Terminus
(Season 20, Dr 5 with Nysa, Tegan and Turlough, 15-23/2/1983, producer: John Nathan-Turner, script-editor: Eric Saward, writer: Stephen Gallagher, director: Mary Ridge)
Rank: 257
''You know, I was so excited to be at the centre of the universe that do you know what happened? me leg dropped off!' 'Pull the other one' 'I'd really rather not - I'm frightened that one might come off too!'
Welcome to a story all about the creation of the universe that takes place right in its centre, in a world full of big dogs who patrol the gates of hell and a colony of people fighting life or death struggles, all because the new companion has started hearing voices in his head and has sabotaged the Tardis. All that in a story by the writer who gave us ‘Warrior’s Gate’, the one Dr Who story that no one watching could predict on first broadcast (not least because the plot was inspired partly by the random toss of a coin). Exciting eh?! Erm, not quite. Somehow, despite so much promise, ‘Terminus’ ends up a disappointment hit more than most by the problems of trying to create an imaginative show like Dr Who on a Thatcher-hit reduced budget in the 1980s. What sounds like an amazing story in principle ends up a story hit by drab sets, ‘Dr Who acting’ and long passages of not much happening. It ends up a story where all the best ideas are squandered and thrown away: the jeopardy comes from Turlough pressing a button, where the big action sequence is a lever moving in slow motion, where Tegan and Turlough spend three whole episodes in the drab flooring of the ugliest spaceship you ever did see and where we spend 100 minutes watching extras cough and fall over. It’s also a story that’s effectively about an ambulance involved in a traffic jam, only it’s run into time instead, in slow motion. Not the most riveting television ever. Unlike some stories that are just poor from the word go, though, this one could have worked so well (and it makes for a great complex and thoughtful novel). What on Terminus happened here?
Let’s start with the script. Steve Gallagher is one of the best writers Dr Who ever had, with a complex cerebral style full of abstract concepts and worldly metaphors. ‘Terminus’ has great concepts galore, with the excellent starting point of a colony driven into the ground by capitalism. The workers there are all slaves, dependent on the intoxicants they need to get them through the day but which they can only afford if they work their socks off. By different turns this story presents us with the Vanir (working classes doing all the tough jobs), the Garm (big hairy thinkers who sort of float about a lot) and the sick, who are herded like cattle and treated like vermin. It’s in many ways Who’s grimmest take on the future as seen in the classic series, an obvious stepping stone to future stories about taxing ‘oxygen’ or ‘sleep’ (‘No More’) and not that much of an exaggeration from where life was heading under Thatcher in Britain in 1983 anyway. No one has leisure time, nobody has ambition, nobody has hope – everyone just shuffles around trying to get through the days the best they can without too much pain. Gallagher takes the clever decision not to show us anyone from the faceless Terminus corporation – instead all we see are those suffering its effects and trying to get by as best they can, each one an innocent victim caught up in a system much bigger than they are with no means to fight back. Full marks for having the guts to show addiction on (supposedly) children’s television and while it’s not as explicit as ‘Nightmare Of Eden’ the sights of people ‘shooting up’ by sticking syringes of green liquid into special holes in their suits is an alarming image. Especially as my take on the drug ‘hydromel’ has always been that it’s not just any drug, but that curiously acceptable social poison alcohol (hydromel being Greek for ‘honey water’, effectively mead). If you see the workers clocking off their extended shifts exhausted, then getting rat faced to avoid having to deal with the bleakness of life as people going down the pub (but far less social, because they don’t have anything to talk about) then ‘Terminus’ all makes sense. This is our narrow world, our narrow little lives, as we wait our existence doing work we don’t understand for paymasters we don’t ever see in a world that doesn’t really care whether we exist or not. There’s even a reference only viewers on first transmission would get: for the voice of the Terminus company they went to the trouble of hiring Mark Muncaster, who’s voice could be heard intoning commuters to ‘mind the gap’ on most British trains (one other complaint about this story came from the Tannoy company who were appalled at being namechecked on the ened credits in a story about suffering – nobody thought to check that ‘Tannoy’ was a company name rather than a descriptive one). Though it’s on the bleaker side of what Dr Who had ever done, it’s very much in keeping with the general tone of the series: to look to the skies, to believe that there is more to life than what human society dictates and that there’s always a chance of things getting better if you live long enough for the revolution.
