Hello everyone, the Historian here. My apologies about the week’s delay; I fell victim to some kind of Venusian flu. But we are back and ready to dive into…er…the Dominators part five, along with all the dubious excitement reaching the final episode of such a…oh, I’m not going to lie–I think the entire Project will be a bit relieved when this one’s done.
Speaking of whom, I’m joined tonight by Ketina, Ronelyn, the ever-silent-but-present Schmallturm, Spoo, MiniSpoo, Photobug, Altair, and CZ. So, without further ado, let’s get to the episode! This episode first aired 7 September, 1968.
H = Historian
K = Ketina
R = Ronelyn
Sp = Spoo
MS = MiniSpoo
P = Photobug
A = Altair
Cz = Cz
H: And, until 1992, this would have been the earliest Patrick Troughton story that any of us here would have seen. Thank goodness for the discovery of Tomb of the Cybermen.
K: Not the strongest season opener.
P: After so many weeks off it was interesting that as soon as the story started I was brought back to exactly the right place in my mind of where we left off. I guess that’s a credit to the quality of the cliff hanger.
K: Or the simplicity of the plot.
Sp: This episode did benefit from having 3 weeks of distance from the rest of the story.
K: First 3 episodes, 3 week gap, 4th episode, 1 week gap, then this 5th finale episode, was how we watched it.
Sp: Which just goes to reinforce the value of the TARDIS Project’s mission… there really is something about watching it at a steady pace of 1 episode a week.
K: Was having the longer gaps harmful though?
H: Not for this story.
Sp: It just reinforces the good design Historian and Ketina had in setting this up to be religious about 1 episode a week thing.
K: Hey, the one episode a week is all the Historian.
H: That is all me, baby.
Sp: Sorry, I wasn’t here last week.
K: What?
H: Neither were we.
Cz: I was here!
H: So, we all enjoyed the personal growth of the secondary Dominator in this episode. Everybody clapped when he said “Destroy… no, keep drilling.”
MS: <Quark voice> Destroy?
R: <old Jewish man voice> “Always with the destroying Hershell. You’re a Dominator. You’re ignoring the Quark’s other setting.”
Sp: I miss the Daleks.
<laughter>
K: We all do.
R: Hey, at least the Dominators are shaped the same.
Sp: No, no. I have the Quarks in mind when I make that comment.
R: You don’t like the fact that the BBC blew up a bunch of school children <actors playing Quarks>
Sp: Oh no, I’m always in favor of that. Let me catalog this… Quarks are vulnerable to: Styrofoam rocks, wooden acting, countermanded orders, bedsheets, rough terrain, chemical bombs…
P: Those are flour bombs.
Sp: inaccuracy of their main weapons over long distances, where those long distances are A HILL…
R: Budget cuts!
MS: Stop with the budget cuts.
H: Talk to the BBC in 1968, don’t talk to us.
Cz: Let me just get in my TARDIS.
Sp: Oh, and, apparently the second in command Omnomnominator forgot to plug in the Quarks before he went to bed at night, because they have about the battery range of my cell phone. So yes, fearsome war machine you got their going guys.
R: It’s 30 minutes of war time, but it’s like 3 days of standby time.
K: I can explain it.
H: Of course you can… wait, isn’t that your line for me?
K: No.. the Dominators got their power, presumably both for the ship and Quarks, from sucking up the radiation on the planet, right. Well, this planet had ONE island of radiation. A lot less than they probably expected.
H: Well then how do they power their Quarks at any point when they are not on a planet with radiation.
P: They take energy with them. Which is sort of the plot.
R: The Dominators are dumber than the aliens in Signs… “let’s go to a planet that is 75% poison.”
H: No one is dumber than the aliens in Signs.
R: There, now don’t you feel better about this episodes.
H: Oddly I do.
R: And hey, Jamie is a friggen genius in this episode.
Several people: Yes!
P: Brave too!
Sp: His idea to dig a parallel tunnel was inspired and I actually give him more credit than the Doctor did for thinking of that. But plotwise it requires an awful lot of hand waving to have humans with their bare hands…
R: Dig a 4-foot gerbil hole?
Sp: Through solid rock.
R: Ah, but they had the sonic screwdriver.
H: Making it’s second appearance. Everybody note that. Second appearance of the sonic screwdriver in Doctor Who, The Dominators episode 5. It’s the first time it does something other than unscrew screws as well.
K: So the “magic” of the sonic screwdriver is introduced much earlier than we expected.
Sp: Quick guys, we gotta think about more things to say about the Quarks and Dominators and the Doctor and the Companions because otherwise all we have left is PANTY SHOTS!
R: <sings> “We’re men! We’re men in skirts!”
K: There was a lot of that, wasn’t there.
Cz: Every single character was in some kind of a skirt, except for the Doctor.
