A Certain Legendary Quality

Life is a series of transitions, some of which we notice, some of which we don’t, some of which are repeated and cyclical, some of which are once-in-a-lifetime events, some of which are almost imperceptibly gradual, and some of which hit you like the proverbial ton of bricks. How much choice do we really have about any of these things? How much power do we really have to affect our own future? Should we really try to be more aware of these strange transitional spaces when we enter them?

So, a review of a Tom Baker Doctor Who story. All Doctor Who takes me to my happy place – some examples, admittedly, more completely than others – but none so quickly nor so surely than the best of the fourth Doctor’s stories. Giving myself only a month this year to concentrate on this era resulted in some really painful decisions – after gorging myself on most of season 14 (surely the zenith of this most zenithal Doctor) I found myself short of time and had to skip seasons 16 and 17 entirely, much as I love them and stuffed with great stories though they are.

Now, my absolute favourite fourth Doctor story is Pyramids of Mars, but the criteria for this current set of reviews is that they’re of stories that have had a special place in my heart ever since I first saw them – and, truth be told, it took me a while to completely fall for Pyramids, eerily brilliant though it is. My next choice was going to be The Talons of Weng-Chiang, but that’s a daunting choice for anyone to review, so many incisive and insightful words having already been written about that wonderful story.

So here I am, writing about Warriors’ Gate, instead – a strange choice, you may be thinking, but this is a strange story in many ways. If you asked a dozen people what they want from a really good episode of Doctor Who, you’d probably get a dozen or so different answers: a rattling good adventure yarn, a scary monster for the kids, clever plotting, heartbreaking emotional journeys (if you asked one of the new crowd, anyway), and so on. The thing is that Warriors’ Gate doesn’t really feature any of these things. (It doesn’t even really feature any warriors, though there is thankfully at least a gate in it.)

The story opens with the Doctor and his companions lost in another space-time continuum, from which they would quite like to escape (they have been stuck here for the previous two stories). When rational analysis of the problem doesn’t produce any answers, the Doctor proposes setting the controls at random and seeing what happens – which Adric then goes ahead and does. As a result the TARDIS enters a featureless white void, and is penetrated by Biroc, an enigmatic alien who seems to have an innate affinity with time even greater than that of a Time Lord.

But Biroc is on the run, hunted by the crew of a privateer starship which is also stranded in the void, and also desperate to escape: they are slavers, trading in Biroc’s people and exploiting their special temporal sensitivity by using them as navigators. Biroc, the slavers, and the TARDIS travellers find themselves drawn to a mysterious stone gateway, the only structure in the void: within is a very peculiar hall of mirrors, a host of decaying robots, and – possibly – the answers to all their questions…

Warriors’ Gate is a challenging piece of Doctor Who, and almost unparallelled in its ability to confuzzle the unwary (Ghost Light could probably give it a run for its money, though). It is utterly unthinkable that anything so oblique and obscure and densely cerebral would possibly be broadcast on BBC1 on a Saturday evening these days, and that’s something that makes me rather sad, because for all of its flaws – which are numerous – Warriors’ Gate is also brave and distinctive.

This story emanates from a period of Doctor Who when the show’s narrative was being overseen by Christopher H Bidmead, who has become something of a divisive and controversial figure in recent years (mainly because he’s not afraid to take pops at Rusty Davies and David Tennant). Where Bidmead’s immediate predecessors told stories which were driven by characterisation and an appreciation of literature, the season Bidmead oversaw was much more about places than people – most of the stories of season 18 revolve around the Doctor arriving in an environment which is, in some way or other, mysterious, and the plot essentially details how he figures out the rules and history which inform the operation of wherever it is that he is. So, for example, Full Circle is basically about the process of coming to understand the very eccentric ecology of the planet Alzarius, and the ramifications of this for its inhabitants. In the same way, Warriors’ Gate is about trying to understand the nature of the void and its occupants.

