Review of The Dominators (#44)

DVD Release Date: 11 Jan 11
Original Air Date: 10 Aug – 07 Sep 1968
Doctors/Companions: Two, Jamie McCrimmon, Zoë Heriot
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Fraser Hines, Wendy Padbury
Preceding Story: The Wheel in Space (Two, Jamie, Zoë)
Succeeding Story: The Mind Robber (Two, Jamie, Zoë)

This month I am taking one for the team. I knew this was coming when I decided on this year’s “Highs and Lows” theme, but everything feels a bit different when I’m actually faced with viewing one of the Lows. At least I knew what I was getting into before I started.

Which is not to say that I remembered much of the plot of The Dominators before I began my rewatch. Mostly I remembered that the stumpy little robots called the Quarks were introduced here—reputedly with the ambition of becoming the next Daleks, a new robot to scare the kiddies and delight toy companies with sales. (Their obscurity fifty-odd years later is a testament to how well that went.)

Now that I have seen it again, I… primarily remember the Quarks.

Frankly, I think the root of the problem with this adventure is the same as the problem with the Quarks. The Quarks don’t work because unlike the Daleks, who serve as a fascist allegory, or the Cybermen, who sprang from body horror, they really serve no narrative purpose. They are mindless drones who do the bidding of the eponymous baddies, and unlike Daleks or Cybermen, could easily have been replaced with a simple weapon like some sort of laser borer.

Similarly, the overall storyline seems to lack a clear driving force. As best as I can tell, it’s meant to be some sort of denunciation of unthinking pacifism, since the reason the Dominators are able to do whatever they want on the planet Dulkis in the first place is that the Dulcians cast off any warlike ways generations ago, and now do everything through discussion and deliberation. But that’s not enough to create a compelling story.

It’s like the writers had a particular theme in mind and slavishly constructed some trappings that they thought might contain that theme—and their excellent new marketable robots. Obviously, I’m totally projecting my own writing process onto these writers; perhaps that’s not how they worked. But from my perspective, The Dominators really feels like the result of devising a story’s shape and then shoehorning certain things into it rather than beginning from a solid idea and letting that grow naturally into a fuller story.

However The Dominators was developed, the end result is not a particularly engaging adventure. There is a lot of riding in the transport pod back and forth between the survey site where the TARDIS team originally lands and the Dulcian capital. There are lots of explosions and falling rubble. There is lots of “alien probe”-ing of sorts as the Dominators test various characters for suitability as slave labor. There is lots of hemming and hawing by the Dulcian council.

At no point does the TARDIS team appear to be in any particular danger, at least from the viewer’s perspective; they’ve been in plenty of worse scrapes. In the end, they make it back to the TARDIS in one piece, managing to escape before disaster strikes. And that’s perhaps the best thing that can be said for this adventure: it leads them to the next one.