By Jessica Holmes

We’re beginning a brand new series of Doctor Who, and you know what that means. I get to ramble at length about it! The Dominators is our opening serial, coming from the pen of Norman Ashby, who I don’t believe has written for Doctor Who before, nor, as far as I can gather, anywhere else. How very curious.

Is this debut the start of greater things, or an omen of troubles to come? Let’s take a look at Doctor Who: The Dominators. (Note: this review covers four episodes in one go, so it's a little bit of a departure from earlier formats).

In Case You Missed It

The Dominators begins with the arrival of a couple of blokes with terrible fashion sense to the peaceful-to-a-fault world of Dulkis. No, it’s not the Doctor and Jamie, but the Dominators, Rago (Ronald Allen) and Toba (Kenneth Ives). They’ve popped in to refuel their ship, and perhaps also conquer this world and enslave its people. Nice blokes.

The Doctor and company (including new companion Zoe) arrive and soon encounter a team of local surveyors (the Dulceans) who are very surprised to find them here on this island, which until about five minutes ago was positively swimming in radiation. It turns out the Doctor’s choice of location for a beach holiday was a nuclear test site.

They’re soon joined by Cully (Arthur Cox). He's the sole person on the island who has seen the Dominators and lived to tell the tale. He tells them of how he and his friends crash-landed on the island, and approached the Dominators for help only to be slaughtered.

The Doctor and Jamie rush off to investigate these interlopers while Cully and Zoe travel to the planet’s capital to beg for help. Jamie and the Doctor get themselves captured (of course). Cully and Zoe can’t get anyone to listen to them, much less lift a finger to help them deal with the invaders.

The Doctor and Jamie fool the Dominators into thinking they’re too stupid to be worth any notice, or to even be useful as slave labour. The same can’t be said of the survey team, who end up as the Dominators’ slaves.

Zoe and Cully get captured on their return to the island. Unlike the survey team, they have the gumption to do something about it. They manage to get their hands on a weapon and attempt to take out the Dominators’ (frankly adorable) robot servants, but the plan goes awry thanks to the untimely intervention of the Doctor and Jamie. Cully and Jamie end up trapped in an underground bunker, separated from the rest of the group, while the Doctor and Zoe fall back into the Dominators’ hands.

Jamie and Cully don’t stay trapped for long, however.  They turn out to be rather good at disabling the robots, which creates enough of a distraction for the Dominators that the Doctor gets a chance to look around their ship and work out their plan. All this time, the Dominators have been drilling for something, but for what? The island has no mineral resources or oil. However, it is on a thin area of the planet’s crust, making it the ideal place to access the mantle. They’re making a volcano, and plan to blow up a nuclear device inside. The plan is all kinds of daft, but the bottom line is that they’re planning to reduce the planet to irradiated slag to provide fuel for their fleet.

Cully and Jamie rescue the others (the robots are really quite useless at being killing machines) and the Doctor cooks up a plan (and some homemade bombs) for them to continue distracting the Dominators. Meanwhile the rest of the group digs a tunnel to intercept the Dominators’ nuclear device (that part was Jamie’s idea).

They manage to get through in the nick of time, but unable to disarm the nuclear device, the Doctor has no choice but to take it out of harm’s way. By which I mean he smuggles it onto the Dominators’ ship, killing them when it goes off.

The day saved, the Dulceans depart back to the capital, and the Doctor and company had better get going themselves before the Dominators’ man-made volcano blows them all to kingdom come.

Thoughts And Rambles

For me, the most interesting source of tension in this serial is that between the Dominators Rago and Toba. They really, truly cannot stand one another. Both are equally unpleasant, but they have completely incompatible approaches to villainy. Rago’s the cold one. He passes up plenty of opportunities to just kill everyone and have done with it, not out of any compassion but because he would rather not waste resources. Toba, on the other hand, is a volcano in shoulderpads. Just look at him funny and he’ll set his cute little robots on you. I had wondered (and was a bit disappointed when this did not happen) if they would end up killing each other, their cruelty and ambition being their undoing. It would feel more appropriate to the general tone and messaging of Doctor Who than… well, I will get to that in a moment.

The funny thing is that if Rago had listened to Toba and just killed the Doctor in the first place, his plan would have gone off without a hitch. Take note, future villains.

