"The Dominators" - Episode 2

Doctor Who
Airdate: August 17, 1968
Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury
Written by Norman Ashby
Produced by Peter Bryant
Directed by Morris Barry

Instead of killing them, Navigator Rago and Probationer Toba put the Doctor and Jamie through a series of tests designed to determine their intelligence. The Doctor fails on purpose. After determining that the Doctor and Jamie pose no threat, and are of no possible use, the Dominators let them go, and they follow Zoe and Cully to the capitol. The research students, curious about the wild story told to them by the Doctor, search the island themselves, but are also captured and examined by the Dominators. Meanwhile, Cully and Zoe travel to the capitol for an audience with the Director, Cully's father. They are unable to convince the Dulcian council of the danger posed by these Dominators, so they decide to sneak away and return to the island. As they arrive back at the research station, Toba orders the Quarks to destroy it, and they are trapped as the building falls around them...

You see up there where it says "Written by Norman Ashby"? That is what we refer to as a lie. Well, a pseudonym, to be more precise. These scripts were actually written by Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, who had considerable success last season with "The Abominable Snowmen" and "The Web of Fear". They were also planning to write Jamie's final story, "The Laird of McCrimmon", which would have included another return appearance of the Yeti. But their experience with writing this story did not go very well, and they did not write for "Doctor Who" again.

Accounts differ as to what the problem really was. The writers have said that they objected to how the political and polemical elements of their scripts had been reduced or excised. There usually wasn't a lot of overt politics in this era of "Dcotor Who" (but just wait... there will be soon), and Haisman and Lincoln had a distinctly right-wing agenda with this story in particular. Their target was the Vietnam War protesters, and it's not hard to imagine that 1968 might have been a difficult time to support the Vietnam War within the context of family television on the BBC. Nevertheless, the final scripts include a strong but implicit denunciation of pacifism. And while I might be making too much of this, the story ultimately ends with the Doctor killing the Dominators with a nuclear bomb.

But it also looks like Haisman and Lincoln were trying to get the kind of deal with the Quarks that had allowed Terry Nation to get rich off the Daleks. Like the Voord and the Mechanoids before them, it seems ludicrous in hindsight that anyone thought the Quarks had anything approaching Dalek merchandising potential. They didn't (although they did have a good run in "Doctor Who" comics of the day).