Aliens with high round shoulders and pudding
bowl haircuts. Ridiculous looking blocky robots called Quarks who were never
going to catch on even if you’d given away a gallon petrol with each one. That’s
about all the Dominators means to me right at this moment. Oh, alright, I know
that its reputation really isn’t all that sweet.
I also know that Norman Ashby, the credited
writer of the series, is a pseudonym for the writing team of Mervyn Haisman and
Henry Lincoln, who scripted one pretty good, and one great story in Season 5.
Now, Terry Nation wrote other stories for Doctor Who than his Dalek stories,
but these have never been anything like as popular. So I shall be interested to
see whether this Haisman and Lincoln non-Yeti story has value in its own right,
and has just not been that well regarded because it’s a departure from what
they’ve done before.
After
Watching
Hmmm. There’s some odd things in this story.
Reading about it since watching it I discovered that it was cut short from 6 to
5 episodes, and Haisman and Lincoln were unhappy about it – and also there were
rights issues with the Quarks I believe. Like anyone would be interesting in
merchandising those! So it’s probably not unfair to say that this was a
production carried out under something of a cloud – sadly the Haisman and
Lincoln partnership never went on to write for the show again.
On the positive side this was not another base
under siege. In fact, if anything, it’s the baddies, the Dominators, whose base
is under siege in the last episode. The story, when you boil it down to
essentials, is rather simple, and you can see why it was decided to cut it to 5
episodes. The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on Dulkis, a planet of peace loving
humanoids. At the same time a ship belonging to the fleet of the Dominators, a
harsh and arrogant race, also lands on Dulkis. The craft needs desperately to
refuel. The island it lands on is the site of the Dulcians’ nuclear test. The
ship almost immediately absorbs all of the island’s radioactivity. The
Dominators’ plan is to drill into the planet where the crust is thinnest, set
off a radiation seed device, and refuel on the radiation created through the
destruction of the planet. The pacifist Dulcians will be killed when their
planet is destroyed.
To some extent we’re treading familiar ground
here. Once again we confront the issue of pacifism, and the Dulcians are so
pacific that they make the Thals look like a gang of drunk football supporters
whose manhood has just been called into question. The strange minidresses that the men wear
only serve to heighten this feeling, which was probably intentional on the
designer’s part. I can’t help liking the Dominators’ costumes, though. You’re
not quite sure whether it’s just the uniform that they are wearing, or whether
their heads really do begin halfway down their chests. Actually, while we’re on
the subject of the Dominators themselves, there’s something quite clever going
on with them in this show. It’s quite common for a race of megalomaniac aliens
bent on domination to be all the same in terms of attitude and behaviour. In this
story there are just the two Dominators, Rago the Navigator, and his
subordinate, Toba. To put it bluntly, Rago and Toba do not get on at all. Toba
has a sadistic streak, and wants nothing more to go around and destroy every
Dulcian he can find. This really annoys Rago, who knows how low they are on
energy, and the tension and conflict between the two of them does add another
level of interest to the story – and this is sorely needed too. Full marks to
David Hunter, sorry, Ronald Allen who plays Rago, and Kenneth Ives who plays
Toba.
As I said, though, there are some strange
things in this story. Which brings me to the Quarks. The Quarks are essentially
robots. They’re about four foot tall, no more than that, with two blocky legs,
a body like a mini fridge, two arms which are a bit like table legs and which
fold out from the body, and a head which is a bit like a ball with a few spikes
sticking out of it on top, and on each of the 4 sides. Now, look, for all I
know the designers had a budget of about tuppence ha’penny, and did well to
come up with what they did. But I can’t see that anyone could think that these
robots could ever have the same appeal that the Daleks had. Now, there’s no
shame in that – successes like the Daleks – something that strikes such an
instant chord with the viewing public – are very rare, and if one turns up
during the life of a series then it’s doing well. But then it seems strange
that, bearing in mind the limitations of their appearance, the production team
seems to have gone out of their way with the choice of voice they have given
the Quarks. On the one hand, I’ll give them a couple of brownie points for eschewing
the traditional monotonous computer voices you might expect. On the other hand,
and I’m not exaggerating this for comic effect, I cannot understand a word that
they say in the high pitched tone that they use. Now, in my book, that’s a
serious drawback. Still, at least the Quarks do have some serious firepower.
So far though, we have been able to say a
mixture of positive and not so positive things about the story. If we’re going
to be honest, though, we have to say, or I have to say at least, that the
Producer Peter Bryant was probably dead right when he cut the story by an
episode because it just wasn’t working. If we examine some of the elements
which contribute to the overall story, the exploration of the Dulcians’
pacifism is rather lumpen and heavyhanded when set alongside the way that
pacifism is considered in the writers’ own “The Abominable Snowmen”. I don’t
know if we’re actually being invited by the writers to feel that it will serve
the Dulcians right if their planet gets blown up, but that’s pretty much the
impression I got from it.
If a story has enough action, of the right
sort, carried out with enough style and panache, then script flaws become far
less important. This is one of the failings of “the Dominators”. Yes there’s a
bit of toing and froing between the Island of Death and the Capital City, but
we’re on pretty much famine rations of action for the first 3 and a half
episodes.
It’s not as if this is not a story that didn’t
have potential. I for one found the couple of hints we had about the
civilization/society that produced the Dominators, and feel that there would
have been scope for us to learn a little more, which would have added some much
needed depth to the story. As it is though it’s a bit of a waste of two good
performers who play them.
Looking at the regulars, then, this is Zoe’s
first story as a full-fledged companion, and it’s one of those instances of a
story not really knowing what to do with one of the companions. There’s one or
two good scenes for her – when she seems completely disinterested by the
prospect of exploring with Jamie and the Doctor in episode one, and when the Doctor
pricks her pomposity in the Dominator’s ship – which incidentally has rather
nicely realized interiors, and certainly competently produced model shots when
it takes off. Jamie, though, is pretty well foregrounded as he gets to escape
from the quarks more than once, to destroy quarks, and to supply the idea that
will finally foil the Dominators’ plans.
Well, there it is, anyway. Sometimes it’s
pretty easy to put your finger on why a story doesn’t work very well. Sometimes
it isn’t. The script of “The Dominators” wasn’t the best, but it wasn’t the
worst we’ve seen by a long chalk. The cast try their best with what they’ve
been given, and nobody turns in what I could point to as a bad performance. The
model work is decent, and sets and interiors pretty good in my opinion. Is it,
I wonder, one of those stories which would have a better reputation if it was
only available in recon. On reflection, I doubt it. Some stories just aren’t
all that good, and this was one of them.
What
Have We Learned?
The Quarks
probably sound great . . . if you’re a dog. Otherwise they’re unintelligible.
If
you’re taking people on a tours, any place called anything like The Island Of
Death is probably one to avoid
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