It's the end of the line for Nyssa...

Mirror mirror on the wall. Who is the fairest of them all? Well it certainly ain't me, since my sun-baked-Gollum-in-a-wig visage smashed the mirror into tiny fragments only this morning. In Doctor Who-land though, put The Hand Of Fear or The Stones Of Blood in a mirror and you get...

Terminus!

Tenuous link? Maybe. But then I'd argue that those two Tom Baker stories are made up of three strong parts and a weak final one, whereas Terminus works on the reverse principle in most fans' eyes: an excellent first part goes steadily downhill into a runaround that's so dull it could be hosted by Mike Reid at the local Tory Party Conference (well, in 1983 anyway). Although "G-g-g-g-g-g-gooooo!!!" is a pretty appropriate phrase to bellow at Cameron and his cronies.

Is Terminus that bad though? It's not a Davison story that springs to mind instantly. A bit of memory jogging will result in a response along the lines of "Ohhhh, that's the one with the leprosy storyline" or even more likely, "That's the story where Nyssa strips down to her undies".

That's right. In a last-minute bid to rid herself of The Most Boring Companion In Who History tag, Nyssa pre-empts the lads' mag market and strips off for no good reason. Mind you, Nyssa's been getting more racy in her last couple of stories. She lost the velvet trouser suit in Snakedance, while trying to catch The Doctor's attention. When that didn't work, she opted for the low-cut top and short skirt in Mawdryn Undead, which The Doctor most certainly noticed. Hmmmm, maybe Nyssa's carrying a torch for the mullet-haired one, so it's too bad for her that The Doctor's paired up for this story with a posh train-station announcer in a frightwig. No wonder she decides to up sticks at the end and leave in what's actually quite a moving scene. "Like you, I'm indestructible," blubs Nyssa to Teabag, and it's all rather sad. It's such a shame that Nyssa didn't really get anything worthwhile to do, and this showed through in some of Sarah Sutton's rather tired performances. At least she gets a reasonable last showing in Terminus, and apart from some of the least convincing screaming this side of pooh-sniffing harridan Gillian McKeith, Sutton gives a good performance.

And so to Terminus itself, which gets off to a cracking start. Having wormed his way into the TARDIS, Turlough is now upping his game to destroy The Doctor by sabotaging the TARDIS on the instructions of his paymaster The Black Guardian. Inevitably this plan fails dismally, and instead the unstable TARDIS locks on to the nearest vessel, in this case a grimy old crate that's been spray-painted by a Grim Reaper fan club.

It's a corker of an episode in fact, and establishes the new companion dynamic - i.e. Teabag can't stand Turlough, or "The brat" as she calls him. Charmlessly blundering into Adric's old room like the world's most arrogant estate agent, Turlough wastes no time in banishing the last remnants of the Alzarian from the TARDIS. It's a pity that this antagonism isn't really carried on in the story, since Teabag and Turlough are reduced to crawling around in gloomy tunnels in the last three parts.

Even better though are the scenes of the TARDIS crew stranded on the apparently deserted spaceship. These sequences are excellently directed by Mary Ridge, with hand-held camera work and eerie sound-effects to hammer home the claustrophobia and desolation. In fact, Ridge just about manages to keep the pedestrian remainder of the story going with some well-chosen shots and good casting decisions (well, the Vanir, anyway).

"Lisa Goddard doesn't convince in the slightest with a performance that's all wide googly eyes and upper-crust mumbling"

But as soon as ineffectual raiders Kari and Olvir blunder their way onto the ship, things start to go wrong. For one thing, actors Liza Goddard and Dominic Guard are hopelessly miscast (odd, given that Ridge's casting is otherwise very good). Kari is supposed to be a tough, streetwise pirate, but Goddard doesn't convince in the slightest with a performance that's all wide googly eyes and upper-crust mumbling. The nadir of this performance is when she bellows "FREEEEEEEEZAHHH!", as if she's advertising the latest state-of-the-art fridge-freezer to a clutch of deaf OAPs. Oh, and she's also pre-empting 80s one-hit-wonder Spagna with that ridiculous hairdo.

If Kari's Spagna, then Olvir resembles a novelty Adam Ant jack-in-the-box, forever bounding about and whining like an am-dram toddler. Olvir is so weedy and spineless, he makes Adric look like Bruce Willis in Die Hard, and again, Guard's lacking that all-important conviction. The cliffhanger to part one nearly ruins all that goodwill that's been invested in the first episode, partly as a result of Guard's awful OTT bellowing: "We're on a leper ship! We're all going to DIE-EEE-IE-EEE-IE-EEEE-IEEEEEE!!" Possibly one of the worst cliffhangers in the whole of Who's long history.

But listen to the words too. The theme of leprosy and disease is not exactly handled in a sensitive fashion. Right at the start of the next part, The Doctor bustles Nyssa out of the way of the shuffling potato sack brigade with a rather tasteless "Don't let them touch you!" I remember reading an interview with Mark Strickson once in which he said that he found the story's concept rather dubious - in a way, he's right. With lines like the above, the problem is more that the topic of disease isn't handled very well in the first place. It's all done in a generic, patronisingly obvious way, treating the sick like battery hens and social outcasts. Maybe the script was trying to ram the message home in this deliberate fashion, but ultimately it doesn't work as a result. Worthy subject of discussion - bad execution.

It also doesn't help that from part two onwards, nothing really much happens in Terminus. Doctor and Spagna blunder about Terminus, while meeting an angry hippy, a mad hippy and then a skeleton in a spacesuit before trying to avert yet another Big Bang scenario with the aid of a red handle. Teabag and Turlough crawl around tunnels. Nyssa gets infected and then miraculously gets cured. Although, let's face it, you can't kill off another companion so soon after Adric.

Nevertheless though, Terminus does tend to drag. Teabag and Turlough get a particularly raw deal, apart from the interesting scene in which the public schoolboy asks his unwilling companion if she could ever kill anyone in cold blood. That aside, Janet Fielding and Mark Strickson get the short straws in a story that doesn't really need them around in the first place.

"Perhaps the reason for Terminus' dull reputation is due to the lack of a decent baddie or villain"

The group of angry hippies also reduces the story to tedious bickering and point-scoring. Yes, the Vanir, a band of ragtag scruffs in skeleton masks and capes, and the uncanny ability to annoy the hell out of each other. Eirak is the angry loose cannon leader whom no one likes. He's especially despised by Valgard, the grumpiest of the lot. With his perpetually sour face and miserable droning voice, Valgard could win the lottery and he'd still moan about how he hasn't got enough money. He's backed up though by Sigurd, the younger chap with another example of the perm-mullet, and Bor, a man who's so doped up to the eyeballs, he makes Keith Richards look like a boy scout.

Fortunately, all of the guest actors do very well as the Vanir. Martin Potter is convincingly obstinate as the unpopular Eirak, Andrew Burt puts the shame of Jarvik The MAN (see Blake's 7's 'The Harvest Of Kairos' for details) behind him to deliver a fine performance as the world-weary Valgard, while Peter Benson (Bernie Scripps in Heartbeat) effortlessly steals the show as the mad-as-a-box-of-frogs Bor.

Perhaps the reason for Terminus' dull reputation is due to the lack of a decent baddie or villain. The Black Guardian hardly features in this story, occasionally appearing on the TARDIS screen or shouting at Turlough as a disembodied voice. Like I said in the Arc Of Infinity review, it's a bit of a swizz to call it The Guardian Trilogy when the Black Guardian only crops up for about five minutes in total in one of the stories.

Fulfilling the story's function as Great Big Hairy Beastie is of course, the Garm, a great big talking dog thing, who's a cross between the Bullseye mascot, Rowlf from The Muppet Show and Geoff Capes. He's also lumbered with a silly talking voice that sounds a bit like Tess Daly speaking from underneath a lagoon. But in the end, The Garm's a goodie, taking hapless victims to be cured and managing to save the world from oblivion by forcing the heavy red handle back to its original position. Later that year, The Garm also won the title of World's Strongest Dog, scored the Christmas Number One and became an ambassador for world peace.

In the end, Terminus is something of a damp squib. The story contains some good ideas and plausible hard science from writer Steve Gallagher. But by contrast, it's lacking a potent threat and also good lines ("What is this horrendous place?" wails Nyssa, for example in part two, just one example of some of the clunky lines that plague the story). While the direction and most of the acting compensate for the tedium, Terminus never really manages to reach the great potential that it showed in part one. One of the weaker entries in what's supposed to be a celebratory season...

John Bensalhia limbered up for this mammoth task with a full four-series review of Blake's 7, and writes professionally and recreationally all over the web. Check out his portfolio of work at Wordprofectors.

Check out John's previous Doctor Who review, Mawdryn Undead

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