Warriors' Gate

It's like talking with a Cheshire Cat.

Now the conclusion of the E-space trilogy and the departure of Romana and K-9. I've heard mixed things about this one and I think it is generally regarded as the weakest of the trilogy. All I really know about it is that involves time-sensitive lion-men so I'm coming into this one as a fairly blank slate.

Plot Summary

An Earth ship is attempting to go into warp drive. It is carrying a group of sedated humanoid lions called Tharls aboard and using one of the Tharls, named Biroc, as it's unwilling navigator. The ship is damaged an stuck in a neutral space between E- and N-space. Biroc appears to pass out and the captain, Rorvik, orders him taken below. Biroc comes to and shakes off his custodians, running out into a white void.

On the TARDIS, the Doctor and Romana debate about how to get back to N-space while Adric listens quietly. The Doctor suggests just pushing random buttons to see if anything will happen, though Romana restrains him. Adric however, does push a random button and the TARDIS flies off. Their flight is intercepted by Biroc, who appears out of phase. His appearance also opens the TARDIS to time winds which damage K-9.

Biroc guides the TARDIS to the null space and then leaves, although giving a warning about the people they will soon meet. Seeing K-9 damaged, the Doctor has Romana start to repair him while the Doctor leaves the TARDIS to follow Biroc. The Doctor and Romana also note that they are in a bridge of space between E- and N-space.

The TARDIS shows up on the scanner of the human ship. Already thinking of leaving to find Biroc rather than attempting to wake another Tharl and potentially killing others (and cutting into their profits), Rorvik and two others leave the ship to investigate the TARDIS. They find it and attempt to gain entrance.

The Doctor follows Biroc through the void to a small castle gate. Inside is an old hall, covered in dust and cobwebs. Biroc finds a mirror and passes through it. The Doctor enters and starts looking around. As he does so, one of the suits of armor comes to life and lifts its sword to attack him. The Doctor dodges it but the armor continues to pursue him, soon joined by a second.

To determine if Rorvik and his crew are friendly or not, Romana leaves the TARDIS but gives Adric warning to wait for her signal. She converses with Rorvik, who becomes suspicious that she might be a time sensitive person and invites her back to his ship to examine the damage. Romana sends gives a signal for Adric to be cautious and wait in the TARDIS and then goes off with them.

Adric however, does not obey and instead waits a few minutes and then decides to head off looking for her and the Doctor with K-9. K-9 is still damaged and they soon get lost in the void. Adric gets an idea to help K-9, removing one of his ears to help him triangulate better. It helps K-9 but Adric becomes lost himself.

The Doctor manages to corner himself in such a way that the two robotic suits of armor damage themselves. He opens up their circuits and begins to interrogate them. They are Gundan warrior robots, designed to guard the gate. They lose power before they can elaborate leaving the Doctor frustrated. However, K-9 arrives at the gate and the Doctor decides to hook him up to give a temporary power boost to the robots.

On Rorvik's ship, he grabs Romana and hooks her up to the navigation unit. She is unable to provide complete navigation but she does give enough for the castle gate to show up on the scanner as a physical location. Rorvik decides to head out to investigate with most of the crew. He orders two crew members to bring out one of the Tharls to be woken up on his return.

Rorvik and his men arrive at the gate just as the Doctor is getting information about there being three gates and they all being one. They threaten him to reveal more but are distracted by one of the robots suddenly getting up and passing through the gate. The Doctor grabs K-9 and dodges through the fortress. At risk of being cornered again, he leaves K-9 and passes through the gate, leaving Rorvik and his crew alone with K-9.

The two remaining crewmen on Rorvik's ship pull out one of the Tharls but against orders, try to revive him. They end up electrocuting him instead and leave the body for someone else. However, the Tharl is not dead. He gets up and makes his way to the bridge where he finds Romana bound to the navigation chair. He loosens the straps but has to hide before undoing them completely as the two crewmen left behind enter.

The two men debate what to do with her and are startled by her opening her eyes and asking questions. They leave her on the bridge as Rorvik calls them over the radio to ready a piece of heavy equipment called the M-Z for transport. Romana then slips out of her loosened bonds and hides under a tarp in the equipment bay.

Rorvik and his men fire at the mirror gate but their weapons bounce back at them. Rorvik sends three men back to the ship while he radios to prep the M-Z. K-9 follows, attempting to get new masters but he is unceremoniously tossed out of the ship when he attempts to enter.

