Episode 214: The Dominators (5)

Synopsis:

Toba orders a Quark to kill the prisoners one by one until they tell him where Cully and Jamie are.

Educator Balan is the first to suffer, and Toba informs the Doctor that he will be next to die...

As the robot confronts him, Rago suddenly returns from his trip to the Capitol. Once again he berates his underling for wasting resources, referring both to the energy levels of the Quarks and the destruction of their labour force. He demands to know progress on the drilling, and Toba announces that the perimeter boreholes are completed, with rockets primed, but work has yet to begin on the central one. Rago warns his Probationer that he will be left to die on this planet if he does not complete the work on schedule. He asks if the atomic seed capsule is at critical mass, and Toba checks an egg-shaped metallic object. He reports it is almost ready, then is sent to ensure the central bore hole is completed, taking the captives with him.

Rago then contacts their Fleet Leader for feedback on the use of the Dulcians as slave labour.

Jamie and Cully are in the bomb shelter, planning their next attack on the Quarks. Through the periscope, they see the Doctor and the others arrive outside the museum, for this is where the central borehole is to be drilled.

They decide to free the prisoners and bring them down here. Jamie takes a sheet off the bed, and slips outside to try to tie up the legs of one of the Quarks. Seeing him, the Doctor creates a diversion and the Quark is overpowered. Everyone escapes into the shelter.

On hearing the alarm, Toba rushes to the scene. He is ordering the Quarks to seek out and destroy the captives when Rago appears and countermands the order.

He points out that the Quarks have barely sufficient power to complete the drilling and cannot be wasted on searches. He tells Toba that the Fleet Leader has advised that the Dulcians would not be suitable as a slave labour force, and so their escaped prisoners will die soon enough along with the rest of their people once their work is done.

The quicker they finish, the sooner they will see them perish.

In the shelter, the Doctor explains the Dominator plan to the others. They know that their spaceships absorb radiation to use as a power source. The outer crust of Dulkis has been found to be at its thinnest here. The Dominators are drilling down into the molten magma, which will trigger a volcanic holocaust into which a powerful source of radiation will be introduced - the atomic seed capsule. The planet will be transformed into a radioactive mass, which will act as fuel for the Dominator fleet. The Dulcians will be wiped out, their planet destroyed.

He points out that the central bore hole, which is the one down which the capsule will be dropped, is the one only a short distance from the museum building.

Jamie suggests digging a tunnel from the shelter to the borehole, using the periscope to align it. The Doctor agrees. They will need time, so the drilling must be disrupted as much as possible.

Once they get the direction, he starts off the tunnel using his sonic screwdriver to burn through the shelter wall.

As the others take turns digging, he and Zoe mix up some chemicals from the medical kit - creating a small explosive. Jamie and Cully will go back on the hunt, now armed, to try to wreck as many Quarks as they can find and so hinder the drilling.

They destroy a small group of the robots. Toba is forced to restrain himself from going off to kill the attackers. When Rago appears, the Probationer angrily claims that he should have been allowed to destroy the Dulcians earlier. Rago indicates that they only have eight remaining Quarks, which is only just enough to complete the drilling. He sends Toba to the museum site.

However, Jamie and Cully then attack Toba's party at the central bore, halting the drilling.

Rago orders him to continue his work, as he will personally deal with their attackers. He organises the remaining Quarks to form a pincer movement which will trap Jamie and Cully. This almost succeeds, and Cully is hit. Luckily, the low energy reserves of the robots means he has only suffered a temporary paralysis in the arm.

Jamie manages to get him back to the bomb shelter.

Through the periscope, they are shocked to see that the central borehole is complete, whilst they have a few more feet to excavate. They see Rago approach the hole with the atomic seed capsule.

The Doctor completes the tunnel just as the capsule is dropped, and he succeeds in catching it. 

He is alarmed to find that it is perfectly sealed, however, and he will not be able to open and defuse it. As it could be detonated at any moment, he realises that they must get it off the planet immediately - and there is only one way of achieving this.

Rago and Toba return to their ship, preparing to contact their fleet to approach the planet for refuelling.

The Doctor rushes out of the museum, running with the capsule towards the Dominator spaceship which is just about to lift off.

