 This story is the second of three loosely connected stories known as "The Black Guardian Trilogy", and was the last to feature Sarah Sutton as companion Nyssa.
"The Black Guardian Trilogy" is the third "trilogy" during John Nathan-Turner’s time as producer - the first two being the E-Space adventures in Season Eighteen and the Season Eighteen to Season Nineteen bridge of The Master stories.
As with every story, during Season Twenty, "Terminus" also featured an enemy from The Doctor’s past. For this trilogy (begun in the previous story, "Mawdryn Undead", and concluded in the next story, "Enlightenment"), the enemy was The Black Guardian, who last faced the Fourth Doctor at the conclusion of The Key to Time saga in the 1979 story "The Armageddon Factor".
In "Mawdryn Undead" The Black Guardian enlisted the help of stranded alien Vislor Turlough to wage vengeance on The Doctor for his earlier crime of sabotaging his plans to obtain The Key to Time. This story continues with Turlough joining The Doctor, Nyssa and Tegan Jovanka aboard the TARDIS but still under the influence of The Black Guardian.
Written by Steve Gallagher this story was actually pitched two years prior on the success of his first Doctor Who scripts that became the 1981 Fourth Doctor story "Warriors' Gate". As production was beginning on "Warriors' Gate", in the summer of 1980, Steve Gallagher entered into discussions with then-Script Editor Christopher Bidmead about penning a second story. Commissioning of his script was delayed by the changes of Script Editor. Steve Gallagher’s script eventually came to John Nathan-Turner attention and he was interested in Steve Gallagher’s concept. The original storyline though had to be revised so as to include new companion Turlough, who was acting as an agent of the evil Black Guardian, as well as the inclusion of the Lazar Disease subplot.
Steve Gallagher drew heavily from Norse mythology. The Garm was a dog-headed beast who guarded the gates of Hell, while the Vanir were named after minor fertility gods. Several of the individual character names were inspired by other Scandinavian figure, including Eirak (the Norwegian king Erik Bloodaxe), Bor (the father of Odin, head of the Norse pantheon) and Sigurd (for Siegfried, a descendant of Odin).
John Nathan-Turner had always intended that Nyssa was to be a temporary companion, and his original intent had been to write her, not Adric, out of the show the previous year. It was only through the efforts of Peter Davison, who was quite fond of the character, that Nyssa had survived to this point, but by the middle of this season John Nathan-Turner finally decided that her potential had run its course and so she made her departure from the show in this story - electing to stay behind on the Terminus station to tend to the survivors of the Lazar’s Disease.
Liza Goddard, who plays Kari, is the former wife of Colin Baker - who would become the Sixth Doctor. Steve Gallager originally wanted to call Kari ‘Yoni’ until Eric Saward pointed out that it was the Sanskrit word for the female reproductive organ.
The director assigned to this story was Mary Ridge - a BBC veteran whose lengthy career included assignments on programmes including Z Cars, Dixon of Dock Green and Blake’s 7.
This story was affected by an electricians’ strike resulting in a major reorganisation of shooting schedules. This meant this story had one less day, for its studio recording, than the six studio days that was standard for stories with no location material.
Mary Ridge therefore had little time to spare in the studio. To make maters worse the production of "Terminus" was fraught with technical difficulties, including major costuming issues, delays due to electrical problems and a mis-built set – namely the missing rotator unit of the TARDIS console, having been shipped to the exhibition at Longleat. The result was that some scenes had to be recorded on improperly-lit sets, production therefore ran seriously late, and several scenes had to be recorded hastily, much to Peter Davison’s frustration.
Mary Ridge tried desperately to make up for the time lost but eventually it was realised that another studio day would be required. It was originally hoped that the remount would occur in November, but because of the BBC’s prioritising of its Christmas holiday programming this finally got pushed back to December during the middle of the filming of "The King's Demons". The consequence of this was that Sarah Sutton had to return for a final studio after her scheduled departure in late October.
This marked the end of Sarah Sutton’s regular involvement in Doctor Who, although she would return for a brief appearance, as an image of Nyssa, during the regeneration sequence in next season’s "The Caves of Androzani". Sarah Sutton reprised her role as Nyssa for the Thirtieth-Anniversary Children In Need special "Dimensions in Time", in 1993 and has since contributed to Big Finish Productions’ range of Doctor Who audio stories.
"Terminus" became Mary Ridge’s sole Doctor Who assignment, and it was also Steve Gallagher’s final Doctor Who story. Steve Gallagher did submit one further script idea but this was rejected on budgetary grounds. He has since concentrated on his successful genre novels and associated adaptations, as well as other television work.
It is revealed that Terminus is at the centre of the known universe. The spacecraft was once capable of time travel (though The Doctor doesn’t explain who built it). When one of its jettisoned fuel pods exploded in a void, it caused a chain reaction which led to Event One and the ripples followed the craft through time throwing it billions of years into the future.
The Doctor uses the same term, ‘Event One’, to describe the Big Bang as was used in 1982 story "Castrovalva". But in "Castrovalva" Event One is taken to refer to the creation of our Galaxy, not the universe. As the exact fuel used by Terminus is never mentioned, but apparently produces radiation as a side-effect of energy generation, it is not implausible to believe that Terminus is fusion-powered by hydrogen, and its release of fuel and the in-rush of hydrogen mentioned in "Castrovalva" are the same event. However, the description here of how Event One took place is later seemingly contradicted by the 1985 audio adventure "Slipback" featuring the Sixth Doctor and Peri.
It is revealed that the TARDIS’ space time element is beneath the console and is, according to The Black Guardian, ‘the heart of the TARDIS’ (see also "Arc of Infinity") and if removed while in flight can cause the jamming of the column and dimensional instability. The ‘heart’ of the TARDIS would be later important to the plots of the 2005 Ninth Doctor stories "Boom Town" and "Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways", where it would be shown as an intense light.
When the TARDIS is threatened with break-up, it will attempt to lock onto the nearest safe place in space-time (in this case, a starliner), to allow its passengers to escape. The Doctor claims it has always had this protocol, but it has never worked before.
Turlough is given Adric’s room in the TARDIS. There are visual references to the 1981 Fourth Doctor story "Logopolis" (the star chart) and the 1982 Fifth Doctor stories "Kinda" (the double helix) and "The Visitation" (the android’s mask), amongst others.
This is the first instance of The Doctor being able to ‘spy’ on his companions using the TARDIS scanner.
This story is well-remembered for its scenes in which the conservative Nyssa gradually removes some of her clothes. At first Nyssa drops her skirt in the second episode, for no apparent reason, and she ends up wearing little more than a slip for the remainder of the story. According to the script she was feeling ill and trying to loosen the pressure on her stomach, but this is not made clear on screen.
Lazar’s disease is cured by a massive dose of radiation, but this is a crude method, sometimes exchanging one killer disease for another. Nyssa thinks she can put into practice her Traken education, so elects to stay with the Vanir, promising to synthesize a form of Hydromel, the drug supplied by Terminus Incorporated. This results in Nyssa leaving the TARDIS crew in a moving scene at the story’s end.
Nyssa’s subsequent history after her departure from the TARDIS is dealt with in the BBC Books’ The Past Doctors Stories novel "Asylum" written by Peter Darvill-Evans. Nyssa’s life after her adventures with The Doctor are also covered in the Big Finish Productions’ audio stories "Circular Time" and "The Darkening Eye".
Strangely enough, despite the grim tone of the story and its themes of disease and death, it is the only story from Season Twenty in which no-one dies.
A novelisation of this story, written by Steve Gallagher under the pseudonym "John Lydecker", was published by Target Books in June 1983. As with the novelisation of "Warriors' Gate" this book has no chapters.
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The Firsts:
The first Doctor Who story to be directed by Mary Ridge.
The first instance of The Doctor being able to ‘spy’ on his companions using the TARDIS scanner.
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(Position = 131 out of 159)
(Position = 169 out of 200)
(Position = 209 out of 241)
