214 The Dominators: Episode Five

EPISODE: The Dominators: Episode Five
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 214
STORY NUMBER: 044
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 07 September 1968
WRITER: "Norman Ashby" (aka Mervyn Haisman & Henry Lincoln)
DIRECTOR: Morris Barry
SCRIPT EDITOR: Derrick Sherwin
PRODUCER: Peter Bryant
RATINGS: 5.9 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who: The Dominators

"Nowhere on the island is safe. Nowhere on the entire planet, come to that!"

Rago returns and is angry at Toba's progress and waste of Quark energy. He decides to leave the Dulcians behind on the planet when it is destroyed as they are useless slaves, but in the process the Doctor overhears the Dominators plans to turn the planet into radioactive magma to fuel their ships. Jamie & cully immobilise a Quark and rescue the Doctor & Zoë. Toba interrupts drilling again to aid the Quark. Rago reprimands him again, but Toba is pleased to learn the drilling will lead to the Dulcians death. Jamie comes up with a plan to catch the explosive device when it's dropped down the bore hole. They dig a tunnel from the shelter to the bore hole using the Doctor's sonic screwdriver to cut through the wall. Using the shelter's medical kit the Doctor makes bombs for Jamie & Cully to attack the Quarks, but for once Toba concentrates on his task. Jamie & Cully attack the drilling site. Rago pursues them and they hide in the shelter. The seed device is dropped into the shaft and the Doctor catches it. He is unable to open it. Realising they will be killed and there's a risk of the planet being destroyed, the Doctor hide the bomb on the Dominator's ship. The Dulcians leave in the travel capsule while the Doctor and co retreat to the safety of the Tardis as the rockets fire into the crust creating an eruption on the island as the bomb destroys the Dominators ship.

JAMIE: Doctor, come on, will ye? The whole place is going to blow up.
DOCTOR: Oh, it's quite all right, Jamie. The planet is quite safe. There's just going to be a localised volcanic eruption. It'll only affect the island.
JAMIE: Maybe so, but we happen to be on the island.
DOCTOR: Oh, my word!

Well.... most of the cast spends the episode stuck in the shelter but the brief action scenes are OK. There's a lot of Quark destruction in this episode.

If you've been paying close attention you'll have seen the little pictures of Quarks beside the door in the ships. The lights have been going out on the pictures as more and more Quarks are destroyed. You can see 8 lit Quark lights in an earlier episode and several have gone out here. Rago says there's 8 Quarks remaining after several have been destroyed so I'm guessing their full complement is 16 and there's a second display somewhere.

Ha! I've got all the way to episode 5 and not mentioned the Dominators catch phrase: Command Accepted. Trotted out by Toba every time he's given an order it starts to grate after a while. They'll be more catch phrases to come later especially when Bob Baker & Dave Martin show up.

KANDO: Surely they don't mean to destroy Dulkis completely?
DOCTOR: I'm afraid they do.
TEEL: But why? What do they want?
DOCTOR: A large amount of fuel for their invasion fleet.
ZOE: But we know that there are no minerals worth having. At least not on this side of the island.
DOCTOR: They're not mining for minerals, or any natural fuel source.
ZOE: But their spaceships use atomic power. We've established that.
DOCTOR: But there was no reactor in their ship of theirs, only a radiation storage unit. You remember how, when they landed, it sucked up all the radioactive dust from the island?
ZOE: Yes. So you're saying that they store radioactive particles and then convert that energy into power.
DOCTOR: Exactly.
ZOE: But then why are they drilling?
DOCTOR: Look, I'll show you.

