Doctor Who (TV Series) The Dominators: Episode 1 (1968) User Reviews

Part one is pretty decent.

[Sleepin_Dragon · 7/10 · 16 January 2019]

I am definitely going through this one episode by episode, as the quality varies so much, a reason why I find it impossible to review a story as one complete unit.

I have always considered The Dominators to be a stingy nettle in a bed of roses, when you see what came before, and what comes next, it just feels so odd, and would possibly be more fitting for Troughton's last season.

However, episode one, I think it's a decent start overall, but approach with caution, as some people are wearing curtains, and some meer pelmets.

The world is interesting enough, The Dominators are certainly intriguing, if a little dull, but it's worth watching for the chemistry between Pat and Frazer, they are so much fun together.

So the production looks a little cheap, but the story is rather good, the first part isn't as bad as some are making out, I'd say this one is a decent watch. 7/10

Men In Skirts ! Never Trust A Pacifist

[Theo Robertson · 5/10 · 20 August 2013]

Refers to all five episodes

This is the opening episode of season six of the classic series and right away you're aware how different it is to the previous season . Out go the horror inspired and instead we get more comic book inspired fantasy with stories that often have a bizarre structure . During the season we get a couple of stories with 5 episodes one of 8 episodes and one on 10 episodes in a rather unfocused series that gives the impression there might be problems going on behind the scenes which was unsurprisingly the case with stories about to enter production being cancelled at the last second and replacements having to be written on the spot and by the end of 1969 the BBC were seriously considering cancelling the show and this season is somewhat aimless to say the least

The Dominators was credited as being written by " Norman Ashby " which was a pen name for Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln who wrote the previous season's two Yeti story that introduced The Great Intelligence that made its next appearance in the 2012 Christmas special of NuWho . The Dominators isn't a great script being a very obvious " If you're confronted by tyranny pacifism is the worst policy " type stories as the alien Dominators plan to turn Planet Dulkis in to a giant radioactive mass . In some ways it's similar to the Dalek debut story but where as the nature of pacifism is well explored and written the arguments are made in a very shallow way . It also started out as a six episode story and script editor Derrick Sherwin condensed the last two episodes in one episode which says a lot about the lack of drama involved and it was this that led the writers to insist the story was transmitted under a pen name . When a writer insists on broadcast under a pen name is the TV equivalent of a movie being released under the director name of " Alan Smithee " You do get the impression that Alan Smithee or even Ed Wood directed this story with its somewhat deranged costume design with the inhabitants of Dulkis wearing a kind of toga /mini dress regardless of their gender which looks very cute on the Doctor's new companion Zoe but is totally laughable on the male characters . This s probably deliberate on the part of the writers who envisaged their script as an attack on pacifism and feel they need to portray non violence at any price types as being terminally effete . That said The Dominators themselves are equally ridiculous looking with a costume looking like a cross between a turtle and a hunchback and respect to Ronald Allen and Kenneth Ives for portraying their silly looking one note baddies with such dead pan seriousness .

The Dominators are helped by small robots called Quarks which might appeal to little children but to an adult do seem somewhat silly and difficult to believe that in the wake of the success of the Daleks were planned to mirror more robotic success for the show . There's also a tale of behind the scenes cynicism where both the BBC and the writers tried to take out merchandising copyright on the Quarks , a copyright battle that became so bitter that Haisman and Lincoln actually threatened to go to court to stop the broadcast of this story . The irony of this was that in 1982 Lincoln co-wrote a historical novel called The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail which became subject to a court case in 2006 where co-writers of the book Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent claimed Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code copied wholesale concepts of their book , though Lincoln didn't take part in the lawsuit

Not dominating any favourite story lists! This is a rather disappointing start to Season 6

[A_Kind_Of_CineMagic · 7/10 · 17 September 2014]

Review of all 5 episodes:

This adventure has The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe arriving on a planet The Doctor has apparently visited before. The peaceful civilisation he knew is revealed to have had war in the past but is a pacifist society. They are attacked by two 'Dominators', from another world with their robotic henchmen 'Quarks' who intend to enslave those they consider worthy.

Unfortunately this is generally a below average adventure. The script by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln is pretty good and interesting but has not been executed well on screen. The writers actually withdrew their names from the production (releasing it under a pseudonym of Norman Ashby) and stopped working on the series altogether after the production team changed the story from a 6-parter to a 5-parter without consulting them and got Derrick Sherwin to write a new concluding fifth episode. This is very sad as their previous work on the series was tremendous. I do not feel this was ever anywhere near the standards of their earlier stories and did not need 6 parts but I think the script itself is better than the production makes it appear. The story's ideas are not bad but perhaps the production problems spoiled the end product a bit.

