First broadcast: August/ September 1968
Plot spoilers? Officially yes, but I shouldn’t worry
“Shall we destroy? Shall we destroy?”
”Destroy”
“Overall verdict”, says Tomb of the Anorak, “it’s crap”. This is not a popular story. It normally finds itself in a three-way tie for last in the Troughton popularity stakes, with ’The Underwater Menace’ and ’The Space Pirates’. (Respectively, a story I didn’t bother with, and one I won’t be.)
People are keen to point out that the premise is daft, the plot thin, the costumes ludicrous, the ‘deadly’ robots actually weirdly cute, and its all bundled up in a reactionary rant against the peace movement. Even the writers washed their hands of it, insisting it went out under a pseudonym.
Which might seem hard to argue with. Starting with the costumes, I would bet money that the actors were signed up before the first costume fitting. The Dominators are for some reason dressed up as armadillos, in armour so stiff and awkward that when they try moving blockily about they resemble a ’South Park’ animation. For their part, the Dulcians parade about in curtains. And the robots Quarks look like packing crates turned bling but also punk, while also a child gang. The Chumblies were more menacing, frankly. You’re clearly intended to understand what they’re saying, and it’s impossible to work out a word.
One character, Cully, is scripted as a headstrong and impetuous youth - but is played by the most incongruously middle-aged duffer since Bill Hayley. (Actor Arthur Cox was 34 at the time, but in all honestly looks older.) But it’s the reactionary moral, and the virulence which its given, that gets most goats. El Sandifer found it:
“…an overt attack on the ethical foundations of Doctor Who… an attempt to twist and pervert the show away from what it is and towards something ugly, cruel, and just plain unpleasant. The sheer sickening stench of this story is enough to turn one off the program entirely.”
Yet ’The Daleks’ was an anti-pacifist story too. But as pointed out by approximately everybody, that gave its target their best face. The Thals were as noble and principled, and in their own way brave, as the Dulcians are a ludicrous Aunt Sally inside a curtain. Anyone can knock down a straw man, in fact that’s what they’re made for. (In addition, I suspect most aren’t objecting out of some card-carrying pacifist conviction. The problem is the familiar elision between being anti-war and pacifism, then pacifism with passivity.)
Except, as you may have already guessed, it’s around now that I’m going to say that its the business of ’Doctor Who’ to be absurd. So, while it’s no competitor for ‘Power of the Daleks’ or ‘Web Of Fear’, this is a whole heap better than ‘The Wheel in Space’.
True, the anti-anti-war angle is the second-hardest thing to take. It does feel highly un-’Who’ for the Doctor to be messing so readily with guns and bombs. And while the Sixties peace movement certainly deserved its share of criticisms, none of them are the knee-jerk reactionary reasons doled out here. But I always say, you’re better being ridiculed than ignored. When they try this hard to misrepresent you, you must be doing something right.
More importantly, with this sort of thing they always imagine they’re telling on us. But of course they’re really telling on themselves. And they don’t know that. Which only makes it more telling. As we’ll see later.
I may have had an advantage here, as I knew before watching that this was originally intended as a satire but had those elements edited out. Which was part of the reason why the writers huffily resorted to a pseudonym. (The other part being a squabble over the robot Quarks, imagined as being as marketable as the Daleks in the same hopeful way as I imagine Ana de Armas and matrimony.)
Except of course the satire kind of sticks. It’s a bit like the adage about rock & roll, you can’t clean it up because it’s dirty to begin with. It could even be argued that the insistence all this is played straight just sharpens the satire. With the story as broadcast it would be more than difficult to work out how intentional the comedy is. But certainly none of it is intentional from the point of view of the characters. Which, like a planet filled with straight men, only makes it funnier. Being asked to take this seriously and finding you just can’t, that’s perhaps the best way to watch it.
The tiffs between the two Dominators are especially hilarious. Big Dominator (as I was soon calling him) is forever called off-stage, insisting that in his absence Little Dominator to not do any more of that destroying business. But as soon as he’s out of sight what do you know but some pressing problem rears, which unfortunately can only be resolved by destroying some more stuff. So what’s a poor Dominator to do? Reluctantly he has to give the order again - “destrooooy!”
Only for Big Dominator to return and ask angrily whose been destroying in his house. Hilariously, his objection to all this isn’t anything to do with scruples or even strategy, he just figures it wastes too much power. He may be concerned they’ll run out of 50ps for the meter, it’s not exactly clear. Little Dominator then sulks and seethes, before muttering the passive aggressive “order accepted.” It may be he’s actually a Destroyer, enrolled in the Dominator fleet by clerical error.
But the Dulcian Council, who endlessly debate stuff and occasionally try to decide whether they should maybe be deciding something, are not exactly ept either. Perhaps their attire comes out of the fact that it’s clearly curtains for them, no matter the size of the threat. Their meandering musings seemed absurd to me. And I work for the Council. In fact the whole thing could be summed up as a resistible force meeting an ineffectual object.
So in short the Dominators look and act like a right bunch of prats, and the Dulcians a different bunch of prats. And that’s a vital part of the story. Their respective costumes represent their respective ideologies. They’re absurd because those ideologies are absurd. The Dominators are encased in rigid armour, their movements little more than literally one-track. While, less happily, the Dulcians look remarkably like men in dresses, emasculated and enfeebled. (I did say less happily. This is in fact the hardest thing to take about the story.)
”Destroy!”
