Doctor Who 18x20

Matthew Waterhouse as Adric • Jeremy Gittins as Lazlo • Clifford Rose as Rorvik • Kenneth Cope as Packard

The Doctor deduces that the freighter is a slave ship loaded up with Tharils to be sold as time machine components, but the immense weight of Rorvik's damaged ship, designed to contain the Tharils, is now collapsing the fragile void of the micro-universe in which they're all stuck, pulling everything inside ever closer.

Request examples:

!req Doctor Who 18x20 [02:32]
!req Doctor Who 18x20 [Doctor Who 18x20]
Syntax: !req EPISODE [quote or timestamp] (max. 8 square brackets)

For quotes, now you can request by index (e.g !req Doctor Who 18x20 [10-11]; !req Doctor Who 18x20 [20] [24]). Keep in mind, though, that index numbers might change at any time.
You can also generate a copy command with the quotes. Hover the desired subtitle and enter the amount of lines you want to copy.

Subtitle languages: English • Spanish • Brazilian Portuguese

Note: you must use specific languages with their specific pages/discord channels.

1. "Can K9 be restored?

2. "Why must the Doctor 'do nothing'?

3. "What is Romana's surprise for the Doctor?" (Radio Times)

4. This episode was first shown on 24 January, 1981.

5. It was seen by 7.8 million viewers.

6. The Tharils' heads were created by the wardrobe and make-up departments in collaboration.

7. The manes were made of real yak hair and the actors wore contact lenses.

8. The faces were plastic prosthetics affixed directly onto the actors' skin.

9. This meant that one of the extras had to shave off his moustache before the make-up was applied.

10. The extras were awarded "discomfort money" for the days they spent under the masks.

11. In the shot coming up, the axe was swung into the table top by none other than

12. effects designer Mat Irvine.

13. Rehearsals for 'Warriors' Gate' took up most of September in Room 402 at the Television Rehearsal Rooms in Acton.

14. Unusually, the room was supplied with a set of props, ladders, and four-foot rostra

15. to enable the cast to develop their interactions with the complex three-dimensional sets, especially for the privateer.

16. When she was not required for a scene, Lalla Ward would sit quietly in a corner, crocheting.

17. The script stresses that Rorvik hopes his crew will look trigger-happy - but, in fact, they're more interested in their lunch.

18. "The crew stare at him," says the script. "He might be speaking Serbo-Croat for all they seem to make of it."

19. The serial was recorded in the studio in two three-day blocks:

20. The privateer scenes in the first block, the void and banqueting hall in the second, and the TARDIS scenes split between the two.

21. The plan was for the first recording block to come halfway through the rehearsal period.

22. Studio 3 at Television Centre was booked for the three days in question, 17-19 September.

23. Then disaster struck - or at least, the BBC carpenters did.

24. The stoppage meant no recording could take place on the scheduled dates,

25. and the production was reallocated to Studio 6 (which was about the same size as Studio 3) a week later.

26. In the script, Rorvik points his gun at K9 and the Doctor sticks a chicken bone in the muzzle.

27. Several problems arose from moving the first studio session to 24-6 September.

28. Most of the actors were under contract for the whole of September, but Tom Baker had commitments in Leeds.

29. He needed to be released from his presentation duties on the ITV children's reading series, The Book Tower.

30. Bunching up the studio sessions also meant that rehearsal time was unbalanced, with only a week between the two blocks.

31. According to Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity, time and space are both elements of the same thing,

32. so if space contracts, time contracts with it.

33. Of course, Doctor Who wasn't the only production to be affected by the carpenters' strike.

34. All the BBC's mid-September production schedules were rejigged.

35. Another production requiring the BBC's green CSO cycloramas had its recording rescheduled to 2-4 October.

36. Unfortunately, 2-4 October were also the dates when the CSO void scenes were due to be recorded in Studio 1.

37. Doctor Who may have had first claim on the dates but the cycloramas were assigned elsewhere.

38. The upshot was that new ones had to be made, with Doctor Who footing the bill for half the cost.

39. The production also had to do without one of the regular behind-the-scenes personnel.

40. Nigel Brackley, K9's operator, had broken his ankle.

41. Fortunately, Mat Irvine was himself an experienced K9 wrangler and stood in for Brackley at the recording.

42. K9 was scripted to say, backwards, "K9, K9. Way out".

43. In the foreground, Rorvik's arm betrays the secret of this shot's optical trickery.

44. The mirror at the back of the shot is set at an angle - otherwise the camera would see itself!

45. In the script, the Doctor sees his own reflection dissolve as Rorvik turns him to face the mirror.

46. In the recorded version, John Nathan-Turner wanted to avoid suggesting that the Doctor has gone through the mirror again,

47. so the crackling sound was dubbed on to indicate that he and Biroc are on different sides of the portal.