Except Gallagher doesn’t
stop there. He decides to throw in the even more depressing concept that all of
life is a mistake and that there is no plan for us, that this is all there is.
There's some very shaky science about the spaceship Terminus being located the
centre of the universe (something that’s impossible in a universe that’s
forever expanding and contracting in unpredictable directions. It’s like
marking the centre of a baby and expecting it to be their true middle when they’ve grown into an
adult). As a concept though, of the universe turning 'heartless' and rotten
from the core, it works in the novel well but on screen the fact that the
centre of the universe is basically an empty space is one of the biggest anti-climaxes
in the series. There’s some rather silly science about how Terminus itself is
travelling at a different speed to everything else, so that – just as with
‘warrior’s Gate’ but without the e-space science to back it up – the people
here seem to be moving reeeeeealllllly slooooooowlllllyyyy. There’s some even
shakier science about how the universe is a side effect of the Terminus ship
itself, when it jettisoned some excess fuel into a pocket universe and
accidentally triggered the big bang: quite apart from being the grandaddy of
all ‘Grandfather’ paradoxes (the ‘Back To the Future’ premise that you can’t go
back in time and shoot your grandparent, because if you did you wouldn’t exist)
Terminus already exists in the universe, so the fuel would have simply pooled
inside a universe, even one that goes back in time. It’s also clumsy given that
Dr Who only did a big bang origin story two years ago, which utterly contradicts
this one (‘Castrovalva’, which didn’t
exist when Gallagher wrote his synopsis). It’s even clumsier/convenient that
the Tardis is assumed to have ‘isomorphic’ controls that only The Doctor can
use, something that blatantly isn’t true given the amount of times Susan and
Romana never mind other one-offs use the Tardis controls no problem (there is a
line where The 4th Doctor says that in ‘Pyramids Of Mars’ but he’s almost
certainly lying to Sutekh to prevent him hijacking the Tardis). This is also the
single bleakest thing Dr Who has ever said: that life isn’t some masterplan,
that we’re not created for a purpose, that we’re not even the slaves of a
God/Racnoss spider/Fendahl slug but an accident we created ourselves and we’re
perpetuating the misery of it all by going round in circles, that pointlessness
echoing out from the centre of the universe. Now these are all clever, worthy
concepts and not the first time Dr Who has played hard and loose with science, but
they’re not very visual: at least ‘Warrior’s Gate’ had robots and Tharils and a
sense of panic. ‘Terminus’ just has people shuffling around while trying not to
get sick.
Because that’s the
sub-plot ‘Terminus’ is doomed to be remembered for. We’ve had many examples in
Dr Who of everyday things taken to extreme science fiction degrees and Terminus
is no different, but it’s choice of the ordinary turned extraordinary
is…leprosy. Yes, leprosy, the Medieval illness that made people’s limbs fall
off, which had by 1983 become a minor respiratory illness (as endless letters
of protest to the production team and in the Radio Times pointed out).
