Warriors' Gate is the fifth serial of the 18th season of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who. It was written by Stephen Gallagher and was first broadcast in four weekly parts on BBC1 from 3 to 24 January 1981.
The serial is set at an intersection between the universe of E-Space and the home universe of the alien time traveller the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker). In the serial, the Doctor and his travelling companion Romana (Lalla Ward) seek to free the time-sensitive Tharils from a group of slavers led by Captain Rorvik (Clifford Rose).
Warriors' Gate is the last of three loosely connected serials set in E-Space. It is the last serial to feature Ward as Romana and the last regular appearance of John Leeson as the voice of K9.
Plot Inside the TARDIS, the Fourth Doctor, Romana, Adric, and K9, while travelling between E-Space and the normal universe (N-Space), become trapped in a white null space between the universes. Elsewhere in the void, a slave vessel, run by Captain Rorvik, has also become trapped. It uses members of the leonine Tharil race as their navigators. On becoming stuck, the current navigator, Biroc, escapes the ship and makes his way to the TARDIS on the winds of time. Biroc warns the TARDIS crew of Rorvik's treachery before disappearing. K9's memory wafers are shredded by the winds of time, leaving him functional but lacking long-term memories. The Doctor leaves on his own to explore the null space. He encounters some robots, called Gundans.
Meanwhile, Rorvik and his crew have discovered the TARDIS. Romana leaves to talk to them. Rorvik, believing Romana to be time-sensitive like the Tharils, dupes her into returning to their ship to examine the engines. When Romana does not return, Adric and K9 leave to recover her, but get separated; Adric eventually makes it to the ship and hides aboard, while K9 reunites with the Doctor and aids in repairing the Gundan, after which he learns from it that they were built by slaves and used to overthrow their masters in a violent battle. The Doctor's work is disrupted when Rorvik and several of his men arrive. During a stand-off between the crew and the Doctor, another Gundan activates and walks through the seemingly-solid mirror. Rorvik demands an explanation from the Doctor, revealing he has Romana captive, but the Doctor's only response is to walk through the mirror himself.
Aboard the slaver ship, Romana is freed by another Tharil named Lazlo, and she hides in the hull. She encounters Adric; the two work out that the ship is made from an incredibly dense dwarf star alloy that can contain the Tharils. K9 arrives, and informs the two of dimensional instability in the null space, which they attribute to the alloy, causing the space to collapse in on itself. Romana rejoins Lazlo, who takes her to the gateway and through the mirror, while Adric remains aboard the ship.
On the other side of the mirror, the Doctor and Romana are reunited with Biroc in a stable, time-locked universe. A repentant Biroc explains they were the slave masters, travelling on the winds of time in order to ravage other planets and subjugate their populations as slaves until the Gundan revolt. The Doctor and Romana are returned to the null space, and are immediately captured by Rorvik. Rorvik's crew realise that the null space is shrinking as the distances between the gateway, the TARDIS, and slaver ship continue to decrease. Rorvik has ordered the crew to try to blast through the mirrors in gateway, believing it to be the way out, but the mirrors resist all attacks. With the gateway and ship in visible distance of each other, Rorvik resorts to one last attempt to break the mirrors by using the exhaust of the ship's engines against them. While the Doctor warns that this action will be as doomed as the previous ones, Romana regroups with Lazlo and Adric, and together they free the remaining Tharils on the slaver ship. The TARDIS crew flee to the TARDIS as Rorvik initiates his plan—the blast from the engines is reflected by the mirrors back onto the ship, destroying it and its crew.
As the saved Tharils pass through the mirror, Romana announces that she will be staying with them, having become empathetic to their plight and not wanting to return to Gallifrey. The Doctor gives her K9, as passing through the mirror will restore his memory but he will be unable to return. The Tharils, in exchange, provide the Doctor with information on how to leave the void back to N-Space.
Production
Conception
In 1979, Douglas Adams, at the time Doctor Who's script editor, met with science-fiction novelist Christopher Priest to develop a four part serial that Adams hoped would add more hard science fiction to the show. In December of that year, Adams left the show, leaving Priest's serial abandoned. Adams was replaced by Christopher H. Bidmead, who aimed to reorient the series around serious science fiction concepts., Chapter One: "A Medieval Mystery Play" Bidmead approached several new writers for the series, eventually contacting Priest after being impressed by one of his novels and Priest's conceptual bent. In February 1980, Bidmead commissioned a scene breakdown of the idea Priest had developed with Adams, now titled Sealed Orders. The next month, he commissioned Priest to produce four scripts for Sealed Orders, which was to run as the fifth story in the upcoming eighteenth season and conclude a trilogy of stories set in the universe of E-Space. The story would be a political thriller set on Gallifrey and featuring a duplicate Doctor and several TARDISes. Although Bidmead closely supervised Priest, who had never written for television before, the scripts Priest produced were judged unusable, resembling a novel more than a workable television script. Priest took issue with Bidmead's proposed changes and rewrites, and eventually withdrew from the series in April 1980.
