Customer Reviews

Doctor Who - The Dominators [VHS]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Dr Who deals with the then-topical subject of the atom bomb, a group of people on an alien planet visiting an atomic testing island but finding that the radiation has somehow disappeared. It transpires that a spacecraft inhabited by two war-like beings and their robots is powered by radiation and his absorbed it all. Before long the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie have arrived on the scene and uncoverda plot to turn the whole planet into a radio-active mass to fuel an invasion fleet.

One of the best Troughton stories I've seen. The Doctor himself is at his best. The two Dominators (an experienced navigator and his over-enthusiastic probationer) are memorable characters, the cold-eyed navigator especially effective. The fact that they have individual and differing characters leads to some excellent confrontational scenes between them. The robotic Quarks are eerily effective with their bizarre crystaline heads and creepy voices and the sound-effects and special-effects are mostly good. A story which is truly worthy of that over-used term 'classic'.

Season Six. Original Airdate:~ 10/8/68-7/9/68.
On the planet of Dulkis lies the "Island of Death", the Island had until recently been a nuclear test site, before the Dulcians had embraced the doctrine of pacifism, and gave up all weapons.
Only a Dulcian survey team resides their now, checking the remaining levels of radioactivity.
It's upon this island a ship from the Dominator spacefleet lands to refuel, and very soon after this arrives Cully and his latest batch of paying thrill-seekers. Unfortunately for them, it turns out to be a very bad trip, man.
The Tardis crew, Cully and the survey team, have a fight on their hands to stop the Dominator's and their robot servants the Quarks, from turning Dulkis into an intergalactic fuel station!
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If ever a Who story were a product of it's time it was this one. Troughton has a Beatle haircut, and the, "Summer of Love" was but a fading memory in the minds of Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln when they wrote this.
But the Hippy Ideal of Love, peace and pacifism had struck a chord, they summized, how would a society that had accepted those ideals as a way of life react if confronted by a militarilistic loving one.
Would they give up their lives to save their beliefs or give up their beliefs to save their lives?
Luckily for the Dulcians the Doctor and his party decide to resolve the problem for them.
It's also not surprising the young of Dulkis go in for adventure holidays that Cully provides, as never have I seen a more stilted, stifled and claustrophobic society ever portrayed on Who.
When confronted by a problem all the elders do is form a council meeting and have a mass debate! At times I was rooting for the Dominators.
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Troughton as usual, is excellent. The way he redirect's the "Flash Gordon" travel rocket that he and Jamie are travelling in whilst eating Jelly Babies, then falling head first into the circuitry always emits a chuckle from me.
Jamie is less of a comic character and a bit of a hero for once.
The gorgeous Wendy Padbury playing pixie featured Zoe, in some ways the Doctors intellectual equal, continues with her air of aloof intellectual detachment.
(I think she looked her best in The Krotons. But thats another story.)
I like this story very much as It is, but some fans mentioned four episodes would have been a more adequate lenght.
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Trivia:~ The Quark costume was so small the production team hired schoolboys to operate them.
Although the name of the writer was Norman Ashby it was really Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln (the Yeti creators.), they had become very disgruntled with the script editor making so many changes to their story so they insisted their names be taken off the credits.
Although I liked the Hartnell era very much, it was the Troughton era that grabbed me and made me a life long Whovian, especially this Tardis crew, their concern about each other comes across as genuine.
One of only three, five episode stories in the shows history. The others being The Mind Robber and The Daemons.
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DVD extras:-
Commentary
Recharge and Equalise - Featurette - 22'55"
Easter Egg - 2'34"
The Dominators - Photo Gallery - 5'46"
Tomorrow's Times - How the media reported on the Second Doctor - 13'12"
Don't let the fact it's in B&W put you off.
If you can't wait it's on sale now at amazon.co.uk

Looking back on THE DOMINATORS it's not hard to see them as the precusor for the Sontarans. They have a similar war like nature, a similar sense of dress, a similar attitude and their interaction with people are often violent, dismissive and comic at the same time - where the Sontarans rose though and the Dominators fell is easy enough to understand in this story; the Sontarans were the enemy of the Doctor straight off, whereas the Dominators were the enemy of only themselves - how they bicker back and forth between each other, always arguing over orders, always arguing over the Quarks, always arguing, arguing, arguing - it's less DOCTOR WHO and more a Cambridge debate over which goes best with pork at dinner - Port or red wine?; who cares is really the answer here.

