a little about their current situation trapped in the void, but not much; the bad guys do most of the heavy-lifting investigating that. Instead, with timey-wimey transitions, the Doctor investigates the backstory of the Tharils, which is intriguing and unique for Who. They were enslavers before they were enslaved, but now they've been punished enough. Some of the best moments of the script dwell on this. The Doctor walking through an echo of a former time represented by Cocteau-style superimposition on black-and-white photographic backgrounds, the cuts back and forth from the banqueting hall in its prime to its future as a cobweb-strewn relic, the slow motion Gundan robot attack. Even a small moment like the Doctor filling up the goblet of wine until it's overflowing then knocking it over is magical. (I have been known, if ever I accidentally spill some wine, to follow that up with my best Tom Baker impression saying "This is no way to run an empire!")

If not about rescuing slaves, then maybe the story is actually about escape? Lots of Doctor Who stories are just about escaping calamity not necessarily about righting wrongs. But no; nothing doing there either. The TARDIS travellers don't do anything to escape, it just happens. The script makes something of a virtue of it, by hinting at pre-destination: Biroc has seen into the future and set in motion everything that needs to happen to free the ship's slaves and get the Doctor back to his own universe. Whether this is because the slave ship causes the void to vanish, or whether it's because the back-blast destroyed the 'gate', or destroyed the ship, or whether it's a combination of all these factors is not clear, but that doesn't really matter. It does, though, mean again that not much is happening in the story. It is somewhat apt, I suppose, in a story so focused on shifting time-zones that the traditional Doctor Who story material all happens either in the past or is hinted at for the future. In the here and now of the void, people wander about, get frustrated, bad guys threaten our heroes occasionally but not with much conviction, and people have lunch. This works as counterpoint to the grander moments, and is an effective depiction of the banality of evil in the down-to-earth crew talking about bonuses and cargo and scrap value when they're trading in and torturing sentient beings. It helps that the cast is uniformly excellent and work well as an ensemble. The comic double-act of Aldo and Royce are fun too.

Whatever the original scripts were like, it's hard to know whether the cuts made were aiming to simplify the plot but inadvertently had the opposite effect (which would fit everything subsequently known about the approach of Bidmead) or were deliberately obfuscating the plot to create that art film feel (which might perhaps fit the mode of Joyce, someone who stubbornly and heroically challenged the BBC crew to work in a different way to create Warriors' Gate, and was fired and reinstated during the course of its production). Maybe this doesn't matter, and maybe it doesn't matter that Joyce's vision and approach - or the massive studio overruns to which it led - meant that he never worked again on Doctor Who. The end product is ultimately what matters 40 years later, and it is very good indeed. Sets, costumes, video and model effects, music: every aspect of the production is sublime. Whether all the contributors agreed with Joyce's vision, or whether they just thought they were salvaging a doomed project, they managed to create something very special.

 

Connectivity: 

In Warriors' Gate and The Girl in the Fireplace alike there is a titular stone object that acts as a portal between different times and spaces; both stories feature a scene where robots come through the portal en masse attacking a set of nobles enjoying a celebration (banquet, ball). For the third story in a row there's an emotional goodbye at the end too.

Deeper Thoughts:

Here comes the future and you can't run from it, if you've got a bandwagon I don't want to be on it. The cliché of the Doctor Who fan as pallid wheezing nerd is no doubt unfair, even though it is true in my case. As I've said before on the blog, I am against sport and the causes of sport. Even I, though, was caught up a little bit in the palaver around the England Men's over 18s professional association football team's progression through the recent Euros competition, and specifically their somewhat historic performance in getting to the final of an international tournament for the first time in 55 years. I started writing this section of the post on the day of the recent Euros final before the match took place, and the tenuous "three lions" connection with Warriors' Gate briefly occurred to me. A rush of enthusiasm ensued, and I started to type, with the aim of completing and publishing the blog with a few paragraphs of Doctor Who's references to the game in time before the start of the match. Then, I stopped, and left it for a week before resuming again. The reason? I realised I would just be jumping on the footie bandwagon like any number of other reprobates had in the run up to the final. At that point, you could suddenly see all the politicians in their newly purchased squad strips, with the creases yet to be ironed out, snapped cheering on "our boys" in posts on social media, while clearly having no clue about the game. I didn't want to be like them; not one bit.

It's always the prerogative of politicians to try to hijack any national feelgood moment for their own ends, of course. The added hypocrisy here is that many Conservative MPs in England, including government ministers and the Prime Minister, had previously been very critical of this England squad, incensed by their peaceful protest of taking the knee at the start of games to highlight racial inequality and discrimination. These MPs refused to condemn fans booing the players as they made this protest, boycotted games, implied that the players were Marxist (tenuously and incorrectly linking their protest to a one-off comment by one of the original founders of the Black Lives Matter organisation in the US) and so on. It wasn't just politicians either but also the usual suspects from the right-wing talk radio / social media commentariat all spouting similar culture war-stoking nonsense. And most did the same volte face once the team were winning. What's most interesting about this is the lack of foresight displayed, at least by the legislators (I had no such high expectations of, say, an actor that once played a DS in a long running crime show). They didn't anticipate that the team might do well, just as they didn't consider that they might not be on the more popular side of this confected culture war. As the woes of the recently launched UK channel GB News seem to indicate, UK hard right-wingers are a very small audience, and nothing will ever be hard enough or right-wing enough for them (GB News viewers threatened to boycott when someone on this free speech advocating channel took the knee themselves this last week, so he was sacked).

It would have been difficult to put together my planned few paragraphs of Doctor Who's references to football anyway, as there are so few. Matt Smith - who played youth football and planned a professional career before an injury redirected his energies toward acting - displays some of his soccer skills in The Lodger and The Power of Three; 1980s companion Ace professed her fandom for Charlton Athletic, 2000s companion Mickey was keen on watching the odd game at the pub. That's about it. Such a paucity of material would be matched only by trying to find politicians in the past wanting to jump on the Doctor Who bandwagon. Even at its most popular, the show has never attracted politicians wanting to reflect in its glory. The closest was probably a Radio Times interview with the last UK prime Minister Theresa May where she mentioned Doctor Who amongst her faves - see the Deeper Thoughts section of The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe blog post for more details. The plurality of messages in such a long-running show, including Warriors' Gate with its resonant sympathy for the enslaved, probably make it too complicated for the bandwagon-jumpers. These sort of people can change their minds pretty quickly anyway. I watched the match, and when Marcus Rashford missed his penalty I instantly knew that he was going to come under attack because of his race, and because of his work for disadvantaged children. In but a few hours, I was proved correct on both counts. I truly believe, though, that the sort of people that do this are in a diminishing minority, their world and worldview contracting like the void around Rorvik and Co. Like Warriors' Gate, I have faith in the future even if the present isn't that great.

In Summary:

It's an accidental masterpiece and a finely-tuned visual experience, and also a mess. Somehow, this doesn't stop it being great.