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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1967 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-01-26
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 3
• Running time: 275 minutes

DVD Description
The E-Space Trilogy contains the following:

Full Circle: The Doctor discovers the TARDIS has fallen into E-Space and landed on the planet Alzarius. Its only inhabitants live on a vast, dilapidated spaceship which they have been attempting to repair for generations in order to return to their home planet. But Mistfall, a legendary time of terror, is coming again to Alzarius, and an eerie menace is rising out of the misty marshes. The Doctor and Romana must solve the riddle of the strange Marshmen if they are to have any chance of returning to their own universe.

State of Decay: Searching for a way out of E-Space, the Doctor and Romana, joined by a young stowaway, land on an Earth-like planet. Here the people live in fear of 'the Three who Rule'; cruel lords who live in a high tower overlooking their village. Suppressing all learning to keep their subjects ignorant and helpless, what chilling secret are these ruthless monarchs concealing? An ancient evil is rising once again and only the Doctor and Romana can destroy it.

Warriors’ Gate: A strange creature forces its way into the TARDIS steering them to a white void occupied only by the ruins of an old building and a spaceship. This empty space is a gateway to the past and future and the creature responsible for taking them there is Biroc, a Tharil, an enslaved race. The gateway offers the only exit out of E-Sapce, but the void is contracting. Are the Doctor and his friends fated to spend eternity in E-Space? And what final shock revelation awaits the Doctor?

Special Features:

Disc 1 - Full Circle

Commentary – with actor Matthew Waterhouse, writer Andrew Smith and script editor Christopher H. Bidmead.
All Aboard the Starliner – cast and crew look back at the making of this story.
K-9 in E-Space – a look at the robot dog's role in the E-Space arc. With actors Lalla Ward, John Leeson, script editor Christopher H Bidmead, writers Andrew Smith and Terrance Dicks.
Swap Shop – Noel Edmonds chats to Matthew Waterhouse and takes calls from viewers of the Saturday morning entertainment show after Waterhouse's first appearance as Adric.
E-Space – Fact or Fiction? - Could E-Space really exist? A look at the science behind the concept of Exo-Space featuring script editor Christopher H Bidmead, visual effects designer (and Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society) Mat Irvine, authors Stephen Baxter and Paul Parsons, planetary scientist Dr Andrew Ball and astronomer and television presenter Sir Patrick Moore.
Continuity – BBC continuity announcements from the original transmission.
Photo Gallery
Isolated Score
Coming Soon
PDF Material
Programme Subtitles
Subtitle Production Notes

Disc 2 - State of Decay

Commentary with actor Matthew Waterhouse, director Peter Moffatt and writer Terrance Dicks.
The Vampire Lovers – cast and crew look back at the making of this story.
Film Trims – mute 35mm film trims from the model effects filming for the story, featuring alternative takes of the Tower and the scout ship staking the Great Vampire.
Leaves of Blood – a history of Vampires in literary fiction featuring authors Ramsey Campbell, Stephen Gallagher, Kim Newman, Pete Crowther, Simon Clark, Alison L R Davies, Chris Fowler and vampire specialist Dr Tina Rath.
The Blood Show – a fascinating insight into the use and meaning of blood in society and culture.
The Frayling Reading – cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling looks at State of Decay with reference to the vampire stories of film and literature.
Continuity – BBC continuity announcements from the original transmission.
Photo Gallery
Isolated Score
Coming Soon
PDF Material
Programme Subtitles
Subtitle Production Notes

Disc 3 - Warriors' Gate

Commentary with actors Lalla Ward and John Leeson, director Paul Joyce, script editor Christopher H Bidmead and visual effects designer Mat Irvine.
The Dreaming – cast and crew look back at the troubled making of this story.
The Boy with the Golden Star – actor Matthew Waterhouse looks back on his time on the show.
Lalla's Wardrobe – a trip through Romana's time on the show via the medium of the many costumes actress Lalla Ward wore along the way. It’s a one-off Frockumentary like you’ve never seen before.
Extended and Deleted Scenes – missing scenes from an earlier edit of ep. two.
Continuity – BBC1 continuity announcements from the original transmission.
Photo Gallery
Isolated Score
Easter Egg – Mat Irvine talks about the Gundan axes and his own on-screen role in Warriors' Gate.
Coming Soon
PDF Material
Programme Subtitles
Production Notes