As a back-up in case Sealed Orders fell through, Bidmead had also commissioned a script from writer Stephen Gallagher. Although, like Priest, Gallagher had never written for television, he was well-experienced in writing for radio. Gallagher had written a successful play for Piccadilly Radio titled The Last Rose of Summer, set in a dystopian Britain and broadcast in 1978. The following year, Gallagher produced a sequel, Hunter's Moon, and in 1980 completed the trilogy with The Babylon Run. Early in his tenure on Doctor Who, Bidmead had read Gallagher's 1979 BBC Radio 4 play An Alternative to Suicide, submitted as a writing sample by the play's director. Impressed by the play, Bidmead contacted Gallagher and met with him in December 1979 to discuss ideas for a serial., Chapter Two: "The Dream Time" Although Gallagher was familiar with Doctor Who, he had not seen the show since it featured companion Sarah Jane Smith, who was written out in 1976.
Among the ideas Gallagher presented was a one-page outline for a story called The Dream Time, originally intended as the final play in his The Last Rose of Summer Trilogy before Gallagher replaced it with The Babylon Run. Inspired by the Aboriginal Australian concept of the Dreaming, which an Australian colleague had introduced to Gallagher, The Dream Time centres on the character Mitchell fleeing to a wasteland planet once inhabited by an advanced civilisation, culminating in a chase through gateways into parallel worlds. Gallagher pitched a five-page outline of the story to Bidmead. As he was unsure when the serial would be produced, he did not include the Doctor's current companions, K9 and Romana, in the outline.
Writing
Development
Gallagher's story was heavily influenced by the Jean Cocteau films La Belle et la Bête and Orphée, as well as two novels he was reading: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman and The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester. With Bidmead, Gallagher developed the idea of a marooned spaceship in a white void and an old banqueting hall where multiple dimensions meet. The story would see the Doctor and his companion follow the time-sensitive navigator of the spaceship to the banqueting hall. The Doctor would eventually escape the spaceship crew, now trying to make him their navigator, by falling through a "mirror like door" into a maze-like house. The serial would end with the crew attempting to blast through the mirror door, eventually destroying their spaceship. Bidmead and Gallagher incorporated the concept of the I Ching, which Bidmead had been reading about, into the story as a means of navigation for the Doctor.
Gallagher met with Bidmead on 30 January 1980 and was briefed on the concept of E-Space, a universe that the TARDIS would be trapped in throughout several of the season's serials. Bidmead suggested the story could end the E-Space arc by having the TARDIS escape through the interdimensional gateway. He also directed Gallagher to include K9 being permanently damaged, with only the Gateway able to save him. The two decided on the names of several characters. The time-sensitive navigator and another escaped member of his species would be named Biroc and Laszlo respectively, after cinematographers Joseph Biroc and Ernest Laszlo. Two old cleaners aboard the ship, inspired by two cleaning women Gallagher knew from Granada Television, were named Aldo and Waldo. The ship's captain was named Rorvik, after science journalist and novelist David Rorvik, while another crewman, Sagan, was named for Carl Sagan. After meeting with Bidmead, Gallagher put together an episode breakdown. He rewrote the cliffhanger to the first episode from the Doctor being menaced by one of the time-sensitive creatures to him being attacked by a suit of armor in the Gateway, which he suggested to Bidmead in early February.
On 15 March, Bidmead wrote Gallagher about new developments in the season that The Dream Time needed to include. As well as ending the E-Space trilogy, Gallagher was also given the task of writing out Romana and K9 and incorporating the new companion Adric. Producer John Nathan-Turner and Lalla Ward had agreed on Romana's departure early in the year, while K9 was phased out because of difficulties with using the prop and Nathan-Turner's feeling that the robot dog had become a "get out clause" for writers. Gallagher had to include Romana's summons to Gallifrey, mention of the Charged Vacuum Emboitment through which the TARDIS had entered E-Space, and that Romana was now mature enough to leave the Doctor. On 17 March, a scene breakdown was commissioned, which Gallagher delivered on 25 March.
Scripting Once Sealed Orders was abandoned, Bidmead commissioned four episodes of The Dream Time on 14 April. Had Sealed Orders gone through, Bidmead planned to reuse several elements of Gallagher's outline in later stories. Gallagher felt uneasy at Priest's failure at producing a quality story, seeing him as an accomplished writer. The scripts were due 7 June, and were delivered by Gallagher on 11 June, after several more meetings throughout May. On 30 June, Bidmead and Nathan-Turner accepted the scripts but demanded rewrites. Unfamiliar with writing for television, Gallagher included detailed instructions for stage directions and camera angles in his first draft, later describing it as "a control freak's manifesto." The script was formatted unusually, using asterisks to mark scene changes and without standard number scenes. Several scenes were judged too ambitious to realize on television. Originally, the script was much more comedic, with Rorvik's crew being given a much humorous dialogue, two of the workers being played as a double-act. Executive producer Barry Letts was against the comedy in the script, arguing that it risked turning the show into pantomime and that the crewmen should be played seriously. Bidmead also wished to town down some of the fantastical elements of the script in favor of more hard science.