211 The Dominators: Episode Two

EPISODE: The Dominators: Episode Two
OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 211
STORY NUMBER: 044
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 17 August 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

"Alien races are occasionally of use to us. I intend to probe your physiological make up!"

The Dominators test Jamie for physical labour, Toba wants to use Quarks but is over ruled by Rago to conserve energy. Cully and Zoe sent to capital, he argues with council, they don't believe his story. The Doctor is made to submit to an intelligence test. They are taken to the museum and shown the weapons where the Dominators conclude they are primitives and no danger, so they escape returning to the research centre and travel to the capital as Cully & Zoe return to the island. The research team investigate the Dominators, entering their ship where they are captured. The Dominators deduce they might be useful as labour and seek out more prisoners. Toba has the Quarks attack the research station trapping Zoe & Cully.

Oooh, the inside of the Dominators' space ship looks rather good compared to similar surroundings we've seen before.

However the general quality of the episode falls down with lots of the Dominator arguing with Rago wanting to conserve power and Toba desiring to destroy anything that moves or doesn't! The Dulcian council are a useless lot, but I suspect that's the point.

RAGO: Alien races are occasionally of use to us. I intend to probe your physiological make up!
DOCTOR: Do what?

OK I laughed when that line came up. Unfortunately testing the Doctor and Jamie takes a large chunk of the episode. Jamie's the one who ends up on the text bench and I came very worried about the Quark who's trying to look up his kilt!

The observation is pretty much as expected but the end of it is interesting:

RAGO: Brittle skeletal structure. Reasonable flexibility. A certain amount of muscular force. Could be marginally useful. Vulnerable, only one heart.
TOBA: Intelligence?
RAGO: A simple brain. Signs of recent rapid learning. Still, somewhat crude.
TOBA: Shall I prepare the other specimen for scrutiny?
RAGO: No, they will be identical. Conserve power.

So the Doctor isn't tested. We don't find out if he is physiologically similar to Jamie. A year later in the series he definitely isn't as we get the revelation that The Doctor, like the Dulcians here, has two hearts.

The Dominator Rago is played by Ronald Allen who'll be back shortly as Ralph Cornish in The Ambassadors of Death. He's best known for playing Crossroads but was also used regularly in The Comic Strip Presents playing Uncle Quentin in Five Go Mad in Dorset & Five Go Mad on Mescalin, The Prime Minister in The Strike, Captain Phillips in South Atlantic Raiders part 2 argie bargie! and Professor Roland Breeze in Oxford.

Kenneth Ives plays Probationer Toba. He went on to become a television director working on both All Creatures Great and Small & Gangsters, both programs with strong Doctor Who connections.

The Quarks were all played by children. One of them, John Hicks, born 1955 and thus 13 at the time of recording making him the youngest credited artist in Doctor Who so far, later returns as the Axon Boy in The Claws of Axos. He has an Out of the Unknown role to his name playing Bik in the missing third season episode The Naked Sun which exists as an audio reconstruction on the Out of the Unknown DVD Set

Another Quark, Gary Smith, also has a missing Out of the Unknown to his name playing John, as a Boy in Target Generation while the third, Freddie Wilson, is the Quark operator fortunate enough to get a return appearance as the Quark in The Games episode 10. He also appears in the Doomwatch episode The Logicians as an Elsdene Schoolboy and you can see that on The Doomwatch DVD set.

The Quarks are voiced by Sheila Grant who'll be back as Jane Leeson in Colony in Space. She too appears in Doomwatch as Gillian Blake in No Room for Error which is also on the DVD set. But down her CV, and ignored by virtually all bar me I suspect is a voice in Captain Zep - Space Detective: The Lodestone of Space!