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| The Dominators |
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 Name: The Dominators/Quarks
Format: Television
show, Book and Comic Book
Time of Origin: Unspecified time and date in the future; attacked Earth in the 1950s.
Appearances: "The
Dominators", "Dominant Species" and "Prisoners of Time"
Doctors: Second
Doctor, Fourth Doctor and Tenth
Doctor
Companions: Jamie McCrimmon, Zoe Heriot, Harry Sullivan, Naomi Cross and Martha Jones
History: Although a superficially stupid and clumsy creation, the robotic Quarks have gained a significant reputation among the show's fans, appearing on a regular basis in some of the Second Doctor's adventures in the comics (Although these encounters cannot be classified as canon due to the out-of-character portrayal of the Second Doctor in these storylines). However, the Quarks were merely the agents of the ruthless Dominators, the self-proclaimed 'Masters of the Ten Galaxies', taking territory for themselves and expanding across the galaxy. The Quarks were the Dominators' robotic warriors, powered by ultrasound and capable of using their arms to shoot to kill, paralyse, or simply deliver an electric shock, recording a wide amount of technical data just by rotating their heads. The Quarks generally served as the Dominators' agents so that they could avoid expending any more energy than was absolutely necessary, with each Dominator controlling a certain number of Quarks at a time even when multiple Dominator ships were assigned to the same mission.
The Doctor confronted the Dominators and the Quarks when they sought control of the peaceful planet of Dulkis ("The Dominators"), which had outlawed war almost two centuries ago. Research into atomic energy on Dulkis resulted in the creation of an explosive device that decimated an entire island, the island being left as the 'Island of Death' to serve as a memorial and a warning to the horrors of war. Seeking to gain slaves and power sources to sustain their energy demands, the Dominators attempted to destroy Dulkis by firing rockets through various holes drilled into its crust to strike the magma. This attack would create a series of volcanoes that would erupt after a seed device was planted in the magma, converting the entire planet into a molten radioactive mass that the Dominators would use as fuel for their fleet's future expansionist policies.
After the TARDIS arrived on Dulkis, once The Doctor and his companions learned about the Dominators' plans, he and his companion Zoe faked their way through the Dominators' intelligence tests to trick the Dominators into underestimating what his companions and the Dulcians were capable of. With this advantage, The Doctor took advantage of the conflict between the two Dominators as one preferred the quickest course of action by killing the prisoners while the other objected to the elimination of potential slaves. With this conflict distracting the Dominators, The Doctor was able to intercept the seed device and confine the explosion to the Island of Death while using the seed to destroy the Dominator ship. The most serious long-term consequence of this encounter was when damage sustained to the TARDIS in the eruption initially prevented the TARDIS crew from simply dematerialising before the lava flow would reach them, forcing The Doctor to activate an emergency switch that would take them out of time itself, leading into his first encounter with the Land of Fiction ("The Mind Robber").
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Dominant Species
(John Dorney) |
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A couple of lifetimes later, when the Fourth Doctor attempted to take his companions Harry Sullivan and Naomi Cross ("Storm of the Sea Devils") for a holiday, he ran into a problem when Taleeria, the holiday planet he took them to, became the target for a Dominator invasion ("Dominant Species"). It was soon established that the entire solar system had been targeted by the Dominators, with Taleeria simply the staging post, with other worlds not getting involved so long as the Dominators didn't come for their planets. The Doctor's companions were collected by the local resistance movement while The Doctor was captured by the Dominators, which led to The Doctor being taken off-planet while Taleeria was destroyed, leaving him assuming that Harry and Naomi had been killed. Left in a funk from the loss of his companions, The Doctor spent the next month working as part of the Dominators' slave forces while they gathered the radioactive remains of Taleeria to use as a power source, officially trying to give the Dominators more efficient fuel reserves so they wouldn't destroy planets so quickly. Fortunately, by the time Harry and Naomi arrived with the resistance, The Doctor had also taken steps to give himself the means to control the Quarks, allowing him to save the resistance from a Quark attack by shutting all the robots down at once.
However, The Doctor admitted that shutting down all the Quarks like that had essentially sacrificed stealth in favour of an immediate result, which meant that Draaga, the Commander of the current Dominator forces, would be able to trace the source. The Doctor was rescued by Naomi before he could do more than explain the basic principle of what he had done to Draaga, but this inspired Draaga to use Kayla - another slave who had worked closely with The Doctor - to complete The Doctor's work and take control of other Quarks for himself. This allowed Draaga to stage a coup against the Dominator Overseer and kill his superior, but this only provoked a Dominator civil war as the other Dominators objected to his takeover.
Over the next few days, Draaga destroyed most of the other Dominators while the resistance helped the refugees escape, until the Dominator forces were down to just Draaga and one other warship. The Doctor, Harry and Naomi were able to infiltrate Draaga's ship using a crashed Dominator shuttle - Harry wearing the Dominator armour to pose as the guard escorting prisoners - but Draaga was able to capture them. However, when The Doctor revealed to Kayla that her family had been killed ages ago, despite Draaga's claim that he was keeping them alive so long as Kayla helped him control the Quarks, she turned Draaga's own Quarks against him. With Draaga dead, Kayla directed The Doctor, Harry and Naomi on where to rescue the remaining slaves, and then sent Draaga's ship on a collision course with the final Dominator vessel, ending the Dominator occupation.
Refugee ships were subsequently sent from other systems now that the threat of the Dominators had been dealt with, leaving The Doctor hopeful that the planets would recover even if he and the others regretted the scale of lives lost because he hadn't been able to find a quicker way.
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| Prisoners of Time |
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Although The Doctor did not encounter the Dominators again for some time, he quickly recognised their presence when he discovered a Dominator plot to invade Earth in his tenth incarnation ("Prisoners of Time"). While visiting a Hollywood observatory in the 1950s, the Tenth Doctor and Martha Jones witnessed a film set that was experiencing scheduling difficulties due to the cast and crew mysteriously disappearing, to the point that the director impulsively hired Martha as a replacement for the main actress. Investigating the props for the film, The Doctor soon recognised a Quark among the mock robots being used, tracking its footprints back to a nearby cave just as the Dominators abducted the rest of the film crew after they stumbled on the Quarks ahead of schedule.
Concluding that humans were too stupid and rebellious to serve as a willing labour force, the Dominators intended to use the movie to transmit a subliminal message to everyone who saw it. The first goal of the message would be to encourage viewers to convince other people to watch the film, with repeated viewings dulling the human will to resist and turning them into the perfect slave race. Naturally refusing to allow this to happen, The Doctor tricked the Quarks into destroying the Dominators' brainwashing machine before manoeuvring himself in such a manner that the Quarks blew themselves up, forcing the Dominators to depart as they lacked the resources to be an effective threat without the Quarks as enforcers.
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| A Dominator and Two Quarks |
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| The Dominators |
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| A Quark |
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| The Quarks |
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