DOCTOR: There are four drill holes, here, here, here and here. And one drill hole in the centre. Now then, they have rockets mounted in each of these drill holes, and the centre hole is probably for that atomic seed device.
JAMIE: Oh.
DOCTOR: Well don't you see? They've chosen this spot because the crust of the planet is thin. They're going to fire the rockets through the crust into the magma, the molten core.
ZOE: And that will almost certainly fracture the crust of the planet.
DOCTOR: Exactly.
ZOE: But that will create a volcano. And if they explode the atomic seed device in the middle of that
DOCTOR: Yes, that's right, Zoe. The whole planet will become one vast molten mass of radioactive material. The fuel store for their fleet.
JAMIE: Well, we'll just have to stop them, then.

The Doctor who team did Volcanic eruptions in Enemy of the World last year and I could swear they used the same footage there. They'll do drilling and eruptions again next year in Inferno and the shots show up again there, this time in colour!

JAMIE: Will you listen to me. Now there's a dead easy way to get that device thing.
ZOE: Really?
JAMIE: Yes, now listen. You said they were going to drop it down the centre hole, the one they're drilling outside here.
DOCTOR: Yes.
JAMIE: Well it's simple isn't it? All we've got to do is dig a tunnel through from here to the borehole and catch the seed device thing on it's way down. Well, it was just an idea.
DOCTOR: But Jamie, it's a brilliant idea! It's so simple only you could have thought of it.
JAMIE: Oh. Eh?
ZOE: We can get the direction from the periscope. Just line it up with the drilling site.
DOCTOR: Yes, there's only one snag though. Could we complete the tunnel in time? It'd have to be twelve feet long or more.

12 feet of soil at that depth is going to take a while to dig through even given what happens next!

JAMIE: Well Cully and I could delay the Dominators' work up there.
ZOE: How?
JAMIE: Oh, we're getting very good at destroying Quarks, aren't we?
CULLY: Yes, certainly seems to stop them working.
DOCTOR: Yes, that's true, but you've been lucky so far. If only I could devise some sort of weapon for you. Is anything down here, Cully?
CULLY: I doubt it. Nothing but survival rations and medical kits.
DOCTOR: Medical kit, oh. It's surprising what you can do with a few simple chemicals and a little ingenuity. Now come on, we must dig this tunnel. Zoe, give us a direction will you?
ZOE: Right. Er, on a line from here.
DOCTOR: Right! We start there tunnel there. Get that bunk away. Come on.
JAMIE: That's it, Cully. I'll start it off with a knife, now. This line here.
DOCTOR: I think you'd better let me start it, Jamie.
JAMIE: How are you going to dig through there with your sonic screwdriver?
DOCTOR: It's a little more than a screwdriver. Just watch this.
TEEL: Where'd he get the technology to do that?
KANDO: It's burning straight through.
JAMIE: Aye, the Doctor's very good.

This is the second time we see the Sonic Screwdriver, and the first since it was introduced in Fury From The Deep. It also reveals the first in a long line of extra functions it has setting it on the road to it's eventual abolition as a far to convenient plot device in The Visitation.

Last time The Dominators went a lot, lot better than I was expecting it to. This time it was dreadful again, which matches my previous viewings of it.

The Dominators was one of the last (actually was *the* last, until the return of Enemy of the World) complete Doctor Who story that I hadn't seen. I polished it off, along with Keys of Marinus, Reign of Terror and the Romans, when I gave up work in late 2005. I didn't enjoy it then, and I didn't enjoy it again on DVD release. Yet watching it now it was OK. Nothing special, but OK.

The Dominators was one of the first Troughton stories to be novelised, adapted by Ian Marter, when Target started looking at doing more older Doctor Who stories in 1984. The Dominators was the very first Doctor Who novel I owned in hardback: bought in a sale from the Bentalls book department in the old store in Kingston. I obtained several other new ones, mostly from a sale in Kingston's Volume 1 book store. A few years ago OCD struck and I realised I needed my Doctor Who book collection to all be in the same format. So I replaced the hardbacks with paperbacks and put the Hardbacks on eBay.... and walked away about £500 richer from 10 hardbacks!

A video release of the Dominators was made in 1990 and a DVD release in 2010.