![]() It is even referenced when the Doctor compares Biroc to the Cheshire Cat. Warriors’ Gate is set within the rabbit hole, and this is an opportunity to veer towards the surreal. We don’t get Wonderland on the other side. When I wrote about Full Circle, I compared the CVE to a rabbit hole, but with the problem being that there is the same thing on either side of the hole. ![]() It is tempting to look upon earlier examples as an accident caused by a clash between a script editor who wanted things grounded in science and some writers and directors who didn’t, but accident or not it has all been leading up to this point. I mentioned above that it does something interesting instead, and that is to focus on the barrier between the realms of fiction and reality by investigating the clash between science and fantasy, something the entire series has been doing to varying extents. But what we are shown is a cop-out because it should have been The Mind Robber turned up to eleven and bursting out through the fourth wall, but instead it’s The Mind Robber turned down to a half. The CVE representing a screen is possibly the single bravest idea Doctor Who has offered, with the gateway between universes defined as passing through our televisions (represented by the mirror). Another little clue is the naming of Biroc (I assume) after one of the most influential cinematographers of all time, a man who filmed inside Dachau during the war, pioneered the first feature-length 3D colour film, and shortly before this was going on in Doctor Who was making Airplane! Now there’s an interesting career. So we have a charged vacuum in a box, or emboîtement. The cathode ray is actually a stream of electrons accelerated by an electric field. Most of those are in landfill now, but televisions at the time (and I suppose I need to explain this for future readers!) worked by controlling the direction of a cathode ray travelling down a vacuum tube and reflected on a screen. ![]() And that’s a clear reference to cathode ray tube televisions. However, this is ignoring those other two words, the “charged vacuum”. ![]() ![]() It is tempting to see this as a parallel for the TARDIS, with the whole universe functioning like the Doctor’s ship: step through the doors of the TARDIS and you pass through a CVE. The word is derived from emboiter, to “fit in a box”. To take the last of those three words first, we have an Anglicisation of emboîtement, an outdated scientific concept that all living things come from germs which encase the germs of all future things, enclosed inside each other. CVE stands for “Charged Vacuum Emboitment”. In Full Circle the TARDIS passed through the CVE into another universe and now has to pass back through it so the Doctor can escape back to the “normal” universe. It’s also one of the biggest missed opportunities of them all, because it chickens out on an idea that could have been breathtaking, but still does something fascinating albeit half-baked. So here it is, the most incorrectly apostrophized story on websites of them all (yes, there is more than one warrior!). ![]()
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