What's Wrong With... The Dominators

As far as its Script Editor was concerned, almost everything was wrong with The Dominators. 

Derrick Sherwin did some fairly extensive pruning and the six-parter ended up a five-parter. One of the problems was a lack of incident, with a lot more scenes of old men in frocks arguing - of which there are too many even in the truncated version as broadcast.

This did not go down well with the writers - Henry Lincoln and Mervyn Haisman - who had just been so successful with the two Yeti stories. They decided to have their names removed from the story, so it went out under the name of Norman Ashby (taken from their father-in-laws). 

It wasn't just the story editing which they objected to. Behind the scenes there was also a huge argument about the Quarks. Haisman and Lincoln intended that the squat robots could and should be marketed - possibly becoming as popular as the Daleks had been in terms of merchandise. The writers wanted to do their own deals with the Quarks, but the BBC pointed out that they weren't sole copyright holders. The BBC meanwhile, were allowing the robots to appear in TV Comic, without letting the writers know.

The fallout from this situation was the ending of Haisman and Lincoln's association with the programme. A planned third Yeti story, designed to write Jamie out of the series, and possibly to have ended the Troughton era, never materialised. 

However, they did allow the further use of the Brigadier - a character they had first used in The Web of Fear, though Douglas Camfield and Derrick Sherwin would argue that the character as developed was as much theirs as the writers'.

As for the story itself...

Did the Dominators change their name after they started conquering other planets, to reflect their new lifestyle, or were they always called that? If the two we see here are anything to go by it is a wonder that they have conquered one planet, let alone ten galaxies. We only have two Dominators on this spaceship, despite it being on an important mission to find a fuel source for the entire fleet. There's the Navigator (Rago) and a Probationer (Toba) - so only one qualified person on this mission. Toba seems to think that he'll pass his probation by arguing with his superior and going against orders. A militaristic society like the Dominators surely would never tolerate such behaviour. Rago would report back at the end of the mission and Toba would be toast. Unless this is a society like the Star Trek parallel universe one, where it's accepted that you get ahead by killing your superiors. If this was the case, why not make it more explicit?

Rago thinks a good way to test the intelligence (and therefore threat level) of aliens is to hand them a deadly weapon which they could turn round and shoot him with.

The ironic thing is - Toba was right all along. Rago should have let him kill the others, especially the Doctor and his companions.

Why do the Dominators hang about when all the radiation has gone from the island? They don't go looking elsewhere for it. And if the mission includes looking for slave labour, then an uninhabited island probably isn't the best place to base yourself.

Talking of the Dominators' mission - surely the rest of the fleet will come looking when Rago and Toba fail to return, and will nuke Dulkis anyway.

It's one thing for a planet to be named after a geographical or meteorological feature. Explorers do this sort of thing all the time. It's another thing for a planet to just happen to be called something relating to the transient psychology of the natives - as we have with Dulkis and its sweet, peace-loving inhabitants.

How forward thinking were Senex's parents to have given him that name? (Then again, his son Cully is hardly the teenager he's made out to be - so maybe the Dulcians grow old quickly).

Cully's adventuring scheme is to take people to the vicinity of the "Island of Death", like it's some big forbidden thing - but then we find out that students are visiting it all the time, officially. Cully's friends could have gone and wandered about for free.

Just how many Quarks are there?  We get the impression that they are scarce, so need to be protected, yet quite a few are seen to be destroyed. 6 are destroyed on screen, and we hear of more being destroyed off screen, but later we're told that there are 8 left. Even when they are not wasting power blowing things up on Toba's orders, they don't seem to be very energy efficient. Rago is almost paranoid about them running out of power before their work is done. 

Rago stops the Quarks killing prisoners because he wants to conserve their energy. However, he could have killed them by other means - strangling them or using that laser gun from the museum.

The Quark weapons are said to use ultrasound - so how does that make someone burst into flames? And because of the budget, the killing effect used in Part One isn't seen again - replaced by simply pumping smoke through the victim's costume.

Despite having heads which look like they have 360 degree vision, or can turn round, they are easy to sneak up on, and even a bedsheet can foil them. Again we have to ask how the Dominators can have been so successful in conquering galaxies.

Finally, this story was the season opener. The BBC decided to start it in August - when the weather is hot and everyone is out and about, or away on holiday, so the ratings weren't as good as they could have been.