The Dominators: Rank - 307

                                            The Dominators

(Series 6, Dr 2 Jamie and Zoe, 10/8-7/9/1968, producer/showrunner: Peter Bryant, writers: 'Norman Ashby' (a pseudonym for Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, director: Morris Barry)

Rank: 307

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'Three Quarks have missed their mark, Sure they haven’t got much of a bark, you’d think they were shooting in the dark, but at least the writers get some merchandise fees – what a lark!’

By this point Doctor Who is nearly five years old – approximately four and a half years longer than anyone ever expected it to be on the air. We’re coming up to the fifth anniversary of the story that most people associated with the series, the showdown between atomic war protagonists The Daleks and pacifists The Thals. Longtime writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, are in a bad mood with the series (and you thought it was pnly Anthony Coburn’s family!) They’ve been asked to come up with a third yeti script to follow their popular outings ‘The Abominable Snowmen’ and ‘The Web Of Fear’, with the yeti in the highlands stalking Jamie’s McCrimmon ancestral home. It was meant to be the big emotional story where Jamie leaves, full of pathos and drama. Only Jamie isn’t leaving, at least not yet, Frazer Hines finding out that Patrick Troughton is moving on at the end of the year anyway so they night as well go together and the writers are asked to change their story’s ending. Given that this story is so established round the character and rather undoes all the emotion they had planned, they’re not best pleased. Then the production team find out Jack Watling isn’t available for a third appearance as Professor Travers so could they change that too? Oh and there’s a handful of other changes they’d like making. Quite a lot of them actually: producer Peter Bryant and script editor Derrick Sherwin isn’t as big on battles and fights as their predecessors Innes Lloyd and Victor Pemberton had been. Angrily the writers pull the plug and don’t finish their story at all, only for the production team to come to them cap in hand, as practically all stories in season six have fallen apart somewhere: perhaps they’d like to have another go starting from scratch? So the writers come up with one of the most cynical Dr Who commissions in sixty years: a story that not only flies in the face of everything the series has stood for so far but an attempt to cash-in on its biggest successes, so closely modelled on that Dalek story that it’s basically a carbon copy, a cheap and easy way to get wages and success. 

 That would be bad enough but there’s room for another ‘Daleks’ from a different point of view than Terry Nation’s. ‘The Dominators’ commits worse crimes than just being lazy, though. We don’t know for sure, but it seems obvious to me that, faced with a looming deadline and not exactly in a loving mood, Haisman and Lincoln wrote a parody of what in 1968 was still Dr Who’s most famous story, cynically sending up a series they’d grown to hate. They wouldn’t be the first writers to return to the idea of atomic war in the series - after all, the entire original run of the ‘classic’ series was transmitted against the backdrop of the cold war so an atomic age getting out of control was everyone’s minds. They are, though, surely the only writers to ever agree with The Daleks that it’s a good thing, honest. This story follows the Dominators, warring invaders who swoop in on the peaceful paradise of Dulkis to take over. In practically every other Dr Who story they’d be the villains and the Dulcians the heroes, but no: time and again we hear how easy the Dulcians are to conquer, how weak they are to use their technology for peace rather than war, why they deserve to be taken over by these shouty heroic war heroes. The dictator Dominators might shout at each other and be at constant war themselves, but they’re efficient and ruthless and aren’t slowed down by the constant need to send things through a committee and check that everything is for the brighter good. It’s not as if the Dulcians aren’t capable of war or don’t know what it is either; the story starts on an atomic test island, one abandoned along with the weapons that caused it 172 years ago, turned into a museum, war a relic to be forgotten – exactly what the ‘ban the bomb’ hippies are threatening to do in the future for the audiences of 1968 - which is a problem when their rivals have an unfair advantage and have been building horrible weapons across all those years. Anyone whose ever played the computer game ‘Civilisation’ and created a beautiful Ancient Greece-like paradise based on enlightenment ad learning, only for your barbaric rivals to come along and raise your libraries to the ground and sack your monasteries without warning knows how this feels: if everyone thought like you life would be a paradise but they don’t, so the game teaches you that you have to fight them in case they fight you. Most Dr Who writers look at the cold war stalemate and go ‘we shouldn’t be doing this at all, let’s withdraw!’ but Haisman and Lincoln looked at it and went ‘we should be fighting harder and stronger and conquering!’ 

