The Ambassadors Of Death
(Season 7, Dr 3 with Liz, 21/3/1970-2/5/1970, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writer: David Whittaker (with Malcolm Hulke uncredited and possibly Terry Ray on episode one), director: Michael Ferguson)
Rank: 96
'Going to Mars in a day helps you work, rest and play. Mostly because a Martian replacement has been sent back to Earth instead of you'
If you’ve been keeping a close eye on the lists on the left-hand side of the website where every story title, doctor and season gets tagged as the episodes add up in our ranking from worst to best – and, yes I quite understand you’ve got lives to live so you probably haven’t –but if you have then you might have noticed there’s just one season that still hasn’t been ticked off yet, season 7. Here it is then, the missing piece with what is, amazingly, the lowest placed story of the season for me and that’s still within the top hundred: now that’s consistency that is. All the more amazing, then, that this is the era of such great change: not just a new Doctor but a new production team and a new budget-saving set-up whereby the Dr been confined to Earth, a punishment from the timelords for ‘getting involved’ in the affairs of other planets. Which ought to be a stupid idea, given that in real life mankind was now busy exploring space in fact never mind fiction, but it means that money can be spent decorating this one rather than creating another and it also allows the show to grow roots by having the Doctor side with the cosy army home (?!) of UNIT semi-permanently for the next few years. Oh and to boot they’ve started filming in technicolour, making all these stories seem more colourful in oh so many ways. In a lot of respects Dr Who is now an entirely different series; I would say the stylistic gap between ‘The War Games’ and ‘Spearhead From Space’ is the biggest single leap in the show’s history (even more, I would say, than the sixteen year gap between ‘old’ and ‘new’ series, of ‘Survival’ to ‘Rose’, with or without the McGann TV Movie in the way, as both are after all about a feisty teenager with ideas above their station who come from the rough part of town and dream of something more). Season 7 is a last throw of the dice when the show was in big trouble after slumping viewing figures across season 6 and had things not improved by the end was in more danger of facing the axe than at any time until the 1980s (so much so that producer Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks even have a backup-plan for the Who holidays in ’Moonbase 3’, a more scientifically accurate but duller take on mankind’s future trip into space). It’s really not the right time to throw in a seven part epic, when interest was on the wane, but they just keep coming in this series and all three seven-parters are very different to each other (with the more compact ‘Spearhead’ to kick things off in a big way at the start).
If this is a series on borrowed time, though, nobody seems to be acting like it. The seventh season was one of the show’s most inventive periods, at a time when the show was moving itself away from the ‘base under siege’ formula and hadn’t yet hit its ‘hammer horror recycling’ period, with a number of really effective, imaginative ideas. ‘Ambassadors Of Death’ is a case in point: we’d had stories about space before and about possession and we’d had a number of stories by now where the aliens turn out not to be the ruthless enemy everyone assumes, but there’s no other Dr Who story quite like this one, even if admittedly the brilliant ‘Quatermass’ series (what seriously, again?!) did much of it first: a story that’s filled with mysteries that keep getting deeper and deeper as more layers become uncovered, as a straightforward mission to mars (the next obvious target after the moon) turns out to be an alien assault and then a (spoilers) human mission of sabotage. This must, surely, be one of the strangest of alien ‘invasions’ seen in the series: it’s not a mass attack by little green men out to kill us all but an alien race trying to reach out to us by ’borrowing’ our astronauts without realising that the radiation they need for live is lethal to us.: A lot of Dr Who is really about multi-culturalism, the idea that we have to treat alien life on its own terms instead of expecting it to be just like us and few Who stories are better at this idea than ‘Ambassadors’, a tale where the aliens’ real motives are held back till the end and where the real motive is hidden in plain sight, in the title (everyone watching it the first time picked up on the ‘of death’ half, but that’s just an accidental side effect of ambassadors from space reaching out with a helping, if lethal, hand. The story is caused by a simple misunderstanding, by an alien race who don’t realise that humans are different to them, and an ex-astronaut who in turn is driven by revenge because of a mistake. This is another of those stories where everything would have been solved sooner and happier if everyone had just sat down to talk but that’s the problem with alien races when the Tardis isn’t around: you can have all the best intentions in the universe, but if you’re being judged on your actions not your motives it’s easy for things to go wrong. Human history is a tapestry of misunderstood slights, over-exaggerated kneejerk responses and genuine errors by people afraid of each other who couldn’t find a common language to explain, so why should our journeys into space be any different?
