Who Review: The Ambassadors of Death

The British space program is concerned about their astronauts aboard Mars Probe Seven. They lost contact with them eight months ago. With U.N.I.T. providing security, the team at the Space Centre (it’s British) sends up Recovery Seven probe in an attempt to make contact with the silent vessel. The Doctor and Liz get involved when a strange noise comes across the airwaves from space. Convinced it’s not a random wave pattern, the Doctor tells the team to expect a reply. Sure enough, they pick up a message going into space from Earth. Meanwhile, Recovery Seven returns to Earth, but by the time it gets back to the Space Centre, it is empty. The Doctor doesn’t think the astronauts were on board, and he may be right. But there were life forms in Recovery Seven, and someone is using them for their own deadly purposes…

SPOILER ALERT!! My comments may (and likely will) contain spoilers for those that haven’t seen this serial. If you want to stay spoiler-free, please watch the story before you continue reading!

“The Ambassadors of Death” was the second of three seven-part adventures that made up the Third Doctor’s first season. It aired between March and May of 1970, and featured the first appearance of the “sting”–that screamy eeeeerrrrr sound that would precede the end titles of every episode of Doctor Who up to the present day.

The story was initially written by David Whitaker, one of my favorite Who writers of the 1960s. He had originally written the story back in 1968 for the Second Doctor, Jamie, and Zoe, but now had to re-write it for the Third Doctor, Liz Shaw, and U.N.I.T. It seems he had a lot of difficulty with this new format, so in the end, Terrance Dicks, Malcolm Hulke, and Trevor Ray essentially re-wrote it based on Whitaker’s basic story-line.

While this kind of emergency, last-minute script writing worked for “The War Games,” I don’t think it worked nearly as well here. Maybe it was the added pressure of adapting Whitaker’s ideas, I don’t know, but the story has numerous holes, and a lot of padding. This could easily have been a four-part story, but for some reason they were wedded to the idea of a seven-parter. Dicks has alluded to the fact that the new production team inherited a lot of script issues, so maybe they were forced to stretch the stories because they had so few of them ready? In any case, what we end up with is a good story idea rather clumsily handled.

Here are some of the more glaring problems I found with the story:

• The warehouse shoot-out was way too long, and could easily have been cut.
• The fake U.N.I.T. soldier brings a radioactive isotope to a prisoner. The isotope is on a metal tray under a lid, and the soldier is not wearing protective gloves. Surely he’s as likely to be affected by the radiation as the prisoner?
• The bad guys use a directional control to tell the aliens which way to go, and this is the only way they can communicate with them. Yet somehow, they are able to get the aliens to travel to a man’s office, murder him, and destroy the contents of his safe. How did the baddies tell the aliens to do all that?
• Later in the story, the Doctor manages to create a machine that allows bi-directional communication with the aliens. Through this, the aliens ask, “Why do you make us kill?” These aliens are clearly more powerful than their captors. Why did they feel obliged to act against their will?
• U.N.I.T. shows itself to be the most incompetent military outfit on the planet. Especially in the early gun fights they remind me more of “Dad’s Army” [sorry, British TV reference–look it up!] than a crack squad of soldiers. Why on Earth anyone would call in U.N.I.T. for security is beyond me, given their performance in this story!
• So Much Padding! And by “padding” I mean scenes that simply serve to fill time, and don’t introduce characters, develop characters, or move the plot along. Liz’s escape and recapture is a complete waste of film, as is the stealing and recapture of Recovery Seven, and Lennox’s escape and murder–just to name three instances.

But perhaps the strangest thing about “The Ambassadors of Death” is that, despite all of this, I enjoy watching it. I suspect the reason has something to do with the fact that at heart there’s a good story there. These aliens appear to be complicit in the malicious deeds of their captors. But we eventually discover that they are alien ambassadors, held against their will, while the Earth astronauts are being kept by the aliens until their ambassadors return. But the aliens won’t wait long; if their ambassadors aren’t returned soon, they will declare war on Earth. No-one on Earth understands the true nature of the ambassadors, leading to the trouble faced by the Doctor, Liz, and U.N.I.T. as they try to prevent Earth’s annihilation.

So, a good story, especially if you have a few hours to kill, but not essential Who.