PRODUCER: Peter Bryant (The Dominators - The Space Pirates), Derrick Sherwin (The War Games)
SCRIPT EDITOR: Derrick Sherwin (The Dominators - The Mind Robber, The Space Pirates), Terrance Dicks (The Invasion - The Seeds of Death, The War Games)
REGULAR CAST: Patrick Troughton (The Doctor), Frazer Hines (Jamie), Wendy Padbury (Zoe)
Synopsis:
A fleet of saucer-like spacecraft is travelling close to the planet Dulkis, and one of the ships breaks formation to land there.
It touches down on a rocky uninhabited island and two humanoid figures emerge. In command is Navigator Rago, who is accompanied by his Probationer, Toba. Toba reports that the radiation they came in search of has been successfully absorbed.
They are members of the warlike Dominator race, who claim to be the Masters of the Ten Galaxies.
Rago points out that the planet's crust is thin here, and the natives may be suitable as slave labour. When Toba relishes the idea of destroying them, Rago cautions this should only happen if necessary. He then orders robots named Quarks, of which there are several on board, to begin surveying and marking out drill sites...
Just off the island, a small domed craft is approaching. On board is a young man named Cully, who is accompanied by three friends - Wahed, Etnin and Tolata. He has organised this unofficial trip to the vicinity of the island, which is strictly out of bounds apart from regular visits by students. The place is known as the "Island of Death" as some 172 years ago it was used as an atomic testing site and is heavily irradiated. Cully is the rebellious son of the Dulcian leader, and is frequently in trouble over his many unauthorised activities such as this tour.
His three passengers question if they really are where he claims - they could be visiting any stretch of coastline. Suggestions they get out to explore are dismissed by him due to the radiation. The craft has a warning system to alert them if they get too close, triggered by the radiation count. However, they suddenly notice that this has failed and they are speeding towards the island.
The craft runs aground.
The trio use this lack of radiation as proof that Cully has tricked them, and leave the craft to look around. Cully chases after them, as he remembers they haven't paid him yet.
He is about to catch up with them when he hears them announce that they have seen a strange craft and unfamiliar robots, which they want to look at.
Toba observes them approach and orders the Quarks to destroy. Cully is horrified to see his three friends gunned down without warning.
He had managed to duck down under cover, and decides to slip back to his craft - narrowly missing the arrival of a battered blue Police Box.
When Rago is informed of the deaths of the natives he is angry. They should have been captured for assessment.
The Doctor emerges from the TARDIS with Jamie and Zoe. He is exhausted from producing mental images of his last encounter with the Daleks for Zoe's benefit, and on recognising that they are on Dulkis - which he has visited before - he realises that this is the perfect spot for a holiday. The Dulcians are a friendly, peaceful people.
Cully is approaching the beach but discovers that Toba and the Quarks have gotten there first. Once again Toba orders destruction, and the craft explodes.
The blast is heard by the Doctor and his companions, and Jamie questions his earlier comment about the people here being peaceful. They go to see what has happened, and soon come upon a ruined building.
Inside is a collection of weaponry - and mannequins made up to look like the victims of radiation sickness. Zoe suspects that this war museum has suffered atomic blast damage, but the Doctor is adamant that the Dulcians he met before rejected violence of any kind.
Worried that they are walking about unprotected in a radiation zone, they are about to return to the TARDIS when they are confronted by three figures dressed in hazmat suits...
A short time later the trio of figures - Educator Balan and students Teel and Kando - are discussing the strangers in their survey unit. They have come to carry out the weekly survey of the island.
The Doctor and his companions are in a decontamination chamber, but Teel is surprised that they show no trace of radiation. Balan therefore agrees to let them out.
They are told about this island being a nuclear test site, and is a prohibited area due to the radioactive fallout from the weapon detonated here 172 years ago. Such tests were then banned and the Dulcians pursued their current pacifist ideology.
The Doctor and Zoe are puzzled by the lack of radiation.
Rago is once again reprimanding Toba for his rash actions in destroying the craft on the beach before examining its technology. They too are curious about the lack of radiation on the planet - other than what was here when they landed.
Drilling sites have now been identified and marked out.
Cully finds one of these sites - identified by a star-shaped indentation on the ground - beside the TARDIS. He hides as Rago and Toba arrive to inspect it. Toba enquires if the box should be destroyed.
After they have gone, he is discovered by Teel and taken to the survey unit.