The Doctor slips it inside the main entrance, narrowly avoiding becoming trapped with it as the doors close.

The ship takes off.

Rago and Toba spot the capsule too late. Before they can halt the countdown or eject it from the ship, it explodes and the craft is obliterated. The rockets at the perimeter bore holes have been detonated, witnessed by the Doctor and his companions as they reach the TARDIS - the young Dulcians having been sent to use the travel capsule to return to the mainland.

The Doctor explains that there will be a volcanic disturbance, but it will be confined to the island. 

Jamie points out to the Doctor that this is where they are - and they see a torrent of lava bearing down on them...

Next time: The Mind Robber

Data

Written by Norman Ashby

Recorded: Friday 14th June 1968 - Television Centre Studio TC3

First broadcast: 5.15pm, Saturday 7th September 1968

Ratings: 5.9 million / AI 53

VFX: Ron Oates

Designer: Barry Newbury

Director: Morris Barry

Critique:

As we said last time, Henry Lincoln and Mervyn Haisman had submitted a script for Episode 5 of this story, only to be told the very same day that Derrick Sherwin and Terrance Dicks had rewritten the fourth instalment and were going to wrap the adventure up in only five parts instead of six. Presumably very little of what we see here is theirs.

The conflict between the writers and the production team extended beyond the troubled writing of the story, however. Originally asked to come up with a new monster which might replace the Daleks as a recurring foe, the prospect of merchandising opportunities was also very much on the minds of the creators of the Quark robots.

With their relationship already strained, you can imagine how the writers felt when they discovered that the BBC had already given permission for the Quarks to appear in the "Dr Who" strip in TV Comic.

This had been agreed on Thursday 23rd May, between the BBC and Polystyle Publications, and allowed the use of the Quarks for up to 12 months in the strip.

Haisman and Lincoln, however, had entered into negotiations with Walter Tuckwell - the man who marketed the Daleks for Terry Nation - in the belief that they owned the Quarks outright, and had even copyrighted the name.

The writers also claimed that the actual design was theirs, or near enough to take legal action over. When DWM covered this story in their 'Archives' feature (Issue 262), they published a drawing of the Quark as the writers had envisioned it. This wasn't contemporary with the production, however, but drawn much more recently from memory. 

We see a square box with a dome covering the top - not a globe - and which has a pair of eyes to the sides. Two tiny caterpillar tracks can be seen on the bottom of the box, and emerging from the sides are a pair of spindly metal arms. The writers did specify that these were intended to accept different attachments of weapons or tools.

Other than the box-like body, there's no similarity between their design and Martin Baugh's final version, which Sherwin also claimed to have had a hand in. 

A meeting was held in July with John Henderson of the BBC's Copyright Department, to discuss the conflicting opinions over ownership. As well as the writers and Bryant and Sherwin, present at this meeting were Baugh and Dicks. Baugh claimed never to have seen the sketch put forward to the production team, and Sherwin stated that he had come up with a rough draft based around the Servo Robot from The Wheel in Space, adding the arms which folded into the body. Both Sherwin and Bryant explained that the writers had been asked to incorporate a new monster, so the idea came from them originally.

Henderson agreed that the writers could have 25% ownership.

There was also confusion over the TV Comic deal, which the writers had hoped would include both the Dominators and the Quarks. The meeting ended with the 25% offer, whereas Haisman asked for a lump sum rather than a percentage. This was refused.

The following Monday, the writers came back with a request for a lump sum of £5000 and 65%, plus a deal with Tuckwell, whilst the BBC countered that there would be no commercial exploitation of the Quarks, or the Yeti, unless the 25% offer was accepted.

The arguments continued until the writers threatened to pull the story entirely, as well as barring the use of the Quarks in the comic strip, by seeking an injunction. The BBC then settled for an undisclosed sum - but it was the last time the writers were involved with Doctor Who, permission already having been given back in May for the reuse of the Lethbridge-Stewart character from The Web of Fear in a forthcoming Cyberman story. "The Laird of McCrimmon" - a third Great Intelligence / Yeti story, which would have written out Jamie - never got beyond the outline stage.

In a later interview, Haisman claimed that Henderson had come down fully on their side and reprimanded the production team, but what paperwork survives disputes this.

