For some reason, the third episode of
The Dominators is missing the "Episode 3" caption -- hence the rather odd labeling I've gone with...
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Cully and Zoe are watched over by a Quark. (The Dominators
[Episode 3]) ©BBC |
So let's see: this time around it's the Doctor and Jamie who argue with the Dulcian planetary council and Zoe and Cully who are captured by the Dominators: the opposite of episode 2. Although Zoe and Cully are put to work alongside Balan and his two students, Kando and Teel, to help clear away rubble for a drilling site, so you could argue they've got it worse than the Doctor and Jamie did. Toba attempts to destroy and Rago yells at him, and really not much has changed since episode 2. Oh! But at least Cully has destroyed a Quark with an antique laser gun. And you can sort of tell that Troughton and Hines think this story isn't up to snuff and are therefore doing their best to make things as entertaining as possible (e.g., their scenes inside the travel capsule). Admittedly it works to an extent; the Doctor and Jamie's interplay is easily the most watchable part of this entire serial. But they can only do so much to distract from the same things happening over and over. Although I've worked out that it's not so much that the episodes are badly edited (though they're not error-free on this part) as that almost no effort has been made to match the studio scenes with the location filming -- which is particularly a problem when the two are supposed to be identical. This seems to be the main reason why Toba and the Quarks seem to leap about the island, rather than shoddy editing.
Oh, and look, episode 3 ends the same way episode 2 ended, except Toba's destroying the atomic museum instead of the survey unit. Unfortunately for Cully, he ends up trapped in both buildings...
Episode 4 opens with Rago yelling at Toba (again) and Toba being sulky (again). We get a minimum of plot advancement as the Doctor and Zoe are taken aboard the Dominators' ship and left there under Quark guard, which lets them work out that the Dominators are drilling for fuel in an area where the crust of Dulkis is thin, and that the fuel they're looking for needs to be radioactive. And now it's Rago's turn to visit the Dulcian council -- although instead of having the same arguments with them as the others, he just has a Quark shoot one of them dead (and to be perfectly honest, it's rather hard not to be on Rago's side at this moment).
The most exciting part of the episode comes when Jamie taunts a Quark by throwing rocks at it, luring it into a trap whereby Cully rolls a giant boulder down at it, crushing it. It's a nice bit of action from a story that sorely needs it. Of course, this upsets Toba, who rounds up all the prisoners and demands to know where Jamie is hiding. When they refuse to tell him, he has a Quark kill Balan (so something new actually happened!) -- and if no one speaks up, the Doctor will be next...