H: And the Dominators. They just had shouldermapads.
Sp: And post-it-notes.
K: Sort of fringe, really. It’s hard to find somebody in that much fringe intimidating.
Sp: Well if their fringes won’t intimidate you, their wildly inaccurate child robots will finish the job! You know, the ones with the spherical head full of little dot eye things that apparently can be snuck up on behind by every human.
R: That’s because they’re made of macaroni noodles. They’re kindergarten robots.
Cz: They sound like kindergarten robots.
H: So, I’ve already talked about how both the Doctor Who production office / BBC and the writers specifically designed the Quarks to be the next big thing, and how there was a falling out about the exploitation of them for toys. These were meant to be the next Daleks when they were originally created and designed.
P: As a marketable property.
H: Exactly. And the disagreement about licensing between the BBC and the writers are why we don’t have a third Yeti story.
Cz: <sarcasm> oh. no.
H: I like the Yeti. They were in two great stories.
K: Yeah, I like the Yeti too.
Cz: Their voices weren’t cute enough.
H: And I still maintain that that disagreement is why Haisman and Lincoln didn’t get credit for the creation for the Great Intelligence for the last season of Doctor Who. It pisses me off. I’ve said that before in these discussions and I’m going to say it again.
K: You just did.
Sp: Hey Photobug?
P: Yeah?
Sp: No music.
H: That’s true.
Sp: No soundtrack.
P: Ah.. there was a little bit when they were in the little grove, when they were surrounded in the box canyon. Other than that I think you were right. Am I right?
H: I don’t remember.
Sp: It sounds right.
P: Maybe no music, but there was a lot of control signal sounds when they were dying. So, as far as sound, there was still something else. Which, I don’t know, if you’re going to kill little tiny kids…
Sp: That’s pretty much what they sound like when you do. So I’ve heard. Minispoo.
MS: What? What did I do? <outraged>
Sp: Go back to Minecraft, that’s fine.
MS: Help me world.
Sp: So I liked this episode and – maybe I’m speaking with the benefit of a little distance from the other episodes – I think I like this story. I think it’s consistent in it’s characterizations, I think that it committed to a certain tone and had fun with it, it made… living room curtain guy…
H: Cully?
Sp: Yes, him into a pretty interesting one-off one story character. It gave Jamie a lot of heroic things to do. It had a very second Doctor feel to the resolution as far as how the Doctor divided up who was going to be doing what, and the magic wand… sonic screwdriver… and just the general pace and how the bad guys and their minions go their comeuppance. It’s not the worst thing in the world that this was likely many people’s introduction to the second Doctor for all that we correctly joke about the um… limitations of the story, tone-wise this was a second Doctor story. And actually quite fun. I think I just managed my final thought.
K: Mine too.
H: I’m glad YOU liked it. I think this is one of the dullest stories of the project.
K: Wow.
H: Um, tonally it was all over the place to me. A couple of the individual episodes were good. I liked this last episode. There just wasn’t that much there there.
Cz: What? People died! Volcanoes exploded! Quarks made beeping noises.
H: That was all this last episode.
Cz: Oooh.
H: Everything but the volcano was also the previous episodes too.
Cz: Well the last episode was REALLY intense!
H: Let’s be honest here. Almost nothing happened in the first three episodes.
R: Ah huh. A lot of whining.
K: I didn’t mind. Not saying that this story was fantastic. If I was to rank the story of the Project so far I would hardly put this at the top. But I definitely wouldn’t put it at the bottom. It was much more entertaining than I remember. Cully’s adorable. The plot isn’t any more ridiculous than any of the Cybermen plots…
H: The problem isn’t that the plot is ridiculous, the problem is that the plot is almost nonexistent.
Sp: If one goes with the limitations of pacifists debating and the thrilling drama of turning drills on and off, you can just kind of roll with the rest of this and look for little character moments.
H: Okay. Other than “she repeats things by rote” name one character moment by the students.
Sp: I don’t care about them. I mean the Doctor, Jamie, Cully, both Dominators, a smidge of Zoe, the older professor dude that got shot last episode…
H: So give me a character moment for him, other than when he got shot.
Sp: When he was instructing his students.
H: He said plenty of stuff last episode. None of it was memorial. I’m just saying that so much of this story was empty space.
Sp: Oh yeah.
Cz: I mostly remember the Dominatoring bickering to each other here.
K: And how is that different from about ¼ of the other stories we’ve seen in the TARDIS Project?
H: It’s tremendously different!
K: What I mean is, many stories in these 6 seasons suffer from “one episode too long” syndrome. And many stories suffer from over the top acting bad guys. This story particularly also suffered from lower visible budget issues (Styrofoam, etc., etc.), but I didn’t feel that it was worse than some of the really bad ones we’ve already seen, and complained extensively about. And I think this story had a lot of merit. Cully was awesome. Jamie was awesome. The Doctor was funny. The Dominators were very entertaining.
