Doctor Who: The E-Space Trilogy (Full Circle / State of Decay / Warrior's Gate) [DVD]

Chris Bidmead (who wrote Tom Baker's swan-song Logopolis) as script-editor, & John Nathan-Turner, as producer of Doctor Who, favoured a return to 'hard' sci-fi (that is, the foregrounding in the narrative of quite elaborate & difficult scientific concepts such as Charged Vacuum Emboitments) for Tom Baker's final season. Hence this 'trilogy' - very loosely framed by the Doctor & Romana becoming trapped in E-Space, a smaller universe somehow external to our own, & having to escape from it back into our N-(normal)-Space. I'm ambivalent about the merits of this approach. The final story in the trilogy, Warriors' Gate, has, to my mind, a near-incomprehensible denoument, and throughout lacks proper attention to the basic story-telling. Script-editor, writer and director all laugh on the commentary-track about how now it's on dvd you can watch it over & over & perhaps finally understand it, but the fact is that it barely makes sense, & less chat about CVEs and the like, and more attentio to dramatic & psychological density and depth, would have produced a more gripping result.

Interesting, in State of Decay, the vampire story, Bidmead rewrote Terrance Dicks' script massively (to Dicks' chagrin) in line with his more science-fictional vision and the director, who'd originally agreed to direct the story because of its Hammer-Horror gothicism, refused to do the job unless they went back to Dicks' original script, which they did - a singularly rare occurrence in television or film. Dicks does concede that Bidmead contributed the entertaining rocket denoument.

Everyone is quite candid about Tom Baker & Lalla Ward's tempestuous off-screen relationship, pointing out that on a bad day Tom refuses to look at Lalla in their scenes together. Lalla is fairly cold about Adric as a character, & I did feel a bit sorry for Matthew Waterhouse being thrown into such an emotionally-wrought setting. He himself in his interviews is quite endearing and unpretentious.

Rewatching the stories I actually enjoyed all of them: all contain nice ideas and the odd sharp line and image, and Lalla's outfits are rightly celebrated. But I found the pace and use of language stodgy by comparison with the Graham Williams/Douglas Adams stories. I was also struck by the similarity of set-ups in all three stories. In Full Circle the characters moulder away in an endless round of pointless maintenance chores on a crashed Star-liner. In State of Decay the vampiritic Lords moulder away in courtly parasitism in the ruins of a crashed rocket. In Warriors' Gate the crew moulder away on a crashed space-ship unable to escape the inertia of their situation. Perhaps this reflects that late-70s sensibility that Britain itself was mouldering away inertly, the crashed ruin of its imperial glory...

I like actors, so didn't want to find Adric such an unappealing character on re-viewing his debut, but I just don't take to Matthew Waterhouse's performance. But then I also feel he wasn't really given a proper character to play. Nathan-Turner's original concept was of an 'Artful Dodger' - but then he cast the utterly public-schoolish Waterhouse - who wondered after being offered the part if he was going to be asked to affect a Cockney accent. Certainly there seems to have been little attempt to integrate him psychologically into the trilogy - Tom & Lalla don't become stand-in parents or older siblings or scary magical figures to Adric: everyone just blodges through the dialogue, which is somewhat randomly assigned.

Everyone seems to hate poor old K-9, who is rather side-lined here.

Overall, I enjoyed the E-Space Trilogy but feel that the price of pushing up the level of scientific conceptualisation proved to be letting the psychological maturity of character & dramatic situation deteriorate.

Interestingly, despite a certain amount of technobabble, the next story, The Keeper of Traken, worked almost entirely as a fable and has almost no scientific feel to it at all: it's only with Tom Baker's final story that Bidmead gets to fully express his vision for the show - & does so very effectively, I think.

The E-Space trilogy is one of the last consistent spurts of imagination in Dr Who's run before the troubled reign of controversial producer John Nathan Turner set the show on its long and lingering road to cancellation. While it has stronger plotlines than most of the stories that would follow, they're not always as successfully executed as the ideas - but they are generally ideas-led and one at least makes a serious attempt to break new ground in the way the show would look and feel.

