Warrior’s Gate v. Asylum of the Daleks
I’m sticking with the Doctor, Romana, Adric and K9 for another week, with Stephen Gallagher’s Warrior’s Gate, first broadcast in January 1981, alongside a trip back to 1 September 2012 for Steven Moffat’s season 7 opener Asylum of the Daleks.
Warrior’s Gate
Warrior’s Gate is a tricky one to decode, especially so for a ten-year-old, but I don’t think I’ve ever had the time or the inclination to try to understand what’s really going on – before now. Last week I wrote up my thoughts on Full Circle, the opening story of season 18’s E-Space trilogy, and this week – thanks to the Randomiser – I’m looking at the last of the three. In the winter of 1980-81, these were the stories in which Adric joined the TARDIS team and the Doctor battled the Marshmen, and Romana and K9 left and the Doctor battled … well, I wasn’t very sure who the monster was supposed to be in Warrior’s Gate, but it all seemed very serious and important. In the spring of 2023, allowing a random generation of numbers to tell me to watch Warrior’s Gate has given me an understanding of sorts: Warrior’s Gate is about allowing a random generation of numbers to take you to where you want to be. It provided me with a natural sequel to my blog post of last week, and it provided the Doctor with a way out of E-Space.
The Doctor might call it an I Ching approach; Romana might scoff and call it ‘Astral Jung’. But it’s worked for me so far. I’m on my twenty-second pairing of Doctor Who stories – nearly a sixth of my way through this randomised rewatching of my favourite television programme – and already I’ve had some really interesting and helpful groupings of stories. Fury from the Deep followed by The Wheel in Space, the close grouping of the three middle episodes of Flux, Destiny of the Daleks followed by Genesis of the Daleks, the three Robert Sloman-scripted Third Doctor season climaxes in close proximity, ‘coincidental’ pairings of stories both set in the London sewers, or both featuring crabs, or statues in the dark … I could well be guilty of exhibiting that very human trait of seeing patterns in things that aren’t there. But I don’t know. It’s extremely difficult to generate non-determinate action, and I’m starting to trust the Randomiser to know where I need to be and when.
So Warrior’s Gate provides an interesting counterpoint to Full Circle. Both stories are about the crew of a ship (in E-Space – a universe by its very nature lacking in positive energy) which they can’t launch to escape the place in which they are trapped. In Full Circle, the Alzarians are incapable of taking the decisive actions needed to launch their Starliner; in Warrior’s Gate, the crew of the slaver spaceship are incapable of finding the Gateway through which they need to travel. (It just occurred to me that the second story of the E-Space trilogy, State of Decay, also centres around a long-grounded spacecraft.) Unlike in Full Circle, in which the Deciders needed to do something to escape, the solution in Warrior’s Gate seems to be to ‘do nothing – if it’s the right sort of nothing’. Which I suppose is another way of saying let the universe(s) provide.
This all seems timely to me. The co-directors of my business (and livelihood) and myself have felt stuck in what one might describe as an E-Space-type situation for a long time now. Things got tricky for us during lockdown and with the British economy still so weak we haven’t yet managed to recover. We have a good plan to set ourselves right, but it’s all dependent on getting the right responses from various third parties … and they are taking a long, long time to get there. For many months now, we’ve been playing a waiting game, treading water, shuffling things around to keep ourselves going while we wait. It’s been a nervous, stressful time, and we’re all learning a lot about patience. Every morning I ask myself whether there is more that I can do to speed things up, to get us to where we want to be (like Rorvik shouting at his crew: ‘Well try it! Let’s do something round here for a change!’), but I always end up thinking that it’s too risky – that it could scupper what we’re aiming for. The best answer, up to now, has been to do nothing. It’s taken a lot of courage by all of us. A friendly Tharil to take us by the hands and lead us through the Gateway would be very much appreciated.
Another theme of Warrior’s Gate is slavery, the sin of assuming ownership of another’s life, and justice governing the same. The Tharils are introduced to us as an enslaved race – the mysterious opening shot of the story pans across a cell in which several of these leonine creatures are chained to their beds – used and abused by the human Rorvik and his crew for navigating the time winds. This theme of ownership of another life is echoed in Rorvik’s treatment of his crew, and in particular of Aldo and Royce, who follow orders with weary resignation to their place in the pecking order. Chains are broken in the TARDIS too, as Romana decides to leave the Doctor. ‘Inside. That’s an order,’ is his immediate, telling retort. ‘No more orders, Doctor. I’ve got to be my own Romana. Goodbye.’ It’s a powerful moment. Even K9, who spends much of the story making ‘urgent request for orders’, is granted release from his master at the end of the story – his journey ends as a free dog.