But also, forget all this for a moment and try to picture a contemporary satire of the Sixties peace movement. Surely Rada members in wigs saying “hey man” a whole lot. Hopeless hippies, useless youths who won’t fight the godless Commies like they should because they’re too busy lying down and listening to the Grateful Dead. Kids today…
So then why are so many of the Dulcians so bloody old? They’re one of the most gerontocratic societies yet seen on this show. Yes, there’s Cully the reckless youth. But that suggests reckless youth starts at forty. (Like the daft costumes, there’s a way in which the ludicrousness of this helps the story.)
Further, but relatedly, what’s with the Classicism? I mean, it’s pretty hard to miss. They wear togas. Okay, they look like they all wanted to wear togas but had to resort to curtains, but even so… What could that possibly have to do with peacenik hippies, in their kaftans and patched jeans?
And further still… At this stage ’Who’ almost entirely ignores the mechanisation of labour. And this story soon continues the series tradition of humans doing manual labour while machines look on. The Doctor does ask “What would they want Dulcians as slaves for, they've got the Quarks?" But no real interest is paid to this. We’re told the Dulcians don’t do labour, and the Dominators finally decide they’re useless as slaves. (A message from their home world, confirming what we could have told them inside of five minutes.) But if (as is stated) we’re not just seeing some aristocratic caste, if they don’t labour at all, whose keeping them in curtains or maintaining those travel tubes?
Because it keeps up the link between pacifism and passivity. And it effectively fits with our received history of Classicism, where slaves are kept off-stage and invisible. But then the next thing doesn’t…
What about their rote learning? To the point where “better to do nothing than do the wrong thing” is their credo. Which might seem more part of the Dominators’ culture than the Dulcians. This certainly has nothing to do with our received ideas of Classicism, that it was some kind of forerunner of the Enlightenment.
(While watching I was convinced the Dulcians should be seen as the philosophising Greeks and the imperious Dominators as the invading Romans. But it seems the names are all from Latin. Dulcian means “beautiful people”, an early working title.)
Remember the Thals too had classical-sounding names like Ganatus and Antodus, intended to confer gravitas upon them. But unlike them the Dulcians aren’t there to be seen as nobly wrong. Their society is, in its own way, as problematic as the Dominators. It can’t be a peaceful utopia, whose problems unfortunately rear up from outside. It must call those problems down on itself.
And the learning-by-rote is function overriding theme that allows for this, foregrounding that what we’re looking at is a stagnant society. In a twist on Jules Feiffer’s famous gag about the Republicans and Democrats, the Dominators do all the wrong things while the Dulcians don’t do anything. If they’ve seen no wars for thousands of years, they’ve probably just not got round to one.
Because the point we’re supposed to take about these useless hippies is that they aren’t an aberration but a symptom of a wilder malaise. Like children copying and magnifying their parents’ bad habits, they’ve taken on the worst elements of the generation before. The post-war world of peace and prosperity has softened people up, left them insulated from the harsh realities of life, turned decadent by such luxuries as indoor toilets and central heating systems. What they need is some shock therapy before the inevitable next war rolls round. Haisman and Lincoln spent a good deal of their spare time berating the end of national service, would be my guess.
’The Penta Ray Factor’ (July/Aug ’65), a ’Daleks’ comic strip in ’TV21’, is strangely similar. We have a decadent Classicist society who chooses to do nothing when warned of invasion, we have a brash and reckless son of the leader, and so on. (It’s also similar to ’The Trigan Empire’, though preceding it by four months.) Suggesting these themes were in the air. (Wyndham’s ‘Midwich Cuckoos’, as we saw, also dealt with this projected problem.)
There’s two odd things about this. First, much of their earlier ’Web of Fear’ was about the uselessness of a military response to an otherworldly threat. Okay that threat was specifically designated the Weird, rather that a pair of bickering buffoons in cumbersome costumes. But it’s still somewhat bizarre they went from there to here in one script.
But also, this sounds like last weeks moral panic. By time of broadcast (after, for example, the Grosvenor square riots) the Dulcians should have been if anything more like Little Dominator, headstrong and reckless militants, convinced that the world they want is only one explosion away. (Or jump arbitrarily between hopeless space cadets and deranged fanatics, as the Planet People did in ’Quatermass’.)
But popular culture is never so neat, and the first draft of history normally arrives late. Literally, so here, where the script was commissioned on Jan 2nd ’68 then written over February and March. This was effectively a ’67 story, which just happened to be broadcast to the world of ’68.
”Destrooooy!!!"
If the Doctor taking too readily to guns and bombs seems problematically out of character, his decision to act the part of a dumb local, in order to stay under the radar of the Dominators’ arrogance, seems very Troughton.
”An unintelligent enemy is far less dangerous than an intelligent one, Jamie. Just act stupid. Do you think you can manage that?”
Speaking of Jamie, all the fighting stuff gives him something to do, likening the Quarks to redcoats. True, this mostly takes the form of throwing styrofoam rocks at kids dressed up in packing crates. But he looks happy about it.
While Zoe fares the best. Rather than just being a walking Wikipedia she scores on the gumptionometer. Separating her early on from the Doctor and Jamie takes her out of their shadow, and allows her to be contrasted to the Dulcians. As Cully points out: “She can't be a Dulcian - she has an enquiring mind.” It would have been better not to dress her up as a Dulcian, as the earlier scenes visually contrast her from them. But curtain-covered or not, she gets her moment.
Coming soon! Disruptions in the space-time continuum…
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