The depth of imagery is also reflected in a surprisingly thoughtful and introspective story. You could also argue that the recurring coin toss motif feels like an echo of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, that most iconic of meta-fictional plays.
Review of enter the warriors gate serial#
The serial was heavily visually influenced by La Belle et le Bête and the mirror imagery owes a conscious debt to Orphée. The visuals of Warriors’ Gate are decidedly art house, and so they stand out when compared to quite a few contemporaneous adventures. In fact, it plays to the themes of the season quite well, the sense of decay and erosion. It’s the little touches like the graffiti and the scratches on the metal that makes it seem more lived-in than a lot of Doctor Who sets. The design is more functional than appealing. It looks like the inside of an old warehouse, something that has been lived in. It looks a lot less attractive than most space craft we’ve seen, a lot less polished. The dining hall looks fantastic, but the BBC have always done that sort of quasi-historical setting so very well. That said, the design of the actual sets deserves mention as well. The later Doctor Who serials would often be lit far too brightly, but the brightness gives Warriors’ Gate an ethereal quality. Indeed, for once, the weaknesses of the production in the Nathan Turner era become strengths. Sure, there’s an alien space ship and an old castle, but there’s no jungle or desert or city or anything. The setting for the adventure is pretty much… nothing. The most striking thing about the superb visuals of Warriors’ Gate is that they take advantage of the show’s limited budget. Understandably, this was the last time that Joyce got to work on Doctor Who and a quick review of his filmography shows only two directorial credits following Warriors’ Gate – an episode of Tickets for the Titanic and the documentary 2001: The Making of a Myth. Apparently Graeme Harper even stepped in at one point. Apparently Paul Joyce’s style of filming caused some friction with producer John Nathan Turner, and not all of the serial was the result of Joyce’s work. After all, when else is the show’s tiny production budget going to produce something this beautiful? More than that, though, it turns some of those disadvantages into advantages. Both Stephen Gallagher’s fine script and Paul Joyce’s direction come together to produce a very thoughtful and clever Doctor Who story that manages to avoid a lot of the problems facing this era of the show. It offers an effective bit of speculative fiction while playing to the theme of entropy, decay and collapse. It’s a piece of bold science-fiction that actually manages to accomplish what a lot of these stories in Tom Baker’s final season try to do. I’m actually very, very fond of Warriors’ Gate.
– Adric, the Doctor and Romana discuss modern living Yes, well, that’s one of the advantages of living in a rapidly shrinking micro-universe.
It was the third instalment of the E-Space Trilogy. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the longest-running science-fiction show in the world, I’ll be taking weekly looks at some of my own personal favourite stories and arcs, from the old and new series, with a view to encapsulating the sublime, the clever and the fiendishly odd of the BBC’s Doctor Who.
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