The Dominators

Cully admires Zoe disguising herself in Dulcian costume.

Episode 1, 10 August 1968
Episode 2, 17 August 1968
Episode 3, 24 August 1968
Episode 4, 31 August 1968
Episode 5, 7 September 1968

Written by Norman Ashby
Directed by Morris Barry
Script editor: Derrick Sherwin
Producer Peter Bryant

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Wendy Padbury as Zoe Heriot (earliest extant appearance)

On the planet Dulcis, war and strife are unknown.  Also unknown is basic scientific curiosity--172 years ago, Dulcian scientists detonated an atomic bomb on an isolated island, so that they could study how long it took for radiation levels to subside.  But when all the radiation levels suddenly drop to zero, the Dulcians don't respond with, "Holy crap, that must mean the advance force from a race of merciless alien invaders must have landed on the island and used that radiation for fuel as they prepare to destroy our planet!" or even the perhaps more reasonable, "Hmm, that's weird.  Maybe we should head over to the island and try to figure out why the radiation suddenly vanished."  No, instead they say, "Well, now we know--radiation from an atomic blast lasts 172 years, then vanishes completely."

But I'm getting ahead of myself.  The formerly-radioactive island.  Four groups have arrived there at roughly the same time: a trio from a Dulcian university, studying radiation; a party of adolescent adventurers, visiting the island without passes as a way to spice up prosperous-yet-monotonous life on Dulcis; the TARDIS team; and a spaceship carrying two Dominators.

The Dominators are a race of merciless alien conquerors, "rulers of the Ten Galaxies".  Their spaceships are powered by radiation, but this particular ship is almost out of power.  Detecting the radioactive island, they've come to Dulcis, where they immediately suck up all the radiation to refuel.  But this replenishes their power levels only enough to give them the energy for a full refuel, which involves drilling to the molten core of Dulcis and dropping an atomic bomb down the shaft, to irradiate the whole core--which incidentally will also turn all of Dulcis into a radioactive cinder, destroying all life on the surface.

Of course, the TARDIS team and the Dulcians soon discover this.  The story's what-makes-this-story-different-from-others quality comes in the difficulty our heroes have in getting the Dulcians to fight back, because of the ethos of nonviolence and incuriosity that permeates society on Dulcis.  First, the Dulcians flat out don't believe that aliens have landed on their planet, because they don't believe in aliens.  Then, they refuse to accept the threat the Dominators pose, and continue to maintain that if only they treat the invaders with friendliness and obedience, they'll be able to bring out the Dominators' peaceful side.  And then when they do finally realise what danger they're in, they don't even know how to fight back.

(This is illustrated very well in a meeting of the High Council of Dulcis: "The way I see it, there are only three courses of action: fight, flight or submission."

"Flight is out of the question!"

"And we have means with which to fight."

"Then that leaves only ... submission.")

Eventually, the Doctor and a small group of Dulcians are able to foil the Dominators' plan by tunneling beneath the radioactive island so that they gain access to the Dominators' drill-bore from the side.  This way, when the invaders drop their atomic bomb down the shaft, the Doctor catches it, then stows it aboard the Dominators' spaceship.  The spaceship lifts off so that the Dominators can get away from the planet before it explodes, but of course, the only thing they end up destroying is their own ship.

But none of all that is really what sticks with me about "The Dominators".  The most memorable thing about this story is that it's our first chance to get a look at the Doctor's new companion, Zoe, the girl genius from the year 2000.  (In 1968 terms, "from the year 2000" means "lives in a space station".)

Zoe is a chipper, undeterable character, utterly guileless, completely selfless, friendly, and entirely comfortable with the fact that she's a scientific and mathematical genius.  And actress Wendy Padbury is one of the most adorably sexy women ever to make it onto a television screen.

That sexiness and the mores of 1968 combine to ensure that, over the course of her one season on the TARDIS, Zoe is clad a succession of wonderfully enticing costumes, and the one in "The Dominators" is one of the best.  The people of Dulcis all walk about in short gowns.  For men, this means dresses of a curtain-like material that come down to mid-thigh (longer for figures of authority).  But for women, it means a choker and a revealingly short babydoll negligee, easily transparent enough to show off the bikini bottoms being worn underneath.  It's glorious.

