The Dominators

Episode 1

The title instantly strikes a chord with Hannah.

Hannah: Oooh. Whips and chains excite me.
Me: You what?
Hannah: It's a Rihanna lyric.
Me: If you say so.
Hannah: This is exciting. I'm not used to watching actual episodes.
Me: We've got a nice long stretch of them now. The worst is behind us.
Hannah: You promise this one isn't set in a base again?

An invading spaceship lands in a quarry on the planet Dulkis.

Me: Do you think that ship looks like Sam the Eagle from The Muppet Show?
Hannah: Maybe a little bit.

And then Hannah sees the two Dominators in their shell-like body armour.

Hannah: That is a stupid jacket. I mean, I know shoulder-pads were really cool in the eighties, but what's their excuse in 1968? And what's with all the tassels?

The Dominators check that their ship has completely absorbed all the local radiation ("Why would you step outside before checking that?") and then unpack their robot servants, the Quarks.

Hannah: But Quarks are...
Me: Elementary particles, yes.
Hannah: I was going to say a type of cheese.

Speaking of fashion disasters, the Dulcian outfits have to be seen to be believed. Everyone on the planet is wearing the exact same costume; the women just about get away with it, but the men look utterly ridiculous.

Hannah: Oh! What a lovely dress!

I can't tell whether or not this is sarcasm, until...

Hannah: Seriously, what the fuck? They appear to be wearing dresses that look like crinoline, or folded paper concertinas. Something you'd make quickly and cheaply to go round a doll.
Me: I think they're meant to be tunics or something.
Hannah: They don't look anything like tunics, they look like folded paper towels. It just looks strange, like they each have a curtain fitted around the waist. And they're in a lovely little travelling capsule full of flowers, which looks like a funeral home.

When the TARDIS arrives on Dulkis ("He needs to touch up the paint, it looks a bit scruffy"), it's Zoe's turn for the fashion critique.

Hannah: I find it disappointing that they didn't give her a smooth bra to wear underneath that tight costume; the poor girl's got to stand around with a lumpy bra on show for this whole thing. You put yourself out there, having to be dressed by other people and putting your trust in them, and this is what happens. Still, I suppose it's not the end of the world; considering all the stuff that everyone else has got to wear, I doubt anyone's going to notice.

War has been abolished on Dulkis but there's a war museum full of weaponry exhibits, and for some reason they're armed and functional.

Hannah: I've read a lot of stories over the years where people have a 100% peaceful civilisation and everything's absolutely fine until someone else comes along who doesn't have the same ideas, and they've got no way of protecting themselves. It's really annoying; I'd love to see a world where everyone was peaceful and harmonious and didn't have to fight each other, and they had no such thing as weapons.
Me: Wouldn't be much of a story, though, would it?
Hannah: I know, it's just that those stories always get to me, because it's a lovely ideal but it always raises the question of whether everybody should be peaceful? If somebody comes to try and take that away, you don't want to roll over and let them take it. I'm trying to think of an example, but I can't right now.
Me: Well, there's the Thals in The Daleks; they were pacifists until the Doctor convinced them to fight.
Hannah: Oh yeah, that's true. Can you say that I remembered that?

For better or worse, Hannah finally gets a good look at the Quarks.

Hannah: What are they saying?
Me: I don't know. I don't speak Quark.
Hannah: The voices are completely unintelligible, but they're cute. They look like cigarette lighters. And they've got insect hotels for heads! All those little bamboo ends, that's what you use to make a bug hut; you bundle loads of sticks together and you put them in your garden, and there's plenty of little hidey-holes for woodlice and bees and things. That's what they look like. Little round heads. You're looking at me as if I'm talking nonsense.

Episode 2

As we're preparing to watch the second episode, something tragic happens: I accidentally select the wrong one from the DVD menu, and we start watching episode one again.

Hannah: I'll watch it again if you want me to.
Me: Really?
Hannah: No, it's a waste of time. Look, that's 22 seconds of your life wasted.

The first of many.

The Doctor and Jamie are captured by the Dominators and subjected to a series of tests (one of which seems to involve two Quarks securing Jamie to an examination table and probing up his kilt), but they manage to convince their captors that they're a pair of harmless idiots. Which is fine, except that the final test involves one of the Dominators giving the Doctor a gun and asking him to work out how to fire it.