Things become more complicated when the Doctor is cast back in time with Biroc to a time when Tharils ruled as kings, and sees evidence to suggest they were enslavers themselves as one of Biroc’s kin strikes the human woman serving their drinks. It’s a nasty moment, all of a sudden making it hard to feel sympathy in their current plight. ‘The weak enslave themselves,’ a past version of Biroc tells the Doctor, by way of justification. Later he turns this accusation on the Tharil, whose rebuttal – ‘The time of our enslavement is over. We will be free.’ – gives us no hint of any acceptance of their own guilt or need for reparations. Clearly, Romana feels that they deserve, or at least need, her support as they pursue the liberation of the rest of their kind, but the morality of it all feels ambiguous.
This isn’t a straightforward story. It’s complex, but deserving of deeper thought and reflection. Writer Stephen Gallagher has a distinct voice – the originality of Warrior’s Gate’s ideas combines with a particularly dry sense of character and of humour. (I’ve read that script editor Christopher H. Bidmead rewrote large parts of this so it should be said that I’m not sure exactly whose voice is whose. Nevertheless, I’m looking forward to reading Gallagher’s forthcoming new novelisation of the story, which looks as though it will expand on some of his ideas.) Rorvik’s crew reminded me a little of the crew of the Sandminer in Chris Boucher’s The Robots of Death – they all seem to hate each other, and everyone’s working for a potential bonus – but less flamboyant. Most of the humans on the Sandminer belonged to rich founding families and knew they were on their way home to a life of luxury; the humans on the slaver ship seem to come from lower stock and carry the air of a crew who have given up hope of ever seeing home again.
A few smaller observations:
I’ve seen Warrior’s Gate a few times, but don’t recall noticing before the ‘Kilroy Was Here’ graffiti on the walls of the spaceship alongside the fact that one of the crew members was called Kilroy.
Prop spotting! I’m pretty sure that the mind-reading equipment placed over Romana’s ears on Rorvik’s ship is the same set of repurposed headphones that I noticed used in both The Green Death and Planet of the Spiders.
Biroc describes himself as ‘The shadow of my past and of your future,’ which is in keeping with the season 18 theme of foreshadowing the Fourth Doctor’s demise. The Tharil seems to be another herald of something dark in the Doctor’s future.
Asylum of the Daleks
Discerning the authorial voice in 21st-century Doctor Who is generally a less ambiguous process, in part due to what some might call the ‘cult of the showrunner’ – Steven Moffatt and Russell T. Davies in particular being large personalities front and centre of the whole process, and having very clear styles, tones and approaches. Asylum of the Daleks could probably be described as peak Moffat, showcasing what I think of as the very best and the most annoying hallmarks of his writing, and all distinctly Moffaty-woffaty.
The very best: the parliament and the asylum of the Daleks, and the Doctor, Amy and Rory freefalling from the spaceship to the planet’s surface are the sort of vast, awesome, audacious ideas that he does so well; the logicality of artificial intelligences mixing with the less rational nature of human bodies and minds, such as the Dalek nanobots with which Harvey, Amy and Oswin have been infected, are a typical Moffat device (The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, The Girl in the Fireplace, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, Deep Breath, etc.); blindsiding the audience with a first-person perspective, such as Amy’s ‘human’ vision of the Daleks, and Oswin’s delusion that she is still human; and terrifying scenarios such as the Dalek skeletons, and the ‘eggs’ Dalek coming to life in front of Rory.
The most annoying: Oswin’s rudeness, jokes about Rory’s nose and the Doctor’s chin, is typical of a Moffat habit of making fun of people’s physical characteristics; Oswin’s flirtatiousness – sexual confidence and liberation is fantastic, but is it really normal for people to be as so out there to people they have just met about who they fancy and who they want to sleep with – as if it’s their most important, defining characteristic – as Oswin, River Song, Jack Harkness, and various other Moffaty characters introduced along the way? In real life, you’d want to take a step back from people like this; Oswin’s whimsies – souffle girl, and ‘Run, you clever boy!’ – are just a bit irritating. My gripes do all seem to be about Oswin, and I’m well aware that she’s a hugely popular character for many fans, so this is just a personal response, but she does seem highly typical of a Moffat creation.
But still, I do think this is a great story. This planet-sized dumping ground for Daleks whose insanity has spiralled beyond acceptable limits of Dalek madness is a terrific setting for a Doctor Who adventure. Its dimly-lit corridors, and ‘intensive care’ pens containing deranged survivors of encounters with the Doctor on Spiridon, Kembel, Aridius, Vulcan and Exxilon, is reminiscent of the maximum security wing containing Hannibal Lecter in the movie of The Silence of the Lambs; I was also reminded of the layout of the much-missed Doctor Who Exhibition at Longleat that I was lucky enough to visit on a few occasions as a child. When the Randomiser leads me to watch Terror of the Zygons I’m sure I’ll blog the story of my encounter with Longleat’s Zygon model – one of the scariest moments of my childhood. I felt similar chills as the Doctor walked past these cells containing dusty, half-lit Daleks simmering with menace.
Annoyances about Oswin aside, her true nature is a clever – and disturbing – storyline, and the shock reveal of Jenna Coleman starring in this episode, having been publicly revealed as the new companion not due to make her debut for another few months and episodes, was well executed. ‘Hang on – I think that’s Jenna Louise Coleman,’ was my surprised reaction, and I’m sure that of thousands of other viewers around the country. I’m a fan of not being spoilered; there’s a particular pleasure in the surprise of a live reveal that’s harder to come by these days of advance publicity and so many people keen to announce online every little bit of special knowledge they might get ahead of everyone else. I get annoyed stumbling across Twitter summaries of what the latest edition of Doctor Who Magazine contains a day or two before my subscription copy arrives, and when I’m watching a live football match but there’s a lag in my broadcast sufficient for a phone notification of a goal to come through before it appears on the telly it’s so deflating. So the Oswin reveal was enjoyable, even though I had no idea who or why she was supposed to be.
Asylum of the Daleks offers a lot of fan-pleasing moments – perhaps this is due to it being a season opener, to help generate as much attention and gossip as possible. For long-term Dalek aficionados there are the treats of various older models of Dalek unit making appearances, although they’re not all that easy to spot in the gloom of the asylum planet. The story presents a couple of new insights into what makes the Daleks so nasty. They have a ‘concept of beauty’, namely the ‘divine hatred’ of those of their kind imprisoned in the asylum. And their nanobot Dalek-conversion devices operate by ‘subtracting love’ from the victim. I’m not quite convinced of the science of this idea but it has some symbolic power, and seems useful in a story in which the other main sub-plot is the breakdown of Amy and Rory’s relationship. More on that in the Connections section below.
Connections
A general deterioration of mechanical life seems to be a theme of Warrior’s Gate and Asylum of the Daleks. Both stories feature mothballed mechanical monsters – the cobwebbed Gundan robots in Gate and the dusty Daleks in Asylum.
The Dalek threatening to ‘eggs-terminate’ Rory is struggling to speak because it is low on power. In Warrior’s Gate, both the Gundan robot and K9 also have problems with their vocal units due to drained batteries.
K9 runs backwards for much of Warrior’s Gate, and we also have a reversing (explosive) Dalek in Asylum of the Daleks.
‘What if the Doctor and I went our different ways?’ Romana asks Adric, in a slightly awkward, maternal sort of way. ‘But you wouldn’t, would you?’ he replies, the hopeful child who has probably already sensed that something is up between mum and dad. This ending of the relationship between Romana and the Doctor is underplayed in Warrior’s Gate in a very English/Gallifreyan stoic sort of way. In Asylum of the Daleks, the splitting up of Amy and Rory is a lot more visceral – perhaps healthier, in that ultimately their ability to both speak their hearts helped them work out their differences? Either way, both situations are unpleasant to watch. The breakdown of a relationship is sometimes necessary for the future happiness of both parties, but the process is grim and miserable.
The Doctor’s anxious to help Amy and Rory, to sort things out, to mend and heal, as doctors like to do. It’s quite a male thing, I think, this need to tinker, to interfere and problem-solve. But Amy tells him there is nothing he can do. ‘It's not one of those things you can fix like you fix your bowtie.’ Ultimately he thinks that he does fix it, of course, by not telling them that he has placed his wristband on Amy to protect her from the Dalek-conversion bots, forcing intervention by Rory to save her, but he’s not really the one doing the work here so it’s a false credit. Sometimes the momentum of things is beyond the Doctor’s control, as he learned in Warrior’s Gate. ‘Do nothing – if it's the right sort of nothing.’
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