H: I disagree with you entirely. For one thing, this script was originally 6 episodes long, they cut it down to 5 because it didn’t have enough story for 6, and it still had the one episode too long syndrome. For another thing, I completely disagree that many of the other stories we’ve had have had this little plot in them. I’m glad it was entertaining for you. I agree there were lots of fun moments. There were just also huge swaths of nothing around them that made the story extremely dull for me.
K: And now you know I felt with all the stories that you loved that I felt were extremely boring.
MS: You know, I think the Quarks should be their own enemy of the Doctor. Because I think that they should just because they are officially up there with the Daleks for me. I almost like the Quarks better than the Daleks.
H: Wow!
P: But do you fear the Quarks?
MS: Not really. It’s just the cute noises that they make. “Destroy?” And then the commander comes in and tells them no, don’t destroy. And they’re like “Aww..” Sad Quark is sad.
H: And that makes it all worth it.
MS: Let me Quark. Quarkator!… <continues babbling quietly>
H: Okay, so, Photobug do you want to do your final thought? Because three of the rest of us have already done it.
P: Periscope had me perplexed in it’s direction of movement…
<laughter>
Sp: It had infinate length and range, just like every periscope in every sub movie ever!
P: But those were all sub standard.
<very long groans… room Quark recharges at him.>
P: This bombshelter with a little tiny metal door doesn’t really go over for me. What it a bomb shelter or just a shelter?
R: “Survival shelter.”
Cz: With sticks of butter for food.
<discussion of whatever it was that Jamie ate… cheese? Butter?>
P: I’m genuinely impressed that a medical kit can make explosives…
R: Nitroglycerin heart pills.
<applause>
P: The story arc as a whole… I found the transportation confusing. The space ships remarkably under budget. The acting was sparse but good interactions between characters. I think the Dominators in some ways stole the show, because they were a bickering couple…
Sp: <sings> They were the only conflict.
H: The Dulcians were just dull.
P: I’ve studied enough geology to disagree with the “crust is narrow here” but that’s okay.
R: It’s a better plan than the Dalek one.
H: Any plan is a better plan than the Dalek one. It’s like the aliens from Signs.
<laughter… link jokes>
K: I think we just broke the Historian.
P: I thought the Dulcian…
K: Aptly named Dull-cians.
P: I thought the Dulcian culture of analyze but don’t really understand played well with the story. In some ways a good description of what science should not be.
R: I observed, analyzed, considered, and then I DIDN’T throw a rock.
P: Exactly.
H: I miss Vicki.
P: I this storyline I imagine the Dominators being stuck there out of energy and no longer being relevant to the galaxy.
Cz: It would just be great if today’s Doctor bumped into them out in space.
MS: It’s just like 50 episodes later and there’s a fumf on the TARDIS door and there are Quarks there and they’re like “Destroy!”
H: Final thoughts Minispoo?
MS: These episode are getting way to great to just say it was awesome.
H: So what did you think of the story?
MS: Ummmm…. It was awesome. <snicker> Salutations? Duh. Stuff. Um….. pthth.
K: Okay. I think that’s good.
A: I don’t really have any final thoughts.
H: What did you think of the story?
A: We spread it out so much…
R: That was the only way to keep the toxicity at acceptable levels.
A: I think I agree with Ketina and Spoo that it was entertaining.
Cz: <thinks> I think skipping all those weeks in the middle made this episode seem really awesome.
H: I think I can agree with that.
Cz: SEEM.
R: I look forward to an episode, perhaps not the next episode, perhaps not the one after that, but an episode some day where I can understand the god damn dialog. Dialog that is not distorted by artificial robot voices. Dialog that is not buried under the sound of a giant sonic jack hammer. Also dialog that is maybe… interesting. That would be nice too.
H: I am gonna say, at a guess, next episode might fit your bill.
R: <nods> excellent.
Sp: <Monty Python silly person voice> Can we have another episode like that but… but with a bit more world building? And perhaps not so many pacifists in it. That would be lovely.
H: <Introduction voice> One episode with more world and not so many pacifists in it later…
Sp: <Monty Python silly voice> That was bloody awful!
R: <Monty Python silly voice #2> It’s a fair cop. But the BBC’s to blame.
H: <Monty Python silly voice #3> Right. We’ll be arresting them too.
<entire cast marches off singing that “Walk Upon England’s Mountain” song… which is apparently called Jerusalem, so the Historian tells me.>
——
And…that’s it for the Dominators! (Except for the story wrapup, coming soon.) Next week, we firmly leave somewhat dull Dulkis behind, and journey to…? Until then, I remain
THE HISTORIAN
NEXT WEEK: THE MIND ROBBER EPISODE 1
