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.).
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| 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.
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| 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.