Hannah: They've just given their captive a gun, and now they're demonstrating to him how it works. There's absolutely nothing stopping the Doctor from picking it up and shooting everyone before the Quarks can do anything.
Me: Apropos of nothing, there are schoolboys inside those Quark costumes.
Hannah: They don't seem very practical, shuffling along on those great big rectangular feet. I like their little fold-out arms, though. Having giant spikes on their heads doesn't seem very practical, either. They certainly don't seem very deadly.
Me: They were intended to be as popular as the Daleks or the Cybermen.
Hannah: Wow. They definitely missed the mark on that one.
Me: Apart from anything else, I don't see how they could return without their Dominator handlers. Although, having said that, they did turn up as regular enemies of Patrick Troughton's Doctor in the pages of TV Comic.
Hannah: With the Dominators?
Me: No, they just roam around space like the Daleks, conquering planets and acting of their own volition. Not a Dominator in sight.
Hannah: Seems unlikely.

Cully decides that Zoe's clothes will attract too much attention, so he gets her one of the standard Dulcian curtain-tunics instead. Much less conspicuous.

Hannah: So everybody just wears the same clothes, and gets them from vending machines in their own homes? They're not even trying to make it plausible anymore.

Next on the Dominators' agenda: the subjugation and enslavement of the Dulcian race.

Hannah: Are they the advance party, then? They're just the recce crew, and that's why there's only two of them?
Me: Yes, they're the spearhead for the invasion. That's how you convey a whole invasion force on a limited budget; you just send two of them down and have them report back to the others, and that way it looks like you've got a much bigger army without having to actually show it.
Hannah: Either that, or they just couldn't afford that amount of shoulder-pad for anyone else.

After the run of "base under siege" stories last season, it's refreshing to see another type of story again.

Hannah: I like it so far; it's a nice change from being in bases. I've missed some good outdoor action and I like that we've got a new enemy, rather than bringing back the same old enemies. We haven't found out much about Zoe yet, though; I was hoping we would, but at least she's trying to be proactive and doesn't scream in the face of danger.

Episode 3

Zoe and Cully are trapped as a building collapses around them. As usual, Hannah has her priorities in order.

Hannah: Oh dear; they're going to get their frilly little body-curtains all dirty.

The Doctor tries to warn the pacifist Dulcians that the Dominators are "callous" and "without pity", but thanks to Troughton's frantic delivery Hannah mishears the word "callous" as a different C-word altogether.

Hannah: (laughing) Pardon?!
Me: You heard.
Hannah: Did he actually say that?
Me: What do you think?
Hannah: Um... did it mean something different in the sixties?
Me: Nope.
Hannah: Were you waiting for that to happen?
Me: No. To be honest, I've never heard of anyone hearing it like that.

But now that I'm listening for it, I can definitely hear it a lot more distinctly.

Hannah: How can you make "callous" sound like that?
Me: It works so perfectly in context, too. Not like the "sexual air supply" in The Wheel in Space.

The two Dominators spend the whole story arguing with each other, with the impetuous probationer Toba repeatedly clashing with his superior Rago.

Hannah: It must be difficult, being a society of dominating controllers and yet still being subordinate to someone. That's what I don't understand; if their entire society is based on taking over other people, how can any kind of hierarchy work?
Me: I don't know, but it seemed to work alright for the Roman Empire.

The Dominators put Zoe and the Dulcians to work.

Hannah: Well, I'd ask for some decent shoes first. They're all wearing open-toed sandals and they've got to move lots of polystyrene rocks around.

The Doctor hot-wires a travel capsule, but not without some difficulty.

Hannah: Imagine Hartnell doing that. Falling out of a spaceship in a tangle of wires.
Me: Yes, it's very convenient that the right Doctor happens to come along to deal with certain situations. It's a good thing William Hartnell's Doctor never turned up for any of David Tennant's adventures, otherwise he'd have found himself jumping between moving cars on a motorway.

Jamie take a laser rifle and aims at a Quark.

Hannah: Jamie's going to shoot it in the face. Aw, poor thing! Bits are falling off! Oh, it's got smoking boots!

The episode ends with Jamie and Cully trapped in a bunker as the Quarks open fire.

Hannah: Well, they're not dead; they got out through the back way. It's not really a cliffhanger, unless they've killed Jamie off.

Episode 4

Jamie and Cully find themselves in an old bomb shelter. Jamie climbs a ladder to get a better look, putting Cully in the perfect position to get an eyeful of true Scotsman.

Hannah: Don't look up his skirt!

Jamie sees more Quarks, remarking that they must be all over the place.

Hannah: No, it's just the same three every time. They can't afford that many costumes.

While Hannah gleefully observes that one of the screens on the Dominators' spaceship shows how many Quarks are currently active ("Aw, little life-counters!"), the Doctor and Zoe discover that the ship runs on radioactive material, which accounts for the sudden disappearance of the radiation in the vicinity.

