It’s a bit odd that Tom Baker claims that he came up with the idea of his Doctor offering people jelly babies considering that the motif appears in a couple of Patrick Troughton stories. The more obvious, more likely explanation is that Baker is just remembering it wrong. He’s a notoriously unreliable source on his own era. He worked very intensively on the show, doing multiple stories at once so they all melded together, and drank very intensively off it; he probably would have struggled to remember that sort of thing by 1979, let alone by 1992. Terrance Dicks is far better poised to have established jelly babies, seeing as he wrote a Troughton story, wrote Baker’s debut and edited The Three Doctors, in which Troughton makes a jelly baby joke. It’s even easy to speculate why Baker may remember doing so - The Face of Evil contains a wonderful jelly baby adlib Baker is justifiably prone to bragging about, and in The Invasion of Time clarifies Tom Baker’s favourite jelly babies are the Doctor’s favourites, too. But let’s assume he was telling the truth. Baker often says he didn’t watch the show before he got cast, though he occasionally mentions he saw a few episodes of Troughton’s era and liked the character. That’s not surprising - as soon as you are willing to recognise Baker as a trained actor doing a considered performance of a script rather than take literally the joke that they pulled him straight off the building site and added only a scarf, you can see Troughton’s influence. But there’s a deeper implication here - if he recognises jelly babies at all, and if they left enough of an impression on him that he associated the character with them, then this probably means that the Doctor performance he based his whole approach around was Troughton in The Dominators. And that’s a fun idea, since I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Troughton’s performance in The Dominators is the worst Troughton Doctor performance that still exists. Troughton’s performance on a good day is still a character acting performance rather than a leading-man performance or comic grotesque - the Doctor has become more central, but he’s still part of an ensemble. But The Dominators leaves him mugging in the spotlight, chewing the scenery to take the attention off the fact that it’s all made of polystyrene. He gurns his mediocre jokes (‘Oh my WORD!’), makes puerile adlibs (‘these little number-nine pills...’), howls and flails about while knocking things over (‘Whoaaaah!’). But worse than the desperation is the contempt. He’s so desperate to prove that he is slumming it in this trash that he actually acts it sarcastically, overacting, drawing out his comic timing, rolling his eyes and cracking adlibs that call attention to the story’s characterisation problems (“You got me there!”) without actually doing anything to smooth them over. It’s massively misjudged, since the story’s already self-mocking and absurdist, and because he’s saved worse scripts than The Dominators (Tomb of the Cybermen and The Web of Fear) by doing them properly. And I think Troughton was smart enough that he knew that. He hated the production conditions at the time, and so he went into sabotage-mode. Of course, that said, it’s not like his performance in The Dominators is bad, or anything. Even Troughton in a I-don’t-give-a-shit week is fun to watch - at least, compared to Pertwee on an I-don’t-give-a-shit-week. If you didn’t know Troughton on a good week, you wouldn’t know it was a bad week. You’d just assume that this was what the Doctor was like. And if Tom Baker’s main experience with the character was The Dominators, chances are he thought that too. Tom Baker’s Doctor brings a lot of new developments to the character, but one of the most significant is irony. His Doctor is self-aware in a way none of his predecessors are. He talks to himself, to the camera. He makes fun of bad acting in his own show, rolls his eyes at bad special effects, and indulges in both with a wink and a smirk at the ridiculousness. He watches his own performance with us as he plays it out, and laughs at it the whole time. Boiled down to its components, that’s not that different to what he’d seen Troughton doing in The Dominators - but for Baker, it’s an in-character irony, not an out-of-character one. He didn’t realise it was Troughton on an off-day - he assumed that’s just what the Doctor is like, just like he assumed the Doctor just always eats jelly babies. And so the contempt is absent. Instead of trying to make the show look like it’s beneath him, he lets himself get fully involved. And it turns out that involvement is very important for making the low-campiness of the show work. When Troughton clowns around in The Dominators, he’s being insincere. He seems to be saying, it’s a terrible show, and I shouldn’t be in it. But when Tom Baker clowns around, he’s doing a sincere performance of insincerity. He seems to be saying, this is the best show in the world, because I’m in it. The Dominators doesn't just create the basic character feel of the most iconic classic Doctor, though. It’s far more significant than that. For instance, it introduces the concept of an alien race with two hearts - at a time before the Time Lords were even established in the series, let alone their binary vascular system. Seems like an oddly specific thing to recycle - two hearts. Especially as, in the case of The Dominators, it’s a literalising of a metaphor, part of the story’s absurdism. ‘Two hearts and no brain’ was the idea, the old lefty-bashing cliché. Only both Dulcians and Time Lords do have brains - supposedly highly intelligent ones, with even utter racists like Rago praising the Dulcians’ intelligence - and the Time Lords don’t scan as a lefty caricature. Even before Robert Holmes (establisher of the two hearts) turns them into a House of Lords/Oxbridge dons/Catholic Church/Cold War-paranoia-era US Government mashup, they’re very conservative. They’re Lords. They’re a race of elderly white men in formal dress, whose main political belief