aWill Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 273, The Ambassadors of Death, Episode Two
Dear diary,
“The Ambassadors of Death, a thriller for television in seven parts by David Whitaker (sort of)”
Right the way through today's episode, I had a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that I'd seen it before. I couldn't figure out for the life of me where, or how, and I'd definitely not seen Episode One, or any of the ones that followed this. Then it struck me - this is the first episode of The Quatermass Experiment!
Space shuttle goes up, contact is lost, the shuttle crashes back down (here it's in the middle of a remote location which might as well be the same one from the previous story, in Quatermass it demolishes a house in London), and it turns out that some of the crew are missing. In fairness, we don't yet know that our crew aren't in this shuttle, but they've not been getting any response from inside, and when they do finally manage to make contact, it's just the same message being repeated over and over again. Still, Doctor Who hasn't ever been afraid to 'borrow' ideas from other well-regarded places, and Quatermass is a pretty good template to have in mind when you consider the Seventh Season. I'd be willing to bet money that the production team had this in mind when planning this story.
I'm not really sure what to make of this one so far. Yesterday left me thinking that we were in for another serious drama with elements of comedy injected in all the right places. People insist on calling the stories of Season Seven 'gritty', and it's hard not to simply use that term. Today, the tone has been a bit all over the place. Early on, the Doctor pulls a conjuring trick to hide the recording, and simply pops it back into existence when the time is right. He describes it to Liz as being simple 'transmigration of an object', but the whole thing threw me completely. It was comical, but it just felt very out of place.
We then settled back down for some more (sigh) 'gritty' action, in which the Doctor tricks their prisoner into revealing that he's a member of the military (and it's very well done. It's similar in style to the way that Troughton forced his way into the prison during The War Games, and yet it feels perhaps even more authoritarian when it comes from Pertwee), and then we're treated to a long dialogue-free sequence in which UNIT get the recently returned capsule onto a convoy, before getting ambushed and loosing the thing.
What follows is an odd sequence in which Pertwee puts on a funny voice (it's what he was best known for at the time he started playing the Doctor, so it was bound to come up sooner or later. It does have to be said that he really was the master of voices), and tricks two men into being stuck to his car. It feels a bit slapstick again when they can't remove their hands (as does the button to activate this strange mechanism), and it jolted me right back out of the action again. Before you know it, we're back at the base and given an eerie cliffhanger in which they've finally made contact with the people they hope to be inside the capsule, and are treated to the same message playing on repeat.
I just don't know what to do with any of this. Doctor Who is usually very good at blending comedy with drama (Troughton was a dab hand at doing it - scripted or not!), but here it seems that we can have either one or the other. I'm hoping that it's simply a bit of a blip and the story can settle down and pick which way it wants to lean from now on, so I can try to get my head around it!
The one bit of comedy that I did really enjoy today is the emergence of a running joke about Bessie. The Doctor was patching her up at the start of the last story, and she'd broken down by the time that tale was over. Today, it seems to be in another questionable condition and even the Brigadier makes a joke about it ('I'll see you at the Space Centre. If you can make it'). I quite like the idea that even though the Doctor's gotten hold of his dream car now, it's just not reliable enough to keep him going. But it can stick people to the bodywork .Yep.
