Will Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 620: Terminus, Episode One
Dear diary,
Of the three tales in the ‘Black Guardian Trilogy’, Terminus is the one I know the least about. I’ve seen it (or, at least, some of it) before, but my memories really boiled down to a single image - that of the TARDIS wall being replaced by a large image of a skull. Other than that, I know some basic facts about the story - it’s Nyssa’s last, features a large dog, and is based around a leprocy colony - but that’s it. I always love going into tales like this one, because I’m completely unbiased from either a previous viewing, or the way I think other people may feel about the story - I simply have no idea!
First impressions… have we ever had a more 1980s story than this one? To start with, Nyssa’s hair is looking particularly ‘on trend’ for the period, and don’t even get me started on Liza Goddard’s barnet! The space suits our two raiders have been stuck in are particular dated now, too. Very much a 1980s rendition of 1960s ‘futurism’ - Dan Dare as seen through the prism of 1983. It’s not necessarily a bad thing - but it certainly does make this story scream out at you more than any others this season, and I dare say more than any other this decade. It almost needs that, though, because the sets for the story are particularly drab, decked out largely in gun-metal grey. Once again, that’s not a complaint, because it suits the story perfectly, but having such outrageously 1980s fashions stuck in there gives the piece at least a little jazz!
And yet, despite being so ‘of the era’, this is another tale which harkens back to the early days of the programme. Nyssa and the Doctor don’t get to leave the TARDIS until something like ten minutes in, and we don’t have any characters other than the regulars until fourteen minutes in. We’re back into the old model of the TARDIS crew exploring the strange new location for a while before encountering danger. One of the ‘strange new locations’ on show is the TARDIS itself - with Turlough lost in its rabbit warren of corridors. I think it’s fair to say that they’ve never looked quite as good as they do in the opening shots here: it’s simply the regular set flats arranged in a different way, but they seem to better give the impression of the corridors stretching out into the distance. I’ve had the CGI effects on again for this episode, which means that the Doctor and Tegan staring into the problems the ship is encountering makes it look larger again (though I did check the original version for comparison - the very close up pixellation effect doesn’t work as well for me, but mostly because it makes it look like Tegan is stood just a few inches from the trouble when she notices it!
I’m somewhat confused about Turlough’s purpose again here. At the end of Mawdryn Undead, he’s relieved to see that the Black Guardian’s crystal is cracked and I took that to mean that he thought he was free of the man’s influence. Obviously, I knew he wasn’t, but I was expecting him to simply get on with his new life in the TARDIS for a while before the Guardian re-emerged to him. Instead, we open this story with the boy in mid-conversation with his evil paymaster, and it doesn’t feel quite right. It’s as though we’ve missed an episode between this one and the last, in which he finds that he can never escape (waking or sleeping, etc etc)…