Hannah: I'm not sure you can "suck up and store" radioactive energy.
Me: I can't believe you've spotted a flaw in this exemplary storytelling.
Hannah: I don't see how you can soak it up like a sponge.
Me: Presumably you can't, otherwise cleaning up after Chernobyl or Fukushima would have been a lot more straightforward.

Rago is throwing his weight around with the Dulcian council.

Hannah: Seriously, these costumes are crazy. I was going to comment on the fact that everyone wears the same thing but it makes sense that a peaceful world would have removed all sources of inequality and disagreement, even to the point of making their clothing completely uniform. But that's where things get really controlling; that removal of the sense of self and self-expression, which is what makes you human, or Dulcian or whatever. Having said that, their perfect world has lasted centuries so maybe these people are different enough from humans to actually make a society like that work without any dissidents.
Me: I think you're crediting this story with a lot more depth than it deserves.

Toba demands to know where Jamie is and threatens to kill everyone, one by one, until they tell him. He kills an old man to prove his point, and the Doctor is next in the line of fire.

Hannah: He's gone proper mad; he was specifically told not to destroy anyone. It's a good thing Dominators aren't strong and clever.
Me: They claim to be the "masters of the ten galaxies", so I suppose they must be doing something right.
Hannah: I could see their race being a legitimate threat, as long as the small advance party doesn't always include a power-mad underling who has a death tantrum every time something doesn't go his way. The clash between the two Dominators is actually quite interesting, though; you'd expect them to send their very best crack team down there to go and take over, but instead they've sent a guy who's really good at his job and a short-tempered probationer who's rubbish at being a Dominator. It's just a shame so many frolicking, curtain-wearing Dulcians have to die. They seem so naïve and innocent.

As the credits roll, Hannah comes up with an interesting theory.

Hannah: I'm starting to wonder whether Zoe is maybe going to stay on Dulkis.
Me: Already? She's only just joined them!
Hannah: I just have a strange feeling that she'd get on quite well if she stayed behind. It's not the perfect fit for her, but she's intelligent and I assume their technology is a little beyond what she knows, so I'd understand if she wanted to stay and do some investigating and some sciencey stuff even if it's probably not as exciting as she would like. I don't want her to leave already, though.

Episode 5

In the interest of distracting ourselves from the story (such as it is), I try to engage Hannah with the identity of the unknown writer.

Me: Do you want to know who Norman Ashby is?
Hannah: Not particularly. (pause) Alright, who is he?
Me: I'm glad you asked.
Hannah: I'm probably still not going to care, though, am I?
Me: These episodes were written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln - the ones who wrote the two Yeti stories, The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear - but they asked for their names to be removed afterwards, and used a pseudonym based on the names of their respective fathers-in-law instead.
Hannah: Why did they want their names removed? Because they thought it was so shit after it was finished?
Me: It wouldn't surprise me, but apparently the main reason is that there was some dispute between themselves and the BBC over the ownership of the Quarks.
Hannah: Because they wanted them to be as big as the Daleks?
Me: They were asked to create a new monster for merchandising purposes but they wanted the same kind of lucrative deal that Terry Nation had got with the Daleks, and eventually ended up with a compromise that didn't satisfy anyone. There were also plans for them to write a third Yeti story set in Scotland called "The Laird of McCrimmon", which would have ended with Jamie leaving the series and becoming the laird, but it never happened.
Hannah: It's all very convoluted and odd.
Me: Just be thankful for small mercies; this story was originally going to be six episodes, if you can believe it, but the script editor edited it down to five and added one to the following story instead. There isn't even enough story material for five episodes; a six-part version doesn't bear thinking about.

Jamie approaches a Quark from behind and ties its feet together, causing it to topple over.

Hannah: It's like a little wind-up robot toy that's fallen over and gotten stuck. When did science come up with the name "quark", by the way?
Me: James Joyce invented the word in Finnegans Wake in the 1930s.
Hannah: Okay, but when did they start using it in a scientific context?
Me: I think quarks were actually discovered the year this was broadcast, but the name was appropriated a few years earlier.

The Dominators are planning to drill through the planet's crust, fire rockets into the magma to fracture the crust and create a volcano, and explode an atomic seed device in the middle of the volcano to turn the whole planet into one vast molten mass of radioactive material as a fuel store for their fleet. Hannah groans.

Hannah: "An atomic seed"? How can you seed something atomic?
Me: Surely an atomic seed would grow into a nuclear power plant?
Hannah: Get out.

But the Doctor has his own methods of tunnelling through solid ground, and whips out his trusty sonic screwdriver.

