Today it's the 44th serial in the Doctor Who series. The Dominators was broadcast August 10 through September 7 1968. It's the first serial of the 6th season and Patrick Troughton is the second Doctor. Frazer Hines is Jamie and Wendy Padbury is Zoe. It's a 5 part serial that was a 6 parter when it was being written. The writers, Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln, used the name Norman Ashby in protest of the cuts to their serial. They had already written 2 other serials, The Abominable Snowmen and The Web Of Fear, and they never wrote another DW episode after The Dominators. Sadly their last hurrah is not a great one. It's ok but nothing special. The planet Dulkis is home to some pacifists. The Dominators, a pair of them, arrive with a dozen robot pals to blow a hole in the planet's crust. The 2 have a magical egg that they'll drop into the magma to turn the firey planet goo radioactive. That's the fuel they use in their ships. The Tardis drops down in the middle of the island where the Dominators are carrying out their nefarious plan.
Those boxy guys in the photo on the left are the Quarks. It was an intentional attempt to make a marketable toy like the the Daleks. The first big hit aliens were off the series temporarily to star in the Doctor Who film. These sad, boxes were the best they could come up with. There were little kids inside the Quark suits and they could walk around but they just aren't all that menacing, even though they could shoot you dead. They never caught on big with the public. Part of the writers issue with the serial was the rights to the Quarks. They thought they should have a cut and the BBC didn't.
The Dominators were kind of fun with their bickering. "I want to kill them!" "No you can't!" I laughed. The Doctor fixes it so the evil aliens blow up in the end. I laughed there too. There wasn't a whole lot to recommend. A pot boiler to open the season. Kind of sad. The commentaries were a bit livelier than the one I listened to last week. There are a couple of making of that were ok to watch. Maybe next week something better will show up from the library. I have a lot of requests in and they are in various stages of arrival. Sometimes there isn't anyone requesting a dvd and other times there are several people on the list. Newer items are more popular for the most part.
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