Full Circle finds the Doctor and Romana tapped in the alternate universe of E-Space, and they're not the only ones looking for a way out. On the first planet they land on they discover the descendants of the survivors of a crash who have been spending generations in attempts to repair their craft without ever actually leaving the planet, and finding themselves at odds with an indigenous lifeform that periodically evolves - or possibly devolves - to threaten the survivors. State of Decay is a throwback to the classic gothic Dr Who stories that sees them on another planet where another spaceship has crashed - only this time its inhabitants have not only become medieval-style rulers of the local population, but vampires as well. Both are stronger stories than you might expect with some neat twists, but the standout - and a genuine oddity - remains the final story, which continues the ongoing theme of entropy in increasingly unexpected ways.

Warriors' Gate is perhaps the most troubled and certainly the most contentious Dr Who story of Tom Baker's era (or any other Doctor in all probability). Trapping the Doctor and his companions in an exponentially contracting limbo at the intersection of two incompatible universes with a spaceship full of slavers and their leonine time-sensitive cargo who aren't so morally innocent themselves, it's not one of the best, but it's certainly one of the most ambitious. Novelist Stephen Gallagher's treatment took inspiration from Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete and Orphee while director Paul Joyce took his from Kubrick (who he would later make several documentaries about) and Last Year at Marienbad, setting much of the drama in a white void or using half-plate black and white stills of a country house to stand in for time corridors. In many ways it was a deliberate attempt to make a feature film within the existing TV technology of 1981, trying to stretch the envelope technically with long takes, hand-held camera work and moments of moody fatalism that went violently against the BBC culture of the day, with philosophical undertones and alternating timeframes that marked a more adult shift from the previous season's more kiddie-friendly approach. Unfortunately Joyce was saddled with a famously unsympathetic producer who hadn't read all the scripts and couldn't understand the final cut, a worried BBC management, a difficult star who wouldn't even make eye contact with his leading lady (and ex-girlfriend and future wife) and an unsupportive crew who all seemed agreed he was incompetent, though his own ego may have played into a situation that eventually saw him fired and rehired when no-one else could work out how to put it all together (telling the executive producer "You're the past, I'm the future" wasn't the best way to kick things off).

It's a story that repays a second viewing even if, as Joyce admits, it veers more towards glorious failure than success, and the documentary on the DVD is typically frank: while it goes into details of the difficult production, at times it allows Ken Livingston soundalike Joyce to hang himself with his own words.

The E-space trilogy was a series of three seperate adventures linked together into a 12 episode story arc, and came in the middle of Tom Baker's final series as the Doctor.

The three stories contain therein are a mixed bunch. Full circle would have been a decent tale, with some interesting ideas, good supporting cast and an above average script. Trouble is, it introduces Adric, the companion we all love to hate. On the rare occassion I can see through the red mist that descends whenever he's on the screen it's not a bad series.

The second story - state of decay - is good, but is unfortunately vastly overshadowed by the big gothic tales, such as 'Talons of Weng-Chiang', 'Terror of Fang Rock' and 'The Brain of Morbius'. This seems a pale shodow when compared to those earlier triumphs. It's not bad though, and the central premise is one that I've always quite liked.

The final story - Warriors Gate - is one of those wierd stories, where you have to watch it about 15 times to figure out what the script writers had in mind. And even then you're still not sure you've got it. It marks the departure of Lalla Ward, and my favourite companion K-9, in slightly rushed scenes at the end. The confusing plot aside, this story does stand out for one reason - the special effects and set design. The whole thing is very imaginatively done, one of the best in the whole series for that sort of thing.

The central premise lonking all three stories is also a bit confusing at first. I'm still not convinced I understand it. It doesn't matter much in the forst two stories, but is important in the third, where things get so confusing I usually give up on what passes for the plot and just enjoy the photography.

So, three stories, all with good and bad points, so a pretty average 3*. All of them watchable, but no stand out classics here. The DVD's come with the usual excellent range of commentaries and extras, but even after these I'm still not entirely sure what the script writers were on about....