If you’re coming to this review after reading some of the others from the crossover 1960s-70s era then you’ve got two guesses who could have come up with such a philosophical, humanitarian angle - and you’re right on both, David Whittaker being officially credited for the first three episodes (even though he created at least the basic form of what would happen in the remaining four) and script editor Terrance Dicks’ old mentor Malcolm Hulke being drafted in to finish (officially credited for parts four-to-seven, although he did a lot of re-writing on the first three as well to being them more in line with the rest). Why the change? Whittaker was struggling with the format of a series that was so different to the one he’d had a large hand in creating seven years earlier and getting steadily fed up of all the changes as doctors and companions came and went (this is the only season seven story largely written, at least in first draft, before Jon Pertwee was cast and for a while it was hoped Wendy Padbury would stay on in the ‘Liz’ role), before running out of time before a deadline of moving to Australia to take up TV work there. Hulke was a sensible choice: he was more used to the format, coming to it fresh from the previous ‘Silurians’ story, but he shared largely the same curiosity, moral outrage and characters.
Another thing the two writers had in common was loathing the earthbound format and not being quite sure what to do with it. Hulke in particular complained that it had cut Dr Who’s formula down to two possible plots (‘we go to them or they come to us’ plus ‘mad professor’). Whittaker, wasn’t any more enthusiastic: being stuck in the near-future with a bunch of action-driven soldiers robbed him of his strengths from his early days with the series, things like historical accuracy, an eye for detail and rich period dialogue. However they both find new ways of putting a twist on stories they’d written in the past: this is just ‘The Crusade’ again but in outer space and with aliens instead of Arabs, two cultures that live in parallel and are both worthy of respect from the Tardis time-travellers (to whom both feel alien and strange) while repeating the themes of ‘The Silurians’ that there’s no reason we shouldn’t live in peace and harmony, except for human paranoia getting in the way. You sense, too, that both writers agree that they trust aliens they’ve never met far more than they’d ever trust humans they know oh so well, both writers having a similar scepticism and frustration in their writing. Once again the lines between good and bad becomes blurred in ways that it never was in the Troughton era, for all the bigger risks and format-breaking that went on in the 1960s. In an era when Dr Who was besieged by ruthless aliens and megalomaniac dictators I love the fact that everyone in this story think they’re doing what they doing for the greater good: the aliens are just reaching out with friendly arms not realising they’re lethal to the touch and General Carrington thinks he’s saving his species from an all-out invasion. Only the Doctor sees the truth and it takes even him six a bit episodes to get there. The plot ended up being changed greatly by the time it ended up on screen, to the point where there are far more of Malcom Hulke’s fingerprints are on it than Whittaker’s but the central plot is the last thread that leads back to DW’s early days: What would you do if you were stranded in an alien world and couldn’t get back home? Only this time, instead of the Tardis crew being stranded, it’s the aliens. And the aliens just want to have fun. The deaths they caused were all by accident, honest.
