The Dominators Episode 4

The one where the bad guys have a right old ding-dong...

Right at the start of this episode there's a close-up of a Quark as it burbles something or other, and you can actually see the little boy operating it inside, peering out and looking from side to side. It's very hard to capture it in a screengrab, but just take a look, and you'll see the little lad!

The Dominators are arguing again. It's handbags at dawn as Rago calls into question whether bloodthirsty Toba has the necessary intelligence and detachment it takes to be a Dominator, which suggests to me that a Dominator is a role or position, rather than their race. The Dominators are masters of the ten galaxies, apparently (which ten, we don't know), and they've not achieved that by employing what Toba accuses Rago of: "unnecessary softness". These two chaps really are the most mismatched pair of warmongers I've ever seen, spending most of their time arguing with each other and never really getting anywhere. In their own way, they're just as bad as the ponderous Dulcians!

There's a nice focus on the Dominators' crumbling relationship in this episode, and it seems director Morris Barry suddenly realised what an interesting face Ronald Allen had, and gives us lots of moody close-ups of his handsome-craggy features.

Rago decides to repair the travel capsule and zoom to the Dulcian capital, and it's a real shame we're not afforded a scene with Rago and his Quark inside the capsule because I'm convinced they'd look perfectly ridiculous! This all leads to my favourite scene of the entire story so far, when Rago bursts into the council chamber during one of their particularly drab meetings and starts throwing his weight around. The councillors are outraged at their meeting being interrupted, with one gloriously declaring: "If you'd care to make an appointment!" That bit right there is the funniest two seconds of The Dominators.

Ronald Allen oozes screen presence through his stillness and grandiosity, looming over the seated and slumped Senex and demanding submission. To show he means business, he has Tensa killed, but sadly not with the arresting special effect that killed Tolata in episode 1. The Dominators want to take the Dulcians back to their homeworld to work as slaves, while they themselves take their robot Quarks out into the universe, intent on, well... domination! Imagine being so desperate that you'd actually take a Dulcian with you to your house!

Jamie and Cully survived the collapse of the building by discovering a lucky underground bunker, and the two spend a bit of time wondering how they're going to get back out now that the rubble has jammed the hatch shut. It's all padding of course, but it does allow us the wonderful shot of the kilted Jamie at the top of a ladder with the skirted Cully peering intently up at him! How wonderfully camp can you get? They do escape though, thanks to the rubble being made of polystyrene...

The scenes shot on location in a sandpit take on an impressive scale absent from earlier location scenes, and Barry makes the boys' assault on the Quarks quite exciting, with Jamie running headlong toward camera in the wake of a series of explosions. There's also a giant polystyrene boulder which Cully hurls down a ravine to crush a Quark, and Jamie throwing a load of rocks at some other Quarks in a moment of primitive supremacy!

Meanwhile, the Doctor and Zoe are trying to work out what the Dominators want from Dulkis, after being rather unwisely left alone in the spaceship. I love how the Doctor continues to gently tease Zoe for her verbosity. "Well, the Quarks use ultrasound, so presumably it must be a fuel capable of producing a high enough energy quotient to sustain an amplifying complex of considerably sophisticated design," rattles Zoe, to which the Doctor smirks: "Yes. Must be pretty powerful too."

By the end of the episode, guest characters are starting to drop like flies. First there's the pretty gruelling torture of Teel (it happens out of shot, but Giles Block probably does his best work in the serial by making whatever they're doing to him sound very painful), followed by the death of Balan. Johnson Bayly really makes the most of his death scene, staggering across the set, and quite impressively smouldering from within his costume. Bayly is just one of a string of poor actors in The Dominators, but he certainly knows how to milk a dispatch! Incidentally, the actor Ian Ogilvy tells in his memoirs how, in the early 1960s, Johnson successfully sued a local newspaper while appearing in repertory at Canterbury's Marlowe Theatre. The paper's theatre critic had written that Johnson was a lacklustre actor and hadn't learnt his lines, and Johnson succeeded in winning damages, a retraction and a public apology from the reporter!

Anyway, the cliffhanger. It's the same one. Again. Toba threatens to kill someone. He never learns, does he?

First broadcast: August 31st, 1968

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: "If you'd care to make an appointment!" Classic!
The Bad: All four of The Dominators' cliffhangers are essentially the same. It's lazy (perhaps what DWM's 2018 Time Team would call "cheap tricks"?).
Overall score for episode: ★★★★☆☆☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Episode 5...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; 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.