Thatcher and the Tharils: a political interpretation of "Warriors' Gate"

 By Danny Nicol

University of Westminster

“Warriors’ Gate”, a four-part Doctor Who adventure broadcast in 1981, is one of the Doctor’s most surreal escapades.  Influenced by I Ching philosophy and Couteau’s La Belle et La Bête (1946), brilliantly directed and set for the most part in a white void, it has been described as “beautiful, violent and ultimately inexplicable” (Mark Campbell, Doctor Who, Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2000, p.64).  In a detailed analysis of the serial in his book The Humanism of Doctor Who (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2012, 224-230), David Layton argues that “Warriors’ Gate” is about Taoist-Buddist philosophy with an emphasis in particular on the notion of ethical non-action – the choice to go along with the tide of events.  Ethical non-action is based on the idea that one may only determine the right action when one has the right facts.  By contrast, according to Layton, the serial condemns destructive and dangerous activity driven merely by the perceived need to do something. 

A Whoniverse of interpretations

Layton’s is a perfectly viable interpretation of “Warriors' Gate”, yet his reading tends to depoliticise the adventure.  The story was broadcast at a particularly dramatic time in British politics and a credible political interpretation of the serial is also readily apparent.  There is no reason why a political reading should not co-exist with a philosophical one.  After all, as Rebecca Williams has observed, the idea of a singular homogenous and stable interpretation of Doctor Who which establishes an officially constituted reading formation cannot be sustained (“Desiring the Doctor: Identity, Gender and Genre in Online Fandom”, in British Science Fiction Television: Critical Essays, eds. J. Leggott and T. Hochscherf (Jefferson: McFarland 2011), 167-177, 177.)   Nor can authorial intention be the only guide to interpretation.  As Matthew Jones has argued, the concerns that underpin recent British history have emerged in Doctor Who regardless of whether the production team intended to invoke particular socio-political anxieties. (“Army of Ghosts: Sight, Knowledge and the Invisible Terrorist in Doctor Who”, in Impossible Things, Impossible Worlds: Cultural Perspectives on Doctor Who, Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures, eds. Ross Garner, Melissa Beattie and Una McCormick, (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 45-61, 52.).

Captain Rorvic menaces the Doctor and Romana

In very condensed form, the plot of “Warriors’ Gate” is that the TARDIS along with a large privateer spaceship are pulled into a white void which straddles two universes.   Aside from the two ships the only object in the void is an ancient gateway.  The privateer craft - staffed by a humanoid crew – is a freighter transporting members of a slave race, the Tharils.  These Tharils are a valuable commodity since they are “time-sensitive” and are used to guide spaceships through the “time winds”.  Exploring through the gateway the Doctor discovers that the Tharils were once a dominant race, enslaving others, but were ultimately overthrown and are now themselves enslaved.  It also becomes apparent that space and time are contracting within the void, but the Doctor is advised by the Tharil leader, Biroc, that the best course of action is to ‘do nothing’.  The captain, the energetic Rorvik, compels his unenergetic crew to use the backthrust of his ship in order to try to escape the void.   The blast destroys ship and crew, but the Tharils, being time-sensitive, manage to escape, as does the TARDIS.  At the end of the adventure the Doctor's companion Romana leaves in order to help the Tharils, a departure which I have commended in an earlier post.

The serial was broadcast in 1981, two years into Margaret Thatcher’s period as Prime Minister.   Her premiership marked a revolution in British politics which ultimately led the country in a more capitalist direction.  Privatisation was one of the central tenets of the Thatcher years, as was the general promotion of private enterprise.   Deregulation meant less emphasis on an ethical state (reflected in the serial’s slave trading) and more emphasis on liberating the energies of the entrepreneur (which finds expression in the busy Rorvik).  Yet Rorvik’s subordinates are performed as lazy and apathetic, suggesting that the new more aggressive form of capitalism, however energising for those in the upper echelons, would not meet the needs of those lower down the social scale.

Biroc the Lionheart

Just as one may read the spaceship’s demotivated crew as representing the British workforce so too there are indicators in favour of reading the Tharils as something as a metaphor for the British.  Significantly Biroc himself prompts the comparison between Tharils and ourselves by telling the Doctor and companions that he is “a shadow of my past and of your future”.  The Tharils are lion-like, and the lion is an animal associated with the English.  King Richard I, famed for his wars in the Middle East, was known as ‘Richard the Lionheart’ and lions remain on the Royal Standard and a symbol of the national football team.  The enslaving, Empire-building Tharils hark back to the imperial era in which the English, and subsequently the British, were involved in the slave trade. 

Under Biroc's guidance the Doctor and Romana 'do nothing'

As Graham Sleight observes, the sophistication of “Warriors’ Gate” is that unlike other slave races in Doctor Who such as the Ood, the Tharils can be both slave and enslaver.  (The Doctor’s Monsters, London: IB Tauris, 2012 139-143, 142).  The idea that the British (the Tharils) are subsequently enslaved may seem far-fetched, and of course the metaphor of science fiction and dystopian fiction often exaggerates.  Yet the idea of the British as victims of colonisation chimes with socialist texts of the time.   In particular in the same year as “Warriors’ Gate” the leading left-wing Labour politician Tony Benn published Arguments For Democracy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981: 3-17) in which he characterised Britain as a colony.  Benn argued that British democracy has declined and that the country faced a national liberation struggle as “the last colony in the British Empire”.  He argued that Britain was under the influence of economic imperialism from the growth of private monopoly, that the country subordinated itself to the USA in foreign and defence policy, and that it had formally surrendered national sovereignty and parliamentary democracy to the European Economic Community (now European Union) making it a colony of an embryonic Western European federal state.  These were the views of many on the Labour Left at the time, before they were toned down in response to the Thatcherite tsunami.

Doing nothing as response to Thatcherism

Finally the plot emphasises that the way to resist oppression is “to do nothing”.   If the new hard-line capitalism be seen as the source of oppression then this may seem absurd.  Yet one should beware the benefit of hindsight.  At the time, many political figures saw Thatcherism as a blip.  The Conservative Cabinet was split between “drys” who supported the Prime Minister’s new ideology and “wets” who favoured a return to more consensual policies.  Many assumed the wets would triumph.  Indeed many mainstream politicians thought that Thatcherism would be a temporary aberration.  Middle-of-the-road Labour figures such as Roy Hattersley and Peter Shore gave lectures on how the country would soon recommence its journey along the road to social equality.  

Ultimately, like Rorvic, Thatcher was indeed undone by her hyperactivity and hubris.  Her insistence on a regressive means of financing local government, known as the Poll Tax, guaranteed her political demise.   Yet as Simon Jenkins has shown in Thatcher and Sons (London: Penguin, 2007) her ideology outlived her.  Rechristened neoliberalism, it was enforced and expanded by Conservative, Coalition and New Labour governments alike.  A political interpretation of “Warriors’ Gate” provides a reminder that in Thatcherism’s early years this course of events was not seen as inevitable or even likely.