The acting of the guest cast is mostly OK but the direction is flat and the production is not well executed overall with terrible costumes, unimpressive sets etc looking too cheap and cobbled together, including the rather silly Quark robots.

Some decent standards are still in evidence in aspects of the story and the performances of regular cast Troughton, Hines and Padbury are very good but this adventure is a little bit dull and not as well produced as it should be at all. It is below what you want to kick off season 6, especially after such a great season 5.

My Ratings: Episodes 1, 2, & 5 - 6.5/10, Episodes 3 & 4 - 6/10, Overall - 6.3/10

One of Patrick Troughton's low points?

[poolandrews · 4/10 · 2 December 2007]

Doctor Who: The Dominators: Episode 1 starts as a spaceship lands on an island on the planet of Dulkis, navigator Rago (Ronald Allen) & probationer Toba (Kenneth Ives) two members of a race called the Dominators get out after their spaceship absorbs all the radiation in the atmosphere so they can breathe. Meanwhile the TARDIS arrives a short distance away, the Doctor (Patrick Troughton), Jamie (Frazer Hines) & Zoe (Wendy Padbury) plan a relaxing stay on Dulkis. They are found by a Dulcian university expedition there to study the effects of radiation from atomic weaponry on the island lead by Balan (Johnson Bayly), the expedition soon realises that all the radiation has mysteriously disappeared & that something sinister is going on...

Episode 1 from season 6 this Doctor Who adventure originally aired here in the UK during August 1968 & was the first story in Patrick Troughton's sixth & final season as the Doctor. Although like all the other Patrick Troughton stories the original masters for The Dominators were destroyed by the BBC during the 70's all five episodes exist in the form of 16mm telerecordings even though it's far from Troughton's best & some might say they would happily sacrifice this story for something like Fury From the Deep (1967), anyway it's irrelevant now so it's no use dwelling on it. Directed by Morris Barry this is actually a pretty poor 24 & a half minutes by Doctor Who standards & sci-fi standards in general. Originally commissioned as a six part story written by Mervyn Haisman & Henry Lincoln then script editor Derrick Sherwin apparently requested wholesale changes which Haisman & Lincoln were reluctant to do so once they submitted episode five Sherwin said not to bother with episode six & both he & Terrence Dicks did the necessary rewrites with the pseudonym of Norman Ashby ending up on screen. One has to say The Dominators has very little going for it, it's pretty slow going even in this initial episode, the basic plot is just too familiar with a standard 'TARDIS arrives on planet & the Doctor finds himself in some sort of trouble' with dull character's & a distinct lack of incident. Maybe things will improve over the next four episodes, then again maybe they won't...

The only really notable aspect of The Dominators so far are the costumes, the Dominators with their huge shoulder pads actually look quite good in a silly sort of way but the Dulcians look terrible with long skirts which are obviously just ordinary curtains pinned around the actor's chests. To say they look silly & naff is an understatement. The Dulcian spaceship belonging to Cully looks like a giant vibrator! For anyone interested a lot of the character names in The Dominators were taken from Latin, the word Dulcian actually means 'beautiful people' in Latin for instance.

The Dominators: Episode 1 is a largely forgettable & unusually poor opening to a Doctor Who adventure, to be honest I'm not really looking forward to the next four episodes which is very rare as far as I'm concerned since I usually lap this stuff up.

Domination By Boredom

[timdalton007 · 2/10 · 10 March 2011]

(Note: A review of all five episodes) 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. 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 stagy 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 clichéd, 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.

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.

Disappointing Start to Season Six.

[wetmars · 4/10 · 21 December 2020]

When two belligerent Dominators and their robotic servant Quarks land on the peaceful planet Dulkis planning to drop a radioactive seed into the planet's core to refuel their spaceship, the Second Doctor, Jamie and Zoe must attempt to inspire the pacifist Dulcians to resist.

Review of all five episodes -

It was a disappointing start to Season Six. The story felt very dull. There were no memorable moments nor excitable elements. The Quarks tried too much to be like the Daleks, "Destroy, destroy!" as similar to "Exterminate!". The action wasn't good enough. Fun fact, the Quarks were created to replace the Daleks and more dangerous.

The execution of the Quarks was meh. They didn't feel menacing at all, their ridiculous voices, way too many mentions of "Destroy!" that drove me to insanity. Zoe had no place in this story. She was utterly forgettable and asked questions about "Oh, what's this? Doctor?"

For the good aspect, Jamie was a bit fun and started to act like a stupid idiot, lol.

4/10.