The Dominators, by... Terry Nation?

On watching The Dominators recently, it occurred to me that the story’s plot appears to have been lifted from two earlier Doctor Who adventures, both written by Terry Nation. Or, more likely, from their film adaptations, as I’m thinking of the first two Dalek tales, which in the late-1960s were probably more accessible via their big screen versions.

There’s a radioactive wasteland leftover from an earlier atomic blast and a race of effete pacifist humanoids. Threatened by a militaristic race who are happy for them to be wiped out to further their own needs, some of these natives are very reluctantly persuaded to resist. So far, so serial B. The Dominators and their Quarks obviously take the role of the Daleks, but they are invaders, rather than locals as in The Daleks. So on to the similarities with The Dalek Invasion of Earth.

The invaders arrive in a saucer-like spaceship and subjugate the locals. Captured, the Doctor and his male companion are subjected to an intelligence test. Other captives are used as slave labour and worked to exhaustion clearing rubble for a mining project. The aliens’ plan involves drilling into the centre of the planet and delivering a bomb down the resulting shaft. The Doctor’s party intercept the bomb part-way down the shaft and redirect it, causing the destruction of the invaders and a local volcanic eruption.

The Quarks’ initial appearance is held back to the end of the first episode, as the Daleks’ was in their first two adventures. There’s even a near-slapstick routine involving the hero(es) onboard the enemy spaceship, as in the second Dalek film. The Quarks themselves were even a deliberate attempt to recreate the success of the Daleks, both as a potential recurring monster (since rights to the Daleks had been withdrawn by Terry Nation) and – from the writers’ point-of-view – as a subject for lucrative merchandising opportunities.

In fact, the whole serial has a Hartnell feel, with photographic blow-up backdrops being used (badly) and the sets being crammed into such small spaces that in the early episodes characters ‘suddenly’ notice things that had clearly been within their line of sight for ages.

Put like this, The Dominators looks like an unimaginative cut and shunt job. Writers Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln already had form with The Abominable Snowmen, which appears to draw on Nigel Kneale’s 1955 television play The Creature (or more likely its film version, The Abominable Snowman).

Yet, in case their lawyers are reading, I’m not seriously suggesting the writers deliberately pilfered other people’s plots. More likely, the similarities are partly coincidental (many elements of The Dominators and the earlier Terry Nation tales are fairly generic anyway) and partly due to the authors taking a modest measure of inspiration from earlier successes.

Images © BBC

[This is a slightly revised version of an article originally published in Panic Moon in October 2010]

Sources

Production subtitles on the DVD of The Dominators

Mervyn Haisman interview in DWM #268 (August 1998)