Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln delivered two pretty damned good scripts prior to this, and for all that one could criticise the final result on this occasion, there are some interesting, well-conceived ideas going on here. The radiation on the island gives everyone a reason to be involved with it: the maverick Cully wants to get paid for shepherding the youths into the danger zone, teacher Balan and his students are monitoring the radiation levels, and the Dominators land on the island because there’s radiation for their ship to suck up. Dynamically, there’s a clever juxtaposition between Balan getting his student Kando to display her knowledge of the history of the island, and a later scene where the two Dominators postulate on the ramifications of a primitive weapon they find in a museum. Both teachers grill their pupils about war, but for diametrically opposed reasons. (Oh, and I must ask: why is there a working weapon in the museum? Health and Safety would go ballistic!)
Visually, this is better than you might expect. Tolata’s death is pretty gruesome; it’s quite the showpiece moment for a season opener, as is the whacking great explosion that destroys Cully’s sea-paperweight. And director Morris Barry has an eye for framing his pictures on film, so we get another forced-perspective shot involving the bottom of someone’s legs in the foreground and high up (like the Toberman shot at the beginning of The Tomb of the Cybermen), and a great moment at the end of the episode with the two little Quarks on top of a hill, joined by their towering master.
And I feel a bit sorry for some of the actors involved in this (but not for the reasons you might expect). Phillip Voss was previously the Mongol Acomat (hardly the best part in Marco Polo), and in this story, he’s the first person to get bumped off! For pity’s sake, this is a man who played Shylock for the Royal Shakespeare Company – he’s one of our finest classical actors, use him more than this! Malcolm Terris (playing another thrill-seeker, and slain early on in the story) is no slouch either, another good actor who’s not been well served by our favourite series. And while Arthur Cox always gets stick for his rendition of Cully, he actually plays the part with brio and a rebellious zeal. All right, he looks like a bank manager, but that’s hardly his fault. Ronald Allen, at least, is remarkably right – he has a cadaverous, sunken-eyed face that seems chiselled from stone; he’s impassive and cruel, with a hushed, gruesomely deadened delivery.
Why, though, do all the Dulcian men wear dresses or skirts? Some of them, at least, are students looking for experimental fun. And it happens that people dressed in such a fashion have turned up at the same location as some self-confessed Dominators; is this one of those sorts of parties? I hope the Doctor’s brought his car keys...
April 17th
The Dominators episode two
R: As a comedy, this is absolutely marvellous. Much of the episode is taken up by the Dominators subjecting the Doctor and Jamie to intelligence tests – and Troughton and Hines are never funnier than here, trying to convince their captors that they’re safely stupid. I so enjoy the look of delight that Troughton gives as he’s told the answer to the simplest of puzzles (“Jump!”), his attempts to pronounce “electricity”, and the sulky pout he gives when talking of the clever people who boss him about. And Hines is in his element too, making the most of the comic rapport between the two of them that is by now second nature, playing a sort of bewildered fear that is very winning.
The problem is, though, that as a drama the laughs never go anywhere. After evaluating our heroes and dismissing them as idiots, the Dominators let them go with a warning to leave them alone. And that’s it – the story really hasn’t advanced any further, and before too long, the Doctor and Jamie are parading around gravel pits once more. Poor Wendy Padbury is stuck in a storyline which isn’t half as interesting as theirs, trying to impress a bunch of bureaucrats with her alien origins. There’s a comedy to all of this as well, of course – the council on Dulkis are supposed to be tedious old duffers, and on paper their dry academic response to what’s going on is not without wit. But there’s a limit to how long you can make jokes about people being boring without... well, being boring. The best gag comes from when Balan and his other student – Teel – draw a graph to show the radiation levels on the island of death, and take the inexplicable loss of that radiation as a natural phenomenon. (“It has happened, therefore it is a fact. We now know that the effect of an atomic explosion lasts for a hundred and seventy-two years.”) If you’re going to satirise pacifists as a bunch of gullible fools who’ll take everything on face value without suspicion or intelligent inquiry, that’s one thing. But it needs to be done consistently – why the story at the same time makes such heavy weather about the Dulcians not believing that the Doctor and company are aliens when they accept everything else so complacently is beyond me. So what we’re left with on the one hand is a society who’ll react without fear or great interest to the crises around them (which is a little dull), and on the other a society, conversely, who’ll stubbornly deny the evidence in front of their eyes (which is, if anything, even duller).