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe are reduced to merely running back and forth in ths story, falling into the hands of both the Dominators and the Quarks, only to be rescued or escape on their own only to end up back where they started doing nothing more than marking time until the Dominators end up, almost, destroying themselves. The fact that the Doctor is responsible for the death's of the Dominators isn't seen so much as murder here as more an emotional release - finally, at long last, the Dominators can agree on one thing - they're dead...or perhaps destroyed?...no, dead...surely, truly dead. What the Quarks felt is a matter perhaps best left unexplored.

The concept of a passive, totally peaceful society is interesting and the play between the Dominators and Dulcians does bear watching and discussing since each side makes up an aspect of the Doctor, who himself comes from (at the time of this story) a very peaceful, isolated world - the Doctor is more Dominator here, having stolen the TARDIS and getting into the middle of things at once saving the day while leaving death, destruction and disaster in his wake - compare the two and ask yourself, who really is more troublesome to the Dulcians?

The extras this time around are fairly tight and interesting. Commentary is lighter than usual, but there are moments that stand out (Wendy Padbury's history with Matt Smith being the biggest, most unexpected surprise) and as always Frazer Hines cracks wise and still has a good grasp of the making of series. Text commentary is tight and worth the time reading. I found the TOMMORROW'S TIMES to be oddly empty and in need of more content and the inclusion of Caroline John as narrator an odd choice as she had nothing to do with the 2nd Doctor's era.

In the end the question isn't will you or won't you buy THE DOMINATORS, with so few 2nd Doctor stories left to us, not owning this story to go along with the rest would be a crime - yes, the story is dull, yes the Dominators seemed to be reading from a different script, yes, the Doctor and his companions really simply do rush back and forth destroying Quarks and being yelled at by the Dominators or forced to wear curtains as clothes and yes, the Quarks come across as a chest of drawers crossed with a Twonky; but in the end it's the interaction between the 2nd Doctor and his companions that will win you over and draw you back again and again.

So, a truce - THE DOMINATORS is best served with Port.

"The Dominators" is perhaps the weakest of the Doctor's adventures from the Patrick Troughton years to escape erasure from the BBC archives. The story, co-written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, was suggested by the burgeoning peace movement of the late '60s: What if a totally pacifist society were threatened by its ideological opposite, belligerent invaders dedicated to waging war?

The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe land on the pacifist planet Dulkis at about the same time the war-loving Dominators and their crew of robotic servants, the Quarks, touch down to size up the planet as a possible power source for their space fleet. The production was in trouble from the start because script editor Derrick Sherwin was waging a war of his own with his writers over rewrites they ultimately refused to make, forcing Sherwin to shorten the story by an episode, thus creating production problems for the following sequence, "The Mind Robber" (see my review).

Meanwhile, the writers, Haisman and Lincoln, were negotiating with toymakers to make the Quarks the next big marketing phenomenon after the Daleks, which creator Terry Nation had spirited away from the BBC to start his own movie franchise. Two problems: (A) the Quarks were NOT the next Daleks; and (B) the BBC disputed the writers' intellectual property rights to their creation. The legal wrangling forever poisoned any future the writers might have had with the series.

