The Dominators

Chapter The 230th, when life gives you lemons... take your name off the finished production!

Plot:

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe materialise on a nuclear test island, a space Bikini Atoll, on the now peaceful and pacifist planet Dulkis. Also recently arrived are a couple of Dominators, Navigator Rago and Probationer Toba, ruthless alien warmongers with cute robot assistants, the Quarks. Their ship uses radioactive material for power, and once they have absorbed all the fallout from the island, they set about drilling through a thin part of the planet's crust to deploy a bomb in a shaft, to turn the planet into radioactive magma that they can use for fuel. They are also investigating whether any of the indigenous lifeforms are suitable for slave labour. Elsewhere on the island are a survey team doing the annual check on the island, and Cully, the rebellious son of the head of the Dulkis government, who's been running unofficial tours of the island in a craft that looks very like a lemon squeezer (it really does - one of his party even talks about their illegal activity adding "a bit of zest" - they know it!). Cully is stranded on the island when the Dominators kill the rest of his party and destroy his ship. Luckily, the Dominators waste a lot of time bitching at one another and conserving the power of the Quarks, so by the time they are ready to plant their bomb, everyone has teamed up and dug a cross-shaft intersecting with the bomb tunnel. The Doctor catches the bomb, then sneaks it aboard the Dominator spaceship, slipping out before they take off. They blow up in orbit, the surviving Dulcians set off in an automated transporter back to safety away from the island, and the TARDIS team rush into their time ship before a localised volcanic eruption engulfs them.

Context:

Seven years ago, almost to the day as I write this, I finally decided to start something I'd been considering for a while, and created this blog. In one place, I could write Doctor Who story-by-story reviews, mini-essays of Doctor Who opinion, and a fragmentary almost-memoir of how Doctor Who has been there as part of my family's and my life since I started watching it as a nine-year old in 1981. It was a modestly ambitious endeavour, particularly the decision not to differentiate between new and classic Doctor Who stories, meaning that I would always - as long as the show remained on air - be presented with a moving target. In the very first post where I set out my stall before covering my first story I noted that it would be "My howlings into the void, tangentially connected on that particular day to, for example, The Dominators".  As I wrote that, I don't suppose it occurred to me that it would be seven years before I reached that particular story, nor that I'd have at least three more years worth to get through before I caught up. Today's howl into the void is just to say that I didn't even try to interest any of the family in a five-episode long black-and-white story with a reputation for being dull. Instead I watched on my own over two evenings; for the first sitting, it was the weekend, so I had an accompanying beer. The second sitting was on a work night, so I did parts 4 and 5 stone cold sober. I will leave it to your imagination which night had the better approach for experiencing The Dominators.

 

First Time Round:

In September 1990, I was starting my Third Year Sixth, a grand label for my situation, which was returning to college for another year to retake the A-levels I'd completely screwed up in the spring. I have mentioned before on the blog that, during the period when I was supposed to be revising for those exams, I was instead rekindling my Doctor Who fandom after a period of relative cool towards the show. I never stopped watching on TV or collecting the sporadically released VHS tapes, but earlier in 1990 I started reading the official magazine again, invested in back numbers from John Fitton - a retailer that provided Doctor Who merch by mail order at the time - and even joined the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, reading their regularly posted publications too. This was a symptom rather than a cause of my flunking, though; I was clever, and wasn't even afraid of work, I'd just become completely dissociated from the whole process. I remember one multi-hour A-level maths exam where all I wrote was "I wonder where Salman Rushdie is right now; he's probably having a better time than me". I thought this disproportionate comparison - the fatwa against Rushdie by the Ayatollah Khomeini had happened the year before and he was still under effective house arrest for his own protection - would give the examiner a giggle, and I'd get at least one mark in sympathy. Of course our situations could not be compared, but I was intrigued to read that being under 24-hour guard had created in Rushdie, in his words, "a curious lethargy, the soporific torpor that overcomes", which very well describes how I was feeling at the time for different reasons.

