The Ambassadors of Death

Chapter the 273rd, the Chapter - twang! - OF DEATH.

Plot:
The UK has a space programme that is running manned missions to Mars, the ground control centre of which is based near UNIT HQ, which is convenient as the Brig is helping out with a recovery mission there. When they lose contact with the astronaut sent out to find the two astronauts they lost contact with months earlier, the Doctor and Liz come to lend a hand. Persons unknown (who are probably military) have sent a signal to space, and when the Mars Recovery Probe spacecraft comes back down to Earth, it's taken before the Brig and his men can reach it. The Doctor intercepts a lorry carrying it. The driver and his accomplice get away, but the Doctor gets the craft back to the centre. When they open it, they find it is empty, the astronauts already having been taken out and hidden away somewhere. With clues mounting to an obvious conspiracy, head of the space programme Sir James Quinlan comes clean that he and a General Carrington were involved in a secret operation to isolate the astronauts, as they have become affected with a form of contagious radiation. They take the Doctor and the Brig to see the astronauts, only to find that they have been taken again (by a criminal Reegan). Reegan is working for Carrington, though, and the spacesuits contain not three astronauts but three aliens. Liz is kidnapped and made to assist another scientist working for Reegan in looking after his charges. 

Previous instructions from the aliens allow the construction of a control device that gets the aliens to do simple tasks. With this, on Carrington's orders, Reegan gets the aliens to cover things up (including by killing Quinlan) and provoke fear. Despite delays and sabotage caused by the conspirators, the centre prepares another recovery module and the Doctor goes up in it. He is intercepted by the alien mothership, and finds the three astronauts still alive; the leader of the aliens confronts him asking when his three ambassadors will be returned. The Doctor returns to Earth, and Reegan kidnaps him while he's in quarantine, bringing him back to the hideout with the aliens. Reegan wants to go solo, using the aliens to rob banks, and instructs the Doctor to build him a more sophisticated control device. The Doctor pretends to do this, but really he's built a signalling device to alert UNIT. Carrington takes one of the aliens, and plans to do an unmasking on a worldwide TV broadcast to start an attack on the alien's spaceship. UNIT arrive in answer to the Doctor's signalling, arrest Reegan and free the Doctor and Liz. Using the remaining astronauts, they stop Carrington just in time. The space centre start their work to rescue the three astronauts and return the ambassadors.

Context:

It'll happen more and more as I write up the final three dozen Doctor Who stories left to blog from 1963 to 2022, but this marks another season completed, adding season seven to the current haul (seasons 3, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 23 and 25, and new series 6 and 13) to make it 12 done out of the the 39 broadcast so far. I watched this from the DVD an episode at a time every evening or so in the second half of July 2023, accompanied by the Better Half throughout, as we had stumbled across a rarity, a classic series story that she hadn't yet seen. Her insights were interesting to record: she, like doubtless everyone seeing the story for the first time, thought the beginning credits - that are interrupted by a mid-credits teaser before the title zooms towards the viewer, with the final two words 'OF DEATH' held back so they crash in last - were "bizarre". She wondered how technology had advanced so far that there were manned missions to Mars, but "they haven't invented mobile phones". On first seeing General Carrington, who's wearing civvies in his first scene, she assumed he must be "the Labour Party candidate" - he's got a red carnation in his buttonhole that's so large it looks like a rosette. She thought the seats in the Mars probe were "hairdresser chairs" (which they may be for all I know). When one scene played accompanied by a particularly jazzy riff by incidental music composer Dudley Simpson, she wondered why they were playing "sex music". Also on a musical theme, she was confused by the cue sampling A Whiter Shade of Pale that accompanied the model scenes of craft docking in space. I thought perhaps I'd read that it was done for verisimilitude, as the BBC had maybe used that music in their Apollo coverage on TV, but I can find nothing online to back that up, so I maybe dreamed it.   

First Time Round:

I first saw the story when it came out on VHS, towards the end of the range in May 2002. They were almost certainly holding off until the end to see if there was any way to fully restore colour to the episodes. The approach used a decade earlier on other stories like The Daemons and Terror of the Autons had been tried on this story then too, but was only successful in patches. The version that was brought out in 2002 went in and out of colour, switching between chromatically restored sections and those that were still black and white. It wasn't as distracting as it sounds, and I enjoyed the story on that first watch without it detracting too much. Just over a decade later, other techniques including some manual colourisation were used to present the whole story in colour for the first time since the BBC's colour master copies were junked. That was in October 2012, and I no doubt would have pre-ordered the disc, received it on the day of release, and watched it straight away, marvelling at all that chroma.

