The Doctor, Romana, K-9, and Adric find themselves drawn into a transcendental void alongside the crew of a slave ship and their lion-esque time sensitive slaves. There are no roads in the void, but if there were, they would all invariably point towards the mysterious arch and the hall filled with cobweb coated mirrors inside. What mysteries lie within the eponymous Warriors' Gate and can they be exploited to get this misfit band of time and space castaways out of the void and back home? Hunker down, boys - it's a Tom Baker in the maroon coat episode!
Warriors' Gate ranks fairly high on my list of all-time great Doctor Who serials. For me, it's the highlight of a criminally underrated season of the show. Say what you will about John Nathan-Turner's run as producer and his obsession with the question mark motif, the Fourth Doctor's cosmetic changes, the departure of some of the regular cast members, and the sometimes uncomfortable on-screen friction between then-lovers Tom Baker and Lalla Ward, season 18 of Doctor Who with its overriding theme of entropy carrying through all the stories like a precursor to more contemporary plot arcs in television is really what set the show up to have darker, more mature, and I daresay more adherent to the science-fiction genre based stories throughout the rest of the 1980's. Warriors' Gate - with its weird and surreal edge, trippy visuals, and hints of black comedy sprinkled throughout - has won me over every time I've watched it.
So here we have the original screenwriter (and author of the original Target novelization) Stephen Gallagher doing an updated version of his own work on Warriors' Gate. The original text from the 1982 novel is purported to be 'expanded' (although I'd have to read them back to back to tell you if that claim is true or not), but this 2023 version becomes an anthology by including two linked short stories after the conclusion of the main story. More on those short stories in a moment.
Right away, fans of the show will notice a number of alterations from the televised version of this story. Apparently, the novelization is based in part upon earlier drafts of what would become the shooting scripts, so things that were changed or abandoned entirely when it came time to film are included here in the novel, including a completely different introduction to the slaver spaceship and how it ends up trapped in the void where the majority of the story takes place. The way in which Romana is written out of the story at the conclusion is also handled differently, first with a touch of foreshadowing, and then with a more drawn-out and emotional farewell scene. I personally prefer how it was handled on-screen, which opted for a quick Douglas Adams-style goodbye, the Doctor paraphrasing Shakespeare, and then end scene. Obviously, your mileage may vary here.
Warriors' Gate and Beyond also loses a lot of the wonderfully weird stuff in its adaptation to print. Despite his best efforts, Gallagher's descriptive language simply cannot capture the strangeness of how the void looks on-screen, nor does he come close to echoing the trippy proto-MTV music video visuals of the Tharils phasing in and out of time. We also sadly lose the slightly unsettling and bizarre black and white photograph backdrops of the world beyond the mirrors. Instead of trying to rival the show in terms of flavor then, Gallagher takes the novel in a different direction, focusing more on the petty class warfare that seems to be a constant for the crew aboard the Privateer slaver ship. He also spends a fair amount of time devoted to the insipid and sometimes impotent authoritarianism of the captain Rorvik. And without spoiling anything, the crew's rather ghastly fate at the end of the novel is a lot more disturbing than what was allowed on BBC television at the time. The author certainly had an axe to grind when it came to middle-management bureaucracy.
This all still makes for an intriguing science-fiction story, but it's one more grounded in our own reality than the otherworldly nature of the television adaption.
After the main story of Warriors' Gate wraps up, we have two short stories. "The Kairos Ring" sees Romana and her Tharil companion Lazlo riding the 'time winds' in much the same way the Doctor uses his TARDIS to catapult themselves backwards and forwards through time to different battlefield eras as they combat an alien parasite collecting soldiers of living dead to create an unstoppable army. In the process of battling this enemy, Romana and Lazlo put together their own little mostly scholarly fighting force comprised of refugees of time. A lot of readers seem to enjoy this story, but it feels a bit twee for my liking, and has all the breakneck pacing of the awful post 2005 NuWho series that I have come to despise.
Meanwhile, "The Little Book of Fate" sees the Eighth Doctor bump into Lazlo and a regenerated Romana hiding in plain sight as a troupe of carnival freaks at a traveling show. I'm going to sound like a major league nerd here, but while this story doesn't specifically contradict other stories, the implication that the Doctor and Romana haven't seen each other possibly since she left in Warriors' Gate does gently ignore the Virgin-era novel Blood Harvest where the Seventh Doctor collects Romana from E-Space. Either way, I found this story as equally unnecessary as the prior short with that same bad hint of NuWho ick in the vicinity with allusions to the Time War wankery. The last thing I want is any whiff of the new series polluting classic Who, so I would say both short stories are mediocre desserts after a satisfying main course.
Mostly recommended.
No comments:
Post a Comment