Whittaker also comes up with a twist on this Earthbound formula so new it hadn’t even set yet: what if something happens to the astronauts we keep sending up into space? After all, we’re never going to know: NASA aren’t likely to admit that our ‘heroes’ been replaced by aliens and we’re not likely to bump into astronauts in everyday life. What if the height of mankind’s progress, for which the audience are still patting themselves on the back, come up against an alien race so far advanced they’re laughing at our first baby steps to the moon and back? While you’d expect lots of Dr Who stories across 1969-70 to be influenced by the moon landings very few deal with the nuts and bolts of actual space – maybe because so many of the stories across 1968 had already done that. By 1970 space travel had become almost boring, in between the success of Apollo 11 and the near-disaster of Apollo13 (which, technically, happened in the week between episodes 4 and 5 but they weren’t to know that when they were making this), with lots of long hours watching not much happening ijn control rooms while reporters desperately try to make it all seem more exiting than it really is, much like the ones Michael Wisher sends up here, but here Whittaker adds a whole new existential threat to something that in the space of two years had gone from capturing a world mood and becoming deadly dull: what if the people we send up aren’t the same as the people who come back down? It’s a neat contrast with the Doctor’s unwelcome exile to Earth too: even a race as primitive as humanity is up there exploring the stars and not realising what they’re meddling with, while he’s stuck on the ground. By the Doctor’s standards the space rocket he uses in episode five is rudimentary in the extreme and he’s quick to point this out over the radio, but witness the speed with which he offers to travel to make intergalactic contact and his sheer joy in being able to travel freely again at all.
You wouldn’t think the budget for episodes in this series was lower pound for pound than the black and white days, mostly because new producer Barry Letts is so clever at using money well yet sparingly, in all the places where it makes the most difference. Rather than create lots of little sets and setting the action in different places this story mostly takes place in space control, with a life-size rocket capsule built in the middle (itself half-paid for out of ‘Doomwatch’s budget who used it too in an episode ‘Re-Entry Forbidden’ sadly wiped, the series where a lot of the people who worked on the black and white era of Dr Who ended up, including Cybermen creators Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler). It’s one of the best sets Who ever had and looks enough like NASA to make you think they filmed it there give or take the decidedly British accents. The idea that a near-future Britain would ever have a space programme half as good as this is, sadly, the least realistic aspect of the whole story. Similarly, rather than go to the expense of creating an alien out of rubber this one just has some extras walking about in vaguely-futuristic (as nobody can decide from story to story when the UNIT stories are set!) spacesuit costumes, with visors tinted so you can’t see the men’s faces (officially they do this in space to cut out ultra-violet lights that might be harmful to humans; though it’s never mentioned maybe colours down the other end of the spectrum are lethal to the aliens? Or maybe they’re just shy?) Generally speaking, in Dr Who the slower and more lumbering the way a monster walks the less scary it is, but here it’s the slow methodical walk that does a lot of the work, with director Michael Ferguson’s unusual camera shots, nearly whited-out by earth sunlight, making the astronaut-alien’s entrance one of the creepiest in the series. The incidental score, too, is as cheap as they come – it isn’t a score as such at all, just a few un-connected phrases that sound more like a jingle for some futuristic foodstuff played on a sort of alien harp, but played against this sight it’s genuinely unsettling, as if we’re hearing genuine alien music that works to a different set of rules. If this is what comes of penny-pinching, then maybe we don’t actually need all the Disney money in the current era after all?
It’s all very intense and serious and even with an inevitable lull in the middle it’s all impressively gripping and dramatic – like the other season 7 stories in fact, with a grandiose scale and build-up the show never tries again, perhaps in response to the more Earthbound setting as much as the longer running time. It’s all part of a vast conspiracy that’s uncovered episode by episode, headed by the politicians and the scientists – an impressive move for 1970 when both were still more generally seen as good guys (its only with ‘Watergate’ and cloning the tide begins to turn slightly a few years later). By accident the astronauts are implicated too: even braver stuff for 1970 when space travel was something only heroes did and astronauts were bigger celebrities than any footballer or musician. It’s notably well paced too, with each episode unravelling something new. It’s a long running theme of this blog/book/bookblog that you can tell how strong a story is by how good the cliffhangers are and how well the rest of the story has been written around them and these are some of the best with six -six! - superb cliffhangers (a lot of stories struggle to have one). For a story that lasts a month and three-quarters you desperately need a strong pay-off to make the whole thing worthwhile and against the odds all three in season seven do, with this one particularly one of the best and while it seems obvious when written out you only really work out what’s going on at the same speed the Doctor does: the revelation that the astronauts have been in space all this time, thinking they’re in quarantine back home, is a rare moment that really dumbfounds him and (unless you’re really bright or read about it first) dumbfounds the viewer too (that part’s definitely a Hulke-ism!)
Naturally the Doctor realises quicker than anyone else and we get some typically excellent scenes of Jon Pertwee going toe-to-toe with various authority figures, trying to shout some sense into them. While the 3rd Dr will, in time, soften greatly I always think of him as being at his best here in these early stories before Jo and Sarah Jane come along and need protecting, when instead he’s up against people who really push and challenge him – the whizzkid scientist (forget Sarah Jane or Leela, Liz Shaw is DW’s first feminist companion, following a near-start with Zoe, albeit in the sort of miniskirts I’ve never seen any female scientists wear in real life) and the Brigadier, back when he was a true military might with the real power behind UNIT, not a cuddly buffoon who gets the Doctor to solve what he can’t understand (like Watson in the Sherlock Holmes books, I much prefer the early stories where he’s more of an ‘equal’), not to mention the establishment figures who think they’re important, when to the alien Doctor they’re nobody very special at all. The third Doctor’s characterisation is strong in all season seven stories but particularly here where he does all sorts of things you’d never see Hartnell or Troughton doing: Pertwee’s authoritative, suave, serious, at the heart of the action in a way the first two incarnations would never be. All the more so given that the scripts would have been written for the comic persona of ‘Jon Pertwee’ as famous from ‘The Navy Lark’ and various impression shows – Pertwee was hired not to be the run-around gadget-loving action hero he became but to tell jokes in funny voices and maybe play a bit of guitar. Pertwee agonised long and hard over how to play this role and make it his own but he just is the Doctor, straight away. He’s very much the star of this story and his finding new ways to increase the panic and frustration when no one listens is the reason ‘Ambassadors’ works as well as it does. There are things that plainly work against the earthbound era of the show, such as the variety and imagination needed to come up with so many alien planets, one of the strengths is that keeping the Doctor Earthbound only makes him more alien somehow, irritated by humans who are so caught up in petty matters they can’t see the bigger picture, pinioned between amongst petty bureaucrats who are more interested in money and nationalism when the universe out there is so very, very big and brilliant and soldiers whose kneejerk reaction is to shoot at everything instead of explore it, the way he yearns to. By this third story you can tell that the realisation he might be trapped on Earth, amongst these people, in this primitive time is just beginning to sink in and the Doctor’s in his ‘angry’ phase of denial, spending the whole story bristling. After all, the last people who should be sent into space are the military, xenophobic miscreants like General Carrington who shoot first and ask questions later; it should be someone like the Doctor with a clever brain and an open mind.
There’s a strong guest cast too, many of whom were so popular they kept coming back to be Dr Who mainstays of past present and future: Cyril Shaps is excellent at finding new things to do with basically the same sort of character, the put-upon and frequently terrified Dr Lennox. Michael Wisher is a TV reporter who just happens to sound a lot like Davros (because he’s played by the same actor, four years early) – it’s particularly impressive how much he reads his lines as if he’s reading of an autocue, even though he isn’t (there were plans to give him one for real but the production ran out of team so he really is reciting his script from memory). John Abineri plays the marvellous huffy General Carrington, a world away from his best known appearances in the Ferrero Rocher adverts set in an ‘ambassador’s ball’ funnily enough (I still have the subconscious reaction that the chocolates might be radioactive when offered one). The UNIT cast are strong too: John Levene moves Sgt Benton up from extra to real-life Sergeant and deservedly so: his loyal, well meaning character makes him stand out a mile against the other more hardened UNIT personnel who come and go until the format settles down. Look out too for Private Johnson, a small part played by Geoffrey Beevers a full eleven years before he gets to play The Master (sort of!) in ‘The Keeper Of Traken’ and who at the time has just got married weeks earlier to Liz Shaw herself, Caroline John. This is one of those Who stories that’s right on the borders between genius and stupidity and could easily have gone very very wrong if he cast hadn’t taken it seriously: thankfully everyone in this story gives a really strong performance. The result is a rare story that’s clever in not only creation but execution, with a lot to say that (mostly) says it very well. So why isn’t it near the top of the rankings?
