The Dominators

Dear Gary—

I’m so glad The Dominators is not a recon. You have to have the visual on this one just to watch the Navigator and his underling bicker throughout. The facial expressions on these stoic, grim faced, almost straight jacketed Dominators as the frustration mounts is too good to miss, and I can almost hear ‘One of these days . . .’ as the two become increasingly exasperated with one another. However it is the Doctor who ultimately carries through and gives them the ‘Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon.’

Apparently the Quark robots of this episode were created for their merchandising potential, but I think the Dominators themselves should have been given their own sitcom.

“Command accepted,” Probationer Toba  says through gritted teeth to Navigator Rago time and time again, and time and time again he deviates from the orders (no Dalek he) and wastes precious Quark energy on foolish things like killing and hunting down humans when they should be drilling holes in the planet surface. Time and time again Navigator Rago takes Toba to task for disobedience.

“A Dominator must be obeyed without question,” Rago tells the indolent inhabitants of Dulkis, yet his own subordinate continually questions and defies him. Comic strip lines of frustration seem to emanate from his head each time he returns to find Toba flouting his orders.

The Dulcians themselves provide their own comedy routine. “Better do nothing than do the wrong thing,” is their philosophy, which rather makes a joke out of their Council debate when faced with an alien threat. They have three choices: fight, submit, or flee. They can’t make up their minds to any of them so they just sit back and wait.

This do nothing philosophy also makes a joke of their education. When the Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe first meet Educator Balan he trots out his star pupil Kando to recount the history of the dead island of the planet on which they have landed. She almost stands at attention as she recites the memorized words, getting prompts from Balan as she stumbles in her rote.  She finishes with a proud smile, and she obviously had no clue what any of it really meant.

“We are taught to accept fact, being foolish to contemplate fantasy in the face of reality,” she tells our travelers when told they are not from Dulkis. “You are here; this is fact. That you come from another planet I accept because I have no other means of proving it.” And her teacher reiterates, “It seems pointless to spend time searching for reasons to prove facts; a fact is a truth.”

Not very enquiring, these peace loving, do nothing Dulcians. “We have proved that universal gentleness will cause aggression to die.” They have also proved that it causes intelligence, creativity, imagination, and originality to die as well. I can very well see how this pacifist planet was intended as a satirical commentary on the hippie movement.

Cully is the lone stand out: “Vegetables, the lot of you; you don’t live you exist.” However it’s hard to accept him as the rugged individualist he portrays when he is running around looking like Benny Hill clothed in some weird Roman like dress and sandals.

And so we have the Dulcians, eager to lend a helping hand if asked, and the Dominators who never ask for assistance: “What we need we take.” Add the Doctor and his companions to this as a wild card and you have quite a delightful story.

What the Dominators want is to blow up the planet, converting it into an energy supply to replenish their own depleted resources. And if there are any able bodied humans around they will be taken back as slaves. One meeting with the Dulcian Council, however, and Navigator Rago determines that none are even worthy of that.

Two qualities are required of a Dominator, Rago states: “intelligence and detachment.” On the one hand, the potential Dulcian slaves struggle with intelligence. On the other, his own Probationer struggles with detachment. He is surrounded by idiots; one of these days . . . .

The Doctor plays with this theme of intelligence.  “An unintelligent enemy is far less dangerous than an intelligent one, Jamie,” he explains to his companion after failing a simple test the Dominators had set before him. “Just act stupid,” he advises Jamie, and then adds parenthetically, “do you think you can manage that?” Later he exclaims to Jamie, “It’s so simple only you could have thought of it.”

The Doctor and Jamie have this kind of easy, amusing rapport that brightens all of these Troughton stories.

Jamie: “You can’t just take things to pieces—not when we’re flying at heaven knows what speed.”

Doctor: “I think I’ve got it!”

Jamie: “You think; you mean you’re not sure?”

But for all of the banter between the Doctor and Jamie there is some real, heartfelt camaraderie. Theirs is a gentle humor, unlike the Rago and Toba show.

An interesting side note here, Gary. The Dominators run a body scan on Jamie and determine that he is inferior for having only one heart. They assume the Doctor is of the same make up and don’t bother to scan him. Later they scan a Dulcian and find two hearts. A tantalizing hint.

We also get a second appearance of the sonic screwdriver in The Dominators, and we learn that it is “a little more than a screwdriver,” as the Doctor uses it to burn a hole through the wall.

And in the end the Doctor dominates the Dominators, using the Dominator’s nuclear fission seed against them, sending them ‘Bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon.’

I was sorry to see the end of the bickering duo, but the Doctor and Jamie (and let’s not forget Zoe) continue on, as do I, Gary . . .