48. The Doctor means that the Tharils are, in a sense, responsible for their own enslavement:

49. By ruling unjustly, they effectively invited their slaves to rebel and subjugate them in turn.

50. The MZ was made by effects assistants Simon Tayler and Charlie Jeans.

51. This line was dubbed on in post-production,

52. after John Nathan-Turner felt the characters' movements needed clarification.

53. After a troubled studio (of which more in three minutes), he took an especially active interest in the post-production edit,

54. even though he admitted he didn't really understand what the story was about.

55. In the script, they see that the privateer is now mere yards from the Gateway: K9 was right!

56. Some bickering ensues. The Doctor hands K9 to Romana.

57. "I'm not your dogsbody," she retorts, pointing out that it's his turn.

58. The Doctor wishes Romana were his dog's body, because K9 needs a new one.

59. Romana then passes K9 to Adric, saying it's his turn, and the Doctor says, "Come on".

60. "And I wish you wouldn't keep saying 'Come on'," grouches Romana, then turns to Adric and tells him, "Come on!"

61. In this episode, as Romana effectively becomes another version of the Doctor, she takes on some of his speech habits.

62. These are "shy, different men with higher things on their minds," smirks the script.

63. "They look around them at the empty culmination of their life with Rorvik," and vanish into the void.

64. The Gateway was sculpted in jabolite by the outside contractor Geoff Rivers.

65. He worked from a design by the Lincolnshire-based watercolour artist David H. Smith.

66. Bidmead and Joyce drew on aspects of Lalla Ward's own personality in fine-tuning Romana's moral outrage against slavery.

67. The privateer looks like "a giant frog about to spring", says the script.

68. Two versions were made: This detailed model,

69. and a flimsier version specifically designed for destruction later on.

70. The visual effects effort on 'Warriors' Gate' amounted to 2,123 man-hours, split among Mat Irvine and his five assistants.

71. Nathan-Turner exerted strong pressure to have the effects shot on videotape, like the rest of the serial.

72. The effects department overruled him: The models had to be on film because of the backblast scene later in this episode.

73. Lalla Ward made her line even more of a tongue-twister by adding a word: The script reads just, "The backlash will bounce back".

74. Recording went slowly in the first studio block.

75. This was partly because the in-studio effects took longer than planned to set up.

76. But the main cause of delay was Paul Joyce's working methods.

77. He opted to shoot each scene twice A master shot for coverage, then close-ups for the characters' reactions.

78. As work fell further and further behind, John Nathan-Turner stepped in - and fired Paul Joyce.

79. His plan was to take over as director himself.

80. Joyce went to the BBC bar and waited, knowing that nobody else could make sense of his camera script.

81. Half-an-hour later, Nathan-Turner admitted defeat and reinstated the director.

82. Can you tell that Lalla Ward didn't get on with Matthew Waterhouse?

83. The next scene was scripted to show that the collapse of space has pulled the TARDIS into the Gateway itself,

84. directly in the path of the backblast.

85. The gantries for this set were supplied by the firm Benjamin Scaffolding.

86. A safety officer declared the set unsafe on its final day in use, 26 September.

87. That stopped all work for about an hour and restrictions were imposed when they restarted.

88. To try and make up some of the lost time, Nathan-Turner, Paul Joyce, and production assistant Graeme Harper

89. spent their meal breaks together in the studio's control gallery trying to simplify the camera script.

90. The first three-day recording session ended up overrunning by 31 expensive minutes.

91. Afterwards, lighting supervisor John Dixon filed a scathing report which cannot be quoted here for legal reasons.

92. He pointed out that Paul Joyce's working methods were tailored to the slower production rate of a feature film,

93. rather than the breakneck speed of Doctor Who.

94. (Ironically, Joyce's only prior experience of Doctor Who in production

95. had been a visit to the location filming of 'Full Circle' on 25 August.)