Perhaps the biggest reason the Quarks were a flop was that they were designed by the costume designer, Martin Baugh, not series designer Barry Newbery. They were essentially iceboxes with stubby legs with much the same mobility problems on set as the Daleks. The Dulcians' costumes, meanwhile, resembled living-room curtains bunched up under the arms and gathered at the waist for men and cut into revealing, baby-doll nightie-style dresses for the women--it was perhaps the worst fashion catastrophe in series history.

Finally, the plot was preposterous even by Doctor Who's usually lenient standards: an entire planet is threatened by two tall men made up to look like the butler Lurch if he had used Grecian Formula, and a horde of pint-sized robots, of which we see only three at a time (because there were only three!). The Dominators spend the first four episodes or so experimenting to see whether the Dulcians might make good slaves but then don't really use them. Instead, it's the Quarks who drill boreholes in the planet to turn it into a radioactive molten mass the Dominators can use for fuel. Whatever.

The Special Features include the usual, workmanlike "making of" documentary, plus a ho-hum retrospective on press coverage of the show during the Second Doctor's tenure. For some reason, this is narrated by Caroline John, who had nothing to do with the Second Doctor but played Liz Shaw, the first companion to the Third Doctor.

Great little story with Troughton displaying his inimmitable style.

Troughton is the best Dr and this is an entertaining 5 parter that shows Troughton off as a mixed bag of fun and fear.

The story sees dastardly dominators who aim to destroy a planet with a nuclear bomb in order to fuel their star fleet.

The Doctor, with Jamie and new recruit Zoe manage to thwart their plans but not without a great deal of team work and action. With Jamie out and about exploding Quarks the Dominators is an entertaining tale to the end.

I'm really glad I watched this story now when I'm older. The idea and concept this story represents is very interesting. What would happen to a completely pacifist society if they were invaded by a "dominating" race. Well The Dominators answers this question for you.
If you can get past the cheap sets and lame special effects (and lets face it, if you buy a classic who story and are surprised by this you really have no idea what your purchasing) then the story itself is really well worth a watch. The dialog is great and The Dominators themselves are for a 60's villain pretty imposing. The major drawbacks to this serial were the costumes and the Quarks. Just really lame work even by Doctor Who's standards of the day.
Still this serial is one of the few surviving stories from the Troughton era, and though it would be wonderful to see Power of the Daleks or The Highlanders we have to appreciate what is available.
The documentary is funny and it amazes me how these actors recall so much from the time of production. I have to dissagree with the original author of the script though, he lamented that this story survived over others, I think The Dominators is a fine example of a story that although may go over the heads of some children it is definately something that you can appreciate later on watching again as you get older.

The Dominators: the opening story of Patrick Troughton's final season as the second Doctor. By all accounts the story should have been a good one when you consider it was written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln (the team behind the two successful yeti stories The Abominable Snowmen and The Web Of Fear), was directed by Morris Barry (who had directed the Cybermen stories The Moonbase and The Tomb Of The Cybermen) and featured the TARDIS crew of the second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe. The result though is perhaps the least successful of the surviving intact Troughton era stories.

Certainly this is not the fault of the TARDIS crew. In fact the combination of Troughton's Doctor, Fraser Hines' Jamie and Wendy Padbury's Zoe are perhaps the biggest redeeming aspect of the story. This was the first story for them as a team (as Zoe had been introduced in the previous story The Wheel In Space) but all ready there is a strong sense of chemistry amongst the team starting from the moment they arrive with the Doctor getting ready for a beach holiday right up until the final scenes of episode five. Indeed they don't enter the story until nearly ten minutes into the first episode and the story works best when they are on screen. Unfortunately they can't make up for the rest of the story's faults on their own.

The supporting cast representing the invaded Dulcians are functional at best and weak at worst. On the functional end are Johnson Bayly as Educator Balan, Arthur Cox as Cully and Walter Fitzgerald as Director Senex whose performances are exactly that: functional. The rest of the cast though give weak performances, including Felicity Gibson as Kando and Giles Block as Teel who occupy so much of the story's run time. That's not to mention the story's weakest aspects.