This had lifted by September, though, and I was in good spirits, looking forward to the coming year. That third year turned out to be one of the best of my education; I edited the college magazine, got involved with college theatre, started other writing - sketches, plays and poetry - in earnest, and eventually passed my exams and got in to a good university (where I'd meet many more Doctor Who obsessives, with whom I'm still close to this day). Accompanying this were more and more releases in the Doctor Who VHS range, which had established a regular release pattern in 1990 that would endure for the first half of the decade. For some reason, almost all the releases in 1990 were black and white stories, brought out every couple of months in pairs - one each for the first two Doctors William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton. The Dominators was one of the last pair released that year, accompanied by The Web Planet. These are two stories - if not the two stories - with an immense reputation for being the most boring the series had to offer. They may as well have called it the Soporific Torpor box-set. For me in 1990, though, any Doctor Who was a novelty, and I enjoyed both on the first watch.

Reaction:

This story is one of the rare times in the history of Doctor Who where the author (or authors) asked for their name to be taken off the broadcast episodes. Credited writer of The Dominators Norman Ashby does not exist; the scripts were originally written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, who had delivered the two very popular Yeti stories for the previous season. I don't think anyone would disagree that The Dominators is not as successful, certainly not they themselves; they disagreed with the rewriting done by script editor, and future Who producer, Derrick Sherwin, and therefore asked for their writing credit to be replaced with a pseudonym. What was in the original scripts is lost to the mists of time, but one fact that is indisputable is that the commission was for six episodes. One of the acts that Sherwin did in editing was to condense the action down into five. If Haisman and Lincoln's basic plotting and characters are reflected in what made it to the screen (and it's hard to believe that any busy script editor working on Who in this era would have the time to change things so radically that there isn't at least the blueprint there), it is very hard to come to the conclusion that the original writers should have been left to create their own vision, let alone to have it drag on for another whole episode. It's not exactly that the story is short on incident; things happen in the Dominators, it's just that they're mostly the same four things over and over: less experienced hothead Dominator Toba gets mildly provoked by some shenanigans (Jamie throwing a small rock at a Quark, say); Toba shouts at his Quarks the order to "Destroy" repetitively and histrionically; more experienced sneery Dominator Rago rushes in to belay that order and tick Toba off for wasting the precious energy levels (which, he reminds us for the nth time are dangerously low); Toba says "Command Accepted" in a passive aggressive way. Rinse, repeat.

I counted up, and Toba says "Command Accepted" 19 times in the story, that's almost twice as much as is mentioned the phrase "Contact Has Been Made" in Tom Baker story The Invisible Enemy, to take one example of a supposedly ubiquitous refrain. Just because something is repetitive doesn't necessarily mean it's dull, but there has to be progression. The Dominators' plan though doesn't go up a gear until late in the final episode, when they drill a shaft down which they want to drop their bomb, and our heroes dig a tunnel sideways into the shaft so they can intercept it. There's an obvious joke to be had about how at this point everyone in the cast is literally boring, but at least these scenes have a bit of momentum, and the dramatic question of who will be first to break through does engage to a certain extent. In the four and a half episodes leading up to that there isn't any progression, and instead the dullness is leavened by cutaways to scenes away from the Dominators' main operations, bits of fun amidst those repetitive story beats. The regulars of this period are all wonderful, and there are some great comic Troughton moments (his pretending to be stupid to fool the Dominators for example), new girl Wendy Padbury is settling in nicely too; mostly, though, this episode belongs to Frazer Hines as Jamie. He gets to partner with Cully in lots of on-location antics, knocking Quarks over and blowing them up. The film work is good, the location looks good, and the pyrotechnics of exploding Quarks are fun; models and optical effects are variable but the good outweighs the bad.