Oh, and speaking of which. The plan. I think there is someone at the BBC who lives to think up new ways of annoying anybody with an O-Level in science. My inner know-it-all simply cannot let it be. There is a deep lack of understanding of how harnessing nuclear energy works. The Dominators use nuclear fuel, but have no reactor, just using the passive radiation from the raw fuel to power their ship. Not exactly efficient. Without a reactor you’ve just got a load of hot rocks. And if you have a lot of them all in one place…well, now you DO have a reactor, don’t you? One which you can’t control.

So the Dominators’ plan to get more fuel for their nuclear-disaster-waiting-to-happen is to dig holes into the planet’s crust, fire rockets into them to trigger an upwelling of magma, then drop a small nuclear device into the base of the resulting volcano. And then it'll spew radioactive lava. Which, for some reason, will cover the whole world. The planet basically becomes a petrol station for the fleet. One: That’s not how volcanoes work. Two: That is not how radiation works. Three: That’s not how… planets work.

The incredibly peaceful Dulceans have this atomic test island, by the way, because a couple of hundred years ago they decided to do research into nuclear energy. As part of their research, they built a bomb (for some reason), set it off, and panicked when it did exactly what bombs are supposed to do. And then they swore off nuclear research altogether. I am going to have a migraine.

It’s one thing to make up daft science about stuff far beyond our scope of knowledge but this is just a bit silly.

However. I can let bad science slide. If it’s a fun idea, who am I to rain on everybody’s parade? What I’m not sure I can let slide is the much more serious issue with this serial.

For all these years, Doctor Who has been quite strictly pacifistic in its philosophy. When the guns come out, the Doctor is in the thick of things trying to persuade everyone to put them away and talk. However, in this serial he spends much of his time trying to persuade the Dulceans in the opposite direction. Now, I’m all for nuanced critique of the limitations of pacifism, but that’s not what this is. It’s the narrative equivalent of having an argument with yourself in the shower.

The Dulceans are pacifist to a degree that goes beyond absurdity. Pacifist does not mean ‘doormat’. Yet the Dulceans are willing to just give up and give their invaders whatever they want. They’re a parody of hippies (sans the free love, but you can’t really show that sort of thing on teatime television), and a bad one at that. They’re very rigid thinkers, the youth accepting the word of their elders as gospel. And they lack curiosity, the council seeing no need to investigate the arrival of the Dominators. Though they might have two hearts, they don't have the slightest ember of rebellion in either of them. Not exactly counter-cultural icons, are they? Nice people, sure, but not a fair representation of pacifists, hippie or otherwise, and their problems would have been over a lot sooner if they’d just been willing to attack the Dominators as soon as they’d started causing trouble.

And that’s a weird message for Doctor Who, isn’t it? Not that it’s a lesson that the Dulceans would even have learned. In the end, the Doctor took care of the threat for them.

Oh, yes. The Doctor killed the Dominators, and I am pretty certain he did not actually have to. If he had time to go and plant the nuclear device aboard the Dominators’ ship, he had time to hop into the TARDIS. He could have flung the device out into space or dropped it on some lifeless moon. It would probably have been quicker; I’m pretty sure the TARDIS was actually the closest ship to the bunker. He had to go out of his way to dispatch the Dominators. That doesn’t seem like a very Doctorish thing to do. Sure, the Doctor might not step in if a villain is about to get themselves killed through their own foolishness, but I wouldn’t say that he makes a habit of making sure they meet a sticky end.

And just to top it all off, this act was ultimately pointless. It was an act of revenge, not one that served to actually ensure the continued safety of the Dulceans. The Dominators mention many times that they are just a small part of a vast fleet bent on conquering the galaxy, and yet the serial ends without any consideration for said fleet. The planet Dulkis may have been spared for now, but do you think it will last long against the full onslaught of the Dominators’ empire?

The Bottom Line

It’s not that this is a bad story, per se. I quite enjoyed it. The Dominators were fairly fun to watch, the Quarks were far too cute to be scary but ultimately quite charming, and I developed a fondness for Cully. He’s a bit of a boy in a man's body, but he’s good in a crisis and possesses a degree of backbone and curiosity not seen in the rest of his people. Plot-wise, it’s not the most exciting or inventive fare, but I am just so glad it wasn’t another base-under-siege.

The problem is the messaging. Ultimately, whether intentional or not, the moral is clear: resisting oppression and pacifism are mutually exclusive. That runs counter to every Doctor Who story I can remember. More often than not the villains are the architects of their own destruction. The heroes win the day with their wits and the strength of their convictions, not through blowing stuff up or slaying a retreating foe.

All in all, it’s a decent story. It just misses the entire point of Doctor Who.

3 stars out of 5 for The Dominators.