 Given the use of ancient Latin for some of the names (‘Dulcians’ mean ‘beautiful people’ which is how some of the smugger hippies referred to themselves, while ‘Serkis’ the boss of the Dulcians means ‘sleepy old man’; presumably ‘Dulcians’ is a joke on hippies being ‘dull’ too) I wonder also if this is the writer’s reminder to hippie utopianas that even Ancient Greece, portrayed now as an enlightened and reasonable age, had an army, mostly to keep the pesky Ancient Romans out. Usually Dr Who stories depict war as a neverending cycle of chaos and wanton destruction that the Doctor himself is usually above and tries to stop, a programme where the past, present and future are all interconnected points on a line, with a run of battles and skirmishes long forgotten and which seem pointless to us now that nevertheless play a factor in causing what comes next by making people accustomed to war and dead miserable about the damage it does, wanting revenge. Having a story that went the other way for a change could have made a valid point. But instead it flies so far in the face of practically every other Dr Who story (‘Kerblam!’ is the only one close to being this right-wing and even that’s only in the finale) that it feels like a parody of this show’s core values, a complete misunderstanding of what this series is all about. After all, the writers try to so hard to make the macho Dominators be the ‘heroes’ – they’re aggressive, serious and have clearly been around the block more times than their more gullible rivals The Dulcians who are not only portrayed as big girl’s blouses but quite literally dressed in them too, including the men, along with skirts (another Ancient Greek influence maybe?) Interestingly we don’t see a macho female Dominator or know what happened to them, though you have this awful feeling this is one of those chauvinistic tales that has the men going home after regular conquering to shout at them too and beat them up, because that’s what real men do baby, get used to it! Even so, the Dominators aren’t the heroes their writers think they are and you still side with the wet and feeble Dulcians because, well, we’re Dr Who fans, we haven’t forgotten about all the awful rotten things war does just because we have different writers this week and the arguments made don’t stand up to any real scrutiny. 

 Dr Who is one of those programmes that’s pretty much unique for the times or indeed any era: a rare series that families could sit down and watch together, across the generations. In the 1960s particularly it was pretty much the only place that the youth of the day were able to see their ethics placed on screen and could show their parents ‘See? Being a hippie isn’t so bad’, though more often than not Dr Who stories tended to be balanced, to show both points of view in a nuanced way. The 1960s created a generation gap like never before, as people either side of thirty clashed over whether having fought two world wars it meant we had to fight a third in order for the sacrifices of the first two not to have been in vain – or whether it proved how pointless all war was and that somebody had to be brave enough to break the endless cycle. The mid 1960s is the same gap since WW2 that there had been between WW1 and 2 and with Vietnam and Korea cooking in the background, meaning that many children of the day felt that they would inevitably end up in a war somewhere down the line, while secretly hoping that when they come of age war will have died out with their parents and grandparents. Dr Who is used by both sides to talk to the other about this conflict, whether consciously or subconsciously - generally though, writers and especially television writers, and very especially science-fiction TV writers being what they are, most arguments tend to come down on the side of the left or at least the middle. Even Haisman and Lincoln had just about skirted the middle line before; while it’s possible to see ‘The Abominable Snowman’ as an uncharitable take on hippies being turned funny by having voices whispering in their ear that turn out to be aliens, the ending is that if people work together then evil things can be defeated without much blood being shed. ‘The Web Of Fear’ glorified soldiers a bit too uncomfortably for my tastes, but that’s maybe a special case you could argue: it’s not every day an alien invasion gets so close to London that they actually take over underground stations and the soldiers are fighting in defence, not offence. 

‘The Dominators’ though is different, full of outdated macho ideas about how shouting at things and blowing them up is the way to go, which felt particularly wrong in the 1960s and certainly had no place being in a script about the future. Maybe it was the writers being in a bad mood, maybe it was script editor Derrick Sherwin being so desperate for scripts he didn’t have time to be picky about or give quite as many re-writes as he needed (though the authors still ended up being upset with the amount he made) or maybe they were just growing grumpier with old age, but there’ a real sense of ‘the kids of today don’t know how lucky they have it!’ in this script. That idea of the family using this show to talk to each other works both ways and this is surely the only story that tries to show the parental point of view to the children: that the idea of being hippies spouting peace and love will only last as long as it takes your enemies to drop their first bomb and if you forget the ways of war then you’re easy pickings. Though these two writers aren’t particularly older than the usual Dr Who authors (Mervyn was forty when this story was made, Henry forty-six) they nevertheless come over as grumpy old curmudgeons. These are the days when men were men, aliens were aliens and earthling-types walking around in togas were just asking to get shot, when appeasement (of the type of pacts Chamberlain made with Hitler) didn’t save lives and just speeded up the process of dying. Death in battle is glorious. Death by pacifism, when you had the means to fight back if only you’d kept up your nuclear arms race, is stupidity. That’s such a fundamental misunderstanding though: it takes guts not to fight back when someone is attacking you, as so many other Dr Who stories will tell you. Declaring war is easy; its keeping the peace that’s hard and the honourable thing to do. To the children watching this, who’d been brought up on tales of mothers, fathers, aunts and uncles with limbs torn off and evacuated to alien landscapes far more frightening than the quarry on TV with the feeling they could be sent off to fight any time in the next few years this was all a complete slap in the face, a betrayal all the deeper that it came from a series that generally gave them a voice and took their side. Even to me, as a child of children of the 1960s, it still feels like a betrayal of everything this series stands for. And for half the story even the Doctor, our voice of reason and intelligence, is pretending to act ‘stupid’. Oh brother. 

 More than that, though, the writers seem to take a ghoulish delight in the Dulcians’ downfall. The Dulcians are painted as the future for the youth of the day when they’re no longer youths but sticking to their anti-war stance, overgrown students who just look silly acting like children in middle-age (this is, after all, a future 172 years after the atomic test so for the Earth somewhere around 2119; an interesting detail is that this place is no longer radioactive – flying in the face of absolutely everything we know about radiation then and now – suggesting in context, perhaps, that the dangers of the atomic age have passed long ago and we should stop being so namby-pamby about it all). This wouldn’t be the first Dr Who story to take what was happening in the present day and imagining the inevitable result in the future if humanity carried on in the same direction, but it’s the only one that takes a fear or phobia of the present day and says ‘stop being such snowflakes, deal with it!’ If this was in the ‘new’ series you can guarantee the dresses would be some Laurence Fox-style comment on how ‘this is where we’ll all end up if we don’t have proper gender roles etc etc’. By comparison the Dominators wear tough-guy shell suits that make them seem adult, down to the feel of having the weight of the world on their impressively padded shoulders (though given the choice I think I’d take the skirt, whatever the writers want us to think). Normally in Dr Who the writers at least start out liking their characters before re-writes get in the way to drain their enthusiasm, even the ones they ‘love to hate’, but you get the real impression the writers delight in killing the Dulcians off as brutally as they can, chortling with glee when another one snuffs it, making sure we linger on the actually rather good graphics when their servants The Quarks are unleashed on them, oil-on-water effects mixed into the hole where the actors go after they’ve being physically cut out of the negative (an effect that recalls an atomic blast in itself). 

Ah yes, The Quarks. Lincoln and Haisman have clearly been paying close attention to the many interviews with Terry Nation both about how he created The Daleks and the sheer amount of money he’s made out of them. They figure they’d quite like a bit of that themselves after being so messed around and, besides, it sounds easy. Nation’s original description of The Daleks doesn’t amount to much at all: they’re round creatures who have no legs and glide across the floor; it was Dr Who designer Ray Cusick who took that idea and flew with it, creating the iconic design that made the series one of the BBC’s biggest ever success stories; had a different designer been assigned to a different story the result might well have ended up like The Quarks, bland and laughable, recreating the description to the letter without any imagination (to be fair, its hard to create a second Daleks without simply creating The Daleks and Terry Nation would have been straight on the phone demanding compensation if they had; as it happens Haisman did include a sketch with his sript which got turned down; this looks suspiciously like The Trods, the supermarket own brand daleks who turn up in ‘TV Comic’ when Terry goes to America and takes The Daleks with him). Evidence that lightning doesn’t strike twice, the writers try the same thing here, with a vague mention in the script of ‘metallic chatter’ and a description of their guns. Frankly, the writers had a nerve demanding half the money for that (and they kicked up a fuss about the BBC getting the other half, which is partly why they were never invited back to the series again). The Quarks are silly and feeble in every way The Daleks are tough and scary, tiny robotic squares that are only big enough to be played by child actors, with spindly feet and horribly squeaky voices. The writers were clearly thinking of the elementary particle ‘quark’, a new name in the news a lot after being coined in 1963, and it fits in nicely with this story’s themes of atomic war (splitting the atom down to its component parts, of which quarks are one). ‘What’s the point in having all this scientific knowledge if we don’t use it?’ seems to be the argument, but just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should (the atom bomb was created more out of fear the other side were creating their own and we had to match it than any great feeling it would stop wars; indeed a lot of the scientists responsible for it argued against ever using it against Japan, even if it did speed up the Second World War).

 I fear, too, that there’s a rather cynical comment on the famous Dalek catchphrase here as the archaic ancient Celtic word ‘quark’ (as used in James Joyce’s ‘Ulyssess’ and where the atomic scientists got the word from) means ‘to croak’ –not quite ‘exterminate’ but close enough to the same thing. So, The Quarks look like Daleks, have a Daleky name and do much the same thing in principle. But they feel like someone laughing at The Daleks i.e. the Skaro aliens, which in a script that’s basically laughing at ‘The Daleks’ the story, is a dangerous line to tread for the programme that, however much they’ve messed you about, are still trying to give you work. They’re possibly the least scary monster ever seen in the series (although the pantomime-Myrka horse and the Ergon half-baked chicken cut them close), so feeble they can’t even shoot properly at people who are right up close to them, while they’re also the only Dr Who monster to date that can be defeated by aiming a great big rock at them and treating them like skittles. Every single one of the entries for that year’s Blue Peter competition beat them hollow (and most of the entrants were less than twelve years old). They’re an embarrassment Whovians try to forget – and yet the writers were so convinced they were going to be big that they struck up a special deal on the side, away from the BBC, so that they could get any extra money from merchandise, even going to the lengths of selling their rights to ‘TV Comic’ so they become the only baddies outside the Daleks and Voord to appear from the actual TV series. That’s the reason why this story didn’t go the same way as ‘The Laird of the McCrimmon’ I suspect: the BBC were hoping to get a bit of a cash in on the merchandising on the side too. Well, more fool them because the poor reception to this serial damaged the programme so much they stopped selling a lot of their normal Dr Who gear along the way. That’s the real parable here; don’t do stuff to make a quick buck, however tempting it is and don’t spoof your most successful story to a fanbase who, even in 1968, were known for being passionate. 

