"The Dominators" - Episode 5

Doctor Who
Airdate: September 7, 1968
Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines, Wendy Padbury
Written by Norman Ashby
Produced by Peter Bryant
Directed by Morris Barry

Once again, Rago intercedes before Toba has a chance to kill the Doctor. Jamie and Cully return to the shelter, where they concoct a plan to rescue the prisoners being held nearby. Once everyone is in the shelter, the Doctor explains that the Dominators plan to drop an atomic device into the center bore hole, which will destory the planet and create a tremendous amount of energy for their ship to absorb. Jamie suggests tunneling from the shelter into the bore hole and intercepting the atomic device. To buy time, Jamie and Cully use some chemical bombs devised by the Doctor to attack and distract the Quarks. The Doctor intercepts the seed device and slips it into the Dominators' spaceship before it takes off. Rockets from the four outer bore holes fire, causing a tremendous volcanic eruption, but the Dominators are destroyed. As the Doctor stands by the TARDIS marvelling at the eruption all around, Jamie spots the molten lava advancing toward them...

Looking back over this week's worth of posts, clearly this story brings up plenty of stuff to talk about in terms of themes and whatnot. Of course, the reason I spent so much time talking about pacifism and war is that the actual story is not worth talking about at all. Until this episode, actually. There's actually a lot of stuff happening, and it actually works pretty well. Jamie's plan to intercept the atomic seed device is simple but ingenious, and it really works. I'm a little disturbed by the Doctor's decision to simply kill the Dominators, but it was literally either them or the entire planet, so I can live with it. I wish he wasn't quite so gleeful about it, though.

In fact, I really do like the Dominators as villains. I really enjoyed the antagonism between Navigator Rago and Probationer Toba, and these two characters were very well cast. But they're pretty much the only characters who were, though. The Dulcians are uniformly dull, and the costumes really don't help much either. Classic "Doctor Who" should be about taking risks. When those risks pay off, you get fantastic and imaginative stories like the one we'll be talking about next week. When they don't pay off, you get glorious disasters like "The Web Planet". But when it doesn't take risks, you get irredeemable mediocrity like "The Dominators". This story feels to me like no one was putting in a great deal of effort.

Well, the set design for the interior of the Dominators' spaceship is pretty good, but seriously, that's about it.