Customer Reviews

Terminus (Doctor Who #79)

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Doctor Who - Terminus is part of the overall story of the Black Guardian trying to do not so nice things to the good old Doctor. In this case, the fifth doctor.

This is the middle book of those three.

The TARDIS has been sabotaged, which leaves Nyssa and the Doctor end up on a spaceship, which is en route to a space station called Terminus, supposedly at the centre of the universe.

This one was just filled with stuff happening. There are three 'real' companions (Tegan, Nyssa and Turlough) and a couple of one off companions (Kari and Olvir). Turlough is not quite the standard companion as his primary mission is not to help the Doctor, but rather to eliminate him. However he and Tegan spend most of the book crawling through the ducts of a plague ship so he is not really a problem. The overall story is a quite fun to read and even though this book is longer than most of the novelizations, it is still a quick fun read.

Any time a sci-fi book/movie/show has a "Forbidden Zone" I tend to tune out, and so it is with this Who novel. With no chapters to aim for, this book is 159 endless pages. Why is the Black Guardian story kept as a "B" plot while everyone runs around a spaceship with two people on it? Why do I keep pushing along when I don't care about finishing the book? Do not waist time reading this poor excuse for a New Adventure. Read a classic Target novel, and ignore this story.

The TARDIS is travelling in the vortex, when new companion Turlough sabotages the console at the command of his secret master, the Black Guardian. The sabotage causes the ship to start to break up, and Nyssa vanishes in an unstable area. The TARDIS locks onto a nearby space liner, and the Doctor hopes Nyssa is on board it. But the liner seems abandoned, but there is a dark secret to its journey, and more at the terminus of its trip...

The middle story of the Black Guardian trilogy was written by Steve Gallagher and is again novelised by him under the pseudonym John Lydecker. Given the peculiar wonder of his previous effort, 'Warrior's Gate', one could be excused for expecting another good story. However, some sad disappointment awaits.

While the story isn't all that bad, and works better in a written form than it did as a TV serial, some of the concepts end up being swamped by when in Doctor Who it occurs. For instance, the Black Guardian plays a relatively small role (it might have been better if it turned out that the liner was part of the plan all the time), Tegan and Turlough are largely sidelined, and a couple of characters, Kari and Olvir, get cast in companion-like roles while real companions spend their time crawling through ducts. And then there is the pilfering of Norse mythology for names - why call the guards on Terminus 'The Vanir' and the creature 'the Garm'?

And so a reasonable story gets drowned in a soup of extraneous ideas and, sadly, Nyssa gets a confused story to leave with.