Doctor Who A-Z #53: The Ambassadors of Death (1970)

Despite only being Jon Pertwee’s third story, The Ambassadors of Death is a story defined by endings. This is true in a narrative sense: the final moments of the serial, where the Doctor simply walks off and leaves the Brigadier to sort out the diplomatic fallout, feels like something that should happen much later in the UNIT cycle. (Indeed Season Seven as a whole, with its scenes of the Brigadier performing atrocities on both a parallel Earth and this one, would be strangely effective as a way to close off the Doctor’s time with UNIT, rather than begin it) The cliffhangers, which after this season will frequently end with an extreme close-up on Pertwee’s terrified gurning, cut to credits with brutal speed. The episode three cliffhanger, where Liz Shaw is knocked off a small bridge into some rapids, is hardly one of the show’s most inventive – but it ends before you can fully register what’s happened, adding a note of genuine shock to a basic concept.

It’s also defined by an ending behind the scenes. This is the last Doctor Who story written by David Whitaker, the show’s first script editor. Even that description sells his influence short; it was Whitaker who fleshed out C.E. Webber and Sydney Newman’s pitch document into something resembling the modern series, it was Whitaker who overruled Newman’s objection to “bug-eyed monsters” in order to commission the first Dalek story. Whitaker developed the rules of what the show can and can not do when it enters Earth’s past. Then, as the show became less focused on historical settings during Patrick Troughton’s tenure, he wrote The Enemy of the World, one of roughly four stories that, between them, established how this new incarnation of the show would deal with contemporary and near-future Earth.

Despite this, Whitaker found the show’s new Earthbound format difficult to write for. He submitted roughly three episode drafts, which were heavily rewritten by Trevor Ray, his successor in the script editor’s chair. Eventually the problems were judged to be insurmountable, and the remainder of the story was completed by Malcolm Hulke. It’s not a glorious end for the Doctor Who career of one of the show’s greatest visionaries, though in the long run there were no hard feelings. It’s hard not to respect Whitaker for that, particularly once you read the memo from outgoing script editor Derrick Sherwin saying his initial scripts needed to be changed because the show is “more sophisticated” now. Even the greatest defender of the Pertwee era – which would be me, I am the greatest defender of the Pertwee era – would struggle to describe it as being reliably “more sophisticated” than The Crusade.

It certainly isn’t more sophisticated than The Evil of the Daleks, a story which is worth bearing in mind as you watch The Ambassadors of Death. The Evil of the Daleks proves beyond doubt that Whitaker can fill seven episodes without any padding, but here the Whitaker-Ray-Hulke hydra struggles with the same run-time. There are certain things – not least those cliffhangers – which are skipped over with remarkable briskness, while things other serials would smooth over are lingered upon endlessly. The Doctor is stuck waiting for a spaceship to launch for a whole episode, while Liz Shaw is captured by the villains for roughly three episodes.

The stalling tactic which works – and gives you the best look at the story’s priorities – is when UNIT need to retrieve a crashed space capsule. Retrieving things that have fallen from space is presumably something UNIT do all the time – indeed, we’ve seen them do it in the first story of this season, and we certainly didn’t get to see a low-loader with a helicopter escort take the Nestene meteorites away. But here we do, and it’s there to set up one of the show’s all-time budget-busting action scenes. Every time you think you’ve got a grasp on the scene’s rules, director Michael Ferguson pulls the rug. You assume, for instance, that the helicopter must be stock footage – until it cuts to the Brigadier getting out of it. In a different way, you assume the rules of serial television will protect any recurring characters from being harmed in a gunfight in episode two, but there’s a jolting insert of the Brigadier being shot that briefly makes you wonder if he’s been killed.

Full marks to Ferguson for making us think he and Whitaker are about to do something the show would bottle nineteen years later in Battlefield, and it’s true that every time The Ambassadors of Death starts to lag it pulls off some similar coup. The look of the titular Ambassadors, hiding their bizarrely distorted features under human space suits, is eerie enough to be lifted in at least two Steven Moffat two-parters, and there are some deeply unsettling moments like the scientist Lennox being murdered with a radioactive isotope. The revelation that Reegan, a supporting player in the serial’s conspiracy, wants to kidnap the aliens so he can use them to rob a bank feels like a sly jab at the Earthbound serial’s lowered horizons, but there’s a very obvious trick missed in this strand. Reegan has obviously bitten off more than he can chew, and in a later serial this kind of naivete would get a villain killed off early. Hulke keeps him around to the end credits, and it’s a status he doesn’t really deserve. By the end of the story, the threat has escalated to a nuclear war between aliens and the Jack D Ripper-esque military renegade General Carrington; poor old Reegan, with his ambition to crack a few safes with ray guns, can’t compete with that.

The final stage of Carrington’s plan plays out in front of TV cameras, which seems somehow to be almost as integral a part of his scheme as the business with nuclear warheads. The Ambassadors of Death has an interesting relationship with television, right from the moment in episode one where a character unexpectedly breaks the fourth wall to address the camera. We understand from his manner of speaking that this is a news broadcast, but since there’s been no previous indication that the scene was a show-within-a-show, it’s quite destabilising. The central device of Doctor Who – a magic box which shows you a different time and place every time it’s turned on – has been plausibly interpreted as a metaphor for television, not least by the First Doctor in An Unearthly Child. Yet the only prior appearance of actual TV in the series has been the deliciously irresponsible full-frame fake news broadcast in The War Machines. Given that the series has, at this point, vetoed certain historical stories for being too close to living memory, it’s no surprise that the present-day Earth storylines are the only ones that reference the medium Doctor Who is broadcast on. But it forges a pleasing link between television and modernity in the series’ iconography, a link that isn’t broken until 21st-century pseudohistoricals like The Idiot’s Lantern.

Next: Inferno (1970)

Graham’s Archive – The Ambassadors of Death

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