The Dominators Episode 1

The one where aliens land and take away all the radioactivity...

The episode opens with an attempt to be epic, with model spaceships that look like bin lids tumbling through space in formation, and then one separating from the group and coming in to land on a planet's surface (it's a sandpit, so it can't be Earth!). As Doctor Who model effects go, there's been much better, but what we see here isn't actually all that appalling. It's not exactly the opening to Star Wars though!

Two fearsome humanoid aliens step out of the ship, looking for all the world like Frankenstein's monsters with Richard III humpbacks! The Dominators look strange, but Sylvia James does a good job on the make-up, giving them a dark, morose, almost funereal look in their faces. They're called Dominators, and they look domineering. They don't look like they have much of a sense of humour! They're actually far from fast friends, and get quite bitchy with each other.

The Dominators have soaked up all of the radiation in the immediate area and transferred it into power, and now they're looking for some more. So these chaps are like intergalactic atomic cleaners? They're actually doing this planet a favour, surely?

And then we meet the natives of this planet. What a bunch of wet wipes! Hurtling across a sea of mist in what looks like a salt shaker, these young adventurers are in search of "a bit of danger", and are approaching the forbidden Island of Death without official permission! These people lead sedentary, unexciting lives, and so Cully has decided to bring his chums out to this forbidden place to see a bit of action.

But to be honest, it's very difficult to get past the elephant in the room in this scene - those costumes! Martin Baugh (a staple designer for Season 5) seems to have lost all judgement and come up with outfits which look totally ridiculous. The women wear gym leotards, while the men wear ruffled skirts and flowing gowns that completely undermine any serious attempt to depict a believable futuristic alien society. I mean, I'm not even sure director Morris Barry is taking this all that seriously, perhaps because the writing is so damn awful and hackneyed too (it's written by Norman Ashby, a pseudonym for Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, who obviously do Earth-based Great Intelligence stories far better than futuristic sci-fi). Baugh's costume design is unforgivably bad, and is particularly cumbersome and impractical for the actors (especially the Dominators - I mean, are we supposed to think their shoulders fill those outfits?).

So, that's the costumes and the writing, what about the acting? Well, that's pretty poor too. Nobody seems to be taking this very seriously at all, so most actors are treating it as your worst type of B-movie sci-fi straight from the Saturday morning serials of Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, but then who can blame them when they're dressed like that? The only one giving any sense of a decent performance is Arthur Cox as Cully (he'd have a lot more dignity in his second Doctor Who story, The Eleventh Hour, 42 years later!), but even he can't disguise the fact that some of the dialogue is atrocious ("Nothing can live on this poisonous plot of soil", and "Oh Tolata, don't be a little fool. This island is a killer").

It's gratifying when Cully's crew are wiped out by the Dominators' unseen robots, the Quarks. Much is made by director Morris Barry of holding back the Quarks' appearance for a big reveal, so we get some creative shots of their point of view, which builds the curiosity a little, but this is kind of ruined by the silly sound design which accompanies everything they do. It's a sort of shrill burbling noise which doesn't sound at all threatening or sinister, although the special effect used to show the death of Tolata is pretty gruesome (and really quite clever too - like something out of Sapphire & Steel).

More than eight minutes into the episode, the TARDIS finally arrives, with the Doctor exhausted after all those weeks of projecting his thoughts into an episodic adventure starring Dr. Who (whoever he is). Zoe makes no mention of her thoughts and feelings about The Evil of the Daleks, and doesn't even ask the one question that would automatically spring to my mind if I'd just been shown this story: whatever happened to that girl Victoria, because she's not travelling with you and Jamie now, Doctor? Did she get killed?

The Doctor is very excited about arriving on Dulkis (for that is its name) as he has been here before and he had a whale of a time then. He says the Dulcians are advanced, gentle and friendly, and not at all dreary as Zoe assumes. I'm with Zoe though - they are supremely dreary.

The episode all seems a little under-rehearsed and laboured, which perhaps reflects the fact that nobody seems to be all that invested in what they're doing. A bad script is a bad script and will not inspire the best from your performers, and even Patrick Troughton seems underwhelmed by it all. In fact, at times he over-eggs the Doctor's enthusiasm and just comes across as a little desperate.

The Dulcians have apparently abolished war. I'm not sure how you do that. It's all well and good passing a law to say nobody's allowed to have a war any more, but that doesn't stop people wanting or doing it. People break laws all the time, particularly warmongers. We also learn that the Dulcians are a pretty pragmatic race, and accept facts readily, without need for explanation. "We are trained to accept facts," says Kando (who looks like Lalla Ward). "You are here, this is fact!" So why, when Cully storms in saying he's seen aliens and robots and spaceships on the Island of Death, does nobody believe him? The Dulcians have already accepted that the Doctor and his friends are from another world, so what's so hard to accept about there being more of them, with robots?

It just doesn't work. There's some interesting ideas bubbling under in this script - aliens which absorb and recycle radioactivity, a race of people who have outlawed aggression and become indolent - but it's all done so tiresomely, with no conviction. After several visions of the future which Doctor Who could be proud of in Season 5 (The Ice Warriors, The Enemy of the World, The Wheel in Space), this all feels so hackneyed and cheap. Cheap sets, cheap costumes, cheap actors.

And when we finally do get to see the Quarks, they're a huge disappointment. They look like fridges on legs and have silly child-like voices which I'm sure were intended to be unsettling (the idea of murdering robots with child-like voices could work), but again, it's the decisions the production team make in the execution which fails. They look cumbersome and silly. They look like little men in fibreglass boxes. And they sound kind of cute, but in an annoying way.

Oh dear... As the handsome Wahed (aka Mason in the ITV sitcom Vicious) rather clunkily says at the top of the episode: "I'm not so sure that this so-called adventure was such a good idea after all." I think the story has been ill-starred from the start. When the Dominators first land on Dulkis, Toba says: "We should have continued to Epsilon IV!"

First broadcast: August 10th, 1968

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: I do like Sylvia James's Dominators make-up. Oh, and Philip Voss was rather dishy!
The Bad: After the intricate, considered scripts of The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear, Haisman and Lincoln turn in a woefully cheap effort here (no wonder they wanted their names taken off it).
Overall score for episode: ★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Episode 2...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4; Episode 5

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/the-dominators.html

The Dominators is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Dominators-Patrick-Troughton/dp/B003O85CDA.