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Customer Reviews

The Bidmead/JN-T vision - for better and worse...
Chris Bidmead (who wrote Tom Baker's swan-song Logopolis) as script-editor, & John Nathan-Turner, as producer of Doctor Who, favoured a return to 'hard' sci-fi (that is, the foregrounding in the narrative of quite elaborate & difficult scientific concepts such as Charged Vacuum Emboitments) for Tom Baker's final season. Hence this 'trilogy' - very loosely framed by the Doctor & Romana becoming trapped in E-Space, a smaller universe somehow external to our own, & having to escape from it back into our N-(normal)-Space. I'm ambivalent about the merits of this approach. The final story in the trilogy, Warriors' Gate, has, to my mind, a near-incomprehensible denoument, and throughout lacks proper attention to the basic story-telling. Script-editor, writer and director all laugh on the commentary-track about how now it's on dvd you can watch it over & over & perhaps finally understand it, but the fact is that it barely makes sense, & less chat about CVEs and the like, and more attentio to dramatic & psychological density and depth, would have produced a more gripping result.

Interesting, in State of Decay, the vampire story, Bidmead rewrote Terrance Dicks' script massively (to Dicks' chagrin) in line with his more science-fictional vision and the director, who'd originally agreed to direct the story because of its Hammer-Horror gothicism, refused to do the job unless they went back to Dicks' original script, which they did - a singularly rare occurrence in television or film. Dicks does concede that Bidmead contributed the entertaining rocket denoument.

Everyone is quite candid about Tom Baker & Lalla Ward's tempestuous off-screen relationship, pointing out that on a bad day Tom refuses to look at Lalla in their scenes together. Lalla is fairly cold about Adric as a character, & I did feel a bit sorry for Matthew Waterhouse being thrown into such an emotionally-wrought setting. He himself in his interviews is quite endearing and unpretentious.

Rewatching the stories I actually enjoyed all of them: all contain nice ideas and the odd sharp line and image, and Lalla's outfits are rightly celebrated. But I found the pace and use of language stodgy by comparison with the Graham Williams/Douglas Adams stories. I was also struck by the similarity of set-ups in all three stories. In Full Circle the characters moulder away in an endless round of pointless maintenance chores on a crashed Star-liner. In State of Decay the vampiritic Lords moulder away in courtly parasitism in the ruins of a crashed rocket. In Warriors' Gate the crew moulder away on a crashed space-ship unable to escape the inertia of their situation. Perhaps this reflects that late-70s sensibility that Britain itself was mouldering away inertly, the crashed ruin of its imperial glory...

I like actors, so didn't want to find Adric such an unappealing character on re-viewing his debut, but I just don't take to Matthew Waterhouse's performance. But then I also feel he wasn't really given a proper character to play. Nathan-Turner's original concept was of an 'Artful Dodger' - but then he cast the utterly public-schoolish Waterhouse - who wondered after being offered the part if he was going to be asked to affect a Cockney accent. Certainly there seems to have been little attempt to integrate him psychologically into the trilogy - Tom & Lalla don't become stand-in parents or older siblings or scary magical figures to Adric: everyone just blodges through the dialogue, which is somewhat randomly assigned.

Everyone seems to hate poor old K-9, who is rather side-lined here.

Overall, I enjoyed the E-Space Trilogy but feel that the price of pushing up the level of scientific conceptualisation proved to be letting the psychological maturity of character & dramatic situation deteriorate.

Interestingly, despite a certain amount of technobabble, the next story, The Keeper of Traken, worked almost entirely as a fable and has almost no scientific feel to it at all: it's only with Tom Baker's final story that Bidmead gets to fully express his vision for the show - & does so very effectively, I think.