 So, you have a story that’s rude to half the people watching, with a monster that’s incredibly stupid. Would that was all ‘The Dominators’ had wrong but no: it’s also incredibly boring. The writers were reportedly extremely angry that Sherwin messed around with their script, ‘missing’ i.e. toning down all the satirical elements and adding in too many action sequences that weren’t there in their original and completely changing the ending (Sherwin so losing the will to live by the time it came to edit episodes five and six that he reputedly threw the whole thing away and wrote his own conclusion to speed things up, causing the following story ‘The Mind Robber’ to gain a Sherwin-written episode along the way). Which makes you wonder: what on Dulkis must the first draft have been like? Almost nothing happens in this finished story except a lot of people talking at each other – or shouting at each other in the case of the Dominators, who don’t even look at each other for most of the story. The script is one long case of people being captured, rescued, captured again, rescued again, captured for a third time, with long scenes of dialogue in between that keeps going round in circles. What’s odd about that is that the writers’ previous story ‘Web Of fear’ is almost all action – honestly it might have been better with more time for dialogue as per here, but at least that story zips along – this one crawls, as wobbly on its feet as a Quark walking down a bumpy road. As a general rule you can tell how good a Dr Who story is by how good the cliffhangers are, whether they can arrive naturally, build the tension across an episode successfully, move the plot on from what came before or change how we see the world we’re in. Not in this story. Episode two ends with Zoe trapped in a bunker being hit by some Quark fire before the Dominators walk in and say ‘stop!’ and complain about using too much energy (they really are going for the ‘grumpy dad’ angle in this story aren’t they?) Episode three ends with Jamie trapped in the bunker before the Dominators walks in and stop that too. Episode four doesn’t actually have the Doctor in a bunker – he’s in the Dominator lemon-squeezer spaceship (no seriously, that’s the basis for the actual model design, which might explain why they’re so sour all the time) and it’s a Dominator shooting him close up this time, but its near enough the same too. Mercifully episode five rights some of the damage and the rather odd morality, Sherwin changing the ending to have the Dominators defeated at their own game by having their bomb blow them up instead – accidentally setting off a chain of volcanoes on the planet’s surface right by where the Tardis is. After five episodes of people barely moving, its rather a shock to see people running with urgency and its easily the best of the five (and not just because it means the story’s nearly over). 

 Oftentimes a bad Dr Who script will be salvaged by the acting or production. Though neither are quite as shockingly poor as the script, neither are they what you might call Dr Who at its best. This planet is a quarry (to be specific, Wrotham Quarry in Kent). I guess that makes sense, what with a lot of this story being set on a radioactive atomic test island, but it’s not the prettiest place to look at. Much better are the underground Dulcian cities (it makes sense the one big set we would have is a library as they’re a very cultured lot in every sense except war) but we don’t see nearly enough of that. The inside of The Dominators’ spaceship is your typical alien vessel albeit more cramped than usual: it suggests to me the set designer was thinking ‘submarine’ (it’s too early for The Beatles’ hippie-friendly yellow film to be out yet but the song was but it’s kind of the opposite of this story: a hippie utopia that had taken over a vehicle that had once been built for war so might have been an added barb, in a story about a hippie colony used for war). The acting too is variable: most of these people are woefully miscast (I mean, who looked at future ‘Playschool’ presenter Brian Cant Sing - whoops, sorry, just my response to sitting through so many of those episodes…it’s just Brian Cant - and thought ‘yeah, let’s make him a nasty dictatorial tyrant’? I’m all for playing against type, but there are people in the same cast far more naturally suited to this role). Dr Who in every era generally gets the casting spot-on and its only when John Nathan-Turner starts getting bees in his bonnet about publicity in the 1980s that things go wrong (and even then every actor who isn’t a stunt guest star is well placed) so how did things go so spectacularly wrong this time? I do wonder if this story, which was delivered so late in the day, changed the roles at the last minute or whether these people were actually hired for the ‘Laird of McCrimmon’ story (which might also explain the skirts if the actors had already been measured for kilts). Whatever the cause, you can tell most of the people on these sets don’t want to be there, the people behind the sets don’t want to be there, the writers almost certainly don’t want to be there and the audience? Yeah, we’re not so happy about it all either. 

