What's Wrong With... Terminus

Apparently we aren't supposed to call him the Black Guardian anymore - he's the one of Darkness and Chaos as opposed to Light and Order.

Whatever he's called, he doesn't seem to have a clear plan for the Doctor, other that to destroy him. Last time, he seemed content just for Turlough to bash his brains in with a rock, but then he wants the Doctor to suffer before he's destroyed. 

Turlough must surely realise that the Doctor is one of the good guys, and that the Guardian is a figure of pure evil - so why does he trust him to rescue him when the TARDIS breaks up. Destroying a thing you are travelling in whilst still on it is surely going to make the boy think twice about going ahead with the sabotage.

Why is Turlough given Adric's bedroom when the TARDIS must have loads of empty ones? Why is Tegan so blasé about her dead friend's belongings being disposed of by someone she doesn't like?

Going back to last time again, I asked what was going on in the Doctor's mind regarding Turlough. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, we could say that he knows exactly that there's some mystery to solve with him, and his actions are suspicious. But if that is the case, why would he leave him alone in the console room for so long? The alternative is that the Doctor is a bit of a gullible idiot to be taken in by him. He's ignoring the opinions of his companions as well. Tegan is warning against Turlough every five minutes, and even Nyssa - the one whose opinion he values the most - is only reserving judgement for the time-being.

It's very confusing what is going on with the Lazars. The Vanir don't seem to know about the transport ship, so how do they think the Lazars get there? Olvir says the illness is incurable, but we're told that lots of people do return cured - or at least think they've been cured.

Nyssa thinks that the company won't retaliate as people are scared of the disease - yet there is a known cure. And what's to stop the company retaliating without putting soldiers on Terminus. They could simply blow it up and write it off for tax purposes, or send in robots. We've seen that they have such things at this time in this region of space.

Are the Vanir - supposed warriors - really going to stick around and act as nurses once they get a source of synthetic hydromel?

Lazar's Disease is clearly based on leprosy, so the programme was quite rightly criticised for depicting this as teatime entertainment and demonstrated ignorance of the subject.

The writer / script editor haven't structured this story very well - despite the reported interventions of the latter in the writing process. Tegan and Turlough - who's the new companion, remember - have nothing to do for much of the story, and have to be parked in an airduct for a significant part of the running time.

Whilst there Turlough is ordered to press a few buttons. How can doing this, on a converted space-liner docked with Terminus, cause the engines on the station to overload? How can they possibly be connected? The way this is edited is a little confusing.

The engines are shut down, but surely the danger still remains? What's to stop a malfunction occurring five minutes after the Doctor leaves? We ought to have seen the Doctor fix things so that there would be no possible danger of such an event happening again. Why not shift the station somewhere that it can't do much damage?

We're told how the universe was created by an earlier accident, but how can some exploding fuel possibly create a universe-destroying event under Terminus' current circumstances? The conditions are totally  different now.

When the company which runs Terminus took over, did no-one bother to have a look round and notice a giant dead astronaut in one of the control rooms? Did they not think of fixing the engines themselves, or were they happy to have a money-making business blow up at any minute?

Actually, where exactly is the money-making opportunity in this set-up?

Kari and Olvir are set up as highly trained pirates, but Olvir comes on a mission with a gun whose power pack runs out after a single shot.

And who ever thought that the Garm was an acceptable costume to be seen clearly on screen, rather hidden in shadows with only glowing eyes showing, as the writer intended?