Doctor Who: The Dominators

I want to love The Dominators, I really do. Patrick Troughton's Doctor is my favourite, and unfortunately there are precious few stories of his left in the archives. Unfortunately, The Dominators has one massive problem - it's utter crap.

There are four key reasons for this:

1. The Quarks. They are just dreadful in every way. The design is rubbish - they look like what they are; kids in cardboard boxes who occasionally wave their "arms" in a completely unconvincing and unthreatening way. Furthermore, as enemies, they are pretty crap. They burble every now and again like a Sat Nav that has just inhaled helium, and they need recharging every 5 seconds like a really primitive mobile phone. Finally, they are pretty easy to defeat - you just push 'em over.

2. The Dominators themselves. While they look pretty formidable, and they display a penchant for cruelty, they actually achieve very little since they spend nearly all of their time sniping at each other. After a while, it just becomes really, really boring.

3. The Dulcians. The emphasis is very much on dull. They do remarkably little other than talk to each other in a pious and pompous way. As the story progresses, you start to wonder whether it might just be better if the Dominators win out. The most interesting thing about this race is their curious style of dressing, which seems to consist of vests and curtains.

4. The story. It is essentially a rewrite of the first Dalek story - itself not a striking classic of plotting. It is all about the limits of pacifism, and the need to fight sometimes. The problem is that point can (and is) made in about five minutes, leaving us with a couple of hours of not much happening.

Is there anything good about it? Well, Troughton and Hines are as great as ever. Troughton always seems to give his best, even if the scripts really don't deserve it. Cully is also a relatively interesting character - something that is slightly undermined by the fact that he is a youthful rebel who looks like a portly, balding bank manager. And that's about it really. I seem to remember reading that one of the reasons why Troughton left was because he felt that the quality of the scripts was declining. Given his first story was the superb Power of the Daleks and his second season opener was perennial favourite Tomb of the Cybermen, it is easy to empathise with any despair he may have felt when faced with The Dominators to open his third season as the Doctor.

And why is this the clunker for the Troughton era? Well, there is another bad story in the archives, namely The Krotons - but that story is faster paced, shorter and with marginally more credible monsters (if only because they are taller than the Quarks). And, of course, The Underwater Menace is hardly a classic, but I can't include it as I can, and only ever will, see two episodes of this. And that is the real tragedy here - we have all five episodes of The Dominators and all four episodes of The Space Museum. Yet we cannot see the fourth episode of The Tenth Planet, or the vast majority of Evil of the Daleks or The Web of Fear. It is bad enough that large swathes of sixties Doctor Who were wiped back in the day; it is unforgivable that they wiped some of the best and preserved some of the worst.