 So, what we have is a pro-war parable by writers cashing in on The Daleks with a bunch of old men shouting in a quarry and some of the silliest aliens ever seen in the series. Does anything go right? Well, this is still one of my favourite of all Tardis teams and they all put in special effort, as if to distract from just how bad the rest of this story is. There are some of the best and most fondly remembered gags of the 2nd Dr era, lots of cracking bits of dialogue and jokes, most of them cracked at poor Jamie’s expense. Zoe too is well catered for, losing some of that robotic stiffness she had in her debut ‘The Wheel In Space’ a story (and a repeat) earlier and seeming more like an actual ‘person’. If you’re thinking to yourself ‘well at least the writers are good at writing dialogue then’ though, apparently barely any of the trio’s original lines got through without being changed in rehearsals, often dramatically, the cast modifying practically everything. Considering that Troughton and Frazer Hines filmed this at the end of a very long second year together (its around now that Troughton hands his notice in for the end of the following season…maybe if the last story filmed for season five had been something better like, say, ‘The Mind Robber’ we’d have had many more Troughton years?) it’s remarkable how fresh their humour is – and how quickly and easily Wendy Padbury has slotted into the family atmosphere. Cully too is the one interesting supporting part and as much as the writers try to make him out as a big nitwit, in this story at least its someone who isn’t shouting all the time and you feel quite protective towards him in a way the writers provably didn’t intend. He is brave, too, when it comes down to it, more proactive than the other Dulcians who take so long to decide on anything they’re nearly wiped out. The starting point of a story set on an island that used to be peaceful but has now been given over to atomic testing is a strong one – there’s a lot of emotional drama to be had there, especially the 2nd Dr’s puzzlement because he had such a nice time the last time he landed on Dulkis. Unlike some of the other stories at the bottom of this list this was never a collection of episodes that promised the world either: even the big season six comeback splash in the Radio Times is more ho-hum about it all so at least its not one we were really looking forward to. That’s kind of it though: the mistakes dominate the parts this story gets right and sitting through 110 odd minutes of this is enough to stretch your patience in this series to new limits. Certainly compared to the source material (‘The Daleks’) this one gets everything wrong: The Quarks are poundland monsters compared to the deluxeness of the Dalek designs, this planet is a bunch of rocks not an exciting city, the plot falls down the ‘wrong’ side on the nuclear war debate with a far too simplistic idea of war without taking the time to consider the hippy point of view (I mean, what happens if both sides are in a nuclear stalemate which was what was happening in the real world?), there’s no actual peril and danger and perhaps most of all nobody in this story learns anything: Terry Nation might not have been the best writer at characterisation but in David Whittaker’s hands there’s just enough room to explore four very different characters’ responses to this crazy world as they learn to trust one another; by contrast the 2nd Dr Jamie and Zoe have a few laughs, watch some local squabble and go home. There’s an arrogance about this script that makes it unwatchable, as if the writers know better than everyone else who works on this series and the audience – even back in the days when there were only five years’ worth of stories to look at, not sixty, it feels hopelessly out of kilter with what came before it. Uncharitable, borderline offensive and at odds with practically every other Dr Who story ever made it was a hideous choice as an early home video and DVD (to be fair there aren’t a lot of complete surviving Troughton stories to choose from), not to mention as a season starter (its eight interminable minutes before the Tardis even arrives, during which surely everyone who could has moved off to ITV) or indeed with The Quarks getting a second life in the comics this story gets way more attention than it deserves; it would be much easier to pretend the wretched thing didn’t exist, that we could lose it down the back of the sofa to make up for having no reason to hide behind it this week. One of the most wrong ideas about Dr Who from fans, especially new ones in the 21st century, is that black and white Dr Who is boring and slow (which is why they have to speed things up with that shockingly awful colourisation of te original Dalek tale that missed the point several times over) which is so off the mark for every single story but this one it makes me want to ask: surely you can’t all have used this as your starting point for monochrome Who? If so, how did you ever make it back to this series at all? Even the writers, who were responsible for most of this story, hated it to so much they took their names off it and – in the spirit of the ‘fatherly’ take on the war debate – had the names of their own fathers-in-law substituted instead. Honestly, ‘Norman Ashby’, even their pseudonym sounds pompous and arrogant. 

 POSITIVES + There are a lot of model shots in this story and, while they’re not amongst the very best, they do at least have a different ‘look’ about them that’s impressive compared to everything else. Yes, they’re based on lemon squeezers but the round shape makes sense aerodynamically: after all, if ‘real’ aliens can fly around in saucer shaped craft then so can fictional ones. There are some nice shots of the models passing between model shots to actual shots of the set, too, which was quite a big special effect for its day. 

 NEGATIVES – Zoe has the old ‘oh dear wouldn’t it be awful I got captured just at the time the others escape so they have to come back and rescue me…whoops’ subplot and even mentions this in the plot. 

 BEST QUOTE: ‘An unintelligent enemy is far less dangerous than an intelligent one, Jamie’