Well, odd to say given the class of the writers involved, but it’s a very visual story with lots of long pauses where not very much is happening. If this had been the olden days (of, ooh, a year earlier) when Who stories were being wiped as a matter of course so all we had left were the soundtracks I suspect this story wouldn’t rank very highly at all (as it happens it’s the colour recordings that were officially wiped, bar the first episode which was held back because it performed so well at a screening for TV executives – only a low-quality version big fan Ian Levine got a mate in Australia to tape exists in colour, used to restore the footage for the DVD using technology that isn’t alien or magic but might as well be). Even when people do speak it’s, well, underwhelming. It is a shame that so much of Whittaker’s script was changed in the rush of getting this story on air – nothing against Hulke who may well be my favourite Who writer in terms of plots and concepts, but you can tell this story isn’t having the same level of love and attention lavished on it as his own ‘Silurians’ tale and nobody wrote better dialogue than Whittaker. Compared to those great Hartnells and Troughtons a lot of this dialogue is B movie stuff indeed. Even though there are seven episodes to fill, ultimately we never discover much about the ‘Martians’ either and don’t even get a name for them – except, apparently, that they didn’t originate on Mars but travelled there when humanity was in its infancy and have been waiting for us to pay a visit (how this fits in with the Ice Warriors, Mars’ natives who’d been kicking around Dr Who for three years already, is anyone’s guess). It’s a real letdown we never see what happens next once the mistake is ironed out: this isn’t strictly mankind’s ‘first contact’ story but it’s the first one people watching at home saw on TV (which might be where Russell T Davies got the idea for all of his stories!) and it’s never explained how people seem to forget about aliens all over again till next time. Did the ambassadors simply go back home again? Did another lot come down to see what was going on? Did our astronauts get back OK? Despite this story lasting for a whole 175 minutes we never find out.
Instead many of the places where the dialogue should go are filled up by gun fights with UNIT personnel who die a lot in this story (some of them multiple times over if you keep your eyes out for particular stuntmen), although as its the days before we get to know these soldiers nobody seems to care much yet. There’s a sequence in episode two that seems to go on forever and wastes all the money so carefully saved across the rest of the story, with a helicopter, two motorcycles, a low loader, smoke grenades and gas projectors, the result of Barry Letts’ inexperience as new producer (he’d gone along with director Michael Ferguson’s suggestions happily until the bill came in: there’s a story that he called the director into his office to explain where a perturbed Ferguson commented ‘It’s my job to come up with ways to make it look better on screen – and it’s your job to stop me!’) Whittaker was hired originally to write a ‘spy thriller’ to go with ‘Enemy Of the World’ from season five, the production team asking Hulke to re-write it partly to get more of that James Bondy feel after Whittaker went in a route he considered more interesting: not for the first time in this book (but sadly the last, chronologically speaking) Whittaker was right: it’s the spy elements that don’t work. They never do in Dr Who: he’s not an action hero who uses his body but one that uses his brain (arguably less so in the 3rd Doctor era than any other, but still). Unlike Bond all world governments are automatically the enemy to an anti-establishment lone outsider until proven otherwise and we don’t get that same sense of countries getting things from other countries, because to a series that can travel across all space that’s small fry. There’s also a two episode diversion where we follow Liz Shaw being locked up next to the aliens with the threat that she’ll be the next to snuff it when pretty much everyone around her comes into contact with them and dies that slows the plot right down too – the Ambassadors choose that moment of great peril to basically have a bit of a kip and stand around not doing much, which is deeply lucky for Liz but doesn’t exactly speed the plot on. As good as the beginning and end are there are times in the middle where you’ll feel like the astronauts caught in quarantine, killing boredom by having the same conversations over and over.
