This is the last story penned by David Whitaker. Let’s
just remind ourselves about his previous stories, also not forgetting the fact
that, as the first Script Editor of the series he would doubtless have had a
lot to do with working on the scripts of other writers, applying the kind of
polish that they would need for the show. His own stories were : - “The Edge of
Destruction” – “The Rescue” – “The Crusade” – “The Power of the Daleks” – “The
Evil of the Daleks” – “The Enemy of the World” – “The Wheel in Space”. What a
range the man had. It’s very difficult to identify hallmarks of a David
Whitaker story, which is more of a tribute to his versatility rather that any
implied criticism.
I have read that there were problems with the story, and
that David Whitaker, although he came up with the idea and wrote the treatment,
didn’t actually write the scripts. Uncredited were Malcolm Hulke, who had
scripted the previous story, Terrance Dicks, the Script Editor, and Trevor Ray,
who at the time was in the Associate Script Editor role from which Terrance
Dicks had progressed to Script Editor.
Stories with a complicated parentage like this often
fail to set the world alight, and so I’m trying to tone down my expectations a
little bit. What I do expect though is for the more adult tone we have seen in
“Spearhead from Space” and “The Silurians” to be maintained.
After Watching
I can still remember exactly where I was in the early hours of the
morning on July 20th, 1969. I was in my Nan’s front room upstairs
watching Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the Moon. (Conspiracy
theorists please note – I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next
man, but the idea that the Moon landings were filmed on Earth is just pure cock
of the poppiest variety). It seems funny to recall how excited we all got about
manned space missions back in the late 60s and early 70s, but we did, and “The
Ambassadors of Death” cashes in on this excitement.
The opening episode has a great idea behind it – namely, a manned
space probe is sent to Mars. (Ah, the innocence of youth. I remember after the
Apollo programme ended being told, it will be at least 5 years before a mission
to Mars – and may even take a few years longer – and thinking – oh come on! It
won’t be that long, surely!) All contact
is lost with the Mars probe for something like two months. Contact is never
re-established, yet suddenly it becomes clear that the probe has actually taken
off from Mars, and is heading back to Earth. The crew on the probe are more
than technologically adept and experienced enough to have mocked up a radio if
they had wanted. So what is going on?
It’s a question which Rago the Dominator asked, certainly. Well, the
actor who played him, Ronald Allen, anyway. He thus becomes another actor for
whom the 3 season rule is overlooked – if indeed it really ever existed in the
first place. It’s not a problem, for his character, Cornish, looks extremely different from Rago here – for
one thing his head actually starts above his shoulders rather than somewhere in
the middle of his chest. He puts in a good stint, Ronald Allen, appearing
throughout the story, and consistently managing to be on the side of the
angels, even though sometimes it is far from clear who the good guys and who
the bad guys actually are in the first place.
The idea of a space probe coming back to Earth with something more
or something different from what it left with wasn’t a new one when this story
was made. I am too young (honestly am) to have watched any of the original
Quatermass TV series apart from the late 70s ITV revival with Sir John Mills,
but I watched each of the films once or twice, and this seems to have a few
echoes of “The Quatermass Experiment”. This puts me in mind of a rather
pointless digression: I remember when I was probably in my early teens that my
grandmother once tried to explain what the original Quatermass was about, and
the phrase – there was an orgasm from outer space – memorably passed her lips.
I had to stifle a laugh, since I would have been dreadfully embarrassed back
then for her to have known that I did actually know what the word meant. I
digress.
Considering then these rather, well, I wouldn’t exactly say clichéd,
but certainly rather familiar plot elements, I found that “The Ambassadors of
Death” did actually continue to serves up some surprises during its seven
episode run. It is essentially a story about paranoia. The Recovery 7 returns
to Earth with a crew of what seems to be three men in spacesuits previously
belonging to the two Mars astronauts, and the astronaut sent to rescue them.
The wearers of the suits when they return to Earth are somewhat strange. For
one thing they do not allow anyone to remove their suits. For another thing,
they need extremely high doses of radiation to thrive. Oh, and their touch
brings instant death.
Sounds like these guys are the monsters, doesn’t it, or at the very
least, the villains of the piece. Yet the twist is that they are nothing of the
kind. They are Ambassadors of an alien civilisation, apparently sent to Earth
to establish friendly contact. The first inkling that it is not the aliens who
are the villains that we, the viewers get, is when the transporter bringing
back the newly landed Recovery 7 capsule to the Space centre if hijacked. It is
recovered by the Doctor, but by this time the three occupants have been taken.
Far from being the work of some criminal mastermind, this is actually contrived
by the regular Army, led by General Carrington. He eventually reveals to the
Brigadier, Doctor et al that they have been working with the full knowledge and
agreement of Sir James Quinlan, Minister for Technology. This gradual reveal of
a plot within a plot within a plot does need closely following – I would
imagine that it would have been pretty easy, especially if your attention span
was limited, to have got lost in who was working for whom. Especially when it
turns out that Carrington is in reality working for himself, and not the
minister, who turns out to be an innocent dupe who is killed for his pains.
Carrington, we learn, is a former Mars Probe astronaut himself, and his former
dealings with the aliens whose Ambassadors these three ‘men’ are, have twisted
his mind so that he is convinced they are set on an alien invasion, and
blasting their mother ship out of existence is the only answer.
