Day 137 — May 17th 2021
The Ambassadors of Death Episodes Six and Seven
The Ambassadors of Death — Episode Six
After my moaning yesterday about the cliffhanger seeming to come at an unusual point (having already reached peak tension five minutes earlier), we’re presented early on in this one with another moment that would have made a better cliffhanger;
Cornish: ‘Doctor, can you see the object? What is it?’
Doctor Who: ‘Some kind of space ship. It’s enormous!’
Cornish: ‘Can you evade it?’
Doctor Who: ‘I’ll try.’
Brigadier: ‘He hasn’t got the speed!’
Cornish: ‘He’s still linked to Mars Probe 7.’
Brigadier: ‘How much fuel has he got for manoeuvring?’
Cornish: ‘Precious little. What he’s got he’ll need for re-entry.’
Doctor Who: ‘It’s closing in too fast! I can’t —’
Brigadier: ‘They’ve collided…’
As Doctor Who’s space craft blinks off the screen and we’re left with the dumfounded reactions of the people left behind it’s possibly my favourite moment of the story so far. Why on Earth didn’t they end Episode Five on that moment? It’s brilliant!
Having been given a space ship in the last episode to start steering this story away from the kind of action which might be better suited to another action series and towards being Doctor Who, we start getting some answers here, ready for the big climax. I love the reveal that the Astronauts are alive and well — and stuck in a trippy version of the Space Complex we’ve been in for six episodes. It feels like a great way of pulling the rug from under you — whatever we were expecting to find on the space ship it wasn’t three men watching football…!
As a side note, is this the first time that football has turned up in Doctor Who? I’m not sure I can remember it being mentioned before, though I’m willing to be wrong!
It also sounds like a stupid thing to say but I really enjoyed the revelation that the space-suited creatures are ambassadors for some alien race. I say it sounds stupid because the clue is right there in the title — The Ambassadors of Death. It’s an interesting idea and one I’m surprised we’ve not seen more of in the programme. Aliens are usually coming to Earth distinctly to invade us, so it’s nice to see an attempt at something more peaceful (even if it has been co-opted by human hands).
I dare say it’s reflective of the programme’s attempt to try and do some different approaches top the baddies in this season. Doctor Who greeted a Silurian as a friend in the last story, and this feels very much in the same vein; the idea that the monsters aren’t necessarily evil.
There’s another moment in this episode which feels like it should be a cliffhanger, and that’s Liz seeing one of the Ambassadors with their helmet off, revealing the creature underneath. I’ll admit that I’d been dreading the idea that they might do this, as it risked spoiling the effectiveness of those costumes, but they’ve actually managed to do something really intriguing with it. It’s helped by a brilliant performance from Caroline John, and if I’ve one major criticism of this story it’s that she’s been so side-lined throughout. She’s spent the last three episodes almost entirely trapped in the bunker having to do little more than attempting the same escape over and over.
One less effective moment here is the reveal of Carrington as the lead baddie. I mean… of course he is. It’s been so signposted since the very beginning that I was convinced there’d be a twist in there somewhere. I’m not certain that the confirmation of his villain status is supposed to come as a surprise — Doctor Who worked it out episodes ago — but it feels underwhelming all the same. There were a couple of moments in this one where I genuinely wondered if Professor Cornish might be unmasked as the mastermind, but sadly they opted for the more obvious route.
Cornish does get to be involved in the best scene of the episode, though, where UNIT’s failings are laid bare and the Brigadier is forced to account for himself;
Cornish: ‘You’re not having a great deal of success are you, Brigadier?’
Brigadier: ‘No.’
Cornish: ‘The astronauts are still missing, Miss Shaw kidnapped, Doctor Taltalian killed and now this man Lennox murdered under your very nose.’
Brigadier: ‘We’re following up every possible clue.’
Cornish: ‘And what have you discovered?’
Brigadier: ‘We’ve identified the two radioactive bodies that were found in that gravel pit in Hertfordshire. They weren’t foreign agents at all, they were petty London criminals. And the explosive that killed Doctor Taltalian was the new H37 compound which hasn’t even been issued to the Army yet.’
Cornish: ‘Then our own people could be involved.’
As much as I’m enjoying UNIT in the series so far you have to admit that they’re a pretty rubbish military group, don’t you? There’s a particularly awkward moment in this one where they let the bad guy escape with a cheery wave and then do a comedy double take when told seconds later to lock the base down. All I’m saying is that if aliens really did invade the planet, I’m not sure I’d trust this lot to keep me safe…
7/10
The Ambassadors of Death — Episode Seven
This feels like a pretty momentous episode, because it’s the final time we’ll see involvement in the series from one of Doctor Who’s original pioneers, and he’s sort of the last man standing. Waris Hussein was last involved with the series in 1964, Verity Lambert departed in 1965 and Mervyn Pinfield left the same year. David Whittaker has been a presence in the series on and off since acting as Story Editor on the first series, but this is the final time he’s credited for the show.
And even then, he’s already sort of left. The Ambassadors of Death went through a number of rewrites and alterations during the scripting process, and as I understand it the first two episodes are largely Whittaker while the remainder of the tale was handled by Malcolm Hulke. It’s perhaps telling that it’s those first two episodes which I’ve enjoyed the most, although what followed isn’t bad by any stretch.
Whittaker has been one of my favourite writers for the programme across these early years. Stories like The Crusade and The Enemy of the World still stick in the mind, and the overall tone of that first series — guided by Whittaker’s voice — has rarely been matched. There’s something about those first few stories which feel magical in a way that nothing else ever quite manages. Sure, The Wheel in Space is one of my lowest-rated stories so far, but his name also crops up right at the other end of the scale; The Power of the Daleks is my top-rated story, and it’ll take a lot to knock it from that position.
And all of that is before we even touch on his work in the expanded Doctor Who universe. Thanks to the brilliant collection put out by Panini last year I finally found a chance to sit down and read all of the Daleks comic strip from TV Century 21, and one of these days I really will get round to reading Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks. I think it’s fair to say that Whittaker has been a really integral part of the Doctor Who world in these first seven years, and his input is going to be sorely missed.
As for the episode itself, I’ll spoil nothing by saying here that it’s another 7/10, which brings the average score across the seven episodes to 7.57. I’ll admit I was hoping for a 7.77 score, given the prevalence of the number in the first pair of episodes.
Overall I’ve really enjoyed The Ambassadors of Death. As I’ve said, I wouldn’t want Doctor Who to be like this every week — it’s a little too ‘gritty’ for my tastes — but as a one off I’ve really enjoyed it. It’s made me especially keen to watch some of Whittaker’s other work, to see how his writing fares when it’s not all across time and space.
