“There is no return. This is Terminus.”
Terminus is definitely the weak link in season 20’s Black Guardian trilogy, and a below par episode for Dr Who in general. It’s often the case that the weaker episodes of Classic Dr Who have an interesting premise, and sound good in a synopsis, but aren’t executed well. In this case, the biggest problem is that the story has several interesting premises and gets lost trying to figure out which one it wants to be about— and then doesn’t execute any of them especially well.
After Turlough attempts to sabotage the TARDIS under orders from the Black Guardian, an emergency system causes it to lock onto the nearest spaceship. On the edge of breaking up, the TARDIS doesn’t materialize on board in its police box form, it seems to partly merge with the ship, creating a door (that comes and goes) between Nyssa’s room and the ship. Unfortunately the ship is transporting “lazars”— an undisguised replacement for “lepers,” victims of a contagious disease, feared and shunned by society— to an ancient, vast derelict spaceship called “Terminus.” The Standard Sci-Fi Corrupt Company that arranges the transport claims that on board Terminus the lazars will be cured, but everyone believes that’s a lie. They’re really just shipping the lazars off to die somewhere out of the way— or at least, no one’s ever heard of anyone returning “cured” from Terminus, and even the convicts who run the place (because no one will voluntarily work with the lazars) think the same. All they do is hand the lazars over to the Garm, a giant dog-like alien who takes them away to the “forbidden zone,” where they’re never seen again. When Nyssa is separated from the Doctor and comes down with the disease, she’s handed over like any other “patient.”
Meanwhile there’s a power struggle going on among the convict guards, called Vanir, and the Doctor and his party get caught up in it as they are assumed to be spies from the Company.
Meanwhile again, the Doctor makes a disturbing discovery about Terminus itself: the derelict lies at the exact center of the Universe, and further investigation reveals it was once capable of time travel. The Doctor eventually learns that it was originally wrecked when the pilot jettisoned a mass of unstable fuel while in the time vortex— and the resulting explosion actually triggered the Big Bang and created the universe. Now the ship’s remaining power has become unstable again, and will soon detonate, and this time the explosion will destroy the Universe, unless the Doctor can stop it.
Any of the above storylines could produce a lot of suspense and excitement (of distinctly different types). Unfortunately, neither one does. The story never quite figures out which of the above is the main plot, and the whole story just wanders from one to another until time runs out and it just quits, resolving them all without much of a climax anywhere to be seen. The sets look decent enough but the costumes are decidedly silly even for the eighties, and while the Garm isn’t the worst monster in Dr Who’s history, it’s far from being convincing (see picture above).
The episode is also marred by some horrendous melodramatic dialog (which includes the word “horrendous” at one point with much less justification than I just used it). Dr Who— especially Classic Dr Who— benefits from a certain degree of melodrama. A lot of the series’ villains can put Snidely Whiplash to shame for mustache-twirling over-the-topness. But there’s a way to do that right, and a way not to, and this episode does it wrong. This will be a steadily increasing problem in the coming seasons, which leads me to suspect script editor Eric Saward deserves more of the blame than credited writer Steve Gallagher, at least for this particular flaw in Terminus.
The biggest problem of all, though, is that the whole story just doesn’t make sense. It’s full of things that appear to be crammed in without any thought. What’s meant to be a major surprise twist is that the lazars actually get cured after all— but the reveal only raises questions. How come nobody knows about it? We’re assured early on that no one ever comes back from Terminus, and we’re assured by a guy whose own sister had the disease and was sent there. How did he overlook the fact that she came home cured? How come even the convict guards have no idea there’s another ship that regularly arrives to take the cured lazars back home? It makes sense early on, when we think there’s no cure, that the Corrupt Company is promoting a lie but people have noticed no one comes back. It makes no sense at all when we learn there is a cure and no one has noticed the patients do come back. (The Corrupt Company needs to fire its PR department, stat.)
And over on the other plotline: Terminus is no longer traveling in time, the new explosion won’t happen in the Time Vortex, so why exactly will it destroy the Universe?
I’m typically more forgiving of the illogic at the heart of Dr Who’s essentially comic book universe, but this time around it’s just too much to overlook.
Details
- Nyssa leaves the TARDIS crew at the end of the story. After being cured of lazar’s disease, she decides to stay behind on Terminus and, with the help of the Garm and the convict guards (who she can free from the Company by synthesizing the drug they need to stay alive), reform Terminus into a proper hospital. It wasn’t actress Sarah Sutton’s decision to leave the series: with Turlough coming on board, the producers realized they had a crowded-TARDIS problem again. (She does say in retrospect it was good for her career that they didn’t renew her contract: “I enjoyed it so much I’d probably still be doing it.”)
- Peter Davison generally thinks they removed the wrong character in solving that problem, believing that Nyssa was the best companion the Fifth Doctor had— although he bases that on the view from the actor playing the lead, so that “best” means “the one that draws the least attention away from the Doctor himself.” New Series Dr Who often makes the companions the POV characters, showing us the adventure from their perspective, but Davison has a point in that the Classic series was different: the companion’s job was to say “What is that, Doctor?” and then get into mortal peril as often as possible.
- Tegan and Turlough don’t get to participate in the story much at all, spending almost the whole time trapped in a below-decks crawlspace trying to find the way out. This was a solution to the problem of Turlough still being controlled by the Black Guardian and trying to kill the Doctor. Rather than stage a constant series of failed attempts, they just kept the two of them apart. Turlough does get a tiny bit of progress in his character arc, though: at the start of the story, he sabotages the TARDIS on orders of the Black Guardian and his only concern is whether he himself will be rescued from the breakup. By the end, he’s clearly dealing with a troubled conscience about the whole deal he’s made with the Guardian, and tries to split the difference by stealing the TARDIS without killing the Doctor. The story ends on a cliffhanger as the Guardian stops him from stealing the TARDIS and again demands that he kill the Doctor.
- While the guest characters wear silly costumes in this story, Nyssa barely wears a costume at all. She starts the story in a very thin undershirt that at several moments clearly reveals she’s wearing nothing under it. Then, burning up with fever as she comes down with the lazars’ disease, she sheds her skirt as well and spends the rest of the story in her underwear. This unusually extreme (for Dr Who) bit of cheesecake was actually suggested by actress Sarah Sutton herself, who during her time as Nyssa had received a lot of fan mail from male viewers who found her sexy despite the rather formal costume Nyssa wore for most of her run. Sutton suggested giving those fans a farewell present on her last outing.
- Writer Steve Gallagher attempted to draw on elements of Norse mythology for this story. “Garm” is the name, in Norse mythology, of the giant dog that guards the path to the underworld (the equivalent of Greek mythology’s Cerberus) and the convict guards are called Vanir, which also comes from Norse mythology. But nothing beyond these random names actually tries to parallel the myths, so it comes across as kind of pointless.
- Behind the scenes, the production of this episode was troubled. Threats of another strike by the BBC electricians’ union caused hasty changes in the shooting schedule, included a sharp cut in available studio time that came after director Mary Ridge (one of the rare female directors of Classic Dr Who) had planned all her timetables, and then another loss of two hours’ studio time while in the middle of filming. The flaws of the episode almost all come from the writing, and I’ll give Ridge credit for succeeding in getting it finished despite what appear to have been monumental difficulties.
Next Week
“Enlightenment,” 4 episodes