The Dominators come across the museum building and realise that the lack of radiation must have been due to a single atomic test here in the past. They note that all the weapons seem ancient, and Rago orders that locals must be taken alive to be questioned about their current weaponry.
Cully is brought into the survey unit and starts to tell everyone about the spaceship, and of the robots which attacked his three friends. Infamous for his tricks, Balan assumes that the Doctor and his companions are they, and he is telling tall tales again.
On hearing that the men from the spaceship were talking about destroying the TARDIS, the Doctor and Jamie rush off to check on it.
Zoe stays behind, and makes a friend of Cully when she shows an enquiring mind - something he accuses his own people of lacking. He tells her that his father is Senex, leader of the Dulcians. Teel reports some strange interference preventing them contacting their capitol, and Cully claims this to be the work of the robots he saw.
The Doctor and Jamie find the TARDIS untouched, and examine the star-shaped mark. They see tracks leading away and decide to follow them.
They lead them to the spaceship and they begin to look around. The Doctor wants to go inside, but they suddenly spot Toba standing on a rocky outcrop nearby, flanked by two squat box-like robots - Quarks. Their arms, with built-in guns, extend from their bodies and take aim at them.
The robots ask the Probationer if they should destroy...
Data:Written by Norman Ashby (Henry Lincoln & Mervyn Haisman)
Recorded: Friday 17th May 1968 - Television Centre Studio TC4
First broadcast: 5.15pm, Saturday 10th August 1968
Ratings: 6.1 million / AI 52
VFX: Ron Oates
Designer: Barry Newbery
Director: Morris Barry
Guest cast: Ronald Allen (Rago), Kenneth Ives (Toba), Arthur Cox (Cully), Johnson Bayly (Balan), Giles Block (Teel), Felicity Gibson (Kando), Nicolette Pendrell (Tolata), Malcolm Terris (Etnin), Philip Voss (Wahed), John Hicks, Gary Wilson (Quarks), Sheila Grant (Quark Voices)
Critique:
The production of The Dominators was a very troubled affair - so much so that its writers, Henry Lincoln and Mervyn Haisman, would come to take their names off it...
They had enjoyed great success with the programme by devising the robot Yeti and their Great Intelligence master, providing two scripts for Season 5 featuring these - The Abominable Snowmen and The Web of Fear. These had been commissioned under the Innes Lloyd / Peter Bryant partnership, with Derrick Sherwin only becoming involved with them in the latter stages of their second story.
A third Yeti story was being considered, but for their next project they were asked to come up with a new monster that might replace the Daleks. Terry Nation had now relented in his refusal to allow their use in the series, but there were cost implications in their use and Bryant wanted other alternatives to join the Cybermen as recurring monsters.
Lincoln and Haisman were happy to oblige, as they hoped to exploit their new creations financially, just as Nation had with the Daleks.
The pair began with their monster before developing the story in which they were to feature. These were to be robots called Quarks, after the subatomic particles. They made a sketch of how they envisaged it - a box-like affair which travelled on a pair of caterpillar tracks, and with thin jointed arms to which different implements and weapons could be attached. For a head there was a revolving dome with eyes on either side, and atop this were antennae. The Quark was deliberately planned not to resemble the human form too much - the writers having carefully noted Ray Cusick's Dalek design.
In the same way that they had wanted the Yeti to look cuddly, yet be capable of extreme violence, the writers wanted child-like voices for the Quarks, which would contrast with their destructive capabilities.
This sketch of theirs would later form part of the breakdown between writers and production office...
As for the story itself, Lincoln and Haisman looked to current world events. 1968 had seen political disturbances across Europe and the USA, including student-led protests, which followed on from the rise of the Hippy peace movement the year before. The writers regarded this counter-culture as indicative of a slackening of morals. Taken to extremes, people would simply refuse to fight, preferring to give in. They would be unable, or unwilling, to defend even the peaceful principles they stood by if threatened by someone who did not share their views. Thinking this might make for the basis of a Doctor Who story - one where a peace-loving race were threatened by an alien aggressor - they ran it past Bryant on 1st January 1968, and he agreed that this could be developed further. Another story - "The Dreamspinners", by Paul Wheeler - had been dropped after its first episode had been submitted, and so the timescale for production would be tight. The writers first had to complete work on the Tigon horror film The Curse of the Crimson Altar, which was to star Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff. The deadline for their scripts was for the end of February so that production could get underway in April.