As I say, Patrick Troughton is brilliant – and the sheer variety of faces he pulls for comic effect in this episode makes this an entertaining enough romp. But I think even Troughton will be hard pushed coming up with enough tics and mannerisms to keep this afloat for three more weeks.
T: I’m sure you can predict how I’m going to react to the rather patronising view of pacifism on display; it’s as if the writers haven’t quite worked out that an aversion to violence isn’t the same thing as witless gullibility. It’s also odd that they’re knocking pacifism, and yet the movement that the writers are railing against predominantly, in 1968, stemmed from the young and rebellious cocking a snook at the pompous, patrician establishment. They can’t quite inverse that for satirical effect without it seeming illogical, so it’s still the young people – Cully (who doesn’t seem to qualify as overly “young”, but let’s move on), Kando and Teel – using their intuition and energy to break the intransigence of the stuffy old guard (Balan and Senex), which doesn’t really work to reinforce the script’s reactionary stance.
Still, this isn’t as awful as I feared. I like the nifty molecular bonding wall that flips back and becomes an examination slab, and I think the gossipy council members are rather funny. Arthur Cox has a great moment where he looks genuinely hurt that he’s trapped in his father’s shadow, and doesn’t get treated as an individual. Troughton is excellent too – for all his keen intelligence, he assumes the role of clumsy schoolboy here with aplomb, and it’s very plausible that the Dominators would see him as a nincompoop. I rarely laugh out loud while watching these stories, but I did when the Doctor asked Jamie if he could manage to pull off acting like an idiot. The friendship and rapport these two have is comedy gold.
Some of my perspective, to be fair, might be influenced by Ian Marter’s novelisation of this story, which at times smoothes over what doesn’t quite succeed on screen. Quarks in Marter’s hands are giggling, chattering monstrosities – their childish jabbering is at odds with their murderous nature, which makes them unsettling and cruel. On screen, by contrast, their Orville voices and wibbly modulations make them seem inappropriately cute. The literary Dominators are closer to their on-screen counterparts – if I remember correctly, they have acrid breath, cracked lips and creaking skin, but these descriptions seem inspired entirely by Ronald Allen’s performance. He’s terse, direct and not unlike the walking undead. It’s a looming, underplayed performance of considerable skill which helps to disguise (sorry to say) the fact that many of Rago’s decisions are stupid. It’s rather ironic that although Toba is presented as a hot-headed, blithering idiot from his very first scene, his suggestion to scan the Doctor – and his desire to destroy the TARDIS and its crew – are the correct calls.
The Dominators episode three
R: To be fair, there’s at least the attempt at something different with The Dominators. After a season of Earthbound stories focussed for the most part on scientific bases under siege, we’re on an alien planet on
ce more. It’s the first time since The Tomb of the Cybermen that the production team have had a pop at that – and even if the planet looks exactly the same as the one we saw last time (presumably because Morris Barry has chosen the same quarry to represent Dulkis that he used for Telos), it does mean that we have an adventure which isn’t just relying upon claustrophobic tension. But, that said, it still feels awkwardly familiar. It’s that theme of do-nothingism again, as the Doctor once more tries to persuade people to take action rather than just wait for a crisis to resolve itself. We’ve seen it in The Abominable Snowmen, in The Ice Warriors – here it is again. This time though we’re not merely dealing with passive resistance, but with passive aggression too: because, if anything, the Dominators are just as lethargic as the Dulcians. Every time Toba gets carried away and runs off with the idea of doing something nasty, he’s restrained by his cautious commander. With the watchword of the baddy being one of patient investigation, and the goodies unprepared for more than patient debate, there’s barely a plotline at all. When Senex laughs off the Doctor’s pleas that the Dominators are callous and must be resisted, you can easily see where he’s coming from. I see more dangerous people than Rago on London buses.