What Lisa thought

She enjoyed it fine.  She did complain about the broad strokes with which the story was told--the utterly good Dulcians contrasted with the utterly ruthless Dominators; the simplicity of, "Well, we'll just burrow in from the side and catch the bomb when they drop it."

This sort of block-colour approach to storytelling even extends to interpersonal dynamics.  The two Dominators have a running conflict throughout the story: the first officer wants to destroy everything in sight, murdering any Dulcians he sees, while his commander insists that the natives pose no threat, and they should be spared as killing them will dangerously deplete the spaceships' already dangerously-low levels of power.

In fact, all four cliffhangers in this story involve the first officer ordering the Quarks (diminutive robots that the Dominators use as both a labour force and their footsoldiers) to kill a character, which is then resolved by the commander appearing out of nowhere and countermanding the order. The cliffhangers at the end of part two and part three are in fact identical, with the first officer deciding to destroy a house standing on an opposite hill just to have some fun, unaware that some of our main characters are hiding in the house, and the image fades out as debris falls around our heroes from the blasts of the Quarks' molecular cannon.

(It's interesting that we're supposed to see the first officer as a bloodthirsty fool, while the commander is the voice of intelligence and reason, considering that in the end, it's the first officer who was right the whole time--the natives do pose a threat, and the Dominators' best course of action would have been to slaughter them.)

There is a wonderful example of the comic chemistry between Frazer Hines and Patrick Troughton, when the Dominators (thinking they have captured native Dulcians) subject the two of them to intelligence tests, to evaluate the native populations. The Doctor and Jamie quickly conclude that they should do their best to appear stupid, so as to present less of a threat.

The same scene also illustrates Troughton's nimbleness as an actor, when he convinces the Dominators that there are two species on Dulcis: the stupid ones, represented by him and Jamie, and the smart ones. "There aren't very many of them left. We don't like them very much--they tell us what to do, you see," he says, and all of a sudden his demeanor has changed completely, and with it, the whole tone of the scene. It's not that he's suddenly become threatening, because he hasn't--but with those two sentences and his sudden change in tone, he's managed to summon forth an entire picture in the viewer's mind, and one that's much, much darker than any actual images that appear onscreen in "The Dominators".

But essentially, "The Dominators" is a story where Doctor Who definitely comes across more as a children's programme than a family programme.

But whatever.  Zoe, man.  In a see-through microdress.

The next story in the rewatch is "The Mind Robber".

The Ice Warriors

Miss Garrett: That's not a weapon. It's a scientific instrument.
Varga: I see things differently.

An Ice Warrior hunts Victoria in the glacier caves.

One, 11 November 1967
Two, 18 November 1967
Three, 25 November 1967
Four, 2 December 1967
Five, 9 December 1967
Six, 16 December 1967

Episodes in italics have been lost.

Written by Brian Hayles
Directed by Derek Martinus
Script editor: Peter Bryant
Producer: Innes Lloyd

Patrick Troughton as the Doctor
Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon
Deborah Watling as Victoria Waterfield (later extant appearance)

In the distant future, Earth has entered a Second Ice Age. We have brought this upon ourselves: as our population expanded in the late twentieth century, we deforested the planet in order to create enough space in which to house our increasing numbers. This vastly reduced the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (!), thereby initiating a period of massive global cooling (!!).

Most of the population has been relocated to temperate Africa. The glaciers are swallowing much of the northern hemisphere, held back only by a series of undermanned bases that use a technology called the ioniser to raise the temperature at the glaciers' perimeter, thereby preventing them from expanding.

In the ice, a survey team from one of the bases has found a frozen prehistoric man. Only it's not a man--it's an alien. When defrosted, he reveals himself to be Varga, an Ice Warrior from the planet Mars, who has been frozen beneath the ice for millennia. He kidnaps Victoria and has her help him find his ship, also buried in the ice, and revive three more members of his crew, so that he will then have the resources to decide whether to go back to Mars or stay and conquer the Earth.

