Four Episodes
Aired between 3rd January 1981 and 24th January 1981
Written by Steve Gallagher
Produced by John Nathan-Turner
Directed by Paul Joyce
Synopsis
Trying to find their way out of E-Space, the Doctor, Romana and Adric end up in a time disruption (effectively "nowhere" in time). You would expect this place to be totally empty, but as it happens, it's got a big spaceship in it, navigated by a lion-like alien and manned by a Dad's Army crew of inept space traders. Their leader, Rorvik, is clearly hurting the alien by forcing him to help them by using it's mind to effectively "imagine" them out of the limbo their trapped in.
The alien finds the TARDIS and manages to escape, using it's unique power to run through time.
Meanwhile, the TARDIS is also struggling in limbo and the Doctor, with no better ideas debates some pre-determination and whether he should just start pressing random buttons which would bring them to where they were meant to be anyway.
As they debate this, the lion alien breaks into the TARDIS and starts messing with the controls. He says his name is Biroc and that he's a shadow of his own past and their future. Once he's pressed some stuff, it runs off again back into the white nothingness.
The TARDIS lands and Romana checks the console after it and K9 are damaged by the time winds from the open door. She discovers all the coordinates are at 0. It's like they are at an intersection between the negative e-space and the positive n-space. The Doctor decides to go off and look for Biroc, leaving the other two to repair K9.
The freighter as it happens has also landed nearby and whilst the Doctor is gone, Rorvik and his cronies head off and find the TARDIS. Romana stalls for time by only appearing herself, and the crew take her prisoner, trying to use her like they used Biroc to navigate out of the limbo they're in.
Adric takes K9 and tries to find them but K9 is seriously messed up and not working right, resulting them in getting separated and lost.
The Doctor finds a medieval archway and banquet hall with a mirror at the end and full of old rusted armour and skeletons. The armour comes to life and it turns out they're robots! They try to kill the Doctor and he escapes by ducking and they cut each other to bits.
He takes them apart and learns that the machines are called Gundans. They were built by humans who were enslaved by the lion-aliens (Tharils). The Gundan's were rebels who took down the Tharils and ended their tyrannical reign.
Meanwhile, Rorvik tells his crew to revive another Tharil and he leaves to find the Doctor whom he believes is alien enough to use the navigation chair without dying. As they are gone, a Tharil is awoken (a dangerous procedure) and it runs rampant on the ship. It finds Romana and frees her,
Elsewhere, the Doctor gets close to getting some key information about the church like structure. It's a gateway, possibly out of e-space. He uses K9's power when he turns up to boost the signal, but the last Gundan decapitates its companion and runs into a portal of the mirror. Rorvik and his crew turn up to capture the Doctor but the Doctor also escapes through the mirror. Whilst there, he meets Biroc in an alternate dimension that's black and white. Biroc takes the Doctor to a mansion.
K9 overhears the crew saying that the distances from the freighter, the TARDIS and the gateway are shrinking. This info becomes significant, when eventually, they discover that the freighter is made up of dwarf star alloy, an incredibly dense material that is ultimately responsible for collapsing this pocket limbo like a black hole. It means they have only a short time before everyone dies.
Meanwhile, Romana gets free and discovers that Rorvik and his crew are slavers, and have captured numerous Tharils that are in hybernation (the dwarf star alloy is the only thing the Tharils can't travel through). Romana meets up again with the revived Tharil (Lazlo) and they go through the portal to the mansion.
Once there, they see a flashback to the past, where the Tharils are lording it over the humans. They see the Gundan's turning up to kill them all, and then they're thrown back into the limbo where they are captured by the slavers.
Rorvik wants to use a giant lazer to blow up the portal and open the way out of this place, but the Doctor is certain it will just kill everyone. Biroc appears to him and tells him to do nothing.
After a lot of running about, trying to stop the slavers, ultimately, Biroc's advice was right as the crew kill themselves with the backblast of their freighter as they try to blow open the portal. The Doctor, and co. are on the other side of the portal thanks to Biroc, and Lazlo revives some of the remaining Tharils who phase out of time to escape the collapse of the limbo dimension.
With everything safe, the Doctor aims to return to the TARDIS, but Romana opts to stay behind in the black and white dimension to help free the Tharils from other locations.
She also keeps K9 so he can be repaired from the damage that the time winds did to him.
This means that the Doctor and Adric leave via the portal and re-enter N-Space.
Trivia
- The original conclusion to the e-space trilogy was meant to have been a political thriller involving Gallifrey and Romana's failure to return. It was so long and messy however that in the end it was abandoned and replaced by another story called dream time
- Even the script for the new story was significantly re-worked by Chritopher Bidmead and the Director - Paul Joyce.
- Paul Joyce was ambitious and more suited to working on feature films. He took ages trying to get the perfect shots and often overrun, costing the BBC money and getting many people's backs up including Barry Letts and John Nathan-Turner.
- Tom Baker and Llala Ward were also unhappy with the script and were a constant pain throughout. Llala didn't like how her character had been written out and had a blazing row with JNT and she didn't get along with Matthew Waterhouse either.
- This pressure cooker was particularly hard to deal with, and due to all the problems of the shoot, JNT ended up firing Paul Joyce and putting in director Graham Harper to get the thing shot. Unfortunately, the story was so weird and off the wall, that Harper could only go so far and didn't have the perfect grasp on exactly what it should look like. So, with cap in his hand, JNT had to go back to Paul Joyce and re-instate him.
- In a huuuuge turn up for the books, this story actually brought the blistering rows of Tom Baker and Llala Ward to an end and in a move that shocked absolutely everyone, they ended up getting married! Perhaps less shocking, their marriage wasn't the most plain sailing and the couple would get divorced just two years later.
The Review
Warrior's Gate is weird. If you're not up for weird and you're not willing to think a little about what the show is telling you and just want some Saturday evening family entertainment, then Warrior's Gate is one of the most boring Doctor Who stories that has ever been created.
If you are in fact up for a bit of deeper introspection but you only watch an episode every week, or even every other day, then it's likely one of the most confusing stories that's ever been created.
If..in fact, you're willing to look a bit deeper, and you're willing to invest two hours of your time into this thing, then Warrior's Gate is strangely appealing, with something new to offer you each time you go through it.
No matter how long you spend on it though, you'll find it surreal and will probably be confused. It's not that the plot (what little there is) is complicated. What's confusing is what the director chooses to do and how they choose to reveal the story and what they focus on. There's far less explanation in this story, and a decent amount is inferred by not spelt out which is great, but uncomfortable because we're not used to it. In addition, a story has a beginning, a middle and an end, but Warrior's Gate sets up the basis of this story (getting stuck in the limbo) and then just leaves it there, because they're not focusing on that, they're focusing on the Tharils and their hubris and the slavers and their hubris and the lessons we learn from them.
That all sounds phenomenal and may well have been amazing, but when you boil it all down, all the philosophy of the I Ching and moral messages, the moral of the story seems to be "do nothing and it's going to work out fine". Well, how is doing nothing ever going to make good TV?
At least there's some refreshingly different takes on things to take away from this - the aliens being baddies at first until they learned their lesson is a great change, and because the movie Alien has been shown, we get to see that the crew aren't all space marines and happy go lucky - they're complaining and have unions. It's just a shame that they're all annoyingly inept.
Rating
If you watched it all the way through in one sitting in 2018 onwards...
5 out of 10
Otherwise....
3 out of 10
Rewatchability Factor
2 out of 10
Watch this if you liked...
- The Doctor's Wife (Doctor Who, Series 6)