So to get the most out of The Dominators, you need to look for a series of moments, the chances taken by the cast to put a bit of life into the proceedings. The way that the Doctor can unravel a shuttle’s navigation in mid-flight, so that when he lands on the planet the camera reveals him and Jamie charmingly buried within cables and wires. The little comic business worked out between Troughton and Hines over who gets to look through a telescope. And the beautifully funny scene where Zoe and Cully plan revolt from their slave labour, not lifting a finger to help as their other Dulcian captives stagger beneath boulders of stone. (Mind you, that last one may not have been designed to be funny. I take my chuckles where I can.)
T: It’s all gone a bit pear-shaped, hasn’t it? The scenes in the Dulcian council chamber are deathly tedious; I was mildly interested in the funny perspex thing on the table that Walter Fitzgerald (as Senex) decided to play with at one point, but it came to nothing. And it’s difficult to get excited by a piece of a drama wherein a civilisation is based upon an unwillingness to do anything. The last unwilling warriors in the series were the Sensorites – perhaps the Doctor should poison the Dulcians’ water supply, just to get them to do something interesting. And it becomes massively comical when Chairman Tensa proves his acclaimed intellect by telling the council they can either fight, submit, or flee – if your government needs to draft in Brian Cant to point out something that bleedin’ obvious, it’s time for an election. It is quite fun, at least, that well-known (at the time) Play School presenter Cant has been cast as this “revolutionary” thinker. Why, it’d be a bit like casting a CBBC presenter as a tooled-up freedom fighter in the new series...
The main appeal of this continues to be the Troughton/Hines combo (though their antics in the rocket seemed a little overzealous, as if even they realise how desperate the rest of this is), but I also appreciated Rago’s order to work the slaves to the point of exhaustion, then observe when they collapse – it’s marvellously callous, and Allen’s stony faced, quietly grotesque performance has a dignity that dwarfs everything around him.
Oh, and I like the bit when the Quark’s head wobbles about after Jamie blows it to bits.
April 18th
The Dominators episode four
R: I would also like to praise Ronald Allen. Poor old Rago isn’t being given an awful lot of respect as Big Boss Dominator. Toba constantly defies his orders, and the Quarks don’t seem to know which of the two they should be taking their instructions from. Allen isn’t helped by a script that undermines him at every turn, making him seem a rather tepid villain – there’s terrific potential in the scene where he dresses down Toba and threatens him with execution, but within minutes, he’s off in a shuttle and leaving his subordinate to do what he wants all over again. But the performance itself is great – Allen downplays Rago to great effect, making every single one of his pronouncements much more threatening than the content of the lines could hope for. He shows cold amusement when he realises that he has reason to punish Toba, as if at last he’s being given an opportunity to unleash the same sadistic cruelty that his underling so wantonly indulges in. It’s not Allen’s fault that the story itself then denies him the chance to wreak it. And he’s terrific in the scene where he meets the Dulcian council, and cuts through all the bureaucratic blather by having Brian Cant shot dead. Allen keeps showing us the potential for a chilling and calculating villain – if only he’d been cast in a better story. As a Benik – as a Salamander, even – he would have been excellent.
And a word of praise for the Quarks too. The Troughton monsters have all powered their way round their stories by being big and thuggish. What makes the Quarks in theory much more interesting is that they’re cute – but deadly. When you see one of them knocked down by a boulder, lying on its back with its feet wiggling, emitting high-pitched sounds of distress, your first impulse is to go and hug the thing. And I love the little Quark-shaped indicators on board the spaceship which flash on and off to show when one of them is being destroyed – it’s rather sweet, and also suggests that these funny little robots get destroyed rather often, really. Haisman and Lincoln have tried before with the Yeti to create a deadly robot that played upon your protective impulse – and it’s easy to see why, in a story that took greater advantage of the dissonance that suggests, that they could have been eerie and memorable. (Certainly, the writers thought they were onto a good thing and wanted the merchandising rights, and TV Comic used the Quarks ad nauseam.) But, again, the plot doesn’t do anything with them.