While the door is open, Adric slips in and hides under the same tarp as Romana. The tarp covers the M-Z, which is rolled out of the ship. However, it is left while the engineer, Lane, looks over the damaged warp drive. Romana and Adric slip out and look at the ship, discovering it is made of dwarf-star alloy. K-9 rolls up shrieking about the mass contraction of the null space. His warning alerts the crew and Romana is recaptured though Adric and K-9 run escape.

Romana is taken back inside the ship while the rest of the crew push the M-Z to the gate. Inside the ship, the loose Tharl, named Lazlo, emerges and knocks out Romana's guard. He takes her and they vanish to the gate and pass through it. They emerge in the upper balcony, watching Rorvik and his men.

After passing through the gate, the Doctor meets Biroc who appears to be waiting for him. Biroc informs him that although K-9 will be repaired, only organic matter may pass through the gate. The Doctor follows Biroc through a series of gardens until the both reemerge in the fortress at an earlier time. The Tharls are feasting about the table while being served by human slaves.

The Doctor realizes that the Tharls were the slave masters who ruled a great empire and built the Gundans. He also notes they show as little compassion for their slaves as did the human crew who has now enslaved the Tharls. The dinner is interrupted by a squad of Gundans who break in and attack the party. Romana, sensing danger, runs down to the Doctor. The Doctor is then instantly transported back to the present where Rorvik and his men surround the Doctor and Romana at the table.

Rorvik demands to know the secret of the mirror, believing it to be the way out, and refuses to believe that it can only be accessed by the Tharls or other time sensitives. K-9 Enters and warns the Doctor of the null space collapsing on itself. The Doctor is confused but Romana tells him that Rorvik's ship is made of dwarf star alloy, making it a matter sink in the void.

K-9 attempts to pass through the mirror but loses power. The Doctor runs toward him and Rorvik, frustrated at the lack of answers, prepares to shoot him. Through the mirror, the Doctor sees Biroc, admitting that the Tharls were wrong in their enslavement of others. He now plans to change the future.

Before Rorvik can fire, Adric appears from behind the M-Z device, threatening to fire it. The Doctor runs up and mans the controls, ordering Romana and Adric out while carrying K-9. He follows shortly after and all four reenter the TARDIS. Rorvik starts to pursue but decides not to bother. He fires the M-X at the mirror but the blast rebounds, destroying the device. Rorvik, becoming unhinged, leads his men back to the ship.

Once on the ship, Rorvik turns the ship so that it's engines point toward the fortress. He intends to create a back blow from the engines and try to shatter the mirror that way. The Doctor sees this on the scanner and heads out to stop him, fearing the rebound will destroy everything in the void. Romana comes with him to help.

Rorvik observes the Doctor and Romana entering the outer hull of the ship and goes after them. He also orders his men to wake the remaining Tharls. As Rorvik exits the ship, Biroc and Lazlo are hiding near it. Biroc follows while Lazlo enters the ship. Rorvik catches up to the Doctor and stops him from creating a power drain on the engine. Romana starts the process but Rorvik knocks her aside and stops the drain. Biroc appears beside them and tells the two Time Lords that they should do nothing. He takes their hands and the trio disappears as Rorvik gloats.

Inside the ship, the two low levels who tried to reanimate Lazlo, Sagan and Aldo, beg off and Royce tries to reanimate the Tharls. He electrocutes three of them and is preparing a fourth when Lazlo comes up behind him. Royce attacks him but Lazlo overpowers him, electrocuting him with a severed cable. Lazlo then begins to wake the other Tharls.

Biroc, Romana and the Doctor appear outside the TARDIS. The Doctor enters but Romana refuses, electing to stay in E-space with the Tharls rather than return to Gallifrey. The Doctor gives her K-9, telling her to fix him. The Doctor dematerializes in the TARDIS while Biroc, Romana and K-9 enter the fortress and pass through the mirror.

The human ship discharges it's engines but the blast rebounds off the mirror. Much of the fortress is destroyed along with the human ship. However, out of the wrecked hull, the reanimated Tharls emerge and pass through the mirror. The TARDIS briefly materializes in the Tharl's garden before disappearing again and returning to N-space. Romana and K-9 watch and the walk way with Biroc, promising to help him pass through time and free his remaining enslaved people.

Analysis

I think it is safe to say that Warriors' Gate is weird. In many ways, it reminds me of The Curse of Fenric in that there is more story here but that there wasn't enough time to put it down. Unlike Fenric though, I doubt any of that extra material was ever filmed.

First I must praise both the direction and conception of the story. The direction was very well done and you felt instantly in good hands with the opening tracking shot leading from the sleeping Tharls to the bridge. There were a lot of good camera shots and interesting points of view throughout the story. The conception was also quite good as the whiteness of the void gave it a surrealistic feel. Yet at the same time, there was a feeling of being grounded in reality with the realism of the crew and even the Tharl's abandoned fortress. The gardens were also bathed in surrealism, keeping the watcher heavily off-balance as to what was really going on. So from a visual point of view, this story is excellent.

I also enjoyed the acting for the most part as well. The Doctor had a bit of a minimal role in this one and was off on his own quite a lot. In many ways, this was Romana's story and she did very well. Her confidence was well on display and she held her own very well against the human crew, who also acted fairly well although with a caveat or two.

Adric was also pretty good, being used lightly and mostly for comic relief. Contrasting earlier Adric stories with later ones, the key for him is in limiting his screen time. He should always be a junior companion, with a stronger character taking the main companion role. The problems arose when he was elevated to senior companion in the Fifth Doctor era and tried to hold his own against Tegan and Nyssa. It was in this overexposure that his character flaws, as well as the limits of Matthew Waterhouse's acting, rose to the surface and made him unlikeable.

Rorvik dominates among the crew and he does fairly well, especially as his mania to escape grows. He does lose it in his final gloat scene. That was over-the-top and poorly acted in contrast to his excellent earlier performance. It leaves an unfortunate bad aftertaste.

The rest of the crew is also pretty good, although fairly unremarkable. I got the feeling that there might have been a bit more backstory with Sagan and Aldo as these two were clearly designed to be a comic relief team in the Robert Holmes double act vein. However, they don't do much other than look disinterested in Rorvik's orders and bow out whenever it comes to doing anything that might inflict actual harm on anyone. Their repugnance as electrocuting Lazlo is shown and you can see that humanitarian side when they beg off attempting another revival. But without time or development, they just sort of are there and you don't feel that bad for them after they are blown up with the rest of the ship.

So you have good acting and good visuals. The problems with this story arise in the storytelling. I can handle weird just fine, Kinda being a prime example of an excellent but off-the-wall story. Warriors' Gate however suffers from a lack of focus. Surreal and odd is fine, if it is held in a tight focus or gives something that allows the audience to grab on to at the end to try and make a measure of sense of it. The Mind Robber would probably be a good example of surrealism explained.

However, in this story, the focus shifts all over the place. There are sidebars with minor characters and the main thrust of the Tharl's story is split between the more standard adventures with Romana and the highly surrealistic adventures with the Doctor. I think the ultimate problem is time. There is more to the story and that was cut out of it. I'd be curious if the cuts were made from the original run or if additional cuts had to be made because of the Romana leaving inclusion. Either way, the fall of the Tharls, their enslavement and the source of their power are never really resolved. Nor is it ever really addressed as to how the return of the Tharls to their gardens allows the TARDIS to pass through the gate and back into N-space. It just leaves you hanging and that leaves a bit of a bad aftertaste with the story.

I also wish Romana had been given a bit more time in her leaving. It was hinted at with her reluctance to return to Gallifrey at the end of Meglos and it returned here in Episode One where she expresses disdain at the idea. So her leaving is not out of the blue. However, it is so rushed that it just feels almost backhanded. I know that they were up against the clock but I would have liked a moment between the two Time Lords in the Tharl gardens. It would have also could have provided a better explanation as to how the Doctor and Adric got to N-space through some action of Biroc's or the like. Of course, the episode was running long so that was essentially impossible, but I think it would have made for a more palatable end.

Overall, I'm torn. The story looked good and was well acted. But the pacing got too fast at the end and the story had too many holes and loose threads. It is enjoyable enough and I would not call it bad, but there is not enough to compel me to actively seek this one out to watch again. But for the visuals and portrayals, I'll easily sit through it and find enjoyment in that.

Overall personal score: 3 out of 5