The bad guys may not be dramatically up to snuff, but how do they fare design-wise? The Dominators' outfits are striking, but not very practical. Plus, Ronald Allen as Rago can curl his lip disdainfully so well that he could probably curdle milk from ten paces. They aren't the main bad guy focus, though - this story is all about introducing a new metal monster that could endure like the Daleks previously had. The Quarks are a distinctive design - a simple enough shape that they could be drawn by any youngster no matter their artistic ability, and recognisable from a rough doodle - that's very important. Their movement, and how an actor fits inside them, is a little easier to discern than with the Daleks, but nonetheless it is still a little bit of a mystery at first glance. Nice touches like their retractable arms that fit snuggly back into their box-like bodies stand out too, and I feel sure they would have made fine toys for 1960s kids. As it was, disagreements between the BBC and the writers about the merchandising of the Quarks killed any chance of that, and meant that Haisman and Lincoln declined to work on the show again. An alternative universe exists where the Quarks returned in colour to menace Jon Pertwee the following year, and I'm not saying I would want to live there but it might be nice to visit. The only major issue that I have with the Quarks is with the voices; clearly they wanted to do something different to the Daleks, but the childlike sing-song voices used just don't work for me, and their dialogue is sometimes very hard to hear. The effect on film where someone is zapped and goes freeze-frame then bursts into flames is quite interesting, but isn't an effect they could do in the studio, so we only see it once.

The other main point of interest with this story is the attempt at satire. Eschewing the action adventure approach of their two Yeti stories, the writers wanted to do something a bit different, and they had the 1960s hippy counterculture in their sights. If the purpose of their script was to critique that current youth movement and its pacifist tendencies - as is generally accepted, though I've not been able to find a solid citation online to either of the writers confirming this - the main issue is that there aren't any hippy characters in The Dominators. Maybe Cully (a trust fund rebel, if ever there was one) and the group that he brings to the island at the beginning are supposed to represent 1960s long-haired youth. They are shown to be languid pleasure seekers, that's for sure, but there were young, languid pleasure seekers in the 1920s, in the Victorian era, and doubtless all through history. They aren't a precise enough distillation of the Haight-Ashbury peacenik. It isn't just the young who are being skewered in the story either. The leader of the survey group Educator Balan is shown to be a credulous duffer, accepting of contradictory data without question or thought. Balan's not a hippy, and neither is he a student; criticisms of the un-worldliness of liberal intellectuals and higher educators in ivory towers are common and perfectly fine, but again that isn't specific to the 1960s. Finally, the government of Dulkis are shown to be duffers too, talking themselves into paralysis and focussed on the details of process and procedure, ill-equipt to deal with any violent action. Maybe this was an attempt to depict the logical extension of pacifist ideals, the sort of society that would grow out of the hippy movement, but the result is too varied and the targets too scattered for the satirical barbs to hit home.

Perhaps this muddle in the central theme came about through the rewriting, and the original script was more focussed. Even so, though, the satire wouldn't have worked because The Dominators was a product of 1968 not 1967. It is an endemic issue with classic Doctor Who that ideas take so long to reach the screen that any attempt at something contemporary will inevitably look out of date. Here, though, it's very problematic, as the youth movement had more or less abandoned pacifism and become much more revolutionary early in 1968. The Beatles song Revolution, released as the B-side of Hey Jude during the weeks of The Dominator's broadcast, sees John Lennon wrestling with his personal decisions about peace versus violence, and even he was behind the zeitgeist; protests in Paris were underway as early as May. The later Troughton story in this season The Krotons, which shows a student uprising, was much more in line with the times. Ultimately, and unfortunately, The Dominators ends up satirising something that barely existed anymore. It's probably best to just take those scenes as fun local colour specific to Dulkis, and not representative of anything wider; plus, any scene that gets away from the leaden bickering of the Dominators is to be welcomed. Overall then, the story wasn't as dull as its reputation, but is one of the less successful Troughton stories.

Connectivity: 

Both The Dominators and Daleks in Manhattan / Evolution of the Daleks are set on an island. Both feature monsters that are wholly or mainly metal, led by at least one biped wearing slightly ridiculous clothes. In both, the baddies are toying with making the locals into a slave labour force, and press-gang a few into immediate back-breaking toil.

Deeper Thoughts:

Chibnall era pre-retrospective. [Note: this has nothing to do with The Dominators as I had to port it over from its originally planned position in the last post's Deeper Thoughts section to make way for reactions to Ncuti Gatwa's casting (not that it has much to do with the Manhattan Dalek 2-parter either); I think I've said enough connected to the Dominators anyway.]