‘Terminus’ might well have received more complaints than any other ‘classic’
Who story (arguably any till Steven Moffat started torturing dead grannies who
chose cremation in ‘Dark Water/Death In
Heaven’), including from ‘The Leprosy Mission’ who complained about the
show ‘indoctrinating youthful watchers with Medieval ideas about a mildly
contagious disease’ and the Liverpool School of Tropical Diseases who diagnosed
my m.e. despite it not being a tropical disease (they both missed the new name
and the part about it being in space then!) Is leprosy really a worthy subject
for entertainment? Actually I think its valid - the suffering is shown
sensitively without being lingered on. Like it or not, illness is a big part of
the human condition and likely to exist even in the future - it makes sense it
would appear in a Dr Who story and that even in the future people won’t quite
know how to react. In every age so far, every Human society, the sick and
disabled have been shunned to the sidelines so it’s no surprise that should
happen here too. It’s just that something about the way they do it in this
story is uncomfortable. We don't get to know or really care for any of these sufferers
right up until (spoiler alert) Nyssa contracts Lazar’s disease and we don’t see
nearly enough through her eyes how society mishandles it and turns a blind eye
to people in pain. Instead we get to know the people who back away, panicked or
who are cruel towards the Lazars without any repercussions. We don’t even get
the full picture of how they contracted this incurable disease. Given the time
that this story went out it’s hard not to think of Lazar’s Disease as Aids,
with the people who contract it considered immoral or deserving in some way,
but to do that you really need the wrongdoers to get their comeuppance, for the
rest of society to come around at the end and admit they were sorry and this
never happens. It's basically the American health system in space too: a
company controls all the drugs and charges a fortune for them, not caring who
lives or dies until they can pay for treatment and those who can't pay work as
slaves for the rich to stay alive despite being too sick to do that work. I
can't but help have this nasty feeling that someone in Margaret Thatcher's
cabinet saw this story at the time of transmission and instead of being
horrified went 'wow, what a good idea!' A lot of other Dr Who plots show
what I want to happen with the future of the universe but this is one of the
few brave enough to show it as I fear it’s going to be. For sheer guts to go
where other series won’t, then, ‘Terminus’ deserves praise. When you’re sick
you don’t need a bill, you need a Doctor (or his Trakenite companion at any
rate). The first draft of the story, which had Terminus as a scifi ‘Lourdes’,
visited by people who thought the centre of the universe cured ills rather than
caused them, worked better and would have been more poignant profound and above
all visual than what we got. Nobody knows why it was changed, but given the
religious connotations maybe JNT got cold feet (he should have seen a Doctor
for those. Maybe it's Lazar's disease?)
Even The Doctor doesn’t
seem that concerned by it all – it’s down to Nyssa to solve it all, using her
bio-engineering she learnt from Traken to help the Lazars. In many ways it’s a
worthy end for an idealistic ambitious companion and far worthier than having
her married off or killed, while Nyssa’s too loyal to leave the Tardis in a fit
of pique like Tegan will (in ‘Resurrection Of
The Daleks’). It fits in, too, with her tragic backstory, of The Master
destroying her homeworld and leaving her an orphan, while giving us something
to root for in a story that suggests all created life was a mistake: by staying
and curing people Nyssa has purpose and makes the world a slightly better
place. And what could be more Dr Whoy than that. The actual ending itself is
done rather nicely: Nyssa is half full of Traken reserve and politeness and
half crumbling with emotion as she decides to stay, breaking when she hugs
Tegan (and those are real tears: Sarah Sutton was asked to go as the Tardis was
getting full and while she was thinking of moving on anyway she did go in quite
a hurry and loved her time on the show, mostly). But its still quite clumsily
done. Nyssa should be a heroine, revered by this world and eclipsing even The
Doctor in people’s accolade. This should be the story of the shy simple academic
who’s spent her life in waiting and finally found her purpose. The Doctor
should be giving long speeches about how proud he is, of how so many people
will live thanks to her ingenuity. Instead she just kind of quits while he just
stands there, dumbfounded (he must have seen this coming: it’s a more obvious
exit than the sudden departures of Tegan
- the first time – Romana, Leela or the loss of Adric). This is
potentially one of the biggest emotional upsets in 1980s Dr Who and it’s all
just thrown away. I’m also not entirely sure why having leprosy makes Nyssa
remove all her clothes down to her underwear, randomly, a much discussed plot
point that Sarah Sutton herself suggested was a ‘thankyou’ to all the fans
who’d written in asking why she always wore her full Traken velvets when she
had such nice legs to show off (this really was a very different time…) It all
makes sense when you learn about what Gallagher was intending though: this
story was first pitched for season nineteen when Nyssa only wore velvet, but
nobody thought to tell Gallagher that Nyssa had a lighter, less frumpy wardrobe
these days. The moment, as written in the script, is a moving one: Nyssa fights
her body, struggling against Traken convention to cover herself up and
pretending she doesn’t really have Lazar’s disease. But she can’t do it, she’s
so hot she’s burning, so she reluctantly undoes her Velvet dress which buttons
at the brooch her stepmum gave her back on Traken, dropping both to the floor
for The Doctor to find. Unfortunately on screen we don’t even know she’s hot,
we just see Nyssa randomly stripping and none of the other people here do
anything like that (fever must be a Traken specific side effect). As for The
Doctor he’s naïve and gullible for half of the story, then shows off skills we’ve
never seen him have before (such as throwing a chair from a long way away so it
sticks in a closing door), while Nyssa solves this story not him.