96. Dixon's report caused ill feeling between him and Joyce at the second studio session,

97. which also ended up with an overrun - this time only five-and-a-half minutes.

98. Royce's movements bring a microphone shadow across him.

99. Harry Waters (died 2002), who plays Royce, was first considered for the role of Sagan.

100. He was "demoted" after the original Royce (or rather, the original Waldo) Turned out to be unavailable.

101. Paul Joyce had met him through a mutual friend, the director, doctor, and polymath Jonathan Miller.

102. Earlier in 1980, Miller invited Joyce to visit a rehearsal for his BBC production of The Taming of the Shrew.

103. The cast included David Kincaid (Lane), who played Petruccio's servant Grumio,

104. and Harry Waters as the loquacious Biondello, giving a performance not unlike his Royce.

105. This exchange is at variance with Gallagher's original idea that Aldo and Waldo came with the ship,

106. so it was probably dialogue put in when Bidmead and Joyce rewrote the script.

107. The Tharils wear jackets made of stiff cotton suede (which was used as a cheap substitute for real suede).

108. June Hudson gave them gold belt ornaments because gold is astrologically associated with the zodiac sign of Leo.

109. Watch the dead Tharil's ornamented midriff. Well, actors do need to breathe!

110. In the script, Rorvik catches the Tharils in his peripheral vision and blinks uncertainly before moving on.

111. Post-production began uncomfortably soon after the studio sessions.

112. A "gallery-only" day was booked in the control gallery of Studio 6 on 7 November.

113. This eleven-hour session saw all the electronic video effects added to the recorded pictures.

114. Composer Peter Howell then composed a radiophonic score, emphasising the dark aspects of the serial's tone.

115. The incidental music runs to just over 41 minutes in all: About half the serial's total running time, excluding title sequences.

116. Finally, the four episodes were dubbed, each in a separate nine-hour session.

117. The dub for this episode took place on 21 January, 1981, just three days before it was first broadcast.

118. The subjective camerawork here is modelled on that of iss Me Deadly, in which the villains

119. are most often represented with shots of their legs alone.

120. These particular legs belong to Clifford Rose (born 1929),

121. who had played many a television sadist in the 1970s, notably the Nazi Kessler in Secret Army (1977-9)

122. "Having - if the papers are anything to go by - cornered the market in 'nasties'," he wrote to Nathan-Turner on 22 July,

123. "I wonder if I might do a 'nasty' in Doctor Who some time or another?"

124. He made 'Warriors' Gate' shortly after returning from Poland, where he worked on the American tv movie The Wall.

125. He wasn't quite the "thick-set, bull-like" Rorvik that Steve Gallagher originally imagined.

126. Other actors Paul Joyce had in mind, should Rose have been unavailable, included the burly Stratford Johns,

127. a country vet from All Creatures Great And Small, another ex-policeman from Z Cars and Softly, Softly,

128. and two classical stage actors, each of whom went on to play a Doctor Who villain in 1984 and 2007 respectively.

129. And so we return to the question posed by Radio Times. ; "Why must the Doctor 'do nothing'?"

130. Because, so long as he does nothing to stop it, the backblast backlash will bounce back

131. and shatter the dwarf star chains, freeing the Tharil slaves to ride the time winds once more.

132. In 1981, 'Warriors' Gate' was shown half-an-hour earlier than the preceding episodes transmitted before Christmas.

133. This caused some adverse comment on the BBC's correspondence series, Points of View,

134. mainly from adult viewers who found the earlier time less convenient.

135. Deaf viewers, however, must have found the broadcast far more convenient than usual.

136. 'Warriors' Gate' was the first Doctor Who serial to carry optional teletext subtitles for the hard of hearing.

137. In the close-up shot coming next, Simon Tayler stands in for Lazlo and Mat Irvine for Sagan,

138. with a metal plate on his chest to protect him against the blast.

139. At an early stage, it was proposed that the electric shock should have burned away part of Sagan's hair,

140. rather like the injuries Lazlo sustained earlier when the apparatus was used on him.

141. In an earlier draft, the sleeping Tharils were covered with shrouds.

142. As this scene was scripted, they are walking through blasts of intense heat emitted by the privateer's engines.

143. This scene was recorded on the final studio day, 4 October,

144. but it wasn't the last Tom Baker and Lalla Ward saw of each other.

