Day 109 — April 19th 2021
The Dominators Episode Five and The Mind Robber Episode One
The Dominators — Episode Five
A friend text me after yesterday’s blog post went up. ‘How on Earth,’ he asked, ‘are you enjoying The Dominators?’. Clearly I’m not the only one who’s struggled with this story in the past! Oh, but I’m so pleased by how much I’ve liked it this time around. I’ve said before in this marathon that because I love Doctor Who it bothers me when I watch a story and don’t enjoy it. I was a bit glum last week having found Fury From the Deep so flat and The Wheel in Space so boring. I want to be enjoying these stories! So to discover that my opinion on The Dominators has done a complete 180 since I last watched it makes me incredibly happy.
As much as I’ve enjoyed this, I think they made the right decision to cut it short by one episode. The Dominators was originally intended as a six parter, and I really don’t know how they’d have strung it out for another 25 minutes beyond what we’ve already got.
This episode gives me a chance to return to one of my favourite current subjects; the evolution of the Second Doctor Who’s Sonic Screwdriver.
Truth be told, I’d entirely forgotten that it popped up in this story, so it was a nice surprise when it did, and it’s had a bit of an upgrade since Fury From the Deep. Here, it’s very clearly a pen torch — as it will be in the next appearance too — and Doctor Who has to insert it into another device in order to use it for cutting a hole in the wall. Lee Moone has done loads of brilliant work trying to figure out what shape the ‘holster’ is over on his own blog, but I’m really interested today in trying to work out what they intended it to be.
Back during Fury From the Deep I wondered if they might have used just a regular screwdriver as the tool, and I think this episode lends some weight to the idea that it might have been the case. Doctor Who tells Jamie here that it’s ‘a little more than a screwdriver’, but in the background Teel expresses shock it the capabilities it shows by saying ‘it looks just like an ordinary screwdriver!’.
Now, clearly, it doesn’t look ‘just like an ordinary screwdriver’ at all; it looks like a pen torch. But Teel’s line doesn’t appear in the camera scripts, so it was likely added by the actor during rehearsals.
It could be that during rehearsals Troughton held a real screwdriver for this sequence — the Sonic prop having not been delivered yet — or it could be that either he or Hines had told actor Giles Block that the ‘Sonic Screwdriver’ was… well, just a screwdriver. Either way, the reaction wasn’t altered or dropped in studio when this prop turned up, so at some stage Block must have thought he’d be looking at something else!
This final episode is a 6/10, I think, but I’ve enjoyed it. It gives the story an overall score of 6.8/10, which makes it the new exact centre point of the Troughton era — with seven stories I’ve rated higher and seven I’ve rated lower. And this final episode has been enjoyable for all of the things that I’ve liked in the previous four instalments; humour and great explosions, chiefly.
The Mind Robber — Episode One
The Mind Robber is the ultimate example of me forgetting what I thought about most stories during the last marathon. There’s some tales where I know how I felt last time around. I know I loved all of Season 26, and I know I disliked The Highlanders, for example. But for the majority of stories — especially once we get into the 1970s — I honestly can’t remember which I liked and which I didn't, which makes me all the more excited to see how I feel this time.
But The Mind Robber. A couple of years after I’d seen it for the marathon I was discussing it with a friend. I can’t remember if I said I really liked it or really didn’t… but my friend responded with surprise and pointed out that I’d felt exactly the opposite when writing about it during the marathon.
In the time between watching it and discussing it a few years later I’d completely forgotten how I felt. And in the time since that conversation and now… I’ve forgotten all over again. So perhaps more than any other story I’ve been really interested to see my thoughts on this one and finally settle what I really think of the story.
The one thing I was fairly sure about is this first episode. Created last minute when The Dominators had an episode cut from the running time, this opening instalment is the ultimate example of creativity thriving in adversity.
It’s packed with these great visual ideas — the TARDIS arriving in a white void that Doctor Who describes as being ‘nowhere’. Lumbering White Robots which loom out of the void to menace our companions. Spectral visions of Jamie and Zoe, dressed in all-white versions of their costumes, who try to tempt Doctor Who outside his ship. And then when he does leave the TARDIS we see the Police Box, too, has been rendered as blank.
And then there’s the cliffhanger where the TARDIS — our point of safety since the very beginning — explodes and sends the Console spinning off into a black void. As striking images go, that’s pretty spectacular. When I think of this episode, I think of all these huge visuals and it’s such an obvious classic.
And yet… I think this is an episode which would benefit from being lost. All these visuals sound incredible, but watching the reality of them today I can’t help but notice just how cheap and tatty it all is. I know it’s unfair to criticise some aspects because I’m watching a restored print on a 50" flat screen, but you can’t escape the fact that the white void just looks like an empty TV studio. The join between the cyclorama and the floor really does spoil the illusion.
The White Robots are a fantastic design, but they’re reused from an earlier edition of Out of the Unknown, where they appeared with a perhaps even more striking black livery. Something that’s far less often mentioned is that the costumes had already been reused once before, in an edition of Thirty Minute Theatre broadcast the December before this story went out, again in their original black colouring. That episode was written by Derrek Sherwin, who was also responsible for the last minute creation of this episode, and so I think it’s likely that he suggested that these costumes might be available.
As much as I love the design, I can’t help wondering if it would have been better to have used the Clockwork Soldiers that’ll be showing up in the next episode; the sheer incongruity of them would have been interesting to see.
Those costumes aren’t the only re-used elements in this episode either. The first five minutes are given over to Doctor Who and his friends panicking because the Fluid Links are overheating and causing mercury vapor to leak into the Control Room. We did that exact same threat only a handful of episodes ago at the start of The Wheel in Space. It wasn’t overly thrilling there, so to see it revisited so soon after feels lazy, even if this episode was a fairly last-minute addition to the series.
The volume of The Complete History covering this story notes that ‘Sherwin kept costs to a minimum with no extra sets, cast members or props’, and this has become the go-to thing to say about this episode over the years; that the team pulled it together from nothing, and that it’s an incredible achievement. But I think that narrative has been exaggerated and distorted over the years. Yes, the White Robots were reused from earlier productions but as I’ve already noted, they were all repainted from top to toe. The white TARDIS exterior seen here isn’t the regular prop repainted, it’s an entirely new construction (although it seems only the two sides seen on screen were built). Then there’s the new costumes for the companions, including the white variants only seen in a single scene. Paul MC Smith’s brilliant TARDIS Chronicles book also notes that lots of the interior TARDIS seen here — including the Power Room and the photo blow-up walls — was entirely new for this story too.
I think the narrative that this entire episode was pulled together in adversity and from nowhere is perhaps a little overstated, and has become the defining ‘myth’ for this story.
Oh, I know. I’m having a right old moan. And I’ll accept that the final minutes, where the TARDIS explodes and our heroes go spinning off into the void, is one of the best moments the series has ever given us. I’m just sad to find that after so long thinking of this episode as a proper ‘classic’, I’ve found myself really disappointed by it.
I think I’m going with a 5/10 — bolstered because it’s so full of brilliant ideas, but hampered by the poor execution. Because this episode is such an outlier, there’s no way to know from this how the rest of The Mind Robber will fare, but I’m still filled with more than a little trepidation.
