Another strong episode, with come very obvious Biblical overtones as the Melkur lurks in the garden of this paradise tempting Kassia. It’s unusual for a story like this to play out as family drama, with wife turned against husband and daughter, and the resulting mix of science fantasy and domestic drama is compelling and very Star Wars. Sarah Sutton is impressive as an imperious, precocious Nyssa – although there’s no hint that she’s companion material (the Doctor barely acknowledges her existence when they meet). Elsewhere, Neman’s love of money is a curious touch for an idyllic alien planet.

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‘No Keeper lasts forever, and the period of transition is always difficult.’ As the show hurtles towards the departure of its leading man, this could almost be a metaphor for the uncertainty surrounding its future. I’m sure this must have partly inspired some of The Keeper of Traken: lines like the defiant, ‘Trakens have survived times like this in the past. We shall do so now’ put a brave face on what must have been a deeply unsettling time behind the scenes.

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‘You were right, we abused our power. But judge whether we’ve not suffered enough.’ Romana’s dedication to freeing the enslaved Tharils provides the momentum that carries this through to the end – and beyond, as she leaves to become the Daenerys Targaryen of E-Space and free enslaved Tharils across the pocket universe. It’s a departure done without much ceremony or emotion, but works, I think, because Romana leaves with a mission in a way only Steven and Jo have before. You couldn’t really marry her off, and the excuse of not taking her to Gallifrey doesn’t apply so it had to be something like this.

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‘They’re only people.’ The reveal of the Tharils’ true nature – after we’ve already been encouraged to sympathise with their plight through Rorvik’s treatment of Biroc and Lazlo, the imagery of Tharils packed below decks like slaves, and offhand references to ‘Tharil hunts’ – is a brilliant, rug-pulling moment. Biroc sits in his great hall declaring, ‘we are kings’ as the Doctor grimly guesses that they are the enslavers the Gundan Robots were built to defeat. Two time zones – the fall of the Tharil Empire and its ancient ruins – converge, the blade of a Gundan axe slices into the same axe embedded into a cobwebbed table. The show hasn’t bettered the poetry and visual storytelling in this sequence. It’s astonishing.

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‘There are three physical gateways and the three are one.’ After the mystery of the first episode, this is much more down to earth. It provides some answers which, of course, only prompt more questions, but the overall sense is progress in unpicking the plot. The Gundan Robots are revealed to be the creations of a slave rebellion against an empire that once ruled all of known space, whose masters ‘descended out of the air riding the winds and took men as their prize, growing powerful on their stolen labours and their looted skills.’ There’s poetry in the script, which, combined with the fairytale setting of a long-abandoned feast, makes for a striking and compelling episode.

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For the most part, Doctor Who isn’t the kind of cerebral, “grown up” SF that the BBC occasionally dabbled in during the Sixties and Seventies – earlier Out of the Unknown, A for Andromeda, occasional Play for Todays kind of thing. But it can be. Warriors’ Gate is the convergence of Bidmead’s push to get “proper” high concept SF scripts and JNT’s push to bring in new production talent. Apparently it was a nightmare to make, but the result is a long way from the unsatisfactory clash of styles in The Leisure Hive.

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‘What goes up must come down’ could almost be the tagline for the season. This model script ends with the perfectly-seeded idea of a makeshift bowship dispatching the Great Vampire, as the Doctor has learned the truth about the enemy, and worked out how to improvise the solution from the materials to hand. Something very similar happens in Horror of Fang Rock with Palmerdale’s diamonds. The final result is a story that unfolds steadily, layering its revelations effectively, giving all the regulars something memorable to do, and takes the audience with it rather than baffling them with undercooked surprises (I’m look at you, The Leisure Hive).

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It’s possibly a mark of Terrance Dicks’ feelings on the matter that the Doctor doesn’t even know he’s got a new companion until more than halfway through the serial, and Adric spends pretty much the whole episode in a deep sleep. Instead, the focus is on the Doctor and Romana’s ongoing investigations, which, in true Dicks style, now include a chunk of Time Lord myth.

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There’s a very creditable attempt to create a creepy atmosphere, as the Doctor and Romana spend most of the episode exploring the E-Space equivalent of Castle Dracula, discovering that it’s a spaceship (the kind of reveal that would have been the punchline in most series), that its storage bays are filled with drained corpses, the fuel tanks are being used to store blood, and that underneath, something vast waits for the Time of Arising.

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‘Night must fall, Romana.’ The biggest tell that this was originally intended for the 1977 series is that the Doctor and Romana are involved in the main story by halfway through the first episode, rather than hovering uneasily outside the action. Unsurprisingly, this is much more traditional than Full Circle, and a much less awkward fit for the new house style than The Leisure Hive. As you’d expect from a Terrance Dicks script, the setting is established with economy, and the script pithily establishes the Lords in their castle and the peasants in their village. The Doctor implies that the Lords are leeches feeding off the efforts of the peasants, but we’ve already been clued into their darker purpose: ‘flesh and blood has its place.’

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