Saturday 15 November 2014

Terminus






That shifty Turlough is up to no good right from the get go. 

The Black Guardian orders him to fiddle with the round things. 

Nice to see a bit more of the TARDIS, even if it's just corridors. 


Turlough cracking on to Tegan... just no. 

Turlough claims he couldn't hear Tegan. Hardly likely. 


Turlough explains he's just a squeaky wheel. 


Turlough thinks his luck is in when Tegan says she'll show him to his room... ew. 

Turlough can have Adric's old room. Probably needs a good airing out... 

Why is Nyssa doing experiments in her skimpies? No safety goggles or owt. 

Now Turlough's 'touching the heart of the TARDIS'. 

Whatever became of Turlough's waistcoat? (Why does he have it now?) We need to know these things. 

Due to Turlough's sabotage, the corridors start to dissolve... look out Nyssa! 



Where exactly has the Doctor been? Sculpting those spectacular sideys in the TARDIS barber's?

Used to hate Roger Limb's soundtrack work on Doctor Who but it's really grown on me. Bit Bladerunner-esque in places for this one. 

A door with a skull logo presses through the disintegrating TARDIS wall, so the Doctor tells Nyssa to pass through... 

Wonder what will be on other side...? 

Great stuff as the Doctor wedges the door open by flinging a chair into the gap just at the right moment. 

The Doctor and Tegan follow but Turlough is more reluctant. 

When the Guardian urges him through, the chair falls away, trapping him on the ship. 

Nyssa hears a strange werewolf-like howl... That'll be the Ice Warriors, then. 

The Doctor finds Nyssa hiding under the stairs. 

Elsewhere a couple of glam space pirates in capes blow their way into the ship. 

Tegan and Turlough are menaced by a robot that looks like it couldn't say boo to a space goose. 


The ship is rigged to run on automatic, and it's not where the space pirates expected to be. 

When the Doctor and Nyssa blunder in, they're held at gunpoint. 

Tegan and Turlough hear a cry for help and think it's Nyssa. So someone else is aboard... 

The pirates' ship departs without them. 

Turlough finds Nyssa's notebook, but can't find the way out. 

Tegan is groped by zombie hands until Turlough arrives to free her. 

Space Pirates Kari and Olvir ask the Doctor for a lift home, when the ship announces an announcement... 

Olvir's hair and make-up make him look the biggest idiot in all of space. 

When the lazars are released, Tegan and Turlough take refuge in a service duct under the floor. As you do. 




Olvir's finally realized where they are: "This is Terminus, where all the lazars come to die." 

"We're on a leper ship! We're all going to die!" Glass half empty sort of guy is, Olvir. 

Olvir screams about being on a plague ship but still manages to strike a camp pose whilst doing it. 

Reckon Davison must have made the decision about a 4th year during this, it's the pits. 


The CGI is definitely an improvement for this story, gives a scale and insight. The modelwork was fine, but few shots. 


"We must find Olvir!" Wouldn't bother. 

Tegan and Turlough evade capture with a crawl through some air ducts. Die Hard it ain't. 

The stuff on film does look good. More 80s Who should have been on film. 


The Doctor nerds over some star charts while Nyssa tries to talk Olvir out of his hidey hole. 


The Doctor doesn't believe in coincidences and Terminus is at the exact centre of the known universe. 

A grotty looking character in plastic bone armour and a sackcloth cape stumbles into a 'forbidden zone' and though his colleague wants to go after him, the boss turns him down. 

Nyssa thinks she's located the TARDIS, but they'll have to split up into pairs as it's in 1 of 2 places. 

Nyssa goes with Olvir, but he ditches her when he realizes she's contaminated and she starts taking her skirt off. 

The spindly robot cuffs her and Olvir looks the other way. Git. 

Seems this lot in the armour, the vanir, are dependent on an anti-radiation drug. 

One of the Vanir nicks some of the hydromel and replaces it with a dud vial to cover the theft. 

Nyssa tries to trick Valguard but her escape is thwarted. 

"What is this horrendous place?" It's Terminus! 

Nyssa is shoved in with the other plague victims. 

Valguard summons the Garm, a giant humanoid dog-like creature to retrieve the body of his wandering colleague, Bor. 

The Doctor and Kari are unable to get a wi fi signal due to the radiation. 

When stage 2 sterilisation (bug spray) commences, they leg it, meaning they don't hear Tegan and Turlough's calls. 



Turlough tries to break on through to the other side, and finds the right bar. 

Valguard catches up with Kari & the Doctor, who he decides to kill. Overreaction, much? 

I guess Valguard thinks they've killed Bor?