That’s a sign of how few
people making this story actually understood it. In many ways Gallagher got
lucky with ‘Warrior’s Gate’ – it might not have had the heavy science that then
script editor Christopher H Bidmead wanted but it did feature a higher more
complex literary way of thinking that suited his own. The script editor in this
period is Eric Saward, who’s idea of a good Dr Who story is a quick punchup
with lots of fight scenes. He just doesn’t get this story at all. All four
episodes ended up under-running so Saward did what many script editors did and
threw in a few extra scenes himself which also added continuity the writers
wouldn’t know about. You can tell which scenes Saward wrote: they’re the ones
that stop sounding like sonnets and start sounding like Limericks and stick out
like a sore thumb, such as the opening Tardis scene (with Turlough’s rude
dismissal of Adric’s room, which is an odd move considering how most fans
already disliked the character from ‘Mawdryn Undead’), any scene where people
are ‘nickering’ rather than ‘debating’ (quite a lot of Tegan and Turlough’s
then) and anything to do with the Black Guardian (who seems to ‘cause’ this
story by accident, making Turlough mess with the Tardis which if he’s
all-powerful he must know is going to attach itself to the spaceship that
accidentally caused life and can accidentally end it too). It’s more than that
though: the emphasis is all wrong. Saward is, admittedly, strong in the first
episode (which Gallagher wrote to be more like the ‘spooky’ Hartnell stories he
grew up watching, with the Tardis and Terminus intertwined like a schizophrenic
Lego set) but he really doesn’t understand this script at all the rest of the
time. The big moment when The Doctor works out we’re at the centre of the
universe? He stares into space. Nyssa’s realisation that she’s sick? She stares
into space. Tegan’s realisation that Turlough tried to blow them all to kingdom
come? Well, naturally she tears his head off, but even she’s not as upset as
she normally would be. You can argue that these are Gallagher’s mistakes too,
that he’s written for stage directions rather than things that will come across
in a visual medium, but Bidmead made similar scenes work in ‘Warrior’s Gate’
and become visual yet remain thoughtful. Saward is just out of his depth. Gallagher
said that he preferred how ‘Terminus’ came out on screen because Saward didn’t
alter his script as much as Bidmead had with ‘Warrior’s Gate’ but that’s not actually
a positive: Bidmead shaped ‘Warrior’s Gate’ to make it better, more fitting for
television; Saward just left it alone except for adding bits to it clumsily. He
wasn’t best keen on this script anyway – surprisingly it was JNT, a big fan of
‘Warrior’s Gate’, who invited Gallagher back.
Not that the producer
gets away scot free. Lisa Goddard is one of the worst examples of ‘stunt
casting’ in this era: while giving The Doctor another older female to bounce
off and be flirty with is getting weird now anyway (after ‘Kinda’ and ‘The
Awakening’ to come) Goddard is woefully miscast as a punk terrorist,
complete with a haircut that’s so 1983 it’s silly (we never do find out what
year this story is set in, but nobody else here has one). Godard is not your
typical revolutionary – she’s a maternal, ‘mumsy’ type, as anyone who knows her
at her best in late 1980s children’s series ‘Woof!’ will testify (a series in
which she again spends a lot of her time with an almost Human dog). Lisa
reportedly hated every second of this experience and went moaning to her
then-husband Colin Baker, who said that he was sorry because he so enjoyed
making ‘The Arc Of Infinity’ and had
always had dreams of being The Doctor growing up. This will have huge
repercussions on Dr Who’s future: the pair divorce in some acrimony and Lisa
will instead fall for BBC One controller Michael Grade, passing on what a
miserable experience this was and how she hated Dr Who with a passion. This is,
alas, one of the only stories where Grade’s future arguments stand up: ‘Terminus’
does look cheap, the sets do wobble (because they were unfinished) and there is
‘Dr Who acting’ (because everyone is panicking and going for first takes). Dr
Who never looked this bad before, even when it was being made for 50p and
featured giant butterflies in the 1960s. It was just unlucky the Grade missus
was in this particular show – had she been in, say, ‘Enlightenment’ Dr Who might not
have had a gap at all. This show’s days are numbered, especially when Colin
becomes the new lead. ‘Terminus’ then is aptly named: it may well have had a
bigger impact on the future of series that any story since ‘The Daleks’- all for the wrong reasons.