The Doctor and the staff of the base realise that they can use the ioniser either to free the Ice Warriors' ship from the ice, or destroy it, but there's an issue--they don't know what sort of drive the ship has. If it has an atomic drive, the ioniser could well cause an explosion, destroying the base along with the spaceship. The Doctor sets off for the ship to try and find out what the situation is.

But while he's gone, the Ice Warriors stage a takeover of the base and proceed to steal the ioniser's fuel cells to replenish their ship's power supply--though of course, that will result in the destruction of the ioniser and the overrunning of Europe by the glaciers. Before they can make their getaway, though, the Doctor--now at their spaceship--is able to reconfigure the cannon they have pointing at the base, restructuring it the beam it projects so that it is destructive to Ice Warriors but not to humans. The Ice Warriors therefore have to flee the base, abandoning the fuel cells.

It's now been determined that directing the ioniser at the spaceship could indeed result in an atomic explosion. The staff's human crew have been accustomed to turning all decisions over to their control computer, but the risks here are so finely balanced--directing the ioniser at the glacier, leading to atomic explosion, or not doing so, leading to the base being swallowed by the glacier--that it refuses to make a decision. The base's staff are paralysed by fear, until ultimately their rogue lead scientist, Penley, chooses to risk attacking the Ice Warriors. Their spaceship explodes--killing the aliens--but the explosion is contained within the glacier and does not harm the base. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria slip away while the base staff celebrate.

What Lisa thought
She wasn't too impressed with this one. It's pretty thin on plot--I managed to detail the entire six-episode storyline in six paragraphs, after all, and even that was stretching it. Essentially, the plot of "The Ice Warriors" is Ice Age, aliens pulled from glacier, aliens threaten the Earth, the ioniser can stop them, the ioniser does stop them. To draw this out, seriously four episodes are devoted to debating whether or not to use the ioniser.

Besides the first appearance of the Ice Warriors, there are a couple of noteworthy elements here. The first is the appearance of a young Peter Sallis ("young" being a very relative term for an actor whose main claim to fame is forty years as the star of Last of the Summer Wine) as the renegade scientist Penley. Then there's also the quaint expectation that the Earth's rising population would actually lead to a loss of carbon dioxide, triggering another Ice Age

And finally there's the prediction of us growing to rely on computers so much that we need their assessments to make all our decisions for us, and are paralysed by indecision when they prove incapable of doing so. It's easy to dismiss that as being just as incorrect as the idea of global cooling, but I'm not so sure--I think that might really be a pretty solid extrapolation of where we're going, with our drive to renounce responsibility as much as possible and our reliance upon computers to make determinations in situations where variables change too quickly for the human mind to keep track of them.

The next serial after this is "The Enemy of the World", in which the TARDIS team fight Salamander, dictator of much of the world in the early twenty-first century--and the physical double of the Doctor.

Then comes "The Web of Fear", in which the Yeti that the Doctor fought in "The Abominable Snowmen" invade the London Underground. The Doctor is assisted in combatting them by the British Army, led by a mysterious colonel by the name of Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, making his first appearance on the programme.

Then is "Fury From the Deep", in which hypnotic evil seaweed attempts to take over a North Sea oil rig. The Doctor realises the seaweed is susceptible to high-pitched sound, so he defeats it by amplifying the sound of Victoria's screams of terror, in what must undoubtedly be Doctor Who's most metatextual climax until 2011's "The Wedding of River Song". (How, how can this story by missing and unavailable to us?) Victoria leaves at the end of this one, staying behind with the family of one of the rig workers, Harris.

And then there's "The Wheel in Space", in which the Doctor and Jamie defeat an attempt by Cybermen to take over a human space station, the Wheel. When they depart at the story's end, the Doctor and Jamie take with them one of the station's crew, a young mathematical genius named Zoe Heriot.

All these stories are, sadly, lost, so we'll pick up our rewatch with the next story after "The Wheel in Space", "The Dominators".

I