OVERALL EPISODE NUMBER: 270
STORY NUMBER: 053
TRANSMITTED: Saturday 25 April 1970
WRITER: David Whitaker (and Malcolm Hulke - Uncredited)
DIRECTOR: Michael Ferguson
SCRIPT EDITOR: Terrance Dicks
PRODUCER: Barry Letts
RATINGS: 6.9 million viewers
FORMAT: DVD: Doctor Who-Ambassadors of Death
EPISODE FORMAT: 16mm b&w film recording recoloured using 525 off air video & chroma dot recovery
"It's quite obviously an alien spacecraft. We must attack and destroy it!"
The Doctor is summoned into the alien ship where he meets the three Earth astronauts who have had their minds conditioned to believe they have returned to Earth. Their captor, hidden behind a screen, wishes to know what has happened to the Ambassadors he sent to Earth. The Doctor promises to return them in exchange for the Astronauts and returns to Earth where he is gassed in the decontamination chamber and kidnapped by Reegan. Put in the bunker with Liz they are shocked when the door opens and General Carrington walks in: He has come to kill the Doctor.
Finally the villain of the piece stands unmasked: It is Carrington after all. OK, it's been obvious to the viewers and the Doctor for sometime that something isn't right about him and as the episode goes on The Brigadier and Ralph Cornish start to smell a rat too:
WOMAN: Radio telescope report from Jodrell Bank. Computer analyses as discoid, half a mile in diameter.Now the Brigadier isn't averse to a nice big explosion. So for him to be saying "hang on a moment" there's obviously something not quite right about Carrington!
BRIGADIER: Half a mile wide? It must be a meteor.
CORNISH: Meteors don't stand still.
CARRINGTON: It's quite obviously an alien spacecraft. We must attack and destroy it.
BRIGADIER: What about the Doctor? If that is a spacecraft, he may be on board.
CARRINGTON: He must be dead by now. We could use missiles with atomic warheads.
CORNISH: Until we know for certain that
CARRINGTON: We do know. I've got a plane to catch. There's an emergency meeting of the Security Council in Geneva in an hour's time.
CORNISH: Security Council?
CARRINGTON: Yes, this object has been spotted by observers all over the world.
BRIGADIER: What are you going to tell the council, sir?
CARRINGTON: I shall recommend an immediate all out attack. We must defend ourselves while there is still time! CORNISH: The man's mad.
BRIGADIER: Not necessarily. We don't know what that thing is there.
CORNISH: Then surely we should find out.
BRIGADIER: Perhaps someone's found out already.
CORNISH: What do you mean?
BRIGADIER: I have a feeling that General Carrington knows a great deal more than he's telling us. He went on a Mars probe himself, remember. Perhaps he discovered something.
CORNISH: Then why doesn't he tell us?
BRIGADIER: I don't know.
CORNISH: Are you supporting his plan to attack blindly?
BRIGADIER: No. I think we should wait. But there's only one hope left to us, that the Doctor is still alive.
Carrington returns to find the Doctor has returned to Earth and been abducted and sets off on what is a familiar spiel of attempting to make the Doctor look suspicious: we'll see similar again several times in the Pertwee era!
CARRINGTON: Are you sure he's been abducted? He could have left of his own accord.The Brigadier is still being tactful, after all the General is still his superior officer. Ralph Cornish however says what we've all been thinking.
BRIGADIER: There was a gas cylinder linked to the ventilation system.
CARRINGTON: It could be a blind to make us think he'd been kidnapped.
CORNISH: Now why should he do that?
CARRINGTON: Did it occur to you that all these troubles only started when this Doctor came on the scene?
BRIGADIER: With respect, sir, that is simply not true.
CARRINGTON: He insists on going up in Recovery 7, makes contact with the alien vessel, then disappears as soon as he lands. Can you explain that?
CORNISH: Do you really think that the Doctor is one of the people behind all this?
CARRINGTON: What do you know about this Doctor, Mister Cornish?
CORNISH: Oh, only that he's an associate of the Brigadier.
CARRINGTON: Exactly. Well, Brigadier? Where does this man come from?
BRIGADIER: That's difficult to explain, sir.
CARRINGTON: How long have you known him?
BRIGADIER: Several years, on and off.
CARRINGTON: On and off. What's his job exactly?
BRIGADIER: He's given my organisation a great deal of help in the past.
CARRINGTON: You're being deliberately unhelpful, Brigadier. I intend to have this Doctor investigated.
BRIGADIER: We shall have to find him first, sir.
CARRINGTON: The sooner you do that the better. If he has any explanation to offer as to what that object is, we need to know it at once. Contact me as soon as you find him.
CORNISH: General? How did the Security Council meeting in Geneva go?
CARRINGTON: Complete waste of time. They're still debating.
CORNISH: And what do you think they should do?
CARRINGTON: Arm every available missile with atomic warheads and blast that thing out of our skies!
CORNISH: Isn't that a bit extreme?
CARRINGTON: It's our moral duty.
BRIGADIER: I think the General's a bit overwrought.
CORNISH: I think he's insane.
But even now there's still the slight thought that the General might be just reaching the wrong conclusions: the last few moments of the show dispel that impression entirely!
LIZ: General Carrington!I asked my wife Liz at the top of the episode who she thought the villain was, She said "who?" I told her and she replied "That's obvious - I thought for a minute there was someone above him!"
CARRINGTON: Miss Shaw.
LIZ: How on Earth did you find us?
DOCTOR: I think the General knew all along.
CARRINGTON: You're not surprised to see me?
DOCTOR: Not particularly, no.
CARRINGTON: I'm surprised to see you, Doctor. My instructions were that you were to be killed.
DOCTOR: Then somebody disobeyed your instructions, didn't they.
CARRINGTON: I shall have to attend to the matter myself. I'm sorry, Doctor. It's my moral duty.
With this episode Doctor Who finally cracks open the CSO big time to provide the odd backdrop inside the alien ship and the effect of the Doctor sinking from the capsule to the floor.
Lovely bit of design for the alien spaceship too, giving it an almost organic feel.
Inside the spaceship the Astronauts are kept in the reused quarantine area set seen in episode 5.
It's lit differently but is the same set, which is somewhat appropriate as that seems to be where they believe they are
VAN LYDEN: Oh, hello. Come on in.We saw Ric Felgate as astronaut Van Lyden in episode 1, and Felgate, Steve Peters & Neville Simons appear as the alien versions of the astronauts in the following episodes but this is the first time we see Steve Peters & Neville Simons as the human Mars Probe 7 astronauts Lefee & Michaels
LEFEE: Oh, do you happen to know how long we're going to be kept here?
DOCTOR: What are you talking about?
MICHAELS: Hey, did you see this? Look, you're missing the game.
LEFEE: Never mind that. Turn it off.
VAN LYDEN: What do you mean turn it off?
MICHAELS: Turn it off? No.
LEFEE: We were losing anyway.
VAN LYDEN: Oh, come on.
MICHAELS: Okay. But we still might have
LEFEE: No chance.
VAN LYDEN: I say, any idea when we're going to see our families?
DOCTOR: Do you know where you are?
VAN LYDEN: Why, you ought to know.
DOCTOR: Please, do you know where you are?
VAN LYDEN: Yes, of course. I brought these two fellows back from Mars Probe 7. They slapped us in extended quarantine.
DOCTOR: You think you're on Earth, at the Space Centre?
LEFEE: What do you think that is?
Peter Noel Cook plays the shrouded Alien Space Captain. He was in the now missing second series Out of the Unknown episode The Eye as the Caller.
The Alien Voices are provided by Peter Halliday. He was in The Invasion as Packer and we heard as the Silurian voices in the previous story. He returns in Carnival of Monsters as Pletrac, City of Death as Captain Tancredi's guard, and Remembrance of the Daleks as the Vicar. He appeared in two of the earliest television science fiction series A for Andromeda and The Andromeda Breakthrough as Doctor John Fleming. He in Out of the Unknown appearing in the sole completely surviving third season episode The Last Lonely Man, directed by Douglas Camfield where he played Patrick Wilson which you can see on Out of the Unknown DVD Set. He appears in UFO as Dr. Segal in A Question of Priorities, the missing third season Doomwatch episode Say Knife, Fat Man as Rafael Dominguez, The Sweeney episode I Want the Man as Chief Insp. Gordon and the last first season episode of The Tripods as the Interrogator
Having seen the actual Astronauts we also get to see one of the alien without a helmet on too and it's a somewhat horrific sight, implying a being that suffered from an illness of some sort and reminding me a little of what little we see of the Chameleons in The Faceless Ones:
First there was Masters. Then there was Flynn. Now Reegan's got yet another henchman, this time unnamed. He's played by Barry Kennington had been a German & Roman soldier, an Alien Technician & a Resistance Man in The War Games, the Regular Army Officer in Spearhead from Space and a UNIT Soldier in The Silurians. In Doomwatch he was a Man in Hear No Evil and The Islanders and in Monty Python's Flying Circus he played a Pantomime Animal in Blood, Devastation, Death, War and Horror.
Control Room Assistants this week: returning we have Lindsey Scott, who played the role in episode 1 & 4 and is back again for episode 7. She's alongside Keith Simon, previously a Control Room Assistant in episode 2. They're joined by Diana Holt, making her only Doctor Who appearance but you can see her in Fawlty Towers as a Hotel Guest in The Germans, and Les Conrad who'd been a UNIT Soldier in episode 1 - see there for his credits - and returns as a Policeman in episode 7.
The UNIT Soldiers this week are all on location. Max Faulkner, who'd been in episode 4, is visible as the guard on the gate. Also returning is Doug Roe who had been in episodes 1,3 & 5. Keith Goodman is joining them this episode: he'd been a Guard in The Savages, an English Soldier in The Highlanders, a Cyberman in The Moonbase, a Security Guard in Seeds of Death and a Technician in Doctor Who and the Silurians.
During the Doctor's stay on Earth we see several deviations from history as we know it and one of the more obvious ones involves the UK space program. In this story the UK is mounting a manned mission to Mars not that long after the Americans got to the Moon in real life. At the time the intention was to set these episodes in the near future and indeed the Doctor's third companion from this era, Sarah Jane Smith, will later claim to be from 1980. But even at that time the Americans were struggling to get their Space Shuttle launched and showed no sign of getting anywhere near Mars. So how did the UK, who don't have a great real world track record with space flight, manage such a feat, and then beat it by sending an astronaut to Jupiter in The Android Invasion? The obvious answer can be found in a previous Doctor Who story: the technology has been salvaged from the failed Cyberman Invasion and from the wreckage of craft destroyed in that story. Perhaps some were even captured whole on the ground at International Electromatics plants?
Which brings us onto the thorny issue of when this story is set. The intention is that this story, and the whole UNIT era should be set in the near future (present day plus 5 to 10 years). Most of the evidence on screen does point very much to it being set in the early seventies when the episodes were shown. The only things against it are some technological advances and Sarah's claim in 1975's Pyramids of Mars that she's from the 1980s. However I think that can be explained away and the technological advances put down to improvements made using technology recovered from the failed Cyberman Invasion. So the view I will take is that the UNIT stories are happening in the seventies when they were first shown.
Two day after this episode was broadcast the twelfth Doomwatch episode Hear No Evil was shown on BBC1.
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