Warriors' Gate Part One

The one where the TARDIS lands at the intersection of two universes...

The story with the most troublesome apostrophe in Doctor Who history opens with the most amazing tracking shot which does everything right that Lovett Bickford did wrong at the start of The Leisure Hive. Director Paul Joyce* conjures so much atmosphere and anticipation by panning across an interesting set (rather than a bunch of beach huts), lit in beautiful midnight blue by John Dixon, and which progresses steadily as POV, as if the viewer is really there. Doctor Who does virtual reality! It's a shame the overall sequence is pieced together using separate cross-faded shots, but overall it's a highly effective and intriguing opening to the story.

It builds an interest in what's going on in this strange world of scaffold and sleeping lion men. The voiceover countdown raises expectations too, and it's cheekily playful to have the camera pass a couple of loafers playing cards who appear to have little of interest going on. The fact they are there, doing that, is like a little window on the real world, whatever this world is (and however real it may be!). There's lots of graffiti too, attributed to Kilroy (played uncredited by regular Doctor Who supporting artist Mike Mungarvan).

We seem to be aboard some kind of spacecraft - it's not an easy guess as the set is built from scaffolding - and the crew is using a shackled lion creature as a navigator. It's suggested that the ship can travel to wherever the lion creature envisions ("He's still not visualising"), but the only thing the hairy feller seems to be seeing is a spinning blue box (the TARDIS!), which Joyce places as a rotating frame in his eye. It's directed with such breathtaking imagination and courage, like Doctor Who has rarely seen before, and adds to the overall feeling of weirdness. The ship has apparently fallen into a time rift, represented on screen by a juddering effect, and its warp drive damaged. It has landed nowhen: no space, no time, just nothingness!

Meanwhile, inside the TARDIS the Doctor seems to have changed his mind about returning Adric to the Starliner, and now reckons he'd really enjoy a visit to Gallifrey. It suggests the Doctor is thinking of returning Romana to Gallifrey, as the Time Lords requested, and leaving Adric (and perhaps K-9?) there too so that he can go off again all on his lonesome. The Fourth Doctor has never chosen the company he keeps, remember, so this really does feel like he just wants rid of everyone! The practicality of dumping a teenage orphan from another universe on his homeworld is not addressed.

The lion man held captive on the privateer ship manages to escape, giving the rattled Lane some impressive alien side-eye on the way out, and then makes his way across the white void outside like he's in a New Romantic music video. He's even dressed for the occasion, like he's just stepped out of the Top of the Pop studio next door. The leonine make-up job for Biroc by Pauline Cox is great, complete with hairy hands, a muzzle and cat-like contact lenses. He looks great, and it's hard to believe he's played by the same bloke who was Steven's mate in The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve!

Biroc judders his way into the TARDIS, letting the damaging time winds in at the same time (represented as a shaft of light rather than wind - love it!). These time winds blow up half the TARDIS console, burn the Doctor's hand, and frazzle the innards of poor old K-9, who really has been through the mill of late (he caught laryngitis in Destiny of the Daleks, was attacked by wolfweeds in The Creature from the Pit, was drowned in The Leisure Hive, and beheaded in Full Circle). Biroc is on a separate timeline to the Doctor etc, so appears to be both present and absent at the same time. It's a wonderfully simple effect. Fiddling with the TARDIS controls, before leaving he tells the Doctor he is "the shadow of my past and of your future".

What that means is beyond me (for now), but the Doctor does note that Biroc has brought the TARDIS to a place with zero coordinates. "Ponder on that," he tells Romana, before making off after Lion-O. So if E-Space has negative coordinates, and N-Space has positive coordinates, to be somewhere with zero coordinates (or near as damn it: 0.00057) suggests they are at the intersection between the two. Can they get home this way perhaps?

Who's going home is open for conjecture though, following Romana's rather telling comment to Adric. "What if the Doctor and I went different ways?" she says. Her plan is already taking shape, but this could just as much mean them parting ways on Gallifrey as anything else. But you do get a strong impression that Romana does not want to go back to Gallifrey...!

The Doctor follows Biroc across the white void (very Land of Fiction!) to a ruined church in the middle of nowhere. It appears to be just the facade of a building, but when they go through the doors there is an interior, a vast hall inside. I love this surreal effect, it's a bit like the TARDIS being bigger within than without. This structure is also bigger on the inside.

The grand hall is a medieval marvel by designer Graeme Story, with a banqueting table, candelabra and statues all draped in a canopy of cobwebs and dust. Biroc doesn't hang about, he scarpers through a mirror, like you do. The Doctor stops to explore (like he does) and this is when one of the axe-wielding statues comes to life and appears to decapitate him. I love how the statue's stroke coincides with a quick cutaway to the end titles.

This is all so strange, weird and surreal. I've a general grasp of what's going on, but if I try to think about things too much, my grasp slackens. If I try to make sense of the coin-tossing, or the I Ching gobbledygook (astral Jung, causalistic procedures), then my mind begins to melt. It all looks very pretty and arty, but I need more stability in my storytelling for me to get fully on board. Also, those crewmen are really quite tedious.

* This story was actually directed in part by the credited Paul Joyce, and the uncredited production assistant Graeme Harper due to tensions behind the scenes. But because I've not the time or inclination to find out which scenes were directed by which man, I'm just going to refer to the director as Joyce throughout, seeing as he was credited with it on screen.

First broadcast: January 3rd, 1981

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The opening tracking shot.
The Bad: I find the characters of grumpy Rorvik and whining Packard really annoying.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 24

NEXT TIME: Part Two...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part Two; Part Three; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/09/warriors-gate.html

Warriors' Gate is available on BBC DVD as part of the E-Space Trilogy box set. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Space-Trilogy-Warriors/dp/B001MWRTUY