The 127th serial in the series is Terminus and it first aired January 15 to 23 1983. i know people were watching the show on PBS back then but somehow I never put it on my list of things to see. Mind you I wasn't watching much tv at that time. I look over the list of shows on the air that year and there aren't any that I watched regularily except for Johnny Carson and This Old House.
Terminus is the 4th serial of the 20th season and Peter Davison is the Doctor. Sarah Sutton plays Nyssa for the last time. I was sad to see her go, she was the only companion I liked in a while. Janet Fielding remains as Tegan Jovanka and Mark Strickson plays the creepy and unlikeable Vislor Turlough. Eric Saward is the script editor and I feel he's let me down time after time. It's too bad, he seems like an agreeable chap from seeing him on the extras and commentaries. John Nathan-Turner is the producer and he's really the guy to blame. This serial is written by Stephen Gallager and directed by Mary Ridge.
Turlough is sabotaging the ship at the request of the Black Guardian. He creates a problem that causes the Tardis to latch on to the nearest space ship. The Tardis creates a way out of the dissolving Tardis to the other ship. Unfortunately the ship is carrying people infected with Lazars. It's a leprosy-like disease that kills the victim. They ship docks at Terminus which is a giant spaceship that has time travel capabilities. It's engines use a fuel that caused the big bang. Terminus is having some issues and it's explosion will cause the end of the universe. Damn, good thing the Doc showed up.
The Doctor gets some help of the Garm, a giant dog headed biped, to fix things up. In a disappointing story development Nyssa chooses to stay on Terminus to help turn things around. Now the Doctor is stuck with Teagan and Turlough and, more importantly, so am I. In one of the featurettes Sarah Sutton says it wasn't her idea to leave the series which only makes me dislike John Nathan-Turner that much more. Thankfully he's dead now and he can't ruin any more TV shows. It's those sort of choices that make Doctor Who, at least for me, a program that will never climb into my top ten program list. It was also John Nathan-Turner's idea to have the companions dress up in skimpy costumes. You know, for the dads. The comments about Turner on the commentaries and featurettes aren't filled with vitriol but they don't seem to sing his praises much, or at all, that I recall.
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Peter Davison, Sarah Sutton, Stephen Gallager and Mark Strickson provide the commentary. It was ok. There's a short featurette on the making of the serial, a even shorter piece on the big bang theory, some storyboards, a few unused model shots, the ability to switch to more recent cgi shots, a photo gallery, an info track, a coming soon selection and PDFs of the Radio Times listing and CGI storyboards.
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