Review of Warriors’ Gate (#113)
DVD Release Date: 05 May 09
Original Air Date: 03 – 24 Jan 1981
Doctors/Companions: Four, Romana II, K-9, Adric
Stars: Tom Baker, Lalla Ward, John Leeson, Matthew Waterhouse
Preceding Story: State of Decay (Four, Romana II, K-9, Adric)
Succeeding Story: The Keeper of Traken (Four, Adric, Nyssa)

One of the things about Classic Who that’s become more obvious in retrospect is how the multi-part serial format allowed for extensive story set-up, leading to a slow build. So begins the final installment in The E-Space Trilogy, the spacetime-bending Warriors’ Gate.

Effectively all of Part One is background, laying the scene for what comes after in the manner that a modern audience expects more to see in a novel than in a TV show. We meet the human crew of a cargo ship stranded in some strange void, reminiscent of The Mind Robber (which I’m set to review in October); the Doctor and his friends soon find themselves there, too. The humans’ navigator is a leonine being, apparently enslaved, who breaks free, enters the TARDIS out of phase with their timeline, and then retreats via a door in a stone arch through an ancient, cobwebby great hall. The Doctor follows.

One could be forgiven for thinking, at this stage, that there’s not much to this story, and that one’s time could be better spent elsewhere. But there are several mysterious situations established here that develop in interesting ways through the rest of the serial. What’s the relationship between the Tharils—those leonine beings valued for being “time sensitive”—and the humans? What’s up with the microcosmic void? Is it really near the boundary of E-Space and N-Space, and why does it seem unstable? And is that ancient hall really as abandoned as it looks?

The answers come at a satisfying pace, interspersed with more intriguing and perplexing clues. While there are a couple of moments when I looked askance at my screen (most notably the final appearance of the ship’s captain, who somehow manages a performance that’s the maniacally villainous equivalent of a smile that doesn’t reach the eyes—I mean, come on, lad; put some welly into it!), the story still holds up well, nearly forty years on.

For one thing, this is early enough in Adric’s tenure on the TARDIS that he hasn’t gotten too full of himself yet. He’s willing (for the most part) to listen to Romana after the Doctor leaves, but is also not going to let her simply be captured, and takes action to try to help her. Thus Adric’s role in the team is more useful than not, making it easier to like him.

Romana again shows just how competent she is, being perfectly capable of handling a situation without the Doctor. This fact, along with some of the revelations along the way, make her departure from the TARDIS at the end of the story both believable and somehow a little more bearable. K-9, too, has a well-explained reason for staying with Romana, leaving Adric as the connective tissue between the waning Fourth Doctor era and the impending Fifth Doctor one (the E-Space trilogy leads right into the transitional trilogy of The Keeper of Traken, Logopolis, and Castrovalva).

So if you can bear with the slow start, Warriors’ Gate& turns into an engaging, enigmatic tale full of vague weirdness in both time and space, with one-off creatures that could certainly stand up to a return engagement. Anyone who’s already done the “greatest hits” tour of Classic Who and is looking to dig a little deeper could do worse than to step through this Gate.