The rating seems a bit high at 91.9%... just out of the so far top ten.
Ambitious... yes
Perfect... not really
I'd say it's a very high achiever due to production and direction and imagination but a story that owes very little to performance of the key cast
Tom is phoning this in. Lalla is better but she's inconsistent. Matthew is all over the shop like normal. John is ok and has some good lines for a change but the die seems cast against K9 at this stage.
The rating score is deserved. This is DW that adds to the legend. It is the kind of story that DW should do more of. No earth invasions, no space battles, no arch villains, no space pirates, no jungle planets. But time folding plots, micro universes with variable physics and relatable characters... this is what makes it good.
The funny cynical crew of the Privateer are good to watch. Rorvik as played by Clifford Rose has some cringey moments including his pay off a the end of p4. Kenneth Cope as Packard is entertaining. Freddie Earle and David ?? as Aldo and Royce are standouts. The dialogue for all these guys is some of the best written in DW history...
The plot is complex and stands up well 40 odd years on.
There is no classic baddie/monster. The Tharils have obvious shortcomings in their past. The Privateer crew are unscrupulous and amoral at best... detestable slavers at worst. Characters are deliberately greyed and it works wonders for the story. Major strength this.
There are some weak SFX but they are outweighed by the good ones. The frame of the gateway mirror and booms in shot and the like are easy to forgive. The use of framestore to depict the Tharils riding the Time Winds is particularly brilliant. It could have been a cheap CSO nasty but the use of a 80's poop video look and feel actually works in an imaginative way here.
Compare the way the CSO'd virtual space appears in Warrior's Gate to the CSO'd virtual space appeared in Underworld. Whole scenes achieved in a way that's technically identical but the expectation and the effect is much different.
The production problems (Paul Joyce's 'firing', the complaints by the Lighting engineer, the overruns) are remarkable. The last minute adaptations of some effects (the use of the Powis Castle B&W photography) was sublime and richly effective. Use of the lightweight handheld camera (see teh climax of p2) gives new POV shots and creeping action tracking shots.
Sometimes production troubles seem to make DW better somehow. It's counter intuitive but it can happen. (eg, Spearhead from Space it worked but in Robot is where it did not.)
Peter Howell's incidental score is a remarkable achievement. Bettering Paddy Kingsland's Full Circle/State of Decay soundtrack is no mean feat. (Wait for Paddy's Logopolis soundtrack but...)
If only all 80's DW was like this. Complaints from fans at the time about 'it's too complex', 'I can;t understand it' seem like unnecessary nonsense nowadays.
I can see a young Steven Moffat taking notes.
ABM Rating 3.50/4.00
LJM Rating 4.54/5.00
SPJ Rating 9.75/10
No. 11 (out of 113)
Link to Cumulative Rankings
Rankings Scoreboard
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