Ronald Allen. Quarks. An alien world. The elements for something fresh are in place. They only needed a story to use them to best advantage.
T: Arggg... I already used up loads of space praising Ronald Allen’s blood-curdling performance in previous episodes, and now you’ve done it here, during an episode that has few (if any) redeeming features, leaving me high and dry. I played my Allen joker too soon – curses! Still, I should mention that it must have been easy for Allen to learn his lines; Rago and Toba have practically the same dialogue every week, mainly amounting to “Destroy!”, “Conserve energy...”, “But—”, “Obey!”, “Command [begrudgingly] accepted...” et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. It tends to undermine your villains if their main characteristic is squabbling – it’s like being invaded by George and Mildred, or the sixth Doctor and Peri.
The best bit of the episode? When Rago storms in and begins making demands of the Dulcian council, and one of its members says, “If you’d care to make an appointment...” Allen’s morbid amusement at their assumption that he’s asking for their assistance rather than enslaving them, and his three-fingered point to Brian Cant’s corpse, are winningly alien. Frazer Hines is on form too – he’s rather gamely engaging in comic business at every opportunity, and the bits with a Quark shooting at him inject some much-needed excitement into this episode. Cully’s big comedy boulder is great, smashing as it does a Quark to bits with unlikely accuracy.
But I fear that afraid the bad – actually, not even the bad, the dull – outweighs the good in this episode. While it’s perhaps understandable that Rago doesn’t think the Doctor is a threat, is that any excuse for giving him the run of the spaceship, with all its vital controls and equipment? I think Paris Hilton is a bit of a halfwit, but that doesn’t mean I’d give her the keys to my house when I go on holiday, let alone allow her access to my cooker. Oh and look, Toba is threatening to destroy everyone with a Quark at the end of the episode, again. What are the odds that Rago will wander in, just in the nick of time, and chastise him for wasting energy?
The Dominators episode five
R: For fun, I decided to count the number of times the word “bore” was used. I thought I’d be able to make a very witty play on words, there. I reached five in the first scene, and the
n somehow the joke no longer seemed quite so funny.
Once in a while you have to admit defeat, I suppose, in doing a book like this. I really can’t find anything to say about this episode that is positive. No-one emerges from this one unscathed – not even Troughton, who’s reduced to mugging in an attempt to get a bit of comic energy into the proceedings. He forgets he’s holding a bomb that’s about to go off, he forgets he’s standing in the path of volcanic lava. Oh, my giddy aunt – it’s the very first time I’ve seen my favourite Doctor reduced to something of a manic cliché, all gag and no heart.
But I do have one nostalgic memory about The Dominators. I first caught some of it at the big convention at Longleat House in 1983 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary. Famously, BBC Enterprises severely underestimated the attendance figures that Easter weekend, so that anyone lucky enough to get through the gates spent most of the time standing in queues. The tent that was screening old episodes was one of the smallest, and one of the most packed; there was one story selected from each of the five Doctors. I was able to get a seat somewhere in the middle and watched the Hartnell offering, The Dalek Invasion of Earth – I had to squint a bit, because it was playing on an inadequately small television set, and I had to strain to hear, because John Leeson kept on making announcements over the tannoy about face painting and car parks. I stuck out six episodes of Hartnell, however compromised, and was still in place for my slice of Troughton. Unaccountably, The Dominators was the second Doctor story chosen; it left, no doubt, lots of children with the impression that all black and white Doctor Who was about mining. And I remember craning my neck to make out what was going on the planet Dulkis – and realising, with some shock, that after a while I just didn’t care. And I left to do something else. It was perhaps the first time I’d deliberately given up watching Doctor Who. It’s from that moment that my obsession for Doctor Who was put into some perspective, that other things in life could slot into place. It’s from that moment I stopped being a child, and became a man. Oh yes. Thank you, The Dominators.
Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) Page 62