When the Gundans attack the Doctor from each side, one of the axes falls but bounces harmlessly off the Doctor's back. Given that one of the minor characters is named Kilroy, there's a nice little joke near the beginning when during the long tracking shot we see the legend on one of the walls "Kilroy Was Here". MORAL: How would you like it if he did that to you? OUTTAKES
Adric is mostly out of the way, which is a relief, and since it's - at last! - the end of K9 we'll forgive him anything.īig concepts, great characters, a bit of messing with the audience's heads - what more could we ask? Indisputably, a classic. The Doctor is in some ways slightly less to the fore in this story than Romana, but nonetheless he's bloody good, turning on the impressive gravitas leavened with bleak humour that makes the Fourth Doctor at the top of his game such a knockout. We'll take Sarah Jane's leaving scene for sheer sobbability any day. We're puzzled, though, as to why her leaving scene is so famous, since to us it seems fairly blink-and-you'll-miss-it lacking in impact. It's one of Romana's best performances, the highlight being the scene where she verbally fences with the crew of the slave ship: she's never seemed so Gallifreyan. The Tharils don't get as much chance to shine as individuals, but they nonetheless make quite an impact.Īs for the TARDIS crew, with the obvious exception of Adric they're pretty much brilliant. Double act Royce and Aldo, while tending slightly towards the ham-like at times, do a lot to shear away any Good Versus Evil pretensions, as does that brilliant scene where the captain's trying to lay down the law over the sound of lunch-munching. They're all distinct, and they're all real. In a format usually notable for its hordes of anonymous spear-carriers, the individuality of writer Steve Gallagher's characters is a gift. And there's a wonderfully neat reversal when the Tharils, who are set up in the beginning to look like the innocent victims, turn out to be almost as bad as their enslavers ("They're only people"). The fact that the job involves capturing and enslaving a sentient race is just part of the day's work. It's the banality of it all that's so impressive: the slavers aren't frothing at the mouth and ranting about doom, they're just decent honest working guys trying to get the job done. Instead, we have two groups of people in opposition with each other, neither of whom are exactly lilywhite. What a relief - no black-caped evil tyrants. Then there's the complexity of the characters. The location at the nexus between the two universes, the passages through the mirror, the presence of the scary Gundans and the inexorable contraction of time-space all add up to a story that becomes more and more gripping and claustrophic as it goes along, with a couple of world-class cliffhangers to boot. In fact, it's got an almost Sapphire And Steel air about it at times, which is definitely a bonus. There's no apology for it, either: they just expect us to keep up, which is both refreshing and unusual for television supposedly aimed at children. Warriors' Gate plays boldly with the viewers' expectations, slicing and dicing the linearity of the plot with cuts back and forth in time.
It just goes to show that SF doesn't have to spend a fortune on effects to sock viewers in the eye.Īdding to the atmosphere is the dreamlike quality conveyed by the time jumps. The whiteout outside the TARDIS that was so memorable in The Mind Robber is just as effective here, the black and white garden scenes are striking, and the banquet scenes make a lot out of a handful of props. For a start, the atmosphere is incredible: eerie and otherworldly, with a remarkable sense of desolation and danger.
And lucky for us, it's broad enough to include Warriors' Gate, a story that's complex, subtle and utterly adult.įrankly, it's hard to fault. There's just about every kind of story, on every level. When you stop to think about it, it's amazing what a broad church Doctor Who is. "He doesn't seem to be too sure of his lines."
0 kommentar(er)