Problems began to arise when, in late January, Bryant and Sherwin requested changes - notifying the writers when they attended studio recording on the third episode of The Web of Fear.
These included a reduction in the amount of model work, and the news that Patrick Troughton would be unavailable for location filming - so any exterior scenes where the Doctor needed to be seen clearly on camera would have to be recorded in studio. The actor had negotiated an exemption from location work on two of the stories for Season 6 as part of his latest contract renewal.
Concerned by the extent of the changes, a meeting was asked for - but this was delayed. By the time they all met and agreed to make the changes, the writers assumed that their deadline would have been extended to accommodate them - only to learn that the original deadline still stood.
Sherwin relented on this but, unbeknownst to the writers, he wasn't terribly keen on proceeding with the story at all.
The main thing to take note of here is that this was supposed to be a six part story...
In the original script for this episode, the Dulcians were Dulkians. Balan and his students were to have arrived on the island in a much larger craft, and they would be based inside this, instead of a separate survey unit building. This was changed so that only the smaller travel capsules could be used, giving an excuse why only two people could ever travel at a time.
One scene discarded early on featured Rago reporting progress to his headquarters. (If by video-link, or a cut to an actor on another set, it would have necessitated a third Dominator costume - which may be why it was dropped).
Location filming got underway on Thursday 25th April at Gerrards Cross Sand & Gravel Pit, Buckinghamshire - the same location Morris Barry had used for the surface of Telos in The Tomb of the Cybermen. Another sandpit in Kent would also be used for exteriors of the planet, and the production team would return to Gerrards Cross the following week to film other sequences for later in the story. This was because not all the footage required was completed, so a day's filming at Ealing was sacrificed to return to the location.
Ronald Allen was unavailable on the first day of filming, and Troughton would be doubled by Chris Jeffries where necessary throughout. On this day was filmed the destruction of Cully's travel craft. This was a scale model, filmed in forced perspective.
Another forced perspective shot was for Jeffries and Frazer Hines standing in the foreground looking towards the spaceship - filmed at the Kent location on Sunday 28th.
With Allen absent on the 25th, scenes were filmed of Voss, Terris and Pendrell - playing Cully's hapless friends - briefly exploring the island before meeting their nasty fate. A special hexagonal mask was placed over the camera lens to give the Quark POV. This would also be employed in studio.
Being on film, a special inlay effect was used for the deaths of the trio, though it was only applied to a shot of Pendrell. Peter Netley of the BBC Graphics Department masked off the actress' face on a single frame of film and used an optical printer to add footage of oil floating on water over her features.
The interior of Cully's travel craft was recorded at Ealing on Tuesday 30th. Arthur Cox had injured his ankle the day before on location at Gerrards Cross and so was wearing a cast on his leg. Camera angles had to be planned to work round this, with Cully mainly seated.
Photographs of the landscape taken on location were placed behind the windows, for when it reached the island.
This filming completed the work required from Voss, Terris and Pendrell, and they would not be needed for the studio recording.
Giles Block would later state that the actors playing Dulcians had a gold sheen sprayed on their faces.
Model work took place on Friday 26th April in the Puppet Theatre at Television Centre. This included the landing of the Dominator spaceship, which was attached to a rod at the rear away from the camera. Talcum powder was used to suggest jets, and it had working retractable legs. The fleet of ships seen in the opening shot were based on jelly moulds. Cully's travel craft, which had the appearance of a lemon squeezer so probably was, was also filmed - being pulled along through a bed of dry ice.
Following two weeks at Riverside, the series returned to Television Centre, which would be its home for the duration of this story - though not always in the same studio.
Joining the cast as the two Dominators were Ronald Allen, who had been a regular on the soap Compact which had been produced by Morris Barry, and Kenneth Ives, who had been a stuntman with Derek Ware's outfit HAVOC. Johnson Bayly had also appeared in Compact, and had also featured in its short-lived replacement soap 199 Park Lane, which Barry had also been involved with.
Rehearsals were not a happy time for Wendy Padbury, as she felt that Barry bullied her as the newest member of the cast - disciplining her as a means of keeping everyone else under control. Despite having been an actor himself, Barry was much more of a technical director than an actor's director, and Hines has also been highly critical of him in interviews.
During camera rehearsals, publicity photographs were taken of Allen and Ives outside the spaceship entrance and inside the museum, as well as images of the regulars with the survey team. Portrait shots were also taken of Felicity Gibson as Kando.