Reaction:

The Better Half's amusing running commentary stopped after about an episode. She'd hate to admit it, I'm sure, but after that she was hooked and found the story compelling... until close to the end. This is because the story is compelling... until close to the end. This is the first time that the series has done (and pretty much the earliest it could do) a contemporary conspiracy thriller, so the story is something new, something that thereafter would be used a lot (it won't be the last time that UNIT officers are disarmed and arrested by a group of regular army soldiers who are being commanded by a misguided person out for their own ends). The Apollo inspired background for the story of a UK space programme trying to solve the mystery of missing astronauts provides great visual and narrative interest: the impressive space control set with a working lift and prototype touchscreens, and lots of supporting artists helping Ronald Allen's Ralph Cornish (Allen seems to be following the same school of minimalism in his acting that Keith Barron would later in Enlightenment). Space-suited aliens would also be something the series came back to in future; it's a great visual, particularly when director Michael Ferguson frames them in his signature shot from a low angle with the sun behind. Dudley Simpson provides a momerably eerie cue to underscore the sequences of the ambassadors bringing death too.

There are lots of very effective moments in the story: the recording of voices from the Module repeating over and over, the tense scenes as command supervise link-ups in space, the callous killings of various henchmen with radiation, the three astronauts on the mothership hypnotised to think they are already back home. A compelling story with great moments featuring distinct and intriguing monsters against an interesting backdrop - what could go wrong? Well, it is seven episodes long. For this season only, the episode allocation was structured so that there were three stories of this length in a row. The other two (Doctor Who and The Silurians before and Inferno after) introduce a strong subplot partway through, essentially another story within the story, to keep up interest and engagement (for the Silurian story, it's a plague, for Inferno, a parallel universe). The Ambassadors of Death instead just has one complicated story with lots of ins and outs. I think if one were watching it all in one go then the crosses and double-crosses would get a bit repetitive, but that's not how it was meant to be seen. Even with a day rather than a week's gap between its episodes, I found the story flowed nicely and kept my interest.

The plot does run out of steam a little in the second half of the final episode. The script includes a ticking clock to General Carrington's worldwide television address, but that's an intangible threat compared to, say, a bomb going off. The idea is that a reveal on TV will turn everyone against the aliens meaning an attack that starts a war that will destroy the Earth. It's not immediate enough, and it probably wouldn't have worked anyway. Won't people watching just think it's a hoax, and the alien is a bloke in make-up? (After all, it is a bloke in make-up.) When the Doctor saves the day, it's anyway not clear how much if any of the broadcast has been seen by viewers at home. One good thing about this, though, is the presence of Michael Wisher as the TV presenter at the start and end of the story, adding a layer of reality to the space command centre scenes (again, this is a trick the show will use in future stories). As well as Wisher and Allen, there are many other fine actors assembled in the guest cast. John Abineri is great as Carrington, bringing humanity and pathos to a villain. William Dysart represents the more career criminal end of the villainy spectrum (the story combines Reegan's Euston Films activity with Carrington's espionage, plus a few action skirmishes with soldiers and hardware orchestrated by the Havoc stunt team). Cyril Shaps plays to type, but does it very well, as the nervy scientist Lennox, who falls into being Liz Shaw's companion for a lot of the running time. Caroline John as Liz has good material, as do all the regulars including John Levene, returning to the series as Sergeant Benton.

As well as all of them, there's Max Faulkner milking all the tragedy he can playing identical twins who've both been accepted to be UNIT soldiers, but one has to go to work in place of the other as if nothing's happened when his brother is killed at the hands of the alien ambassadors. Okay, I'm joshing a bit: there is an infamous continuity error in the story where the same soldier appears again after having been killed in an earlier episode. It's never explicitly stated that the touch of an ambassador has to always kill one necessarily, so perhaps it's just the one squaddie and he got lucky. The ambassadors' powers are an area for the one unexplainable plot hole in the piece for me. A big fuss is made that the device Reegan uses can only send a limited set of simple instructions, but somehow he's still able to instruct the aliens by remote control to achieve some very complex activities like breaking into a safe and threatening people in a room into which Reegan can't see. A number of reviews have suggested more plot holes in Ambassadors than just that one, but I can't see them. The story had a difficult gestation, with credited writer David Whittaker's original scripts rejected by the production team and multiple rewrites done by Trevor Ray and Malcolm Hulke. Considering this, I think what made it to screen is pretty solid.

There's a conspiracy led by Sir James Quinlan and General Carrington to kidnap three alien ambassadors they'd arranged to be sent to Earth (Carrington having learned about how to communicate with the aliens and negotiated the visit since his own Mars mission previously). Quinlan just wants the glory of first contact with aliens, but Carrington wants to provoke a war as he is convinced because of his rampant xenophobia that the aliens are a threat. When the Doctor's investigations get too close, they give him a prepared cover story about contagion. Fearing that Quinlan might divulge the aliens' location, Carrington arranges with Reegan to have them moved, and starts using the aliens to stage events meant to whip up fear. He uses them to kill Quinlan to tie up that loose end. Reegan sees the more criminal advantage to these space-suited superweapons, and plans to go solo. As Carrington plans to reveal one of the aliens to a watching world, UNIT capture Reegan and then use the other aliens to capture Carrington. As a villainous plan in Doctor Who it's definitely on the coherent side compared to many in the show's history. In fact, it might have been better for it to get a bit wilder at the end, with Carrington instead getting the aliens to try blowing up a reactor or something. In the end, it's probably Carrington's moderation that means that the story ends on a less than exciting note.