Those would be its villains: the titular Dominators and their robotic minions the Quarks. Both seemed like a good idea on paper but their execution was far from it. The two Dominators, Ronald Allen as Rago and Kenneth Ives as Toba, do little more then march around, argue with one another and issue orders to their minions though both actors project a fair amount of menace in doing so. Their robotic minions the Quarks are much less successful. By the admission of co-writer Mervyn Haisman on a documentary found elsewhere on the DVD, the Quarks were created with the intention of replacing the Daleks as the series most popular monster. Watching the story it isn't hard to see why that didn't happen. The Quarks lack menace thanks to their short stature, their obvious difficulty in movement and their ridiculous voices which range from comical to difficult to understand. Put together they form the weakest aspect of a weak story.

Other aspects of the story are fairly weak. The design work, in both sets and costumes, is fairly weak and the costumes in particular date this story to the late 1960s with even male characters running around in dresses for lack of a better word. The special effects are another weak aspect of the story, especially the model shots that open the story and the shots of the travel capsule in flight which look like they were stolen from a 1930s Flash Gordon serial or the like. Morris Barry's direction, which had served the two previous Cybermen stories he directed well, seems far less effective here as the story moves along at a slow pace though there is some effective use of close-ups occasionally. The result is a weak even boring story.

Which brings us to the script. Though written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, the story is credited to Norman Ashby due to the duo's difficulty with the Doctor Who production team over changes to the story. The biggest change was the story being turned into a five part story instead of six which seems to have been a smart decision in the long run. 1960s television tended to be stagey and dialogue heavy and The Dominators is a perfect example of how this could harm a production. The story is dominated (no pun intended) by scenes of characters sitting (standing in the case of the Dominators) around talking. The story's theme of pacifism versus militarism is highlighted by that fact and that is not a good thing.The Dulcian council sits around throughout the entire story and does nothing but debate how to deal with the Dominators invasion even after the Dominators arrive in the council's chamber. The dialogue is often cliched, such as Cully spending much of the story talking about "Dulcian this, Dulcian that." The result is the least successful of the duo's script and one of the weakest scripts of the Troughton era.

The DVD presentation of the story is fantastic and more then worthy of the story. The restoration of the story itself by the Restoration Team is a testament to them especially when compared to the less then satisfactory version of the story released on VHS here in the States back in 1994. There's a nice making of documentary Recharge and Equalise which reveals the troubled writing of the story, how it derailed plans for a yeti story to conclude the Troughton era and the fact that almost nobody interviewed looks upon the story that greatly. Much the same can be said of the audio commentary that is moderated by Toby Hadoke and features Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury, Giles Block, Arthur Cox and make-up designer Sylvia James. Add on the usual special features you can expect on a original series Who DVD and the result is that the story gets perhaps a presentation that's more then worthy of it.

On paper, The Dominators must have seemed a good idea yet its execution is lacking in almost every way. Indeed of the six surviving intact Troughton stories (the others being Tomb Of The Cybermen, The Mind Robber, The Krotons, The Seeds Of Death and The War Games) this is perhaps the weakest of them as a result. The story is successful in domination...by boredom only.

First transmitted August 10 through September 7 1968 in England, this is a traditional Doctor Who quarry story. Actually they spend more time in this particular quarry than in practically every other Doctor Who story.

The tale is a relatively simple one, a spacecraft lands accidentally on a planet thought to be uninhabited. The lifeforms, Dominators, are in need of an unknown fuel source with the aid of the robot QUARKS and that would be that except for the fact that the planet is not uninhabited, there are humanoids who are a peace loving race in the aftermath of an atomic debacle and then there is the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe.

To all intents and purposes it is a standard story of peace versus war with the Doctor forced tom act to free the Dulcians from evil and oppression. Nothing is quite so simple. The Dominators are cast as evil but in fact there is a trainee, a cold blooded, rash killer of everything he sees. His mentor, although a believer of the mental and physical superiority of the Dominators, is a different creature with a more 'noble' purpose. His consideration for life is more of a calculation than an emotional atttachment and the quest for domination of the universe is to bring order to all things. The destruction of the Dominators is more of a tragedy to be mourned rather than a triumph of good over evil.

The Dulcians are foppish and cowardly unlike the Thals of the Dead Planet and do not have the stomach to fight even for themselves. Science has resulted in an indifference to real new knowledge and has been replaced with a Disneyesque view of the world.

Patrick Troughton is admirable throughout and Zoe, despite the high intellect for which she is renowned as a Doctor companion, is again more of a visual aspect rather than a contributor. The story could have done with some tougher editing too.

The thing I enjoy about The Dominators is that it doesn't hold back being politically true, proving flower power to be oxymoronic. You won't find the John Lennon weed-smoking, "imagine" crowd glorified in this tale. The Dulcians, with emphasis on the first syllable (dull) are portrayed as a bunch of beatniks who wouldn't lift a finger, let alone a weapon, to save their hide. They abolished all weapons long ago, and set up a museum on an island which was once used as a nuclear test site as a reminder of the "evils" of aggression. When faced with a potential threat, they waste time in hours of pointless debate and end up doing nothing, allowing their planet to be overrun by the aggressive Dominators. The Dulcians are a great representation of the left in this country, who think negotiating with those that don't understand negotiation should be our only course of action against fundamental extremists who'd like nothing better than to destroy our way of life. In this respect, the story provides us with a glimpse of consequence if the left get their way.

It is only the Doctor's party who steps up to run the bullies off the planet. Most of the Dulcians are the Kumbaya type, satisfied to accept anything presented to them as fact, without questioning inconsistencies. As the pevious review states, somehow if the Dominators did destroy the planet as was their intention, you'd have a hard time sympathizing. The only Dulcian with any self-pride and courage to fight back, Cully, is considered an outcast and ridiculed by Dulcian society. Yet it is this attitude possesed by Cully that prevents Dulkis from total destruction.

Writers Haisman and Lincoln (unbilled in the credits as they had a squabble with production over having their story, originally a six-parter, sliced down to five) explode a nuclear bomb on pacifism, a refreshing change from most purely fantasy moral messages in Doctor Who. Pacifism works if and only if everyone around you accepts that principle. If not, pacifists will be dominated.

One of only six surviving "Doctor Who" stories with Patrick Troughton as the Second Doctor, "The Dominators" is passable "Doctor Who", but it's not one of Troughton's best stories. The basic plot is that a race of pacifists (in ridiculous costumes) get bullied by a couple of...well, bullies (in ridiculous costumes)....the Dominators, and their little killer robots, the Quarks. In comes the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe to save the day....I hadn't watched "The Dominators" in many, many years, but I bought the DVD. Having watched it again....it's a disappointment. The script is poor, the story is poor, the acting is poor (apart from the three leads), the characters are bland, and did I mention the costumes are ridiculous? The Quarks are amusing, but Daleks they ain't.

Still....I'm gonna give "The Dominators" a marginal recommendation because Patrick Troughton, Frazier Hines and Wendy Padbury are all still in fine form as The Doctor, Jamie & Zoe. Also, there ARE a trio of nice-looking women in this story (though one of them bites the bullet much too quickly---thanks a lot, Quarks), and yes, it IS a direct run-up to the outstanding next story, "The Mind Robber" (which is my favorite surviving Troughton story). And, in light of the tragic loss of so many Patrick Troughton stories, "The Dominators", if nothing else, is one more Troughton story that we can watch. But will you enjoy watching it? Well, that's up to you. If I had to rank the six surviving Patrick Troughton stories in "Doctor Who", "The Dominators" would come in last, but, out of deep respect for Troughton's loveable Second Doctor, I'll still take it.