Trivia / Doctor Who S18E5 "Warriors' Gate"

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• Alan Smithee: The novelization is credited to "John Lydecker."
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Freddie Earlle accepted the role without seeing the script because he wanted so badly to do Doctor Who.
• Creator Backlash: Lalla Ward was unhappy with Romana's leaving scene, thinking it was too rushed. John Nathan-Turner supposedly "didn't want the series to turn into a soap opera". ^note  Ironic, considering one of his ideas for the following three seasons was ongoing character-based plotlines, i.e, "soap opera". The idea failed because they never quite got the hang of writing organic character relationships. She loathed this story as it was her last, but she was pleased that she got an open-ended departure.
• Hostility on the Set: A lot on this production. Between Lalla Ward's completely undisguised dislike for Matthew Waterhouse (shown in her much more biting delivery of dialogue to him), Tom Baker and Ward's frosty relationship (betrayed in the fact that the two only make eye contact once in the entire serial), director Paul Joyce and lighting designer John Dixon's open warfare and John Nathan-Turner finally briefly firing Joyce (Joyce was rehired when it was realized he was the only one who could make heads or tails of the shooting script), it's a miracle this story ever got finished. Note that the creative tensions yielded by, basically, every front over this serial were a factor in script-editor Christopher H. Bidmead's departure at the end of the season.
• Troubled Production: In addition to the difficulties surrounding the writing of this story, virtually every phase of the production of this serial was problematic.
  • Tom Baker was particularly irritable, due to both his ongoing illness during the seasons and the departure of his then-lover, Lalla Ward, from the series. It didn't help that Baker and Ward were barely on speaking terms during the shoot, with the trivia subtitles saying that Ward mostly kept to herself crocheting in a corner when she wasn't needed for a shot, and that there was only one scene in the entire four-part serial where the two make eye contact ^note And yet, they were engaged to be married.... Both he and Ward were deeply displeased with their characterisations in the initial script — which was one of the reasons Paul Joyce became so heavily involved in the re-write. He couldn't get his stars to perform unless their script concerns were directly addressed.
  • Meanwhile, Paul Joyce had little experience directing for television, and had considerable disagreements with John Nathan-Turner and lighting director John Dixon.^note It got so bad that the Blu-Ray's trivia track explicitly admitted they could not quote from Dixon's report due to legal reasons. A snippet that was shown briefly onscreen in the 2009 making of documentary, which mostly focuses on the Troubled Production aspects, uses the word "incompetence", which does show the outright Hostility on the Set between Dixon and Joyce, while a later post-mortem by Turner has Turner taking on the responsibility for hiring Joyce, citing his high recommendations as a director, but saying that he was in over his head when it came to directing television. Ultimately, only about half of the production was directed by Joyce, with most of the final half being tackled by credited production assistant, Graeme Harper.
  • Also, the production was suddenly hit by a strike of the BBC carpenters, which further delayed matters.
  • And, as if the production didn't need MORE problems, the Privateer bridge set was briefly condemned as unsafe by inspectors in the middle of the production block using it until a compromise was made that limited the number of people who could be up on its upper level at any one time.
• Wag the Director: Between the esoteric plot, an auteur director, unhappy producers and the two lead actors up in arms, it's a miracle that the script is intelligible. According to director Paul Joyce, who was unprepared for Tom Baker and Lalla Ward's feud, "I don't think even Tom Stoppard or Harold Pinter could have written a scene that would have satisfied both Tom and Lalla at that point."
• What Could Have Been:
  • The story originally opened with an attack on the Privateer by an "Antonine Killer", which led to the ship becoming trapped at the Gateway.
  • Robert Hardy and Derek Jacobi were considered for Rorvik.
  • Colin Baker was on the shortlist for Packard.
  • A crewman named Nestor was excised from the script, his lines being shared between Lane and Packard.
  • The Gundans were originally called Shoguns or just Guns.
  • The Tharils had a number of name changes, especially since unofficial continuity advisor Ian Levine, pointed out that longtime fans would confuse them with the similarly-named Thals.
  • Very little of Stephen Gallagher's original script remain, mostly due to tensions on the set and the director's decision to rewrite the script into something resembling an art-film. Stephen Gallagher was contracted to write the novelization and based it on his original script; however he got holy hell from the BBC over this and was forced to rewrite it to match the televised story as shown. The original novelization has never seen print, and may be lost.
    • The audiobook released many years later may be the closest to the original story, as Gallagher went back to his notes and wrote new material for this version.
• Working Title: Dream Time.
• Write Who You Know: Stephen Gallagher based the run-down crew on his former colleagues at Granada Television.

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