Maybe one reason that Legend of the Sea Devils didn't perform that well (see Deeper Thoughts section of two blog posts ago for more details) is that people already think Jodie Whittaker's era is over. She did farewell interviews when launching Flux in 2021, which seems such a long time ago now, and there was lots of publicity about her finishing filming and the wrap party. This is as well as lots of publicity earlier than that, then more again very recently, about the regime change with Russell T Davies returning to run the show. Is the average TV viewer, not an obsessive like me following every scrap of information, going to know that Jodie's still got tenure and her finale is not actually being broadcast until October 2022, a year on from her appearance on Graham Norton's chat show telling him she was finished with the role? I don't actually know any average TV viewers, so I can't canvass opinion on this. Because of a couple of accidents of timing, Chris Chibnall and Jodie will be in the Doctor Who equivalent of a lame duck presidency, as showrunner and Doctor retrospectively, for a very extended period. It's going to be a long goodbye, and there will be a fair few retrospectives, I'm sure, in the weeks and months to come, even as the next era's location shooting and publicity happens in parallel. The first big retrospective has already happened, it was published in the most recent (at time of writing) issue of Doctor Who Magazine. Chibnall gave a big interview covering his entire era to date. Like every article in Doctor Who Magazine in the Whittaker era it is so anodyne as to almost cause offense just because of its lack of offensiveness. I wouldn't have thought anybody could get worked up enough to have negative opinions about the piece, but I was wrong.

Boy, was I wrong. I had to mute a couple of people on twitter (damn twitter's algorithm deciding things I "might be interested in"; I'll decide that for myself thanks very much) as they just kept on moaning about certain things that Chibnall had said. These weren't the usual haters either, but people who are normally even-handed. One issue is that, in a somewhat uncharitable mischaracterisation of his words, people claim that he has no idea of where the 'fugitive Doctor' played by Jo Martin exactly fits in to continuity, and also that he has not ever worked out the exact origin story for the timeless child version of the Doctor, found by her adoptive mother all those years ago. He didn't say this; he did intimate that he wouldn't reveal it in the show, but that's not the same thing. It may be frustrating to people who expected to get all the answers, but it's been obvious from the beginning that part of the reason for introducing this plotline is to create an enduring mystery. In typical self-effacing manner, Chibnall stated that he expects returning showrunner Russell T Davies to ignore all of that backstory anyway. Some of the criticisms online were at such a fever pitch that even Chibnall's honesty around screwing up his first season finale - it was only a first draft as they ran out of time - led people to complain that other showrunners' hastily put-together scripts when things had fallen through were much better than Chibnall's. He can't win, I don't think; he's already yesterday's man, and nothing he can do is right anymore (at least for a small subsection of the fanbase).

It's not just Doctor Who that suffers from this. My middle child at 12 years old is finally exactly the right age for enjoying the Netflix series Stranger Things, and has recently binge-watched the three previous seasons of episodes in a short period of time, He is pretty obsessed, consuming every fan video he can find online, and eagerly anticipating the fourth series that is landing soon. When new episodes were last available, it was a big, popular show and there was a lot of positivity around it; in the lead-up to the new series, though, I'm seeing more evidence of a backlash. Nobody can know the quality of the new episodes, as they haven't been shown yet, I just think there's an automatic negative reaction in some quarters when something popular has the temerity to be off air for a while. Stranger Things has been away for a couple of years, Doctor Who's only been off screen for a month - what's it going to be like by the time the final Whittaker / Chibnall special airs in October? I hope the retrospectives and post-mortems can be held back until then, as it only amplifies the issue. Doctor Who with Jodie Whittaker starring is still a going concern, and her (90 minute long, if rumours are true) last blast is only a stepping stone to more Doctor Who after that. Unlike a show with an ageing child cast like Stranger Things, Doctor Who has revolutionary change built in. While we wait for Jodie's finale, episodes for 2023 are being shot on location, with all the hype that brings. Only our favourite time-shifting, regenerating show could bless us by being not one but two going concerns all at once.  

In Summary:

Nothing with Patrick Troughton and Frazer Hines in it could ever be truly dull, but the script for The Dominators - whoever's to blame for its final version - comes closest to making it possible.