General Carrington: Why else should they invade the galaxy? They were on Mars before we were.
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Episode two, 28 March 1970
Episode three, 4 April 1970
Episode four, 11 April 1970
Episode five, 18 April 1970
Episode six, 25 April 1970
Episode seven, 2 May 1970
Written by David Whitaker
Directed by Michael Ferguson
Script editor: Terrance Dicks
Produced by Barry Letts
Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
Carolina John as Liz Shaw
John Levene as Sergeant Benton
Another UNIT story, so is this one an alien invasion or a mad scientist? Well, it has aliens, but they're not invading. And it has a madman, but he's not a scientist. So I guess maybe this one ends up as a wash, bringing our alien invasion/mad scientist standings to 3-0-1.
Really, for all that Terrance Dicks (rightly) complains about the constraints imposed on Doctor Who with the reformatting at the end of "The War Games", this first season under the new regime is doing a nice job of varying it. We started off with a straight alien invasion story; this was then followed by an alien invasion story, except the aliens are actually from Earth. And now we get an alien invasion story, except the aliens aren't actually invading--their intentions are peaceful.
The story opens with the Recovery 7 space probe docking with the returning Mars Probe 7. The astronaut manning Recovery 7, Van Lyden, is investigating to see what's happened to Mars Probe 7's crew, who cut radio contact seven months ago. A piercing noise is then heard over Van Lyden's radio, after which Van Lyden, too, cuts contact. But evidently he, or the Mars Probe astronauts, are still alive, because their landing pod begins re-entry procedure.
UNIT and the Doctor head out into the English countryside to recovery the pod once it lands, but they're attacked--by military special forces, disguised as civilians, who make off with the pod themselves. At this point, another dimension gets added to the story--in addition to the usual Who sci-fi-cum-horror plot of What Did Those Astronauts Encounter in Space?, we've also got a government-conspiracy-thriller, as UNIT have to deal with a clandestine organisation trying to undermine them at every turn, headed by the enigmatic General Carrington, himself an astronaut aboard the previous Mars Probe, Mars Probe 6. In that respect, we can liken "The Ambassadors of Death" to the Torchwood series "Children of Earth".
(Speaking of Torchwood--I've heard a very credible theory that Carrington and his men are, in fact, Torchwood agents. After all, from Earth's perspective, this story falls between "Tooth and Claw" (1879) and "Doomsday" (2007), so Carrington and Torchwood would view the Doctor as just as much a hostile alien invader as they do the Ambassadors.)
So basically, what happened is that Mars Probe 6, with Carrington on board, encountered an alien race on Mars. Carrington became convinced that the aliens were hostile, because they accidentally killed his crewmate Jim. (The aliens didn't know that their very touch would be fatal to humans.) Carrington therefore told the aliens that he would return to Earth and prepare the way for them; when Mars Probe 7 arrived, they should replace its human crew with their own ambassadors.
It is these ambassadors that Carrington has now kidnapped. The alien ambassadors require constant access to radiation to remain alive; Carrington therefore rations their radiation, and forces them to perform missions for him--raiding nuclear reactors, murdering soldiers, stealing secret plans. He hopes thereby to convince the world that an alien invasion is imminent, so that when the alien spaceship arrives in orbit over Earth, he can convince every country in the world to launch all their missiles at it and destroy it.
Of course, the Doctor and UNIT figure out what's going on, and they liberate the aliens and stop Carrington immediately before he makes a worldwide telecast to reveal the alien "threat" to the world.
What Lisa thought
This one was too slow and plodding for her--I think she's starting to feel the press of the other part of the show's new format, the longer story lengths. She was also disappointed in how dressed the Doctor remained this time--for the third story out of his three so far, Jon Pertwee finds a reason to take his clothes off again, but we only see him once he's already been fully covered by a bathrobe.
It's the thriller element of the storyline that, I think, gives Ambassadors what success it does have. We've got Liz being kidnapped and forced to work for Carrington's crew as they try to keep the ambassadors alive. We've got Carrington's chief scientist, who defects to UNIT to tell them what's going on, and insists on being held in a prison cell for his own safety until he can talk to the Brigadier--but then, he discovers one of Carrrington's operatives has left a radioactive isotope in the cell with him, assassinating him by radiation poisoning. And we've got Carrington going slowly more paranoid and insane, using the ambassadors to assassinate his own superior when that superior prepares to tell the Doctor what's going on, and then in the final episode going so far as to have the Brigadier and all of UNIT placed under military arrest in case they're collaborating with the aliens.
Though the most watchable thing about this story is the cast. Several of the guest actors, as opposed to characters, are exceedingly engaging. Chief amongst them are Ronald Allen, playing Professor Cornish (head of mission control for the apparently thriving British space programme), and William Dysart as Regan, the thug who's looking after the imprisoned Ambassadors (and the imprisoned Liz) for General Carrington. Ronald Allen (who had previously appeared as a Dominator) has a very understated, clipped delivery, while Dysart has an odd Scottish accent, and both of them have great screen presence--Lisa told me she thought Allen came across as a man who should be a leading man, but just never got the opportunity. Cheryl Molineux also grabs your attention as a technician at mission control, even though her total screentime is a series of about ten three-second closeups over the seven episodes, as she reads a countdown aloud.
Lisa also came up with an interesting theory about Carrington, to complement the one about his Torchwood origins: she wonders if he and Jim, during their months alone together on Mars Probe 6, found the love that dare not speak its name blossoming between them, and that's why his accidental death at the hands of the Ambassadors pushed him into insanity. Come on, people--of such stuff is fanfic born.
So definitely a hit-and-miss story--mostly miss, but what hits it does have are pretty strong ones.
The next story will be "Inferno".
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