The Ambassadors of Death

The Ambassadors of Death is one of the cleverest stories the programme has produced. It is the first depiction of what has become known as 'first contact' between humans and aliens. It has, however, a very clever twist to it, as it realises that first contact, should it ever happen, will have been an event that would have been planned for by more than one party. The way the story does this is inspired. When a recovery capsule is sent to rescue the returning astronauts from a Mars mission, the three figures in space suits are not the crew, but aliens. This immediately recalls The Quatermass Experiment, something that would have been obvious to any older viewer at the time. The aliens are humanoid, but seem to be intensely radioactive, even feeding off radiation and their touch is deadly. However, Quatermass is very cleverly subverted- instead of spreading a deadly something on Earth, the aliens are captured and imprisoned. Whatever is wrong with this situation, it isn't that the aliens want to conquer Earth. It turns out that former astronaut General Carrington has encountered these aliens on Mars and is horrified at the idea of first contact. He engineers a fake first contact scenario, where the aliens send three ambassadors to Earth, but he uses them to instil fear and hatred of the invader.

This is a very interesting premise and is well explored in the story. Most importantly, it is backed up by some excellent characterisation. Carrington is the main antagonist in the story, but is not a real villain. He genuinely believes he is saving the planet with his actions and even the Doctor states that he understands the general's motives and John Abineri puts in a great performance. Reegan, effectively portrayed by William Dysart is depicted as a smarmy but ruthless thug who, nevertheless, is mildly likeable and the script decides not to punish him for his actions at the end. Even stock characters such as Ralph Cornish are well played. Jon Pertwee builds on the new 'diplomatic' aspect of the Doctor's personality very well and Caroline John and Nicholas Courtney continue to impress.

Visually, the story is very impressive. There are gunfights, convoys all excitingly captured on location and on film. The aliens are brilliantly realised. Although we only see their true form for a matter of minutes, the sight of them in space suits is very chilling and Liz's first sight of them is disorienting and terrifying. Michael Ferguson takes full advantage of what was, clearly, a larger budget than usual and puts in great work behind the camera. There are some very memorable scenes- the thugs being told to get in the van with the aliens only for their bodies to be dumped in a gravel pit later, the trip to the alien mother ship with its wonderful design, the raid by one of the aliens where they are shown walking up to the gate backlit by the sun.

There is a major problem with the story. Alone amongst the stories in this season, it is noticeably padded- indeed it could be stated that the cliff-hanger format of Doctor Who works against this particular story and they tend to impede the flow of the narrative. Each story has a major action set piece that, whilst usually effective, are symptoms of the story engineering situations to lengthen the narrative. As in Whitaker's Evil of the Daleks, there are redundant characters- Taltalian, for example, could have been done away with. This tends to complicate the story unnecessarily.

However, the rest of the story is simply too intelligent, too compelling and too well done, production wise, to derail this story and it's well worth a punt.

NEXT: Inferno