Warriors' Gate

The TARDIS has drifted farther into E-Space to where all the co-ordinates read zero. With E-Space reading negative co-ordinates, and N-Space being positive, the Doctor and Romana believe that they are in the region where both universes intersect and the way out must be nearby. The white void outside the ship in an opaque nothing, but the travellers meet a lion-like man named Biroc who is running from his captors, slavers who are also marooned in E-Space. The slavers use Biroc and his people, the Tharils, to navigate their ship as the creatures are time sensitives, and they are desperate to escape, even desperate enough to strap Romana into their machinery and use her in place of one of the Tharils. The Doctor discovers the physical Gateway, which is guarded by the Gundan robots, and in turn discovers the secret of the Tharils and how they came to be slaves.

I remember times as a younger person when I would randomly come across something that looks to be confusing, overly complicated, and boring. At first glance, Warriors Gate seems to be just that, and I remember feeling somewhat drained after watching it. People can really only take so much bad CSO white void screens and cryptic lion people, but then throw in a severely damaged and babbling K9 and at first it can become intolerable. But then, maybe when you get older, you realize, as I did, that this story is beautifully crafted. The whole concept of the intersection between universes and the way it is falling apart is fantastic, the Tharils realized quite well on screen, the Gundan robots incredibly creepy, and the crew of Rorvik's space ship a real bunch of thugs, even those two clods playing cards below decks while counting their union dues. I think the best bit was the flashback sequence at the climax of episode three, with the Gundans raiding the Tharil banquet hall, and then the sudden flash forward back to real time. The fake axe hitting the table could have been done better though. Don't tell me it wasn't fake; you saw how it bounced when it was dropped on Tom Baker's back in episode two.

Warriors' Gate sees the end of the "E-Space trilogy" with the TARDIS going back to N-Space, but with a lighter crew than before. Romana doesn't want to go back to N-Space and spend the rest of her life on Gallifrey, and being with the Doctor has opened her eyes to the plight outside its bounds. Romana joins with Biroc to help free his people, leaving the Doctor in what has to be one of the most casual departures ever in the show, except maybe for when Dodo blew the Doctor off at the end of The War Machines back in 1967. Both being Time Lords, maybe there's no point in getting attached as their lives are so long they might run into each other again. But off Romana goes, and she takes K9 with her as he can only function properly in E-Space now due to being blasted by the Time Winds. The Doctor and Adric leave, the Doctor stating that Romana will be incredible.

NEXT EPISODE : THE KEEPER OF TRAKEN

The State of Decay

Still looking for the way out of E Space, the Doctor, Romana and K9 arrive at a small inhabited planet hoping to find some help. What they find instead is a society where the people are living in a cultural dark age, working all day in fields to service the needs to the Three Who Rule in their tower. Adric has managed to stow away on board the TARDIS and falls under the thrall of the Three, who plan to induct him into their order. The Doctor and Romana discover that the rulers are not benevolant but are instead vicious vampires following the ways of the Great Vampire himself, an ancient enemy of the Time Lords who vanished from known space thousands of years previous after the Time Lords hunted down and killed the rest of its people.

There's nothing like good atmospheric vampire story, and The State of Decay is just that. There are vampire bats. There is a creepy old tower. There are superstitious peasants and gothic-looking robes, extreme makeup, blood, and a bit of overacting from the players representing Zargo, Camilla and Aukon, but all in good fun. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward continue to make a solid Doctor and companion team, but Matthew Waterhouse's Adric leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth of a true fan, wondering why producer John Nathan-Turner felt the need to clutter up the TARDIS crew with an annoying young boy. Hm.

The sustained thread of E Space comes up a few times over the course of the show, with it being revealed that the Great Vampire deliberately came here to escape the Time Lords, and at the time of his awakening will go back and resume his path of destruction and killing to satisfy his appetite.

Maybe I've watched too much Buffy though, and my ideas of what makes a vampire scary have changed. These three aren't that scary, just their fashion sense is. I'm not quite sure what it is they lack. Maybe we needed to see them killing more people.

NEXT EPISODE : WARRIORS GATE

Full Circle

The Time Lords want Romana back.

Technically, Romana has departed Gallifrey illegally at the behest of the White Guardian to assist the Doctor with finding the Key to Time, but now with that mission fulfilled it is time for her to go home. Trouble is, now she has regenerated and experienced life out in the universe with the Doctor, she doesn't want to go. She is saved the trouble, though, when the TARDIS flies through a space-time distortion and ends up on a marshy forest planet, despite the scanner showing that they are on Gallifrey. The Doctor has a theory about negative space time co-ordinates, but it would suggest that the TARDIS has left normal time and space altogether. The TARDIS has landed on the planet Alzarius, bringing the Doctor, Romana and K9 into contact with a young orphan named Adric. Adric's people are preparing for a ritual retreat into their crashed starliner, something they do every so many years when the planet's air supposedly becomes toxic. The truth, however, is that when the mists come to Alzarius, creatures known as Marshmen rise from the swamps and walk the planet, and the governing Deciders keep the citizens of the Starliner in willful ignorance, despite the terrible truth about their own links to the planet.

Some of the location work for Full Circle is incredible, with a riverbank location dressed up with massive amounts of cobwebs and exotic fruits to make it look like some foreign land. This sort of terrain is of course difficult for K9 to traverse and the odd cable can be spotted tugging the robot along. The use of the river itself is very good, even if the costumes of some of the extras become see through when they are swimming, but the visual of the Marshmen rising from the swamp at the climax of part one is something truly chilling. Too bad the Starliner looks like it was chunked together with old bits of Capsela.

The Doctor gets to see something of himself in Romana and her rejection of the summons back to Gallifrey, but has himself accepted that it isn't exactly easy to fight the Time Lords, having done so once before and lost; his freedom is hard-gained. It seems, though, that the Doctor's enthusiasm for travel and adventure is contagious even amongst his own people, with Susan obviously a willing partaker at the outset of his adventures way back in the beginning.

And then there is Adric. Orphaned, rejecting the rules of his own society, too smart for his own good yet so naive at the same time ... you just know he's going to find a way off Alzarius with the Doctor and company

The truth of what has happened is finally figures out at the close of the adventure; the TARDIS has actually passed through a sort of wormhole between universes, into a region known as E-Space, or the exo space-time continuum. They shouldn't be there at all, but now they are, and they're stranded.

NEXT EPISODE : THE STATE OF DECAY