What makes Warriors’ Gate different is that this process-of-understanding is not especially well-supported by the narrative as presented on screen. There isn’t a big moment of explicit exposition where the Doctor shouts ‘Aha!’ and for the benefit of the audience explains what exactly has been going on for the previous four episodes. The clues are there, very openly if you know what to look for, but not necessarily highlighted as such – talk of randomness and probability, the tension between action and inaction. There are also things in this story appreciably stranger than anything normally seen in Doctor Who, by which I mean conceptually stranger: an environment where space and time are literally interchangeable, and a story where the usual process of cause-and-effect starts twisting back on itself.

This probably sounds like very tough going, and if you sit down and try to make sense of every last detail then you’ll probably just end up giving yourself a nasty headache – I’ve never been able to work out which of the two universes involved the Tharils originate from – most of the clues in the story strongly suggest they’re native to E-Space, as are the privateer crew, but this doesn’t really explain the distinctly Terran-sounding names and cultural references aboard their ship. I do kick myself about this; I once spent well over an hour interviewing Steve Gallagher, writer of this story, and completely neglected to ask him to explain the finer details of the plot to me.

Then again, I got the impression there was a degree of editorial and directorial jiggery-pokery involved with which Gallagher was distinctly displeased. I can’t entirely share his chagrin – while this is one of the most overtly directed Doctor Who stories, by the standards of its time it looks impressively different, with some terrific visual conceits along the way. One of the most striking things about the story is that while the void itself represents the coming together of two universes, the aesthetic of the tale sees the collision of post-Alien grimy hard SF with fairy-tale fantasy. Both of these things are well achieved – a particular word of praise for the under-utilised Gundan robots – and the contrast between the two is highly effective.

The story also benefits from having an interesting set of bad guys in the form of the privateer crew, who mostly seem more concerned with the contents of their packed lunches than with actually being malevolent. Doctor Who has rarely got the banality of real evil quite as right as it does here, and the ship’s captain, played by Clifford Rose, is a plausible psychotic. ‘I’m finally getting something done!’ he cries at the climax – another key line in a story which is on one level about the virtues of sometimes remaining completely passive.

I talk quite a lot about the distinction between plot-driven 20th century Who and its character-driven 21st century counterpart, but some parts of season 18 – particularly this story and Logopolis – come as close as any Doctor Who to being something else again, idea-driven narratives. These are not so much stories based on high-concepts but abstract ones, with the tales seeming to meander around without much of an awareness of traditional plotting. However, with ideas as unusual as these, and direction as strong as these stories enjoy (Warriors’ Gate was the work of Paul Joyce, with assistance from an uncredited Graeme Harper), the results are fascinating and peculiarly watchable.

And there is one further transitional state bound up with Warriors’ Gate, for me personally anyway. It feels strange to admit to this now, and I don’t really understand how it happened, but I didn’t watch most of season 18 on its original broadcast: the stories were just a little too full-on and hard-edged for me to take at the age of 6. I remember odd episodes of The Leisure Hive and Meglos, but (almost uniquely for any story after The Invisible Enemy) nothing of Full Circle or State of Decay from their original transmissions.

But I do remember seeing the first episode of Warriors’ Gate and thinking ‘this is out there’. And I remember making a point of watching the last episode, for a couple of reasons: firstly, K9 was leaving, who I’d always loved, and I wanted to say goodbye to him properly. And secondly, although I couldn’t understand how, I knew that somehow they would be changing the Doctor soon, and I wanted to see how they’d pull the trick. I didn’t know when it would be done, though, and for a brief moment thought it would be at the end of this story. It wasn’t, and so I resolved to watch the next story as well. And then, as it turned out, the one after that. And then see what happened after that. And after that, and after that, and after that, until…

I’m not saying that Warriors’ Gate made me into the pathological, beyond-help Doctor Who fan that I am today [Autres temps, autres moeurs – needless to say, Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall between them managed to come up with at least a partial cure – A] – that process may well have already been underway, and the last couple of season 18 stories also played their role. But it marks the point at which I stopped casually missing episodes, if I could possibly avoid it, and Doctor Who became definitively my favourite TV programme, and ultimately one of the great passions of my life [>Sigh< – A]. And that will always make it special for me.