This worked. I originally had Carrington as the villain of the piece,
acting on his own initiative, but then when the minister intervened I began to
think that maybe I was wrong. That was a tribute to John Abineri, who played
Carrington. John Abineri is another one to add to the list of actors who bring
the story a bit of quality whenever they appear. His Carrington is very
convincing as a tortured soul, whose exaggerated concept of duty has led him to
an unthinkable course of action. There’s a lovely scene between him and the
Doctor after the climax of episode 7, where he seems to be pleading for the
Doctor’s understanding, which the Doctor, with a great bit of eye acting, gives
him.
So as I stated earlier, the Ambassadors themselves are neither
monsters nor villains. However, this is a 7 part story, and in order to stretch
it out to 7 parts, they are forced to act like are villainous monsters at
times. They may not be murderous, but they kill people, and at times pretty
much seem to be threatening to kill others, including the Doctor and Liz. Part
of Carrington’s plan is to use one of the Ambassadors in a live TV broadcast to
the world, in which he will remove the creature’s helmet, reveal his alienness
to the world, and thus justify his decision to annihilate the mother ship. Just
prior to this we do see one of the aliens take off ‘his’ helmet, and the best
way I can describe what we see is similar to the makeup worn by the leper in
the film “Papillon”. It’s also a little reminiscent of the make up of the
unprocessed Chameleon in “The Faceless Ones”, and I’m not sure that it is
totally necessary. Personally I think it might have been better, and shown up
Carrington’s pointless paranoia more strongly had we either never seen them, or
they had turned out to be less ugly.
They are problematical in another way too. They seem to have been
sent to Earth with no way of communicating with humans – which is probably a
bit of a drawback if you’re on a diplomatic mission, I would have thought. If
the aliens are so technologically advanced as to build a massive spaceship,
then surely they could have whipped up a translator of their own – especially
bearing in mind that there is something of this ilk on the Mother ship which
enables them to talk straight to the Doctor when he arrives. Now, quite often
when we point out plot holes, they are usually small and/or inconsequential –
after all, at the very least the script will have been looked over for such
things not just by writer, but by the script editor as well. And may well have
undergone several drafts. But I just can’t get around this one. Yes, the aliens
do contrive somehow to send instructions on building a translator so that the
humans can be understood by the aliens, although even this is just one way. But
why, even if Carrington had promised them the Earth on a stick, why wouldn’t
they have given at least one of the three some method of communicating,
especially when they clearly had the technology to do so? Either I have
completely misunderstood the story (which is a distinct possibility) or this
just doesn’t make sense.
Far less important, although this next point did actually bug me
quite a lot, was the space capsule, Recovery 7. Now, I’ll be honest, I don’t
have such a great grasp of Science that I often sit there watching a story
going – that’s wrong – that’s wrong etc. I think I was away from school the day
we did Science. However, my boyhood obsession with every Apollo manned space
mission up to and including Skylab IV (the confusingly titled third and last
mission to Skylab) means that I still know enough about manned space flight to
make a couple of observations. Getting a man into space is difficult, far more
difficult than putting an inanimate object of comparable weight and size into
space. It is, though a piece of battenburg when compared to the difficulty of
–a) getting him back to Earth alive, and – b) getting the spacecraft back to Earth
in a way in which it can safely be reused. Add to this the fact that when the
Doctor brings the Recovery 7 capsule back to the space centre, they can’t open
the hatch. This means that they have to take what look like gas axes to it.
Now, at the age of 6, when this show first went out, my ambition was to be the
first Brit to walk on the Moon, and while it is still theoretically possible
that this could happen, the odds against it are, should you pardon the pun,
astronomical. Nevertheless, if by some miracle I were ever to be offered the
chance to go into space, I would take it like a shot. But . . . I wouldn’t go
within a parsec of a spacecraft which had been treated with the tender
ministrations of a gas axe. Yet this ship safely takes the Doctor to the alien
ship, and will be used to take back the Ambassadors, and return the earth
astronauts.
Believe it or not, I am not actually trying to say that I didn’t
like “The Ambassadors of Death”. I do think it has some issues plot wise, which
mean that it is difficult for me, even at my most charitable, to put it on a
level with the previous two stories, but there are still enough things to enjoy
here that you don’t need to look particularly hard to find them. It’s a good
Liz Shaw story for a start. Liz gets kidnapped by Reegan. Reegan is a thug
hired by Carrington to look after the Ambassadors, but he’s a bit more than a
brainless gorilla, and is perfectly willing to double cross Carrington when the
chance arises. There’s some good scenes between him and Liz. I’ve already
mentioned the performance of John Abineri as well. Nicholas Courtney as the
Brig continues to deliver value for money. At times during the last three
episodes you can see that far from learning his lesson and showing remorse for
what he did to the Silurians, he actually seems to almost sympathise with
Carrington’s objective. It’s telling, though, that the Doctor still trusts him
enough to leave the Space Centre in his control, happy that this time he’s not
going to blow the hell out of the alien ship.
If this is the worst that Season 7 has to offer – and many people
seem to think that it is, then we won’t be doing badly at all.
What Have we Leaned?
Never shake hands with an
alien – in fact never shake anything with them
Just because an alien
civilisation is incredibly technologically advanced – they can still act like
Homer Simpson from time to time.
In the Doctor Whoniverse,
British Space hardware is considerably further advanced than anything currently
on the planet
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