It's complete pants, right? I'm pretty sure anyone who watches The Dominators can readily agree on that much. Extremely entertaining, despite that, but doubtless not for any of the intended reasons.
The titular Dominators are probably the most ineffective villains the program has given us thus far. There's only two of them, their uniforms are risible, and their Quarks are far too cute to ever scare anybody.
And yet I was still completely enamored with them! It's like everything about them was made to be laughed at. I laughed a solid minute when the first one shuffled on-screen. They're like a couple of kids who found dad's spaceship and pet robots and decided to have a crack at conquering the universe. If these are the people who conquered ten galaxies, I'll eat my shoe. Everything about them suggests that they're very new to this whole galactic villainy business, and quite insecure about it too! So needless to say, they and their cuddly Quarks never had a chance.
This serial is in a blessed position because, while undoubtedly just as bad, it fails to be as boring as The Wheel in Space before it. I'd contend it falls into that most cherished position: so bad that it's good. This one's definitely going into my viewing rotation.
Clearly things weren't supposed to end up this way. Haisman and Lincoln insisted on the Ashby pseudonym because of conflicts with the production team, so one assumes that a lot of things went wrong during the realization of The Dominators. It's hard to say that it would have ever been a great serial, the central premise is just a little too weak for that.
On a slightly more sober note, I though it fitting to remark on the ethos of the story. Much (very, very much) has been made in the review-o-sphere about the hostility of The Dominators toward pacifism. This is a subject I've touched upon twice previously (once during The Daleks and once during my 1965 music post), and it does seem to be haunting Doctor Who through the years. Here I'm forced into another direct confrontation with the question.
Do I think the message of The Dominators is too mean-spirited? I say yes, but not by design. The effete, pacifist Dulcians are reminiscent of the then-contemporary hippies in many ways, but it's not a complete analogy. The youngsters among them are the most willing to take action, despite the advice of their elders. The council of doddering old men (and all men, notably) who actually call the shots here are the ones who determine this policy, and they're about as far from hippies as you can get. I do think that Haisman and Lincoln drew the contemporary parallels consciously, and that it was misguided of them to make the comparison, but the Dulcians seem equally reminiscent of a much earlier target.
Haisman and Lincoln were of the generation that survived through the Second World War. They saw firsthand how appeasement in the face of fascism led to the greatest horrors of the last century, and it's natural that the failure of Britain's politicians of the time, the Blitz, and everything that came after would have shaped their opinions. The elder Dulcians put the politicians of that era in mind far more than they do hippies. This would be a respectable position, left by itself.
The unfortunate downfall comes when the story falsely equates appeasement with the contemporary hippy movement, which touted pacifism not in the face of an existential threat to their society, but against the needless imperialist war then raging in Vietnam. This major pitfall is what keeps the message of The Dominators from succeeding, but I do feel it to be an honest mistake on the writers' part, and not something worth savaging the story over.
Anyway, the fleet commander tells me that I must watch The Mind Robber next. Command accepted.
(Modified from the original posted at Gallifrey Base on 13 March 2021.)
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