Kari saves the Doctor with a neat trick shot, bouncing her laser shot off a metal plate to hit Valguard in the back of the head. 

Kari & the Doctor go into the deadly forbidden zone. Careful, it's got a yellow light! 

The other plague victims believe theyr'e on Terminus to die. 

Valguard has ambitions to be leader; Sigurd agrees to step down if he can bring back the "spies." 

Eirak thinks he's found a spy when he catches Olvir trying a Vanir uniform on. 

But by the time he brings Sigurd, Olvir's legged it and left the empty armour there to fool them. 

Tegan and Turlough are bored of wandering around, so Turlough keeps their spirits up by asking if she could ever kill someone. "You're weird, Turlough." 

The Doctor & Kari find Bor, badly injured, trying to shore up the radiation shielding. His short term memory's shot. 

Bor tells them that if one of the engines exploded, "it'd be more than just a loud bang!" 

But one of the engines has already exploded, a long time ago...

Valguard shows up again to batter the Doctor's arm before being shoved onto the radiation shielding. 

The Garm arrives to pick up the stricken Bor, and the Doctor & Kari follow. 

Having returned Bor, the Garm comes for Nyssa. Olvir tries to free her but the Garm is immune to his laser blasts. 

Bor says the pilot's dead but the engines will start up again and the big bang will happen all over again. 

Turlough backchats the Black Guardian and gets some shocking feedback. 

Nice continuity from Davison still rubbing his "injured" arm. 

They've found the control room, where the Doctor discovers Terminus was once capable of time travel. 

When the pilot dumped unstable fuel in a void, he created the Big Bang, Event One. Nice Castrovalva callback. 

Turlough's bit of tinkering has disastrous consequences... 

The computer starts the automatic sequence to jettison the unstable fuel from the 2nd damaged engine. Here we go again! 

It's not been great so far. The Vanir are unsympathetic and uninteresting, which really doesn't help.



And here's bloody Valguard again to have a pop at Olvir. 


Beaten, Valguard tells Olvir that the Vanir are effectively slave labour & the Garm can cure Nyssa. 

Just when it seems he might be vaguely reasonable, Valguard turns nasty again and picks up the gun. Tedious. 

There's some good news at last; Nyssa's been cured! 

The Doctor hopes to enlist the help of the Garm. 

Turlough and Tegan finally escape the innards of Terminus, and while Tegan tries to track down the Doctor... 


...Turlough makes it back to the TARDIS. 

The Garm speaks! Not that you can particularly make out what he's saying. 

The Garm should actually have been a man in a suit in the story.

Nyssa tells Olvir the cure works, but is too hit and miss and needs refining. She was one of the lucky ones. 

The Garm flips the switch, and asks only in return to be freed from the summoning box. The Doctor agrees & smashes it. 

Not convinced Turlough's cube needs any extra CGI on its glow, to be honest. 

Nyssa steps up; she offers the Vanir their freedom from the company - she can synthesize the hydromel they need. 

In return, they will run Terminus as intended, and work towards a more effective cure for the disease. 

Sigurd faces a polite coup. "We all think it's time we had a little chat." 

Rather like in The Romans, the Doctor & 2 of his companions had separate adventures here. 

Nyssa has decide to remain on Terminus to help with the cure. 

Lovely little return of Nyssa's musical theme from Traken. 

The Black Guardian warns Turlough that this is his last chance (again)... 

...KILL THE DOCTOR! 

I'll be honest, if anything Terminus has gone *down* in my estimations. Which were already low. Davison's worst?

TTFN! K.
Coming Next... Destiny of the Daleks

1 comment:

  1. This was always one of my favorite stories... but looking back on it, especially after reviewing the fantastic production design in Earthshock, it just feels like it could have and should have been better looking. I always liked the look, but it pales in comparison to Earthshock, when considering the space craft sets and costuming (the Vanir outfits are neat, though).

    The space pirate outfits are just pure 70s/80s cheese. This is a great example of the disparity between set/prop design and costuming: The space pirates' "space suits" and helmets are ludicrous. Their guns are cheesy props (at least they light up), compared to the Earthshock weapon props. When you compare the space pirate designs to the dead giant alien pilot of Terminus itself... huge stylistic difference.

    i don't have this one on DVD, so the screenshots here of the CGI are new to me. It looks terrible, frankly. It totally ruins the mood of the original model shots. The original models weren't amazing, but they fit, stylistically. There are some little details i like in the CGI (the death logo on the ship, the dead engine on Terminus), but it overall looks like something I could've done myself with Ray Dream Studio or Carrara. Was this a much earlier work by the Restoration Team?

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