Whilst the robots were allowed to appear in TV Comic, the Dominators would be nowhere to be seen. The comic strip Quarks now operated as an independent and autonomous hostile force - as we'll see in the next "Episodes: Afterlife" post...

Much of the location filming we see in this episode was conducted between the Gerrards Cross and Kent sandpits between Thursday 25th April and Friday 3rd May. It was on the final day at the Gerrards Cross location that Artur Cox sustained an injury to his ankle, requiring his leg to be put in plaster.

Hines and Cox were filmed running around the locations as they first attacked the Quarks, and then began to be hunted down by them. At one point Hines seems to slip out of character as Jamie apologises to Cully for having stumbled on the sandy surface, so probably an ad lib by the actor to his colleague.

The filming at Gerrards Cross on Thursday 2nd May was in place of a day's work originally scheduled for Ealing, which the director sacrificed in order to get all the location material he wanted.

A second extra day was then organised for Friday 3rd May, when only the Quarks and actors Ronald Allen and Kenneth Ives were required.

We know that Chris Jeffries was present at Gerrards Cross on the very first day of filming, so the sequence where the Doctor runs towards the Dominator ship with the seed capsule was presumably filmed on that day. It is noticeable on screen that Troughton is being doubled in this scene.

The model filming for the final episode had taken place on Friday 26th April, at the Puppet Theatre in Television Centre. The lift-off of the Dominator ship was simply the film of its landing in Episode 1 reversed. Its explosive destruction was filmed during this session.

The burning of the wall with the sonic screwdriver was filmed at Ealing on Tuesday 30th April.

 

The final studio recording on the story began with a filmed reprise of Balan's death. An extra then stood in for Johnson Bayly for the remainder of the scene.

A camera inlay was used to indicate the view through the bomb shelter's periscope.

This is the earliest surviving episode to feature the sonic screwdriver, and here we see a pen torch being used as the prop - identical to one which William Hartnell had used in The Brink of Destruction, where the Doctor employed it to demonstrate to Susan what had gone wrong with the Fast Return Switch.

An overhead mirror shot was used to show the Doctor sketching out the Dominator plan on a table top with a chinagraph pen, as used to mark film reels for editing.

The Doctor describes the pills from the shelter medical kit as "No. 9 Pills". This probably comes from Troughton himself as an ex-Royal Navy man. During the First and Second World Wars, the British military issued these to troops as a laxative...

A small flash charge was rigged to be detonated when Troughton threw the homemade bomb behind him.

Recording breaks were mostly to allow cast movements from set to set, and to set up the chaotic scene after Toba and the drilling party have been attacked.

The end credits ran over stock footage of a volcanic eruption - that of Surtsey Island, off Iceland, in November 1963.

There were two small cuts to the ends of scenes made in editing. The first was the Doctor hurriedly telling Cully to give his regards to his father, and the second featured Toba vainly trying to stop the countdown for the seed capsule's detonation.

The Dominators was sold as 16mm film prints to a number of territories, one of which was Australia where a number of sequences, mostly from the fourth and fifth instalments, were cut prior to broadcast. These included the deaths of Tensa and Balan, and the torture of Teel. The BBC Film Library had retained 16mm copies of all but Episode 3. The British Film Institute held the censored Australian copies, plus a 35mm copy of Episode 3. An uncut version of Episode 5 was later loaned to the BBC by a private collector for copying, and the Australian censor cuts then turned up in 1996. The complete unedited version of the story was only to be found on the DVD release, as the earlier VHS release did not feature the cut scenes.

The paperwork accompanying the overseas sales of the story still had Haisman and Lincoln listed as the writers.

I'll make a confession here, and that is that I actually rather like The Dominators - but in the sense that I adore cheap 1950's sci-fi and horror B-movies. They're a guilty pleasure.

I certainly don't agree with the political sentiments of the original writers, but this is a perfectly okay adventure. Far from classic, but serviceable.