Goddard got off lucky in one way though: the one positive change Saward made
was switching her name from ‘Yoni’ to ‘Kari’, after pointing out that ‘yoni’
was a Sanskrit word for female genetalia (reviewers are mixed whether this wasn
accident or Gallagher seeing what he could get away with!)
What Lisa perhaps didn’t
know was that ‘Terminus’ was the exception not the rule, a desperately unlucky
serial where everything that could go wrong did go wrong. This was yet another
story hit by a strike (an electricians one this time) and while the day lost
doesn’t seem like a big deal (not compared to the outright cancellation of
‘Shada’ and for a while ‘Greatest Show In The Galaxy’) it did mean that
everyone was pushed for time. A power failure across the BBC on the first
proper day put everyone an extra couple of hours behind right when they didn’t
need it. Peter Davison for one was distraught at being made to act without a
proper rehearsal first and complained
about the lack of retakes. Part of the set that was due to be built,
wasn’t, for reasons that are still something of a mystery: the lift, which left
a gaping hole at the side of the set that had to be filled (in the end it was
replaced by having a light shone on the back panel, to give the impression that
characters were moving up and down, which is more effective than you might
think). The rest is cobleds together out of leftovers from the ‘Alien’ film,
but nobody seemed to have worked out that that set worked because of the
claustrophobia and narrow passages: here unusually the Dr Who sets are too big
and spacious. Costume designer Dee Robson sensibly picked up on the ‘black
death’ hints in the script and went for a cross between Black Death shrouds and
some more armoured costumes she’d seen on the side of ancient tombs. Only
nobody told her until the last minute that some of these characters would be
made to fight each other – being made of fibreglass and metal they made such a
noise that delays were made to pad them out with foam at vast extra expense. A
misunderstanding meant that the original costumes were in blue, a big no no in
TV productions in the 1983 as CSO effects took out anything blue to replace it
with computer graphics (nowadays it tends to be green). The helmets didn’t work
properly, keeping smoke in so the actors couldn’t breathe rather than letting
it out. It was discovered too late that the ‘proper’ Tardis electronics Turlough
was supposed to meddle with had been accidentally sent to a Dr Who exhibition
instead (this was one of the scenes remounted later). An explosion went off
with far more gusto than intended, causing Lisa Goddard standing next to it to
swear loudly (something drowned out by specially placed sound effects and a
music cue) while legend has it that it could be heard during the BBC’s nine o’clock
news going out life from a nearby studio. The story inevitably ran late, leading
to a remount for 25 scenes picked up a full eleven weeks after the bulk of
series four had been filmed (and leaving Sutton in limbo, as her contract wasn’t
yet up and she couldn’t take work before honouring the terms and coming back
for her last scenes). Tempers flared continually: all the regulars hated this
story and what it did to their characters (Sarah Sutton least of all, though she
wanted a stronger ending), producer and director crossed swords continuously
(JNT blamed Mary Ridge for everything, even the things that weren’t her fault)
and Peter Davison lost his temper in public for the one and time making Who,
calling JNT out for ruining Sarah’s leaving do with his grumpy looks and
sarcastic comments. Mark Strickson took to calling this ‘the story where nobody
smiles’ but he means it about what was going on behind the cameras as well as
in front of it: somehow the misery and despair in the story of ‘Terminus’ settled
on cast and crew too. No one in this story is trying to make this story soar:
they’re just doing what the characters in these episodes are, making mend and
doing as best they can, trying to survive it and get to the end. Everything is
a case of ‘that’ll do’ As a result there’s a lot more slapdash things allowed through
than normal: take your pick from wonky effects, ropey models, fluffed lines,
bored extras and the dodgiest laziest half-hearted fight sequence you’ve ever
seen.
