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Production Code: 6G
First Transmitted
The Doctor - Peter Davison
Plot Outline from Wikipedia Under the Black Guardian's instructions, Turlough sabotages the TARDIS, causing parts of it to dissolve. As the field of instability threatens to engulf Nyssa's room, a door appears behind her and the Fifth Doctor tells her to go through it. The TARDIS, to save itself, has materialized aboard a spaceship heading for an unknown destination. The Doctor and Nyssa, while exploring the ship, encounter two raiders, Kari and Olvir, who are intent on plundering the ship's cargo. When the raiders' ship abandons Kari and Olvir, it becomes apparent that the spaceship is actually a transport carrying lazars, sufferers of a leprosy-like disease, to a space station named Terminus. The station is owned by Terminus, Inc., which claims that a cure exists there, but no-one has returned from it. Nyssa, separated from the Doctor, is infected by Lazar's Disease and ushered away with the rest of the lazars. Terminus is manned by the Vanir, guards clad in ornate radiation armor. They are slave labour, kept alive only by regular doses of a drug called hydromel, which supplied by the corporation. The Doctor discovers that Terminus is at the centre of the known universe and finds this information unsettling. Nyssa, meanwhile, is given over to the Garm, a giant dog-like biped, who takes her to a chamber and exposes her to radiation. The Doctor and Kari find the control room of Terminus and he realizes that Terminus is also a time ship. In some unspecified past, the fuel that powered Terminus became unstable and the now dead pilot had tried to jettison it while still in the time vortex. The tank exploded, and the outrush of energy started Event One - the Big Bang - and hurled Terminus billions of years in the future. There is still one tank of unstable fuel left, and the computer has begun a countdown to jettison that too. However, where the first explosion created the universe, the second will undoubtedly destroy it. Nyssa awakes to find out that she is no longer infected. The radiation cure works, but it is haphazard, with as many people dying from it as recovering. The Garm knows this, but is unable to refine it as he is controlled by the Vanir. Enlisting the Garm's help, the Doctor staves off the countdown long enough to disable the computer and cut the engine control wires. In return, the Doctor destroys the electronic control box, setting the Garm free. Nyssa strikes a bargain with the Vanir - in exchange for synthesizing hydromel and freeing them from the corporation's influence, they will turn Terminus from a leper colony into a true hospital, and with the Garm's help refine the radiation cure. Deciding that her scientific skills are needed more on Terminus, Nyssa elects to stay behind, bidding her friends a tearful farewell. As Tegan and the Doctor return to the TARDIS, the Black Guardian tells Turlough that this is his last chance to kill the Doctor...
This story has the reputation of being remembered only for the fact that Nyssa lost most of her clothes in it. A rather unfair dismissal of the story that saw her departure from the series. There was, of course, the usual dressing up of a relatively simple story in the complicated interaction of rather a lot of unnecessary characters. The marauders who came looking for cargo and found only a ship full of lazar victims – space age lepers – being taken to Terminus, a great space station where a cure was supposed to be available. Except even that wasn’t what it seemed to be. There is a great deal of running around, much of it involving Tegan and the stranded marauder, Olvir in the crawl spaces under the corridors of the station, while Nyssa, infected with the disease is elsewhere being subjected to a haphazard kill or cure treatment. And too much of it seems like padding while The Doctor gets to the point, which is that Terminus, which sits at the absolute centre of the universe, is about to cause an explosion that would destroy everything. But saving the universe is in The Doctor’s job description and it doesn’t take him all that long to get to the bottom of that problem. That being done, it only remained to sort out the problems of Terminus. The Doctor had freed the Garm. Nyssa by offering to provide the drug the slave Vanir need to survive gave them freedom from the company that runs Terminus, and her offer to stay and refine the cure offers hope to the Lazar victims. All that remains is a bittersweet parting in which The Doctor receives one of the very FEW kisses we ever see on screen. Another parting from another companion. The Black Guardian subplot was totally irrelevant to this story just as the Keys to Time had been largely irrelevant in those linked stories. The scene with Turlough and the Guardian at the end served simply to remind us that Turlough is still under his thrall. As if we were likely to forget. There were some good ideas in this story. The Terminus ship and its
victims could have been explored more thoroughly than they were. The
story with the ‘end of the universe’ was almost irrelevant.
It worked, just. But ONLY just.
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