Why not Doctor Who and the Warriors’ Gate?
I find it intriguing how a story that feels so core to the Bidmead/JN-T vision of the show is in the novelisation so clearly equally fit for the Adams/Williams era it just missed. The most obvious example is the ship, which strongly echoes Eddie from Hitch-Hiker’s (and indeed the computer in Eric Saward’s later Adams-riffing ‘Slipback’) both by ending each report with questions like ‘WHAT ARE YOU PLAYING AT […]?’ or sarcastic comments like ‘CONGRATULATIONS’ and referring to the crew with terms like ‘GUYS’ and ‘BOOBS’. It also demonstrates a personality at odds with its function, as when it ‘panicked and closed itself down’, and is more concerned with ‘INVALIDATING YOUR […] WARRANTY’ than with actual crises facing the ship and crew.
There are also just a lot more little personality touches to differentiate characters, which feels more Williams than JN-T to me. Aldo and Royce, for example, come with the ship because ‘in some mysterious way the ship couldn’t function without them’ – in truth ‘only they knew where the main fuses were kept, and they weren’t telling’. Lane, on the other hand, gets used for ‘dangerous and dirty’ purely because ‘he was the biggest’ and can be kept happy with just ‘a little flattery’. In action, meanwhile, Nestor and Jos stick together so that, should ‘any shooting or hard talking’ occur, the other can ‘handle the worst of it’; everyone gladly scatters in the face of the MZ ‘as they realised that the weapon was coming to bear on their chief alone’; and then there’s the scene where Rorvik hopes to be backed up by a ‘trigger-happy and restless’ crew but they instead all point their weapons only ‘vaguely in the Doctor’s direction [while] one-handedly resuming what remained of their lunch’. Very little of this is absent from the tale on telly but, whether because Gallagher’s jettisoned changes made for television or simply because it’s easier in prose, it comes through more clearly here.
Chief beneficiary of all this is Rorvik. He’s summed up as a man whose ‘habit was to go for what he wanted, and let others clean themselves off as he passed’ and there’s a horrible insight into his treatment of the Tharils: ‘Rorvik had ordered it left on for more than an hour, as a kind of lesson. As a result of the lesson, they’d had to get themselves a new navigator’. His temper is delightfully described as not ‘unpredictable – quite the opposite. It exploded at the least provocation’ and, in contrast to being the inspiring leader he paints himself, he frequently ‘gave [an] order without any practical suggestion of how it might be carried out’ and takes his frustration out on his crew: ‘Rorvik was dealing with his annoyance the best way he knew how. He was taking it out on those around him, starting with Nestor, who had the misfortune of being nearest’. Perhaps most illustrative of his character in the novelisation is a line absent from the TV episodes, shouted at a mirror after the Doctor’s disappeared through it: ‘Can you hear me, Doctor? I’ve got a message for you. I hate you. Did you get that? Of everybody I’ve ever met, you’re my least favourite!’ There’s a wonderfully petulant childishness to this rant that feels much more in keeping with villains of the years before.
One final note – in the novelisation, the inside of the ship’s decorated: ‘One of her crews, many years and several changes of owner before, had decorated the passages with spray-paint so that the walls now showed a continuous rolling landscape of crudely drawn flowers and plants, hovered over by huge bees and butterflies. Maybe the scenes had been intended to be cheerful, but down here, with the noise and the permanently stale air and the darkness, it was like a long-haul bad dream’. There’s an incongruity to imagining the Alien-like ship but with brightly coloured graffiti everywhere as the backdrop for so much of this story that I think the novelisation is right to suggest would have made the setting look more rather than less dilapidated and would at least have differentiated it even more strongly from all the other Alien-inspired ship interiors of the early 80s.
Anyway, as you can probably tell from my desire to mention almost every little aspect of it, Doctor Who and Warrior’s Gate is great…
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