Connectivity:

Both The Ambassadors of Death and In the Forest of the Night are somewhat experimental stories from the first year of a grey-haired older Doctor's first season, both in the position of penultimate story before the finale for the year. The set-up of the regulars is superficially similar too - the Doctor teams up with a man and a woman based on Earth that help him with his adventures (Liz and the Brig in the 70s story, Clara and Danny in the new series story). There's soldiers in both as well (at the very least an ex-soldier in Danny, but the people in hazmat suits trying to burn down the trees in central London are presumably army too).

Deeper Thoughts:

Unlucky (Mars Recovery Probe) 7 and lucky (Apollo) 13? In one of the biggest coincidences between events playing out weekly in TV's Doctor Who and contemporaneous events in the so-called 'real' world, the broadcast of episodes of a Doctor Who story about three astronauts bound for Mars missing in space and needing rescue happened at the same time as three astronauts bound for the moon were out in space in need of rescue. The Apollo 13 mission started on Saturday 11th April 1970, the same day as the broadcast of episode four of The Ambassadors of Death. The Doctor was in peril, with one of the space-suited ambassadors' deadly hands poised above his head, at the end of that week's instalment. It would be a couple of days later that the Apollo astronauts Lovell, Swigert and Haise found themselves in danger. Like the fictional astronauts in the Doctor Who story, they needed a lot of help from the ground, but with that help they famously resolved their own cliffhanger and all three safely splashed down to Earth on the day before Ambassadors episode five was shown. It's testament to NASA's record that already by 1970 a trip to the moon was seen as so boringly mundane that Doctor Who had to show a - somewhat unlikely, but there's no shame in being ambitious - UK mission to Mars. Real life proved to be more thrilling than fiction, and the third attempt to put men on the moon was not nearly as easy as the first two (or the subsequent four). I wondered about any other examples of such synchronicity with current events in Doctor Who's classic series era on television (it's still a bit early to know what is truly historic from the new series years).

Though there's no story or even thematic link, the most famous example from early in the series is that a big day that will be remembered by every Doctor Who fan forever more is a mere day later than a date that will be remembered by pretty much everyone forever more, i.e. 22nd November 1963 and John F. Kennedy's assassination. (It strikes me writing this, as it often does, that - assuming that he did act alone - Lee Harvey Oswald only needed to take a fraction more time between the shots he fired at the motorcade, then there'd possibly have been no conspiracy about it at all - oh well!) I couldn't think of any other examples off the top of my head, though, apart from those two. It made me curious enough to have a quick check into when other big events took place relative to the Doctor Who episode guide. (Apologies in advance, but the sort of historic events that came to mind prove the TV news axiom that "if it bleeds, it leads", so it's all a little grisly - I promise I'm not in any way equating these moments, just seeing if there's any points of resonance.) Sticking with tragic assassinations, MLK was killed in April 1968, during the broadcast of Patrick Troughton story Fury from the Deep, but that's famous as one of the very few episodes of Doctor Who in which nobody dies, so it isn't exactly apt. Robert Kennedy was shot a few weeks later after the end of The Wheel in Space but before the repeat showing of The Evil of the Daleks started; I'm struggling to see any link to either story. John Lennon bought it outside the Dakota between the broadcast of the third and final part of State of Decay, a late stage Tom Baker. There's no connection at all to a story of vampires living in an old spaceship.

Going back to the space race: the Apollo 11 mission, and the first man on the moon, was in July 1969, when Doctor Who was off air. The take off and landing of the first ever Space Shuttle took place in April 1981 when Doctor Who was off air. The Challenger shuttle disaster in January 1986 was when Doctor Who was off air. The Columbia shuttle disaster was early 2003 when Doctor Who had been off the air for simply ages. What about natural or man-made disasters? Chernobyl? April 1986, Doctor Who was off air. Bloomin' 'eck! US troops first entering the Vietnam war? March 1965. Doctor Who was on almost all year round back then, so there must be something... The Web Planet was showing: a story about ants and butterflies. Sigh. I've not had much luck with the events of 1986, but then Doctor Who was on its famous 18-month hiatus then, so what about a year later - what about the great storm in the UK in October 1987? It happened between episodes two and three of Paradise Towers, a story restricted to one building with no weather or trees. Ok, what about probably the biggest event that's happened during my lifetime, the fall of the Berlin Wall? The 9th November 1989 was during the broadcast of Sylvester McCoy story The Curse of Fenric. Ooh, now there's something of a connection there: Fenric has a subplot about the start of what would become cold war hostilities, and it includes many soviet characters. It only took until nearly the end of the series to find something. So, the classic series begins with JFK's death and ends with the fall of the Berlin wall. There's probably an academic paper waiting to be written right there. I promise, though, that I won't be the one to inflict that upon the world.

In Summary:

It's really spoiling us (for the first six and a half episodes at least).