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

This trilogy covers the Doctor's adventures in E-space, a smaller universe accessed by the TARDIS after it accidentally slipped through a CVE. In the first story "Full Circle", Romana has to be taken back to Gallifrey. But following the mishap with the CVE, they end up on Alzarius instead, just as the legendary Mistfall is setting in. This is where we first see the mathematical whiz Adric, who a lot of fans found annoying. I actually liked Adric.

My favourite story out of the trilogy is the middle one, "State of Decay". I found this story quite scary when I first saw it as an impressionable child back in the 1980s. "State of Decay" takes place after "Full Circle" but it was actually filmed before "Full Circle", so strictly speaking this is the first time Adric appears in the show. The setting is quasi-medieval, a backwater planet where peasants toil for the sinister Lords - "The Three Who Rule". For over a thousand years things have been the same. A primitive society where learning is forbidden. The vampire Lords rule from a rocket-shaped Tower which looms over the village. Young people are periodically selected from the village to "serve" the Lords. A band of rebels survives in the wastelands. If you look at this story too closely however, you will find plot holes. For example, Lord Aukon could detect the presence of strong alien minds (the Doctor, Romana and Adric), yet he failed to notice the rebellious streak in Ivo's mind. This is especially disturbing when Aukon said "We have bred dullness, conformity, obedience into those clods for twenty generations." Aukon couldn't locate the rebels' hideout either. Nevertheless, the Doctor is up against a formidable enemy in this adventure. Isn't he always?

The trilogy concludes with "Warriors Gate", where the TARDIS literally lands in the middle of nowhere. To be more precise, the gateway that leads back into N-space (our universe). Slavery is dealt with in this adventure, as the lion-like Tharils are cruelly exploited for their sensitivity to Time. Stephen Gallagher wrote this story. Apparently he was influenced by Joe Haldeman's novel "The Forever War". We see some sophisticated special effects (for 1980) as Biroc's mind forms an animated wireframe image of the TARDIS. Look at his "afterimage" as he runs through the white void.

The E-space trilogy is a strong set of stories. This is also where we say goodbye to Romana and K.9. as they decide to help Biroc and the other Tharils fight slavery. K.9.'s departure was a sad loss for fans, but a blessed relief for the technical crew, who sometimes found the robot dog hard to control. It may sound like a cliche, but after "Warriors Gate" things would never quite be the same.

In the first video "Full Circle" the Doctor and his companions Romana an K9 arrive on the planet Alzarius not there intended destination as the Tardis was knocked off course and is now in Exo-Space a completely different universe, there is plenty of intrigue in this appealing story which also marks the beginning of the companion Adric (Mathew Waterhouse).

In video 2 "State of Decay" the Doctor meets the Timelords greatest foe the vampires who were banished into exo-space by Rassilon himself. This story is one of my favourites as there is such a great dark secret laying underneath the tower ruled by the three.

In the last story "Warriors Gate" the Tardis is brought to a place by the Tharils who are a being hunted down and enslaved. Can the Doctor help? You'll just have to watch and see.
This story also marks the end of the much loved companions K9 who first appeared in "The Invisible Enemy" and the female timelord Romana who first appeared in the episode "The Ribos Operation" in the "Key To Time Season" it is a very momentus episode and so I would urge anyone to watch it, as well as the two episodes leading up to it.

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.