aWill Brooks’ 50 Year Diary - watching Doctor Who one episode a day from the very start...
Day 277: The Ambassadors of Death, Episode Six
Dear diary,
So there we have it! The truth about General Carrington! The problem is, I'd been sort of guessing this for a while, now, and it's not the most interesting of reveals. On the plus side, it does seem to even out my debate as to how many different groups there are working together - it looks like it is three, but Carrington works for one and is the shady paymaster of another.
Still, even if the reveal isn't the most interesting thing the series has ever given us, the cliffhanger itself is pretty good. The Doctor's often threatened at gunpoint (has already has been in this story), but the gun isn't usually so close to the Doctor's nose!
I'm sorry to say that I'm still not massively enjoying The Ambassadors of Death. Things have picked up a bit today, but I think my interest dropped too long ago - it's too much of an up-hill climb to try and get back into it now. For a while, when the Doctor was taken aboard the giant clam and encountered the astronauts all safe and well, I did think that things were going to start turning around for me. It was fresh, it was exciting, but then, it was right back down to Earth, so we could carry on with the story at a snail's pace once more.
Something I do have to wonder about this story could potentially be opening a bit of a can of worms. I'll be discussing the actual placement of the UNIT stories further down the line, once I've seen enough of them to make up my mind properly, but The Ambassadors of Death seems to be the first real hint we've had that this isn't as contemporary as I might like to think.
At the time, the Doctor Who production team intended that the Third Doctor's adventures would be taking place in the near future. The Radio Times write up for The Invasion specified the story as taking place in 1975, which would put these tales in the late 1970s at the earliest. Aside from a few bits of equipment seen in the last few stories, I've not had any real reason to assume that the stories aren't simply set an the time of broadcast, but today we've got a full on British Space Programme!
I'd be tempted to simply say that in the Doctor Who universe, things are a little different to the way that they are in the real world, but by the time of The Christmas Invasion we're sending probes up to Mars that are nowhere near as advanced as the manned missions we're seeing here - and they're now on the seventh one! I'm not going to be opening the big can of worms today, but I am wondering what people generally think on the subject - are the UNIT stories set at the time of broadcast or are they set later?
Leave a comment, or head over to the 50 Year Diary Facebook page and let me know - I'll be discussing it all at some point, I'm sure!
