"The Dominators" - Episode 4

Doctor Who
Airdate: August 31, 1968
Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury
Written by Norman Ashby
Produced by Peter Bryant
Directed by Morris Barry

Jamie and Cully manage to escape the destruction by finding an old underground bomb shelter. The Dominators continue using the prisoners to clear drilling sites while the Quarks beginning drilling at sites already cleared. Jamie and Cully come out of hiding and start attacking Quarks with rocks and boulders, provoking reprisals from Toba. The Doctor and Zoe take the opportunity to examine the Dominators' spaceship and work out their plan. Meanwhile, Rago travels to the capitol to intimidate the Dulcian government. Toba assembles all of the remaining prisoners and orders them to reveal Jamie's whereabouts. One of the Dulcians is killed when no one answers, and Toba directs the Quarks to kill the Doctor next...

Without having access to the original scripts, it's impossible to separate which elements of the story came from Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, and which elements were massaged by the production team without their involvement (hence the pseudonym). That makes it difficult to ascertain precisely what the story is trying to say about pacifism and war. Because, the way I see it, the story actually paints pacifism in a pretty positive light.

Ok, sure, the Dulcians clearly ought to have some capacity to defend themselves, and the scripts get a lot of mileage out of how useless they are in the face of a massive assault by two dudes and a handful of stupid-looking robots. But the way I see it, the Doctor is fighting to preserve the Dulcian way of life. In "The Daleks", Ian had to convince the Thals to fight for themselves. In "The Dominators", a handful of Dulcians assist the Doctor and Jamie, but that's it. The Doctor does all the fighting, and we have every reason to suspect that the Dulcians go right back to their pacifist ways as soon as the emergency is over.

More to the point, the Doctor seems entirely supportive of the Dulcian ban on weapons and warfare in Episode One. He's positively horrified to discover that the TARDIS has landed on a nuclear test island, until he learns that only one bomb was ever tested, and further development of the technology was banned immediately thereafter. The Doctor is our moral touchstone, so we're inclined to see things his way, and he doesn't ever voice much of an objection to the Dulcians' pacifism. He objects to their bureaucratic paralysis, but not to their pacifism. He just does whatever he needs to do to protect their way of life. In other words, he fights back so that they don't have to.