The director doesn’t
understand this story either. Paul Joyce had a nervous breakdown trying to make
‘Warrior’s Gate’ and given how close to the wire that story became you can see
why he wasn’t invited back for another go, but Mary Ridge was a worse choice.
She’s filming this story as a literal one, with everything on the page as is.
There’s no sop to Gallagher’s metaphors, no cross-fades from the Terminus
universe to ‘ours’, no sense of lingering in a story that demands we put our
thinking caps on (a case in point: Gallagher spent a long time in the original
script explaining that the Terminus logo of a skull and crossbones was like the
sort plague carriers used to have daubed on their doors, as a sign of death –
only here it’s been adopted by a corrupt company. On TV it’s just a pretty
picture). We spend more time staring at the ventilation shaft Tegan and
Turlough walk through than the wide shots of extras dressed as Lazars (one of
whom is Kathy Burke at the start of her acting career – she’s in episode three)
suffering en masse, together yet apart. We get lots of mucking around with the
Black Guardian, who gives Turlough another string of ‘second chances’ but never
actually does anything, rather than the Venirs who are doing their best to live
their life in ignorance and stay away from the Lazars even though they’re meant
to be looking after them (no Venir in ‘ere!) The script specifies that the Garm
– a poor substitute for the Tharils but with most of the same plot functions,
being able to walk through radiation without ill effect rather than timewinds -
should be shadowy figures, seen in the dark with two red glowing eyes ‘like
coal’. Instead we see yet another disappointing Dr Who monster costume in all
it’s over-lit glory, which make them look like The Chucklehounds (though a lot
less silly than the Korvanista from the ‘Flux’ series forty years later,
admittedly).
Such wasted potential
then: ‘Terminus’ isn’t one of those stories like ‘Time
and The Rani’ ‘Orphan 55’ or ‘Voyage Of The Damned’ where you wonder what
was anyone thinking even trying to do this, wretched more or less all the way
through. It’s a story with great potential that gets thrown away. There are, for instance, bits that really
work. The opening scene, with its corridors of spaceship and bits of Tardis is
really well done, full of mystery and intrigue that evaporates once we discover
we’re on the blandest looking spaceship ever. Bor is a great and under-rated
character with a clever cynical turn of phrase.
He’s all of us, questioning why we get up every day and live the repetitive
days we do and yet who still tries to do the right thing where he can. The
scene of him collapsing from sickness then waking up and assuming he’s dead,
before realising even his worst ideas of the afterlife would look better than
this, are wonderful and actor Peter Benson is the only person here going above
and beyond to make his part in the production work. There are a few points too
when the bitchy disillusioned and mutinous crew mutter in the way workers up
and down the land do around the water cooler, despairing of their bosses and
figuring than they’re all a bunch of idiots (though nothing quite as funny as
in ‘Warrior’s Gate’). Most of all I love the fact that, rather than a big theme
park planet, as other scifi series might do, in Dr Who the middle of the
universe is a spaceship stuck in orbit carrying leprosy sufferers. What other
series would dare to do that?
But sadly that’s not
enough to stop ‘Terminus’ being terminally dull. It’s a story where nothing
ever seems to happen, for long periods, with lots of staring into space broken
up by interminable bickering, where two of our heroes have nothing to do except
shout at each other while crawling round on their hands and knees and where
nothing actually seems to happen. It’s a story where the central conceit about
going backwards in time is all too believable, because this story feels like it’s
going backwards itself at times it’s so slow. Characters come and go and talk,
Nyssa wanders off and The Doctor looks for her and meets Lisa Goddard instead, some
people get sick and that’s it really. There’s no great showdown, no coda where
The Doctor overthrows a corrupt regime by having it out with the evil corporate
bosses, no great sense of anything much happening. ‘Warrior’s Gate’ excelled
because it was a story all about change, of potential possibilities, of people
living their lives in slow motion envying those of us living theirs at speed.
