Warriors' Gate Part Two

The one where Romana is used as a time sensitive navigator...

The axemen cometh! The Gundan robots (for that is what they are) are a great design, and the movement by Robert Vowles is suitably robotic, but not in a disco way. The Gundan is genuinely threatening, especially with its armoured appearance and half-obscured silvery skeletal face. Peter Howell's lumbering theme for the Gundans is great too. What's not so great is the fact it takes an entire eight minutes of this episode before the Doctor manages to actually escape the Gundan attack. Not because it takes him eight minutes to outwit them, but because the episode is paced and edited quite eccentrically, spending more time with Romana and Rorvik's men before resolving the cliffhanger from last week.

The Doctor spends the entire episode inside the banqueting hall finding things out. There's a lot of info-dumping in his scenes, and the Doctor has virtually nothing active to do, while elsewhere Romana gets to go on an adventure.

The Doctor manages to get quite a lot of background info out of the run-down Gundans. The robots were created by their slave masters to "kill the brutes who rule". The Gundans can walk amid the time winds unharmed, something their slave masters could not do, and fled to the Gateway. The Gundan says that the masters rode the time winds too and "took men as their prize", growing ever more powerful with it. The masters created an empire, and drained the life from the ordinary world. It's still not clear who the masters and the slaves are, or were, but it's a lot of juicy information that puts a bit of meat on the bones of what has so far been quite a nebulous story.

Meanwhile, Romana leaves Adric and K-9 in the TARDIS to have a chat with Rorvik and his men, who are hammering to get in. She has a long, drawn out conversation with them which is peppered with sometimes incomprehensible, often impenetrable dialogue as if it's written by a consortium of quantum scientists rather than a television dramatist. In quick succession the viewer is thrown word after phrase which probably means next to nothing to them (or anyone): the "theoretical medium between the striations of the continuum", "digitally modelled time cone isometry parallel bussed into the image translator", "continuum warp", "implicate theory", "supralight speed with dampers", "toroidal time dilators"... It's all just words with no meaning.

Lalla Ward is great in these scenes with the crewmen though, almost flirting with them in a weird otherworldly way. Romana seems removed and alien, with that ever-present smugness underlying it all. It's a bizarre way to flirt with a man (the way she interacts with Lane particularly), but it's nothing quite as odd as the way Ace flirts with Sergeant Leigh in The Curse of Fenric!

Rorvik takes Romana back to his bulk freighter hoping she can fix his warp drive, but secretly intending to use her as a time sensitive navigator in place of the escaped Biroc. Romana's aim is to find some new memory wafers for K-9, but she's being a little naive if she thinks walking off with a gang of strange, desperate men is going to end well.

It's a shame Matthew Waterhouse gets next to nothing to do as Adric, and it's not as though writer Steve Gallagher didn't know the character was going to be a companion. Gallagher was commissioned to provide a storyline for Warriors' Gate just two weeks before a character outline for Adric was issued to potential writers. Not ideal timing, but still well over two months before Gallagher was commissioned to actually write the full scripts. So why Adric spends all his time wandering around in the white void like a lost lamb is hard to fathom.

Nor do I understand why K-9 has both his ears when he reaches the Doctor at the Gateway, when Adric had one of them when they were triangulating. The reason why Adric and K-9 become separated isn't explained either.

The most memorable scene of the episode is when Aldo and Royce try to revive a sleeping Tharil, which is directed by Paul Joyce like a Universal horror film. Electricity courses through the Tharil's body, and we see it contort and fit in searing pain, and there's an agonised scream as the creature is brought back to life. Smoke curls from the tortured body of the creature, and it's all lit with flickering blue light by John Dixon to add to the horror movie atmosphere. It's truly horrible, Doctor Who's milder version of torture porn.

Joyce then comes up trumps by having the viewer see from the injured Tharil's point of view as it rises from its trolley and lurches through the ship towards the shackled Romana. We hear the Tharil gurgling in pain as it approaches the terrified Time Lord and reaches out a hairy hand. Lalla Ward's face of terror and scream of fear make for a stunning cliffhanger, the sort that stays with you.

A few more observations:

• Romana describes Biroc as a "leonine mesomorph", which just means he's a muscly lion. But I've always wondered whether there is some kind of racial connection with the Leonians, as seen in The Woman Who Lived.
• Rorvik's spaceship, the bulk freighter privateer, is a fantastic piece of modelwork with so much detail and texture, but unfortunately looks exactly like a model because of the way we see it, on a plain white set. Because there's no indicator of scale, it looks a bit like a toy.
• The Gundan's axe falling onto the Doctor's back would most certainly maim, or at least hurt him in some way! And after eight minutes waiting to see how the Doctor escapes the axe-wielding Gundans, I can do without the James Bond style pun: "They've cut each other dead."
• The dreadfully unfunny 'close the door' routine with Kenneth Cope feels very out of place in a story which is otherwise painfully serious and self-aware. The "comedy" just doesn't work.

As we head into part 3 I'm keen to know more about the Gundans, their slave creators and their masters. Where do the Tharils come into all this? Perhaps the Doctor will finally be able to escape E-Space now that he knows that there are "three physical gateways, and the three are one".

First broadcast: January 10th, 1981

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The horrific revival of the Tharil and its subsequent menacing of Romana is scary stuff.
The Bad: Adric has nothing to do. At all. Well, he holds an ear, I suppose.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

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

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; 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