We have aliens who are threatening a peaceful planet with a sound motivation - not just invasion for no real reason. There's the complication of the native population being pacifists, without weapons or armies to use them. The Doctor and companions arrive, and fortunately meet one local who thinks differently to the societal norm. Together, they decide to take action on their own. We also see Teel, who is initially as committed to pacifist principles as the rest but - through contact with the friendly alien visitors - comes to see their point of view and is prepared to take up the struggle. Haisman and Lincoln may have had a negative view of the younger generation, but hopefully this story ends with people like Cully and Teel representing that generation on Dulkis, ready to shake up their dithering elders.

One thing which does concern, obviously, is what does the Dominator fleet do next? There's a very good chance that they'll simply turn up and obliterate the planet in revenge for the destruction of their ship.

The one silver lining I can see is what I've mentioned a couple of times already. Are the Dominators really as hard as they like to make out? Are they really masters of ten galaxies? If it's all bravado, they might think the Dulcians aren't as weak as Rago stated, and Dulkis is capable of defending itself - so simply steer clear.

We also have to wonder if all Dominator spacecraft have crews as dysfunctional as this one...

Another concern, probably due to the way the story was truncated, is what happens to Cully, Teel and Kando. Hopefully they can all squeeze into that little travel capsule, and Rago hasn't sabotaged it to stop his much needed labour force escaping in it - assuming they have time to find it before the molten lava reaches them. We don't see the Doctor give them any specific directions to find it, assuming he even knows where it is considering it was Rago who used it last. He simply tells Teel to take Cully and Kando to the capsule and return to the Capitol.

A rushed ending is the price to be paid for the condensing of the story's second half into just two episodes.

As well as having a soft spot for the story, I've also loved the Quarks ever since the first Weetabix promotion, and that was long before I ever saw them on screen and heard the malicious child-like voice they were given.

The regulars are also very good in this, with Jamie taking up the action and Zoe, in what is her first proper story as a TARDIS traveller, joining forces with the Doctor to use their scientific knowledge to work out what the Dominators want here. This will be the template for the remainder of the Troughton era: Hines getting the action and Padbury the more cerebral contribution in concert with Troughton's Doctor.

We also get some more Doctor / Jamie humour after the latter suggests digging the tunnel:

The Doctor: "But Jamie, it's a brilliant idea! It's so simple only you could have thought of it".

If the story has a problem, beyond the writers' mean-spirited intentions, it's that it is rather slow to get going - so the idea of cutting it back by an episode was a very good one - even if this was very messily done (more off screen than on). A pity in some ways that Sherwin and Dicks didn't intervene with the narrative sooner.

We also have to lament the loss of a third Yeti story due to the breakdown between the writers and production team, which sounded like a promising one judging by its brief synopsis. The Great Intelligence would have to wait until 2012 to make its return.

Trivia

• The ratings for this story end with a steep drop of more than 1.5 million viewers, though the appreciation figure rallies a little.
• The Doctor was originally to have caught the atomic seed capsule in his woolly hat, as worn in Fury From The Deep - something added by Sherwin.
• A BBC Audience Research Report was prepared on 19th September, looking at the opening instalment of The Dominators. Whilst Troughton and Hines were praised, some felt the series had now ceased to hold any interest or appeal, the Quarks were just "square Daleks", and stories were too fantastical now that there were no more purely historical stories. It was generally felt to be an "unrewarding" story.
• This would prove to be Morris Barry's final contribution to the series as a director. He would go on to produce a number of BBC dramas, including the excellent 1977 adaptation of Dracula, which starred Louis Jourdain as the Count. It was this production which led to Horror of Fang Rock being hastily written to replace Terrance Dicks' vampire story, which would eventually be resurrected as State of Decay. Barry did have one final encounter with Doctor Who after returning to acting late in life, when he played engineer Tollund in The Creature From The Pit. He can also be seen in the Blake's 7 episode "Killer", The Day of the Triffids, and an episode of sitcom Are You Being Served?
• The September issue of Recorder and Music Magazine featured an item about Troughton's playing of the instrument in the programme, mentioning letters to Radio Times about whether it was a left-handed version or not.

• Frazer Hines held a press call on the evening of 4th September to announce that he would soon be leaving the programme, under pressure from his agent to move into feature films. This made the following day's newspapers - such as this from the Daily Mirror:

• Finally, another excuse to show an image of the replica Quark from the 2025 exhibition at Peterborough Museum: