In the case of the latter, they have chosen to keep the look basic and lo-fi atmospheric (ie dimly lit) lighting, scaffolding poles and gantries, as well as making use of the actual studio lights above the actors – “shooting off set” a verboten move at TV centre that saw ambitious director Paul Joyce briefly replaced by Graeme Harper before his eventual reinstatement. Warrior’s Gate is clearly science fiction that has occurred in the wake of Alien and this is apparent in how both Gallagher chooses to write the slavers and how the production have chosen to depict their cargo ship. It’s not all art house of course (well, not quite). Between these locations lie the white void, a budget saving device that is surprisingly effective and reminiscent of the similarly constrained, yet wholly imaginative Troughton serial, The Mind Robber. OK, it all looks a bit like a music video for Visage or Duran Duran now I grant you, but where did those New Romantic bands get their ideas from? Yup, the same place. It’s certainly inspired the decision to use superimposed black and white stills of Powis Castle’s ornate gardens as a ‘location’, recalling to mind the similar gardens that appear in Resnais’ crisply shot black and white nouvelle vague classic. In its production design of the decaying dining hall and the mirror imagery, the serial is clearly influenced by Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête and Orphée, whilst I get a sense that another French film, L’Année dernière à Marienbad, was also on Gallagher’s mind when he devised this tale of a fatalistic. Stephen Gallagher’s screenplay presents proper, literate science fiction, a world away from the Saturday morning pictures thrills that normally make up the atmosphere of Doctor Who, and in some way predicts the tone of many of the New Adventures novels that were to come some ten years later. I can’t profess to knowing everything that’s actually going on in Warriors’ Gate, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t bloody love it. Adric and K-9 also feature but, to the relief of the audience, Adric has very little to do here and, to the relief of the production team, K-9 is also redundant and increasingly kicked around by the villains. Having been identified as a time traveller, their intention is to put her to use as Biroc’s replacement. Biroc has escaped from his human captors and leads the Doctor through the realms to a deserted, cobwebbed baroque banqueting hall, whilst Romana is confronted by the Tharils slavers – a cargo ship crew led by Rorvik (Clifford Rose) and Packard (Kenneth Cope). The TARDIS, beset by time winds, arrives at these zero co-ordinates where they encounter Biroc (David Weston), one of a leonine race of time sensitives called the Tharils, whose natural ability to walk the winds are being forcibly used and harnessed by humans who wish to travel through hyperspace. The third and final instalment in season eighteen’s E-Space trilogy, Warriors’ Gate is set in the hinterland between that universe and our own, N-Space. “Do nothing, if it’s the right sort of nothing”
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