Day 544: Warriors' Gate Part 3

When setting up this blog, I gave myself a few rules to follow. One such rule was no skips ahead. Aside from brand new episodes, I said to myself that I could not watch any episode until the day upon which I have it scheduled to appear on my blog. This has mostly worked well, but there are one or two hiccups that get in the way. One such hiccup is Warriors' Gate Part 3.

I've seen this story at least once before, maybe twice. I've read reviews of it and listened to analyses in the past as well, so I'm readily familiar with the basic beats of the story. I know, for instance, the journey of the Tharils, which we may perhaps talk about tomorrow. But in all that viewing, I can never really claim to fully understand what happens from about halfway through Part 3. Basically, Romana meets one of the Tharils, they hold hands and start glowing, then they walk off and disappear, re-appearing near the titular gate. At no point is any explanation given for how this occurs. It's all a bit confusing, and left me somewhat lost for words that didn't begin with a W, T, or F.

Another instance is the cliffhanger, where the Doctor would appear to be magically teleported from one position to another, because an axe hit the table in front of him. Or it may be that he travelled from one time period to another. It's the sort of thing that gives the idea that the production staff had a perfectly good idea of what was going on, but they failed to effectively communicate that on screen, leaving the viewers with very little idea as to what was going on.

But we get back to the hiccup at the introduction. As the episode concluded, I felt the need to put on Part 4. I needed to see whether an explanation would be made as to what everything means, with full discussions of the various concepts and their importance to the story. And the fact that I wanted to watch the rest of this must say something about the story, and how it somehow manages to draw viewers in, even if it's only to find out what the hell is going on.