The Dominators - Episode 1

This marks the opening episode of the sixth season and it’s the final for Patrick Troughton as the Doctor. It’s also the first for Wendy Padbury as a proper companion. There was a repeat of ‘Evil of the Daleks’ for viewers in 1968 so we get a bit of a reminder of this when we first see the Doctor, Zoe and Jamie. This season was the one that seemed to have lots of production problems.  The first seemed to be in this story as it was intended to be a six parter but got reduced to five at the last minute. This was originally written by Mervyn Haisman & Henry Lincoln who had written the Yeti stories in the previous season and they weren’t told of this change and this was to be their last contribution to the series and also they had their names taken off. So Norman Ashby is given credit.

The story takes place of Dulkis which the Doctor has visited before and is suppose to be a planet of peace which is the same situation as the First Doctor had in ‘The Rescue’. The difference between the two stories is that this is filmed in a quarry (a classic cliché for Doctor Who) and the problem with this is that it doesn’t allow Morris Barry to do a great deal. Things don’t start well. The change between a ship landing from a glass painting to a model is rather unconvincing. It’s a shame that the first thing we see in this story is some rather lame effects even by 1960’s Doctor Who standards. Another thing that stands out was that Patrick Troughton doesn’t appear in the location filming.

The problems with this story start from the 1:35 minute mark. The two Dominators are charisma free who are boring from the very moment they are on screen. The only thing worse are the Dulcian. They should really be called Dull-cians because not only are they like a bunch of rich posh people who are trying to find something interesting to do, but they are wearing stupid ‘dresses’ and it looks like the costume budget was another thing that suffered during this season. The Quarks are probably the only thing good thing about this story and they aren’t the greatest creation. It’s like they were trying to find something that could rival the Daleks but this definitely wasn’t it.

It was something that I commented on during her debut story but it seems that Zoe has definitely developed and is the typical companion which isn’t a bad thing but she does a strange (but narratively obvious idea) where she separates herself from the Doctor and Jamie, thus allowing them to send Zoe on a different plot strand. Zoe was quite good in this and I have confidence that she will continue with this form for the rest of the season.

It’s not the best start to the sixth season and also to this story. I think that the fact that its only five episodes means that had it not being for the regulars and also the Quarks that prevent this story from being the worst that I have watched so far. In fact as I write this the first episode is currently placed in 180^th place out of 210. That puts it in the bottom 50 but as a story its currently in 40^th place (out of 44). Hopefully the next five episodes will do better but from memory I don’t think that this will be the case but at least I have got through the tough period and will be on mainly DVD’s for the next month.