The main sets were the landing sites of both the spaceship and the TARDIS, the war museum and the survey unit. The landing sites both made use of large photographic blow-ups of the landscape as a backdrop. These photographs were taken at the story's other location, near Maidstone in Kent.
Barry Newbery constructed the museum as two linked sets - exterior and interior. He employed hexagonal bricks to suggest an alien building technique. As the exterior had to be shown in a more damaged state later, this construction method also helped.
The interior was dressed with a number of props from other stories as well as generic "ray guns" from stock. Of the previously seen items, note a Cyberman saucer from The Moonbase, also directed by Barry, hanging above the door, and suspended from the ceiling nearby is the base of the Gravitron probe from the same story.
The survey unit had various plants dotted around as set dressing, and there were three TV monitors on which scientific displays could be projected. Geometric logos were added to the walls and doors, again to suggest its alien nature. Strip lighting was used on the control panels.
Dry ice was employed as decontamination fumes.
Only one recording run-on was planned for the evening's recording - to move the cast from the museum set to the survey unit and to allow the Dulcian actors to remove their protective suits.
A flash charge was built into the museum wall for when one of the weapons is tested by Toba. Oddly, the budget-conscious Morris Barry decided not to use mannequins made up with radiation burns, and employed two extras instead. Like the death of Tolata, the make-up is rather gruesome for the time slot and family audience - more so because they are clearly people and not dummies.
One sequence was cut for timing reasons, the end of a scene in the survey unit after the Doctor and Jamie have left to check on the TARDIS. Zoe learned that Cully was unpopular as he didn't conform to the Dulcian "mindset", and an attempt was made to contact Senex by video, with Cully telling her that they were about to hear "Words of wisdom and a gentle reproof from on high...".
The director preferred the use of stock music in his productions to save on budgets, but for this story he relied on Brian Hodgson of the Radiophonic Workshop to provide special sounds. He created 81 pieces in total, including making a new master copy of the TARDIS materialisation.
This was one of four stories where Hodgson provided the entire soundtrack - the others being The Wheel in Space, The Mind Robber and The Krotons. Some of the special sounds heard here had previously been used in The Moonbase.
Sheila Grant spoke her lines as the Quarks very slowly, to be speeded up for the finished episodes. Her laugh was also sampled and this was modulated to provide all of the different sound effects for the robots, such as when they recharge or employ their molecular force.
The Dominators is a story which has a poor reputation, and for several reasons. The main one cited has always been its mean-spirited politics. The writers come across as conservative reactionaries, opposed to - or at the very least alarmed by - the global peace movement popular with young people of the time.
There's nothing original about this in the series. We saw similar arguments from Terry Nation back in his first ever Dalek story, in which the TARDIS crew challenge the pacifist ideals of the Thals - encouraging them to fight or risk death. I was never terribly keen on the message then, and am not here either.
There are a number of parallels with The Daleks, so that's certainly what Lincoln and Haisman were using as their model. We have the blond, good-looking pacifists versus aggressors, an irradiated landscape, and squat metallic monsters with potential for marketing.
We'll come back to the plot and its politics as the story develops.
In this particular episode we only have a couple of fairly minor issues.
No offence to him, but Arthur Cox was one of those actors who looked middle-aged even when he was young. If you wanted to get someone to play a rebellious youth then I'm sure there were plenty of other actors who might have suited the part better, visually.
Then there are the costumes. Martin Baugh is trying for a classical Grecian style, with a touch of toga in the robes for Balan and Etnin, and skirts for the younger Dulcians, including the "boys". The idea was that the robes got longer the older you were. The female costume was a diaphanous skirt worn over a leotard. The outfits just about work on Teel and Kando as younger people, and on Balan as the older figure. The costume does not do Arthur Cox any favours at all...
The Dominator costumes, on the other hand, are really rather good. They could have been kitted out in plain uniforms, but Baugh has given them these big hunched shoulders, like the carapace of a turtle. We don't know if their actual shoulders go that far up, or if it's just a fashion design, like the big shoulder pads of the '80's. As they are a warrior race, I personally think it unlikely they'd opt for such a restrictive suit unless they had to, so like to think this is their actual body shape.
If you're going to have humanoid aliens, then altering their physique somewhat is a good idea, rather than just sticking ridges on their face / heads a la Star Trek.
The bickering between the pair is interesting. Is Toba simply surly and insubordinate by nature, or is this what all Dominator crew relationships are like? If so, you wonder how they managed to master ten galaxies. Then again, this might just be braggadocio, as we've never come across them before or since.