Hannah: It's back!
Me: And it's got other settings now, instead of just unscrewing things.
Hannah: It's unscrewing dirt.
Me: Yep, it's literally a boring machine.
Hannah: How can a sonic device make fire?
Me: It can mend severed barbed wire in the modern series!
Hannah: Maybe it vibrates the particles back together? The vibration energy creates heat and melts two things together. I don't know.
Me: From the Pertwee era onward it's pretty much an all-purpose magic wand anyway. It doesn't even make sense that it can use sound waves to function as a novelty screwdriver in the first place, never mind anything else.
Hannah: But it's more recognisable now. It's not just a sonic screwdriver anymore, it's the Sonic Screwdriver.

Jamie and Cully take out some more Quarks, triggering their alarm system ("It's just chirping!") in order to lure the others away from the drilling operation, but Toba doesn't fall for it. ("He's learning. It's disappointing when the bad guys learn.") Hannah is more concerned with Dulcian geology, however.

Hannah: What is the ground made of? Dust? They seem to be digging very far, very quickly.

One of the remaining Quarks only has two power units left, but another has five so they "equalise" by holding hands.

Hannah: Aww! Now they've got three and a half each. That's really sweet.

But their power levels are still too low for them to shoot down Jamie and Cully at long-range.

Hannah: Oh, so their "accurate aim" is to do with how much power they've got. If they can equalise their power, why can't they just put it all in one unit who can aim?
Me: Probably because if that Quark gets taken down, they're stuffed.
Hannah: True. Eggs and baskets.

The Doctor nabs their atomic seeding device, but needs to somehow get rid of it before it explodes.

Hannah: Put it on their ship!
Me: Are you joking?
Hannah: No. Put it on their ship! This is the kind of thing that happens in TV shows. I've seen this exact kind of thing before.
Me: You've seen the Doctor blowing up his enemies with nuclear weaponry?
Hannah: No, I've seen people putting the bomb back in the ship, or handing the dynamite back to the Coyote.

When he does exactly that, she's completely untroubled by the Doctor's ethics. In fact, she even rewinds the DVD to watch it a second time.

Hannah: (laughing) I want to see their faces again. Just because shit comes to those who deserve it.

The episode ends with the Doctor feeling very pleased with himself, until Jamie points out that a stream of volcanic lava is flowing directly towards them.

Hannah: The Doctor's a bit silly sometimes, isn't he? That's a shame, he obviously just leaves and we never get to see the Dulcians all happy and thanking him for saving them. Lots of cool magma, though. Stock footage? Or did they go and record an erupting volcano specially for this?
Me: I would assume stock footage.
Hannah: Also, if that bomb was a radioactive seeding device, doesn't it make everything radioactive now that the spaceship has fallen apart?
Me: Probably. In all fairness, the island was radioactive when they arrived anyway.
Hannah: True, but what about the Dulcians who are still on the island? And the Doctor and his companions haven't left yet, either. Besides, if the seed was powerful enough to irradiate the entire magma core of the planet, there should be a lot of energy in there; if it blows up a spaceship in mid-air, the fallout should be immense. Either way, I think it probably isn't very good for the planet.

The Score

Me: I smell a 10 out of 10 here.
Hannah: You must have a blocked nose. It's a fun romp...
Me: It's not that fun.
Hannah: I mean, I see what they did there; or I see what they tried to do, anyway. They tried to make one of those stories with a great big threat, where the Doctor arrives at just the right time to save all those useless people, but mostly it's just running around and waiting for the right opportunity to get one up on the Dominators. All they're doing is slowly picking off the Quarks one-by-one whilst people are dying.
Me: Any thoughts on the story's anti-pacifism message?
Hannah: Is that really what they were trying to convey? That pacifism is a bad idea, and you should always be ready to fight because people are going to come and kill you?
Me: Pretty much. It's the same World War II moral that we saw in The Daleks, about how you need to be prepared to fight back and defend yourself against invaders.
Hannah: I like the intention, but they executed it poorly. It was watchable, though; I don't know if I'm ever going to give anything a below-average score, because I like Doctor Who enough that even the rubbish stories are enjoyable.
Me: You gave The Tomb of the Cybermen a 4.
Hannah: Did I? Well, this is better, because... why are you looking at me like that?
Me: Sorry.
Hannah: This is better, because the Quarks are cute, but the science is atrocious and the characterisation is awful; the Dulcian council just sits around and talks until everyone dies. I want a planet full of pacifists to work, but this level of pacifism has left them in a state of complete stagnation and inaction; Jamie's willing to do it for them, and he doesn't even live there! For some reason I still found it entertaining, but the costumes are awful, the story is awful, the characters are awful and the science is awful.

5/10

Hannah: I like the story they were trying to tell, but not the one they actually told. Everything else is just weak.