Doctor Who A-Z #44: The Dominators (1968)

Why do I love Doctor Who? If you asked me as a child, I’d probably say it’s because it’s very exciting and has scary monsters. But a lot of properties for children have those qualities. What made Doctor Who into a lifelong obsession was its ethics. I was slightly curious about James Bond as a kid but I did find all the casual killing of nameless henchmen a bit depressing. The Doctor offered me a different kind of adventure hero, one who would go up against the most violent, militaristic people in the universe and win not because he was more violent or militaristic but because he was smarter.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice there are plenty of Doctor Who stories which resolve themselves by finding some sort of loophole in the Doctor’s abhorrence of violence. As with most other matters relating to art and morality, it depends on how you frame it. There are stories like Empire of Death or The Talons of Weng-Chiang where the Doctor is pretty clearly responsible for the villain’s death, but the preceding story has done enough work to sell said villain as someone who can’t be stopped any other way. There are also stories like The End of the World, where the Doctor simply refuses to save a dying enemy. Then there’s The Dominators, which ends with the Doctor putting a bomb on board the Dominators’ spaceship that blows up and kills them all.

This is not a clever solution to the plot, and it’s not in character either. As with some of the stories mentioned above, his action is justified in the script by the unique evil of the Dominators. On paper it appears inarguable; they invade planets, steal their mineral wealth and work the inhabitants to death. They generally signal that they mean business by killing one of the subjugated people’s leaders, with any further dissenters slaughtered by their robot servants the Quarks. At no point do the Dominators express an interest in anything other than the brutal exploitation of other races. They are also called the Dominators, which is a bit of a tell.

And yet it may be that the show has never seen an alien race less intimidating than the Dominators. Upon capturing the Doctor and Jamie they force them to do a simple children’s logic game to ascertain their value as slaves. The Doctor decides to pretend he can’t do it to lull them into a false sense of security, after which he and Jamie escape with such peculiar ease that the script has to lampshade it by having the Doctor say he doesn’t know how they got away. The Quarks, infamously created as an attempt to create a Dalek-like merchandising bonanza, are even worse. They speak with feminine, child-like voices, which is presumably meant to be creepy and uncanny, but since the design isn’t intimidating either they just look weak. It’s also unclear why the Dominators – whose interests, once again, include dominating – would make a robot assault squadron who were uncanny rather than ferocious, or imposing, or unstoppable, or not laughably useless.

The Dominators is the final Doctor Who script by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, who created the Yeti, the Great Intelligence and the Brigadier. They felt this was a sad end for their involvement with the show, and I’d agree, albeit for different reasons. Haisman and Lincoln forced the producers to credit the serial to “Norman Ashby” after being dismayed to find their planned satire of the peace movement had been edited out. Haisman and Lincoln’s original idea was for the Dulcians, the race the Dominators are invading, to be idealistic young hippies who had eliminated war and crime on their planet. This remarkable achievement came at a cost; with no police or military required, they were completely unprepared for an invasion. Very little of this comes across, not least because many of the Dulcians are played by older actors. Arthur Cox, who plays the firebrand Cully, is a dead ringer for L Ron Hubbard in his Sea Org years.

Even if Haisman and Lincoln had got this through Derrick Sherwin’s script editing process, though, it would have still been a failure. The peace movement was not as centrally important to the British counterculture as it was in the USA, which might be why Haisman and Lincoln misunderstand it so catastrophically. All those people putting flowers in gun barrels weren’t doing it because they didn’t want to fight invaders, they were doing it because they didn’t want to be invaders. Without the layer of hippie parody, the Dulcians come off as an ossified, bureaucratic race of the kind Doctor Who has plenty of. This could have been a more fruitful area for satire, but it doesn’t even work accidentally because the Dominators are just as indecisive, prone to having long, drawn-out arguments in front of their prisoners about how they should dominate, who they should dominate, what the best time to dominate is, etc. etc.

The upshot is that the middle three episodes of this five-episode story are taken up exclusively with people standing around and arguing about what should be done. Whatever your take on its morality, it’s punishingly tedious, surely one of the least incident-packed Doctor Who stories ever made. Even Troughton can’t do much to enliven it. I would prefer that a Doctor Who story was not about the Doctor persuading a race of pacifists to embrace war, but the show’s morality is, as noted above, flexible. In the right hands it could work – Terry Nation’s first script for the show was about that exact situation. That script, The Daleks, worked because it had the Daleks. The Dominators fails because it has the Dominators.

Next: The Mind Robber (1968).

Graham’s Archive – The Dominators

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