I’ve tended to interpret Doctor Who stories through an authorial lens during this project, which raises the question of how we decide authorship in television. The cliche is that it’s a writer’s medium, and Doctor Who‘s format – the ultimate procedural, where every week involves a different location, set-up and cast – means it’s unusually easy to see a particular writer’s fingerprints. But this doesn’t mean screenwriters are straightforward auteur figures here. If they were, it wouldn’t be so easy to tell the difference between Terry Nation being script-edited by Robert Holmes and Terry Nation being script-edited by Douglas Adams. It’s also worth considering the impact producers and lead actors have on the tone, tropes and themes of a series, not to mention the directors.
If Doctor Who was a film franchise, I’d be happy to focus on directors as the key visionaries of a particular entry. As it is, television directing tends to prioritise a “house style” over individual creativity – but there are exceptions. Warriors’ Gate is a fantastically distinctive piece of direction right from the opening shot, an extended mobile tracking shot of the kind that looked just as exciting when Mark Tonderai did it at the start of The Ghost Monument in 2018. The usual caveat of dated effects applies; the practical make-up on the Tharils is still very impressive, but the Quantel zoom-in on the coin frozen in mid-air now brings to mind the “got any more of them pixels?” meme. But the attitude underpinning Paul Joyce’s work here – the use of cutting-edge effects to tell a story visually – is still in a different universe to most television directing.
That’s both metaphorically and literally true, of course. The E-Space stories are easily the most enjoyable of Season Eighteen, yet they still feel like an opportunity missed. Doctor Who has crossed into a whole new universe, a universe defined as the opposite of the regular universe, and the only real difference is the greenish tint on the star fields. Full Circle and State of Decay are very good stories, but there’s nothing in them that couldn’t have happened in the show’s regular universe. Then Warriors’ Gate happens, and we’re in the alien void of The Mind Robber again. Characters interact with frozen objects and pass in and out of mirrors, full-colour people walk through black-and-white landscapes, and suddenly the show really does feel like it’s fallen into a brand new universe.
Warriors’ Gate is a fantastically distinctive piece of direction right from the opening shot
Joyce’s claim to be the architect of the serial’s best qualities rests, in part, on how many of those virtues involve his strange, poetic visual tricks. They also involve a little behind-the-scenes knowledge. The funniest fact about Warriors’ Gate is that Joyce was fired halfway through production for going over-schedule and replaced with Graeme Harper – not a bad substitute at all – but he had to be rehired because no-one else could understand his camera scripts. But Joyce also claims that Stephen Gallagher’s scripts were unworkable, and Tom Baker and Lalla Ward objected to the characterisation of the Doctor and Romana. The final version of Warriors’ Gate was, in this telling, largely the work of Joyce and script editor Christopher H Bidmead.
No doubt there is some collector who has every draft of the screenplay and can say for certain whether this is true or not. Bits of it ring true; as a first-time writer, it’s believable that Gallagher would be less sure-footed with the Fourth Doctor’s characterisation than an actor who’d been playing him for nearly seven years at this point. It’s also quite plausible that Ward would insist on an unsentimental leaving scene for Romana, just as Elizabeth Sladen had years earlier (although of course both scenes are absolutely heartbreaking anyway, and the extended scene of Romana bamboozling Rorvik’s crew in episode two is almost cruel in reminding us what a joy we’re about to lose). Joyce’s claim to authorship is also more than credible, for the reasons noted above.
The part I don’t buy is the part that claims Bidmead worked on this more than usual. Christopher H Bidmead is not the kind of script editor who can hide his voice; David Fisher’s The Leisure Hive feels much closer to Bidmead’s own scripts than it does Fisher’s The Androids of Tara, for instance. But there aren’t many familiar Bidmead ingredients in Warriors’ Gate, and even when they appear they’re defamiliarised. The motif of a stranger appearing in the TARDIS control room will recur in the very next story, yet there is no comparison between the haunting, bizarre, poetic scene of Biroc operating the TARDIS console while phasing in and out of time and the incredibly boring opening gambit we’re about to get in The Keeper of Traken.
Warriors’ Gate also ignores Bidmead’s directives about avoiding satire, allegory or pastiche, resulting in a story that’s much easier to relate to than even the best of its Season Eighteen stablemates. It has bored, working-class spaceship employees straight out of Alien, and its heady time-travel storyline is put across using medieval castles, magic mirrors and beasts straight out of Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete. Admittedly, Bidmead himself would sometimes fall back on mystical and fairy-tale motifs in order to dramatise the theoretical physics he wanted to make stories about – that’ll be clear enough by the end of this season. But there’s nothing in Warriors’ Gate that points the way ahead to Bidmead’s later scripts as clearly as it foreshadows Gallagher’s later Terminus, whose final twist – that an apparently dead character is actually experiencing time at a different rate – essentially mashes together the big reveals regarding the Gundans and the Tharils here.
Underneath it all, Warriors’ Gate is about a race of aliens being exploited for their natural abilities, the sort of post-colonial science fiction which has been a regular part of the show for ten years at least. But even if it’s possible to scrape back the layers of visual invention, there are still new twists here. The Doctor receives his first inkling as to what’s going on when he meets a third party, the Gundans, and the Tharils prove to be just as capable of exploiting the humans as the humans are of exploiting the Tharils. It’s a sign that the story’s mix of traditionalism and radicalism goes deeper than simply using Quantel. Rorvik is a complex villain with a compelling plan; he doesn’t need to start cackling madly in the final episode, but it’s sort of delightful that he does. The E-Space stories are all, in their own very different ways, about reconciling the blood-and-thunder fun of traditional Doctor Who with the show’s new aesthetic and thematic concerns. Warriors’ Gate is the best of them, because it features both the largest volume of radical new ideas and the broadest range of traditional Gothic adventure elements, all mixed together in a thrillingly unpredictable fashion. It’s a phenomenal piece of work, whoever’s responsible for it.
Next: The Keeper of Traken (1981)