Even so, there are far more strengths than weaknesses. When the plot’s moving it moves at some speed and even when it isn’t you’re only a few minutes away from another classic image that stays with you long after the credits stop rolling: our first sight of the astronauts, Bessie’s ‘anti-theft’ device where the rogues who’ve kidnapped the space shuttle end ups tuck to the back of the doctor’s car (which is already becoming his favoured Tardis substitute to tinker with, in only its second story), the Doctor’s deeply psychedelic and disturbing journey into space (even if the scene of Jpn Pertwee having his face blown back with a hairdryer to simulate g-forces is maybe the one time this story stretches the budget that bit too far!), the shot of the astronauts in the middle of their tea break staring blankly at the Doctor when they think he’s walked into their quarantine and his comments that they’re still in space, Liz’ best line as the stick-thin scientist quips to a great hulking brute of a guard ‘Don’t worry I won’t harm you’, all those times the Doctor loses his rag at someone in authority. That’s plenty to be going on with for the normal four-parter; it’s just a shame that this story has to get stretched out to seven. Even so ‘Ambassadors’ is still a thrilling story, a great central conceit written (and re-written) with some skill, directed with intelligence and acted from the heart with some terrific moments. And even if it can’t quite fill out a story with them from beginning to end, well, it makes the most of everything it does has, so much so that it was this story in particular that ‘saved’ Doctor Who, the alien-astronauts becoming the talk of the playground with over 9 million people tuning into episode four (the highest since ‘The Celestial Toymaker’ four years earlier). Even if a lot of those people happened to be watching following a particularly riotous FA Cup final (fittingly given this story’s plot it’s a draw, Chelsea and Leeds ending it equal on 2-2) what’s more important is that most of that audience stayed, right through the next story ‘Inferno’ and on into the future. And after all, why not? This story has all the jeopardy, excitement and blank gormless stares of any football match, but tells a much bigger tale about humanity and our place in the cosmos (besides, everyone knows Skaro United are the only team worth following!)
POSITIVES + Poor Caroline John is hard done by across her one and only year, being an awkward mixture of haughty clever cold scientist and femme fatale in a miniskirts no scientists could get away with wearing for real. She’s a deliberate move against the grain of the usual Who companion: the actress was twenty-nine for one thing, nearly a decade older than most and the oldest we’d had since Barbara and the oldest we will have till Donna as late as 2008. Mostly she doesn’t get to do much at all but here, at last, her character comes into focus as the only person who automatically takes the Doctor’s side, backing him up with science, before holding her own against the baddies with a withering sarcasm more companions should adopt, a chase scene in Bessie (complicated by the fact Caroline hadn’t passed her driving test and was busy trying to hide her pregnancy bump from the cameras) and even her own action sequence, when she’s nearly washed away to her death fleeing from the baddies across a bridge and falling off. Caroline’s more than up to the task: as good as Katy Manning and Jo Grant are the following year it’s a shame we didn’t get at least another season to see what Liz could really do.
NEGATIVES - This wouldn’t be the first Dr Who story let down by a ropey special effect but, while it’s not the worst, the crackle of ‘lightning’ between the astronaut-aliens and their victims is a little too much like the Cybermen effects from the black and white days, only worse because it looks less convincing in colour, all too obviously added on in post-production. It really, really, really doesn’t look like ‘radiation’ (though admittedly I’m not sure how that idea could ever have been put across on screen).
BEST QUOTE: ‘I don’t know what came down in Recovery 7 but it certainly wasn’t human!’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘The Dying Days’, a
‘New Adventures’ 8th Doctor novel by Lance Parkin (1997) is a
typically excellent novel from one of the best writers of the range and follows
what happens to the British space programme after the events of ‘Ambassadors Of
death’: twenty years of cut funding, then a mission to Mars that’s equally
doomed when it leads to the Ice Warriors invading England. One of the few
places you can see the Paul McGann Doctor rubbing shoulders with UNIT and the
Brigadier it’s as full of twists and turns as the parent story.
Previous ‘Dr Who and The Silurians’ next ‘Inferno’
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