There’s none of that in ‘Terminus’, which is just a lot of miserable people
living miserable lives that makes even our regulars seem miserable for once. It’s
the sort of story you watch, willing something to happen, then the credits roll
and you realise that you’ve just wasted 100 minutes of your life. And it’s worth
if you forget (because there’s nothing memorable in this story at all bar the
opening) and watch it all over again, in a very Dr Whoy vicious timeloop cycle.
The worst of it all is that this could
have been great: not much actually happens in ‘Snakedance’
and ‘Enlightenment’ either this
same season yet they turned out pretty darn good. It’s impressively grim in a
season that’s often too light and fluffy for its own good, with a sense of real
suffering this time not just issues that arrive in time for the cliffhanger (although
there is an odd one at the end of part two when a guard randomly decides he wants
The Doctor dead, on the spur of the moment), despite being a rare pre-Moffat
story where actually ‘everybody lives’. They just gave this story to the wrong
production team and recorded it at the wrong time when everyone’s backs were up
against it, a story about not being in a hurry made in a rush, ‘Terminus’ even more
than most ‘classic’ Who stories a victim of capitalism. Which is somehow rather
apt.
POSITIVES + Like many of
the best Dr Who scripts – without actually being one of the best Dr who scripts
– Terminus leans heavily on myths and legends, giving them a scifi twist where
they could take place (and all the more so given that terminus is going back in
time, so everyone could in theory pass its stories on). The difference is that this story is based on
Scandinavian myths that a lot of the audience wouldn’t have known: the idea
that God is a time traveller who’s omnipotent precisely because he’s lived
through time from the end to the beginning, the idea that those who help the
sick are closest to God, even the idea that there’s a whacking great dog called
the Garmr, guarding the gates of hell (which in this case is a radiation and
leprosy filled no man’s land). The Vanir
are themselves named after a group of Norse Gods (the literal meaning is ‘beautiful
ones’) – but the more shambolic ‘Human’ ones rather than the ones doing all the
ruling. Sigurd was the name of a Norse hero (more normally spelt Siegfried,
which might ring a bell if you know your Wagner) and Bor is also the father of Odin, but good luck
getting that to fit with what we see in the story! The rest comes from an olde
English poem ‘Sir Orfeo’, about a Queen who is kidnapped by fairies and her
pining husband who grows older the ‘normal’ way and sees his wife, still young,
every so often when the fairies bring her back. The tragic poem is far more
moving than anything we get on screen.
NEGATIVES - What's
happened to the Black Guardian trilogy? For those who don't know in his second
appearance Valentine Dyall wants revenge on the Doctor and has saved Turlough
at the point of death by getting him to kill the Doctor, brainwashing him with
lies about what our favourite timelord is really like. This is Turlough's
second story and he's already tried to top the Doctor repeatedly in his first.
In 'Terminus' though he wrestles with his conscience, wrestles with the Tardis
electronics and then wrestles with Tegan. The Black Guardian zaps him with a
crystal at one point for disobeying him but that’s all: at the end of ‘Mawdryn’
Turlough was this close to being executed for failure. The Black Guardian’s a
big softy. Also, how thick and naïve is The Doctor to simply take him on board
and give Turlough the benefit of the doubt when the Tardis suddenly starts
doing things its never done before the minute they pick Turlough up? It’s almost
as if the whole Guardian aspect was added at the last minute (which it was) but
why bother? Why not move this story till after ‘Enlightenment’ and make the Black
Guardian arc a two parter? Why have this story in the middle at all? Instead we
have the equivalent of that most hackneyed of drama devices, two people who don’t
like each other stuck in a lift (well, ventilation shafts but it’s much the
same thing). At least Turlough accidentally ‘causes’ this story though – poor Tegan’s
only memorable moment is being groped by a leper hand (including a memorable
first take where the extra, unseen behind the Tardis door, accidentally exposed
her breasts to all and sundry. Needless to say, even though time was at a
premium and other takes were left in, they re-recorded this one!) This was an
especially rude awakening given that she had only just come back to filming
from her honeymoon to journalist Nicholas Davies and boy is that quite the tale,
far more interesting than anything that happens in this story involving spies,
blackmail and arms deals (she divorced him when she found out that he was
selling English weapons to Israel illegally).
Previous ‘Mawdryn
Undead’
next ‘Enlightenment’
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