The Dominators
“All I want is peace! Peace! A little piece of...”
The Dominators was not included in the bottom ten of Doctor Who written up by Doctor Who Magazine writers in 1988. But twenty one years later, when DWM did a readers’ poll of the series’ entire history as it reached its two hundredth story, it came in at 191. Just inside that bottom five percent. Five years later, in a post fiftieth anniversary survey again for DWM, it fared slightly worse, coming in 234th of 241 stories. Both are, broadly speaking, a reflection of how the story has always been seen by fandom when examining it in the rear view mirror.
The story got a poor review when released on VHS, with Doctor Who Magazine criticising the basic set up of a planet of people devoted to peace (“one of the worst science fiction cliches”) being attacked, and disliking how their attackers, the titular Dominators “hate each other and argue the whole time” while noting that “the production team of the day ...chucked an episode out because they thought it was boring and upset the writers so much they took their names off it!” DWM even questioned why it was being issued on VHS at all. That last point might sound odd, given that surely DWM should want any and all Doctor Who to be available, but The Dominators was only the 21st Doctor Who VHS in a range that had around a hundred possible stories to choose from, and which had not at that point declared that it planned to be comprehensive.
