Terminus

Target novelisation Doctor Who - Terminus

Author	John Lydecker
Published	1983
ISBN	0 426 19385 7
First Edition Cover	Photographic

Back cover blurb: When the TARDIS console is wilfully sabotaged, the Doctor's time machine becomes dimensionally unstable and begins to dissolve. The area immediately affected is the room where Nyssa is working by herself. As the creeping instability closes in on her, the TARDIS locks onto the nearest passing spacecraft, and the process of collapse is halted - but there is no sign of Nyssa. Hoping that she has escaped onto the strangely deserted host liner, the Doctor goes looking for her. Whether or not he finds her, getting back to the TARDIS will be no easy business...

• Warriors, Great by Jason A. Miller

Warriors, Great by Jason A. Miller 25/9/22

Terminus is one of those novelizations that I had trouble enjoying as a kid. As with Warriors' Gate, Steve Gallagher's prior novelization, it's got no chapter breaks, and it was a good couple of years before I actually finished the thing. Without chapter breaks, I never knew when to put the book down, and eventually got bored because I'd be reading for too long. OK, I was a strange kid, but that's what really happened for me. Reading it now in my mid-40s, I appreciate it a lot more, and am mature enough to not be thrown off by the lack of chapter breaks or clearly signposted cliffhangers. Also, reading the books in story order rather than in the random sequence of how I purchased them in the 1980s, it's an interesting contrast with the previous Season 20 novelizations. Gallagher writes with more spiced prose than Terrance Dicks, and in a more hard sci-fi style than Peter Grimwade, who novelized the previous episode, Mawdryn Undead, as a comedy of manners in a British public school. Gallagher and Grimwade also tackle Turlough differently in that character's first two stories. Whereas Grimwade made Turlough a POV character who'd decided to betray the Black Guardian and join up with the Doctor early on, Gallagher opens the book with Tegan comparing him to a snake in the grass, and gives him far more villainous overtones. "That's how he works - he'll needle away until you explode, and then he'll stand there in complete innocence while you make a fool of yourself," thinks Tegan.

As Turlough attempts to sabotage the TARDIS, he "started to work on the expression [of innocence] he'd be using when they caught up with him". And, scheming against Tegan, he observes: "Of the three, she was the easiest to manipulate. All he needed to do was annoy her a little, and she'd jump off impulsively in whatever direction he wanted." Turlough is, in fact, sociopathic and chilling, such as in a sequence where he plans both Tegan's murder, and how he'd stage the aftermath so that the Doctor would never suspect him of a crime.

Apart from keen insights into the TARDIS crew, Gallagher also offers a dose of hard sci-fi unusual for the Target line. As with Warriors' Gate, Gallagher is excellent at showing two things: the quotidian procedures of his future-spaceship world (how ships and robots and military/attack drills work), and superimposing real-life concerns on his sci-fi characters. As to the latter point, the slaver crew in Warriors' Gate had garbage men and coffee urns and lunch breaks. Here, the Vanir have middle management and shift schedules, and the space pirates Olvir and Kari (who are ridiculous on TV) walk through their Part One raid on the space liner with Tom Clancy-esque precision. On TV, Valgard says that his former pirate captain turned him in for the reward, but in the book, Valgard is pleased to recall as well that he was going to do the same thing to his captain anyway (and nostalgically remembers the double-crossings as "good times"). Later on, Gallagher invents a cure for radiation poisoning using transmat technology and explains exactly what benefits Hydromel confers on its users. This makes the book a compelling read, even though it's atypical for the Target line and certainly nothing at all like Terrance Dicks's modus operandi.

Similarly, Gallagher has no qualms about getting into the Doctor's head and having the Doctor explain his thought processes through the story's various crises. This helps us get insight into the story that wasn't presented in TV dialogue and lends more convincing hard sci-fi detail, such as when the Doctor ponders the inverse ratio between the complexity of a spacecraft's controls and the level of the civilization that designed and built it. He also gives a nice insight into how the Doctor decides to stand and fight, or run away: "When it came to a choice between fighting and running, the Doctor preferred to run every time. Those who stayed to fight tended to be swiftly stripped of their noble illusions."

The Doctor comparing the inside of the Terminus to Dante's Inferno is a rare moment of poetry ("a living hell, complete with armored dark angels"), and one of several unusual Christian allusions ("like the gaze of Satan"), in a book whose characters are mostly named from Norse mythology. Again, this is not a perspective we ordinarily see in the novelizations.

Something else Gallagher does is add convincing backstories to the secondary characters, thus enriching them beyond their poorly acted two dimensions on TV. We learn that Olvir came from a wealthy family that went broke and that he signed on to join the Chief's raiding party with a signing bonus (an advance against expected loot), only to fail on his first mission out. We have a flashback to Olvir digging his sister's grave, as Nyssa is pulled away for the treatment of the same ailment, Lazar's disease, that felled her. None of this came out in the script, but it helps give a retroactive justification for Dominic Guard's frantic TV performance.

The novelization, as with any Target book, is a window onto the author's original script, and you can compare it with the finished TV version to learn what changed, or didn't change, during production. Gallagher in print uses the TV name for Kari, whose original scripted name was nixed by script editor Eric Saward because it was a rude word in Sanskrit. The Part One cliffhanger features the same over-the-top screaming from Olvir that actor Dominic Guard gave us on TV, but is missing the added line of TV dialogue "We're all going to DIEEEE!" The Part Two cliffhanger moment is similarly missing cringeworthy dialogue ("Now it's your turn. Only you... I'm going to kill!"). The dialogue in print, too, is lush, illustrative and with more detail; Turlough and the Black Guardian have a longer conversation in the Part Two material, much more satisfactory than their two-line exchange on TV. Kari and Olvir also have a long mutually distrustful conversation in the Part Two material, which got cut for TV.

After the Doctor agrees to help Bor, Kari is much more displeased than she was on TV:

"You're breaking every rule in the book."
"Then we work by different books."

Mixed in with the hard sci-fi is real human insight that gives the book a soul. Eirak, the Vanir's middle manager, is "nothing like the monster that Tegan might have expected. He was simply a tired bureaucrat, and problems tended to form long queues for his attention." And look how Gallagher describes the Garm. This is where you see just how little value Eric Saward added to Doctor Who as script editor: "For all its size, the Garm moved in silence. And it kept to the shadows -- even now Valgard could only just make out its massive dog-headed outline and the dull red gleam of its eyes in the darkness." On TV, the Garm didn't do any of that ...

The book devotes well over half its length to the first two TV episodes, but even a verbose and novelistic author like Gallagher is eventually going to run into Target's page limit, so the rest of the book is comparatively truncated. The Part Three cliffhanger kind of sails by with no tension, and chunks of the televised Part Four are missing. But we do get a lengthy explanation of how the Vanir administer the haphazard cure for Lazar's disease, involving a grim calculus of limited resources versus the relative health of the victims.

And Nyssa's departure scene, so well played on TV, is even improved on here:

"With some pressure, he [the Doctor] might just be able to dissuade her, but he doubted it. And it would be something they'd both regret, for ever. ... [I]t seemed that the loss of every member of his ever-changing team took a little piece of him away with them. They were spread through time and space, all of them reshaped and given new insights through their travels. Their loss wasn't too bad a price to pay... not when they gave him a kind of immortality."