Doctor Who A-Z #126: Terminus (1983)

Terminus is, at the very least, trying to do some distinctive things – and if you think that’s an unpromising introduction to a review, well, you’re right, but let’s take stock of the positive things first. It’s the middle story in a linked run of three adventures, which isn’t unprecedented in the series’ history, but it’s being done in a more ambitious way this time. The Key to Time plot lasted twice as long as this, but nobody could accuse the stories which made up that season of being too closely linked – indeed, one of the fun things about the Key to Time run is it allowed the writers to handle the central plot device however they wanted. Terminus, though, is the mid-point in a run of stories designed to put a companion through character changes that would still register as a major event in the 21st century series. It begins with Turlough trying to sabotage the TARDIS, still trying to carry out the hit on the Doctor which the Black Guardian has commissioned from him. It ends with the Black Guardian delivering a final ultimatum to Turlough; either the Doctor dies next time, or Turlough does.

Which is pretty good, as a way to get you psyched for Enlightenment. As a capper to Terminus? It’s not dreadful, but it does cement the feeling that there’s been an awful lot of running around and not much of consequence here. Given my usual writer-led approach to Doctor Who, it’s strange that this is the story in the Black Guardian trilogy that drops the ball most spectacularly, given that the script following it is by a new writer and the script preceding it comes from someone who delivered an absolute turkey for the season before. It’s not as if Stephen Gallagher is a one-hit wonder who used his idea bank up on Warriors’ Gate either, although that would be forgivable considering how complex that earlier script was. Gallagher remains active as a novelist and screenwriter to this day; his 1991 series Chimera maintains a devout cult following, while he is probably the only classic-series Who writer with enough career longevity to have created a series (Eleventh Hour) that was hyped, misleadingly, as a rival to Russell T Davies’s revived Doctor Who. So there may be a lot going on in Terminus, but this isn’t one of those situations where producer John Nathan-Turner has just slapped an impossible shopping list on the desk of someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Gallagher is as safe a pair of hands as someone on their second Doctor Who script can possibly be.

Here’s what I think the core of the problem is: Gallagher is a writer who is very, very invested in aesthetics as a vehicle for meaning, and with classic Doctor Who it’s pot luck as to whether anyone else on the production team will be thinking in that way. Warriors’ Gate benefits because the production team know the void has to look truly surreal and striking, and can pick up on the script’s fairy-tale resonances well enough to design the Tharils in a way that recalls Cocteau’s Beast. Terminus is slightly less confident in its symbolism, and the lack of a clear vision muddles it further. Director Mary Ridge was primarily motivated by her pride in having never gone over schedule, a record that Terminus put a black mark on. The lack of concern for the serial’s visual elements explains the infuriating clattering of the Vanirs’ costumes; apparently the prop designers was told their armour was purely for display purposes, and they were horrified to realise the actors were going to move, run and even fight in them.

The result is a serial whose meaning is constantly shifting. Kinda and Ghost Light may be difficult to grasp on a first watch, but you sense, somehow, that the writers have a solid idea of what their script is about even if you don’t. With Terminus, the behind-the-scenes muddle is all to obvious, not least in the wake of Episode One’s cliffhanger. Olvir’s maniacal screaming, portrayed with maximum camp by Dominic Guard, about having boarded a leper ship is a melodramatic high point of the story; despite the ship’s passengers doing little more than milling around, you feel the danger. There’s something enticingly wrong about having Olvir and Kari, whose space-suits seem to have been borrowed from a 1970s Pan’s People routine, be the ones to identify the very real, very horrific disease that’s afflicting the ship’s passengers. But the word “leprosy” is pointedly absent from the rest of the script. Mark Strickson was worried about the tastelessness of building a Doctor Who story around a real-world serious illness, and the reaction upon broadcast backed his suspicions up. For the rest of the serial, the passengers are suffering from “Lazar’s disease”, and Olvir’s outburst feels jarringly extreme as a result. Imagine if the first episode of Nightmare of Eden included an explicit reference to freebasing crack, and you’re close to understanding how strange this feels.

The lack of a strong vision to the story is particularly problematic towards the end, as Gallagher’s script has a number of potentially very clever subversions which don’t work because it’s not clear what they’re subverting. For instance, the revelation that the Vanirs’ monstrous servant the Garm is just that – a servant, rather tired of his life of uncomplaining duty – is thrown away because the Garm is never frightening enough to disguise this. It’s not just that the Garm is a bad monster costume – although it probably surpasses the Ergon as Season Twenty’s worst – but Ridge shoots it with a complete lack of menace. At one point it wanders listlessly through the background of a fight scene, which turns out to be perfectly in-character but gets a big laugh from first-time viewers who are, at this point, supposed to believe in it as a more conventional monster.

So what, ultimately, should Terminus be about? Lawrence Miles has theorised that it’s meant to be a Wagnerian space opera, with every character written as though they’re played by Brian Blessed. As Jamie Matheson would find out when writing The Girl Who Died, it’s a reckless gamble to stake a script’s success on Brian Blessed and then not have him be available. Ultimately, though, I’m not sure a weight of bellowing would make this a more successful story. The writers still seem to be struggling to find contexts where the Fifth Doctor shines, to say nothing about juggling three companions. Having them all be rendered inaudible by the guest cast would only exacerbate the problem.

No, what I think is happening is this: Terminus is meant to be played as an elegy. If that funereal air had been consistent – if Lazar’s disease was always a palpable threat, if Olvir and Kari looked like desperate space raiders rather than cartoon spacemen from a 1960s lollipop wrapper, if the Garm genuinely looked like a grizzled, brutalised warrior – imagine how potent the ending would be, when it’s revealed that this is actually a story about the birth, rather than the death, of the universe. The level of threat escalation at the end of episode three, where the stakes of the story jump from “can the Doctor and his friends avoid infection?” to “is the universe going to explode?” is completely insane. But so is the level of threat escalation at the end of Logopolis, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Gallagher saw that script as a standard-bearer for the territory he wanted to explore in Terminus.

Logopolis gets away with that level of sustained doominess – just – because it’a Tom Baker’s last story. Terminus aims for it because it’s Nyssa’s last story, and if that does not quite seem like an equivalent concept it’s not through lack of effort on the part of Gallagher and Sarah Sutton, both of whom give it their all, and make Nyssa’s leaving scene feel both inevitable and also thoroughly moving. Sutton seems less likely to criticise the show in interviews than her peers Peter Davison and Janet Fielding, which suggests she has the patience of a saint, because if anyone from this era of Doctor Who has the right to moan about how they were treated, it’s her. She was hired by a producer who wanted to expand the TARDIS team to 1960s levels without considering that, in the Hartnell era, every companion was designed to fill a different role in the story. As a result, she became the second scientific genius travelling with the Doctor, and once her competition for this role died she had one story where she was possessed, two stories that were primarily about Tegan, then two that focused on Turlough. There was never such a thing as “a Nyssa story”, just stories that had Nyssa in. So she moved on, and so did Gallagher, and so should we.

Next: Enlightenment (1983)

Graham’s Archive – Terminus

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