is that they should leave things as they are (with them on the top). Holmes, cynical and anti-corruption, saw Terrance Dicks’ race of good non-interferers and sneakily gave them two hearts to remind us that, essentially, they’re the same as what the Dulcians were being criticised for six stories ago. And, anyway, is the Dulcians’ caricature really as simple as them being left-wing? They seem to spend all their time congratulating themselves for doing nothing about their big ideas (‘inaction is itself a course of action’) and getting mortally offended by semantics while missing the spirit of what is said (the lovely moment when Rago announces his intentions to murder them all and the councillor lectures him about ‘using that tone’). The problem isn’t that they’re pacifists - the Doctor says multiple times that he thinks their pacifist philosophy is noble - the problem is that they’re self-absorbed hashtag-activists (hilariously and absolutely unintentionally, they even spend all their time staring at tiny screens!), so up themselves that they think regurgitating their philosophy to a small echo chamber of people who already agree with them is a revolutionary act when people are dying and they have the direct opportunity to do something to stop it. The Dulcian politics are very generational, as well - old men who support inaction even when invaded by a pair of absolute losers with shitty robots, versus young protesters and marchers and revolutionaries who learn to overcome their prescriptive education and want to do something to change the world. Cully’s often interpreted as being hugely miscast in this regard, but I don’t think so - he appears about the right age to be Senex’s son, which he is, but most importantly it causes him to resemble the Doctor (especially since his two students are a brainless warrior boy and a girl who has been educated to have perfect fact recall). Before this, we assumed the Doctor was a wise old man amongst his people - if we think back to The Time Meddler, the Doctor expects to be treated like a senior and feels insecure about the Monk having a better TARDIS than him - but Cully leads us very nicely into the eventual revelation that the Doctor is more a prodigal son, a bratty little boy... a student activist. (In fact, later on, Holmes literally makes the Doctor a student activist in Carnival of Monsters.) But it’s not just that The Dominators sets up the entire structure of how Time Lord society is going to work before the Time Lords even show up - it’s got more to it than that. After all, it’s got one of the darkest, most cynical moments of all Who history in it, in its very first episode. We go inside a ship and see a late-middle-age academic - melodramatic and flaky but genuinely adventurous - with the personality of a much younger man, surrounded by dim but sexy teenagers. (He’s using his ship illegally, by the way - his two-hearted species wouldn’t let him travel but he’s doing it anyway.) His friends speculate about how dangerous or boring it’s going to be in the outside world while he checks the safety on the ship’s scanner, and he and his companions wonder out into the quarry-planet, and encounter short robots with funny voices - and they murder the teenagers before our eyes. And then we go inside the TARDIS. The Dominators starts by staging a stereotypical Doctor Who opening and ends it with everyone getting killed. And people think The Space Museum is a parody of Doctor Who. There’s obviously a lot of The Daleks in The Dominators - little gimmicky robot aliens, nuclear war, a pacifist race that has to be taught to fight again. All very intentional. There’d already been some catastrophically awful attempts at making ‘the new Daleks’, so presumably Lincoln and Haisman wanted to try repeating the same basic story again in the hope that it’d work just as well the second time. (And The Dominators is better than The Daleks, because it’s got jokes in it, and because it’s shorter, so there.) I don’t think ‘the Dominators’ is a bad name at all for a culture that is primarily based around dominating. It does sound a little bit like an American football team, but you’ve got those big shoulderpads involved, so that’s fine. It’s no worse a title than the largely unmocked term ‘Time Lord’. And there’s a certain level of honorific to their titles which I like - they refer to those above them as ‘Dominator’, to themselves or to those below by their titles (‘Navigator’ and ‘Probationer’). Are lady Dominators called Dominatrixes?
Are there lady Dominators? It’s interesting - you’ve got two Dominators in the entire story, both men, who hate each other; and you’ve got Quarks, who are coded as children. I’m not proposing that the Quarks are Rago and Toba’s children - that makes virtually no sense, fun as Rago and Toba are to ship (I’m not going to pretend I don’t). But there’s a compelling idea there. The Dominator empire is clearly a dying empire - stretched thin of resources, stretched thin of men. They can only afford two men to secure their vital new energy source, and they’re incompetents who hate each other. So they pad out the numbers with robot children - an artificial facsimile of a next generation, and as boy soldiers to fill the front lines, holding guns and doing what they’re told. I assume that some time after the Dominators attempted to blow up Dulkis, their empire progressively crumbled and in that weakness the Quarks overthrew the Dominators and went on to bother the Second Doctor and his grandchildren John and Gillian in all those comic strips where they did that. Just like on Dulkis, the generation try and keep things as they are, and their children try and change things, even if in this case they’re robot children.
1 Comment
12/3/2021 04:18:13 pm
Thanks for the first genuinely inteligently considered and original review of this disastrous story I've read.
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A Doctor Who blog by Holly Boson. Assorted thoughts and activities.
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