The E-Space Trilogy. Hmmm...
The E-space trilogy was a series of three seperate adventures linked together into a 12 episode story arc, and came in the middle of Tom Baker's final series as the Doctor.

The three stories contain therein are a mixed bunch. Full circle would have been a decent tale, with some interesting ideas, good supporting cast and an above average script. Trouble is, it introduces Adric, the companion we all love to hate. On the rare occassion I can see through the red mist that descends whenever he's on the screen it's not a bad series.

The second story - state of decay - is good, but is unfortunately vastly overshadowed by the big gothic tales, such as 'Talons of Weng-Chiang', 'Terror of Fang Rock' and 'The Brain of Morbius'. This seems a pale shodow when compared to those earlier triumphs. It's not bad though, and the central premise is one that I've always quite liked.

The final story - Warriors Gate - is one of those wierd stories, where you have to watch it about 15 times to figure out what the script writers had in mind. And even then you're still not sure you've got it. It marks the departure of Lalla Ward, and my favourite companion K-9, in slightly rushed scenes at the end. The confusing plot aside, this story does stand out for one reason - the special effects and set design. The whole thing is very imaginatively done, one of the best in the whole series for that sort of thing.

The central premise lonking all three stories is also a bit confusing at first. I'm still not convinced I understand it. It doesn't matter much in the forst two stories, but is important in the third, where things get so confusing I usually give up on what passes for the plot and just enjoy the photography.

So, three stories, all with good and bad points, so a pretty average 3*. All of them watchable, but no stand out classics here. The DVD's come with the usual excellent range of commentaries and extras, but even after these I'm still not entirely sure what the script writers were on about....

Tom Baker at his best....
Well, here it is. One of the best sections of Doctor Who that was made.
There can be no denying that John Nathan Turner, much as people grew to loath him for what happened to the programme in its later years under his 'care', did great things in his first season as producer.
This season does away with the rather silly humour that had crept in in the late 70's, (all the more poignant when JNT made the same mistake in the McCoy era and introduced too much humour) and replaced it with a more serious sci-fi air that had not really been seen since Pertwee's first season.
A raft of good stories, and Tom Baker in atmospherically subdued form; some people say the tone of this season was funereal, and all the better for it.
And so to the E-Space trilogy. What a brilliant concept. Doctor Who had done parallel worlds before, and Russel T Davies would do so again in the new series. But here we have a slightly different spin on the idea; that of a negative universe with negative co-ordinates. It made perfect sense to the 10 year old me, who was doing negative co-ordinates in Maths at school and i found the idea fascinating. I still do 28 years later.
The stories are great;
Full Circle, is in some ways a classic Who; people trapped in a confined space; a horrible monster lurking about, and Tom Baker and Lalla Ward on good form.
But the story is intriguing, and i won't give it away.
Its a shame that good use wasn't made of K9 here, as in many stories, the writers simply get him out of the way to avoid writing for him. But, there are some good moments nonetheless.
This story is notable for introducing the character of Adric, a companion hated by many.
I rather liked him as a viewer back then as he was a change to the tiresome screaming girls that had been around for seemingly ever, (i was ten!) and i thought it was great that there should be a boy companion.
I think Adric was a really good idea, and was well realised by Matt Waterhouse, and was exactly as he should have been portrayed, so i have trouble seeing why people don't like the character. In the Davison era he would go on to contribute well to the Tardis 'family' which made the show more interesting and enjoyable then. Oh well, each to their own!
State of Decay is a Terrance Dicks masterpiece, has vampires, a civilisation descended from the crew of an ancient space ship and sees technology lost and a people in decline. This is fantastic stuff and has some genuinely creepy moments.
The last story Warriors Gate is perhaps the most confusing and needs to be watched a few times for it to make sense, but, without giving anything away, it sees a goodbye or two, another fascinating concept and higher than average production values. The model work is good and the incidental music evokes real atmosphere.

I cannot think of any negatives here really. These three tales stand up well today. Obviosly the effetcs are of their time, but very good considering that, and there are some impressive shots in the last story particularly.

This set of stories really is top notch. This is Doctor Who at its finest and should be added to anyones collection.