4.40: Warriors’ Gate

In which the plot, unlike the setting, is not entirely clear.

Broadcast: January 1981

Watched: November 2020

Warriors’ Gate, Part One

“Oh, he’ll love it on Gallifrey.” The Doctor speaks of Adric with genuine affection here. Although literally the next second Adric f*cks the TARDIS up, so.

Anyway – bloody hell that’s good, which makes it the fourth part one out of five this season to have that effect on me. That long opening sequence is instantly strange and gripping; there are loads of weird camera angles that makes it visually compelling in a way Doctor Who doesn’t often go for.

Also, bloody hell, the design work. The ship! The gateway! The banqueting hall! The knights (which remind me of Keys of Marinus, making me wonder if maybe Gallagher saw it as a kid)! This is the best looking story in... ever, maybe?

Plus, in ways I can’t quite put my finger on, this feels like the first story in which you can detect the real ‘80s – some of the hairstyles, maybe the woolly hats. The picture quality even feels different.

I was just thinking it’s a shame there aren’t more stories with this set of regulars (though of course Big Finish have got our back). Then I realised I’d had the same impulse with 4/Sarah/Harry and 9/Rose/Jack. So maybe I just like trios.

What kind of idiot wouldn’t think this was the best season in years, that’s what I want to know [name of friend with bad taste redacted].

Warriors’ Gate, Part Two

“You mean you’re worse than useless.”

So I’m not entirely sure what’s going on, or if that’s my fault or that of the script. Also not sure how the various aspects of this – the Tharil stuff, the gateway, the symbolism of the coin toss – actually links together. Maybe it’s a sort of John Rawls thing? You don’t know if you’ll be ruler or ruled so don’t make the system shit?

But it’s so beautifully made, in a way few Who stories are. I love the contrast between the sort of high concept poetic tone of the story, and the miserable grimey reality of the blokes working on the freighter. Also, the freighter model! And the Tharil make up! Sort of the opposite end of the spectrum from the Nimon in terms of design quality. And people disappearing into mirrors! And the Tharil’s eye view camera angles!

Love the Doctor pretending to be a suit of armour to try to confuse the robot knight. Hadn’t realised on previous viewings that Romana’s sympathy for the Tharils comes partly from being forced to do their job.

Warriors’ Gate, Part Three

“Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection... Action and reaction are equal and opposite.” Okay the symbolism is about how if you mistreat people they’ll mistreat you in return, got it.

One of the things that made this quite boring when I was a kid, but incredibly compelling now, is the fact that none of it’s spoon-fed. There’s no exposition, Tom barely speaks in this episode: we’re just left to infer what’s happening. That works really well but it does mean I’m not entirely sure what *is* happening. Is the pocket dimension collapsing because of the gravity of the dwarf star alloy? Why is the Doctor suddenly in the last days of the Tharil Empire? We’re just left to guess.

Again though – the scenes where Tharils are separately leading the Doctor and Romana through black and white photographs are unutterably gorgeous. Though K9’s breakdown would be more effective if he hadn’t had a breakdown in every second story since season 15.

I remain entirely unable to comprehend why [redacted] would think this season was a step down from the last – it’s the best in a decade.

Warriors’ Gate, Part Four

“Don’t move, lads – it’s on automatic.” “It doesn’t have an automatic.”

Ahh! It is the dwarf star alloy causing the contraction, it’s explained and everything. The consequences of chattel slavery are literally that the universe collapses.

Lot of stuff about moral development in this I’ve never spotted before. Adric doesn’t yet understand that there is no way the Doctor is going to leave a bunch of slaves in captivity – he needs the Doctor’s influence to develop a conscience, like Turlough does. Or Jack, come to that.

Romana, who may have been blasé in the past, is already there and shouts down Adric’s suggestion of just leaving alongside the Doctor. Then she repeats the speech the Doctor gives her about staying behind to Adric: she’s acting more like the Doctor, so her departure is a sign of growth, even if it happens weirdly quickly. I quite like that K9 has the ability to make another TARDIS programmed in, which explains everything she does later in books and audios, I suppose. 

Other things: I like that the use of the MZ happens offscreen so they don’t have to show anything but a bunch of smoke and men running coughing out of the archway. The explosion, when the ship finally tries to take off and the archway collapses, is a surprisingly good bit of model work.

K9 goes backwards at one point. I love Packer getting increasingly mad because he can’t get rid of the bloody thing. (I will not miss K9 either.)

The shot of the Doctor after he’s lost a fight, and lays sprawled on a metal grill, seems to prefigure Logopolis. Given there was another bit of foreshadowing in dialogue in The Leisure Hive I’m wondering if this was deliberate.

I don’t entirely understand what the point of the e-space trilogy was – I mean, they’re all great, I just don’t entirely understand why they needed to invent a whole new universe for three stories. But this season is bloody good.