145. On 19 November, they announced their engagement, and were married just over three weeks later on 13 December.

146. The Doctor puns on a line from Shakespeare's Roman play, Julius Caesar (1599).

147. Lalla Ward hated her farewell scene: She'd been promised a strong exit, but felt this was terribly perfunctory.

148. She had a stand-up row with Nathan-Turner at the preliminary read-through, only to end up with a slapped wrist.

149. This is the less detailed of the two model privateers - so you know what's going to happen to it now.

150. It was made of plastic card on a metal skeleton,

151. so that the explosion would blow away the outer shell of the craft, leaving its sturdy ribs still standing.

152. Two model gateways were also destroyed, one in close-up and one in shots with the privateer.

153. The sequence was filmed in the effects studio at Western Avenue using two high-speed cameras for maximum coverage.

154. At an early stage, it was planned to have one of the Powis photos tinted by a graphic artist.

155. The serial's closing scenes were restructured at a late stage.

156. This sequence originally came later, after the freed slaves passed through the mirror to be greeted by Biroc and Romana.

157. Lalla Ward's next acting roles after Romana were, on the stage, an emotionally scarred daughter in The Jeweller's Shop (1982),

158. and, on television, a 1930s boarding school headmistress in the BBC's Schoolgirl Chums (also 1982).

159. The scene was scripted to end with Romana's and Biroc's eyes meeting as she asserts her new moral purpose.

160. The remains of the privateer are "like the rotted corpse of some beached whale", says the script.

161. The serial's original ending looked forward to the Doctor's future with Adric rather than back to his Romana days.

162. Adric gives the Doctor the old N-Space image converter, which he has mended.

163. It works. "I think you're going to be all right," says the Doctor. "In fact, I think you're full of possibilities."

164. Adric smirks and the Doctor playfully pulls the boy's hat down over his face. Roll end credits!

165. Also seen in this episode were:

166. Robin McPherson (Crewman)

167. Mark Arden, Stephen Frost (Tharils)

168. Laurie Goode, Jeff Wayne (Tharils)

169. Uncredited production contributors

170. Bryony Keating (Effects Assistant)

171. Steve Lucas, Charlie Lumm (Effects Assistants)

172. Gene Carr (Effects Cameraman)

173. Les Calder (Lighting Chargehand)

174. Jan Lee, Lisa Pickering, Heather Squires (Make-Up Assistants)

175. Sue Davis (Trainee Production Assistant)

176. Production text commentary by Martin Wiggins 19:27,958 (LAUGHING MANIACALLY)

177. Here, where did you spring from?

178. I haven't done you. Never mind. You're just what we need.

179. Just a minute!

180. We've made it.

181. Quick, quick. Inside. What's the matter?

182. I'm not coming with you.

183. Inside! That's an order.

184. (SIGHS) No more orders, Doctor. Goodbye.

185. What a moment to choose.

186. But, it is, isn't it, a moment to choose?

187. I've got to be my own Romana.

188. - And we need a Time Lord. - Goodbye, Doctor.

189. No, no, no. Wait, wait. There's something else.

190. K9. He'll be all right with you behind the mirrors.

191. - I'll take care of him. - I'll miss you.

192. You were the noblest Romana of them all.

193. The TARDIS. Gone.

194. TARDIS preserved in concept, mistress.

195. This unit contains all necessary schedules

196. for duplication of the TARDIS, mistress.

197. Exactly, K9.

198. Biroc will help us use the gateway to travel anywhere in E-Space.

199. And we can give him time technology.

200. You shall be our Time Lord.

201. And we will travel far.

202. Our people are enslaved on many planets.

203. And you and I, K9, are going to help Biroc free them.

204. That's something we've got to do, don't you think?

205. Affirmative, mistress.

206. - The picture's fading. - Yes.

207. - It's gone. Nothing there. - Hmm.

208. So it has. Nothing.

209. Well, that's something.

210. How can nothing be something?

211. Well, if the E-Space image translator doesn't work,

212. I'm hoping we're in N-Space.

213. - Back in your own universe. - Yes.

214. - Can you be sure? - Did I say sure?

215. - No. - Yes.

216. One good solid hope's worth a cartload of certainties.

217. - Will Romana be all right? - All right?

218. She'll be superb.