The Quarks are held back to the cliffhanger and on film only - their appearance somewhat spoiled by Radio Times and Reveille publishing photos of them in advance (see below) - so we'll talk about them next time.
The effect used for the deaths of Cully's friends is quite horrific. As mentioned, we see Tolata freeze then the oil on water effect is overlaid on her face - as though the skin is melting. This could be achieved as this sequence was on film, so couldn't be replicated for the studio work.
There's only minimal VFX work on view here - just the spaceship fleet, Rago's saucer and Cully's lemon squeezer - with one establishing image of the ziggurat-style survey unit building, which looks like a glass shot. The saucer model is okay, if a little clichéd, but shots of it superimposed over a landscape coming in to land are unsatisfactory as it becomes transparent.
As an opening episode, there isn't really all that wrong with this. The villains are introduced, their purpose in coming here made clear: they've come to get something this planet has, which might require slave labour to get it. Drilling is mentioned. We also hear that their ship has absorbed the radiation on the island. They aren't simply invading.
The Dulcians are sketched in thanks to Cully. In his travel craft, and at the survey unit, he says quite a lot about this society, and we can see the survey team's lack of imagination backing some of his accusations up. There's little excitement - hence Cully coming up with his schemes, which are never authorised. They are also slaves to facts, as Kando points out when informed that the TARDIS travellers are not native to Dulkis: "We are taught to accept facts, being foolish to contemplate fantasy in the face of reality. You are here. This is fact. That you come from another planet I accept because I have no other means of proving it".
Balan merely finds the idea they are alien to be "interesting", and matter-of-factly says he'll note this in a report.
Cully's description of his own people? "Vegetables, the lot of you. You don't live, you exist".
We are on an uninhabited island, with only four groups of visitors present - so there's a reason for the limited number of characters we see. It isn't a planet where the cities only appear to have a dozen or so people living in them.
There's even a bit of humour in the script, courtesy of Troughton and Hines as the Doctor looks around the spaceship exterior:
Jamie: "You're not thinking what I think you're thinking, are you?"
The Doctor: "That, I think, Jamie, depends on what you think I am thinking".
Trivia:- Season 6 gets off to a slow start, ratings-wise, and with a disappointing appreciation figure - perhaps due to the launch being in the middle of the summer.
- The serial still did well against ITV, however, which was plunged into industrial action following a major shake-up of the regional franchises. An emergency schedule of repeats was being broadcast against the first few episodes of this story.
- This story was originally earmarked for Douglas Camfield to direct.
- Lincoln and Haisman seem to have adopted the Terry Nation naming convention, where planets are named for some aspect of their nature - political, geographical or climatic. Dulkis, derives its name from the Latin dulcis, meaning sweet.
- For many years fandom claimed that the original title for the story was "The Beautiful People". (That title was also claimed as a working one for Destiny of the Daleks).
- Cully's friends Wahed, Etnin and Tolata get their names from the Arabic for One, Two and Three.
- 'Cully', meanwhile, is either an archaic word for a gullible, easily fooled person, or slang for a pal or friend. In the story, Cully is more likely to be the trickster rather than the person tricked - so he's simply friend to the TARDIS crew.
- Senex is Latin for "old man".
- Kando means "beautiful" in Bengali.
- Ronald Allen will return to the series in 1970, to play Ralph Cornish in The Ambassadors of Death.
- Malcolm Terris will be back to play the treacherous Co-Pilot in The Horns of Nimon, who famously rips his trousers during his death scene. As this formed part of the cliffhanger, viewers got to see it happen again the following week.
- Sheila Grant will go on to play Jane Leeson in the opening episode of Colony in Space.
- And Arthur Cox is one of that select group of actors who appeared in both the classic era of the programme and 'NuWho'. He played Amy Pond's neighbour Mr Henderson in The Eleventh Hour.
- The weekly Reveille magazine published a set report in late June, illustrated with a photograph of a Quark in the Dominator spaceship. As well as the report, there were comments about the programme in general from Terry Nation, Kit Pedler, Peter Bryant and Bill Roberts (of Shawcraft Models). Larry Leake, who then ran the Doctor Who Fan Club, also contributed.
- Radio Times featured the start of the new season as one of its highlights for the week, illustrated with a photo of Rago with the Doctor, as well as providing a short plot outline with a photograph of the Quarks on the day's programme listings page:
