Terminus

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Doctor Who: Terminus [VHS]
$19.98
This one is considered to be one of Peter Davison's worst stories, but I can't see why. He made worse. I agree that it wasn't one of his best, but I still found it to be quite entertaining. It's better than people give it credit for, and certainly better than the previous story, "Mawdryn Undead".

Many poeple complain about the "bad" sets of the Terminus spaceship. They say they looked like rubbish. Well, da... Terminus is supposed to be an old and run down spaceship. That's the point! I noticed that the fancy starliner didn't have bad sets. But then the starliner wasn't supposed to be like Terminus. It was supposed to look like a nice passanger liner in order to lead the audiance away from it's true purpose - taking plague victims to their final resting place, which is Terminus. Although the starliner did have some very good hints of it's true purpose such as the eerie feel of the ship and the painted skulls on the doors. The first two parts are very eerie indeed. The story has a lot of mystery in it, and when everything does become clear towards the end of part three, then it's a race against time for the Doctor to save the universe. The Garm was one of the neatest looking creatures I have ever seen in the series, Nyssa's departure was handled very well, and the cliffhangers were all great - and that includes the conclusion of part four.

It does have some faults though. The space suits worn by the space raiders were ridiculous looking, some of the acting by the guest cast wasn't as good as it could have been, and the Doctor saves the universe way to soon, leaving about 7 minutes of the episode left with nothing to fill it with except mindless babble until the departure of Nyssa and the excellent cliffhanger ending.

In all, it wasn't the best story of them all, but certainly worth a look at. I sure did enjoy watching it.

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Doctor Who: The Black Guardian Trilogy (Mawdryn Undead / Terminus / Enlightenment) (Stories 126-28)
$59.98
In a way, it's a bit of an overstatement to call the three stories included in this set a trilogy, for each is very distinct in both style and substance. Thankfully so, since variety is the spice of life. Linking the three ever so loosely though is the introduction of Turlough and his Faustian bargain with the Black Guardian, a cosmic being with a grudge against the Doctor. In a way, saddling the Doctor with a "rubbish" companion (well before Adam in 2005's "Dalek" & "The Long Game") is an inventively risky idea, and having a thoroughly unpleasant and devious character among the Tardis crew adds a suspenseful twist to the stories on the one hand, while on the other it often devolves into Turlough repetitively stepping not quite but almost out of earshot and hissing into a glowing crystal for instructions from his erstwhile Mephistopheles. Be that as it may, something beyond the bounds of the tried and true is laudably being attempted here. The trilogy as a whole also happens to transpire roughly during the middle of Peter Davison's tenure as the Fifth Doctor, a moment when his approach to the character seems to have become comfortably established while still retaining some of its initial freshness. On that score, then, these three stories amply demonstrate in both their significant strengths and minor pitfalls a good deal of what "Doctor Who" was capable of in 1983.

"Mawdryn Undead" is a particularly strong story that unusually makes the most of the potential for time paradox in the show's premise and even more unusually features an antagonist whose ambition is not to conquer nor destroy but to die. The reappearance of the Brigadier along with other references to the show's history are rather skillfully woven into the plot, although the resolution is a bit of a let-down, taking place not through the Doctor's own cleverness nor even the bravery of his companions past and present but limply through a credulity-straining coincidence. Likewise straining one's credulity in "Terminus" is the idea that a load of starship fuel could set off a chain reaction destroying not just a planet, a solar system, or even a galaxy, but the entire universe (!). One can't help but suspect that the writer's concept of cosmology and its scale is a bit uninformed. That said, the story deftly balances the grim imagery of drudgery and disease with resonant mythological motifs while confronting the contradictions between the profit motive and medical care in a way that coincidentally seems unusually relevant more than two decades later. Finally, "Enlightenment" is the real gem of this trilogy. There is something indescribably eerie about it. And yet it's also just an incredibly well-written science fiction tale juxtaposing impeccable expertise in historical detail with an utterly surreal context. The tone can pitch dramatically in range from hauntingly mysterious, boisterously campy, firmly moralistic, and strangely romantic--and yet the tale as a whole, while marred a bit here and there by some overacting, holds together wonderfully and verges on the profound without losing its sense of fun and adventure.

Come to think of it, then, on a deeper level certain rather weighty themes do in fact run through these three stories after all: temptation and redemption, death and regeneration, time and eternity, order and chaos, not to mention the unsuitability of dead birds as headgear.