TV Club: Doctor Who, The Ambassadors Of Death

“The Ambassadors Of Death” (season 7, episodes 12-18. Originally aired March 21-May 2, 1970)

To call “The Ambassadors Of Death” the weakest serial of Doctor Who’s seventh season is less of a knock against it than it might seem. Jon Pertwee’s first year as the Third Doctor was well above average as a whole, especially given the success of the gamble to drastically reinvent the show as an Earthbound, team-driven sci-fi drama of what we’d now recognize as the X-Files/Fringe/Torchwood format. There’s a pretty good case for calling it the series’ best season, period. (That’s a hard one to pick, though. Doctor Who has been so changeable over the years that it’s difficult to compare seasons, like apples and some fruit that doesn’t even grow on this planet. I’d vote for season 13, the second Fourth Doctor season, with its murderers’-row of “Terror Of The Zygons,” “Pyramids Of Mars,” “The Brain Of Morbius,” and “The Seeds Of Doom.” But I digress.)

“The Ambassadors Of Death” isn’t perfect, far from it, but nevertheless it has a lot going on that I really love, and which exemplifies what the creative team was trying to do with season seven—lure in a larger (and older) audience by blending the established “eccentric scientist fights alien monsters” sci-fi with slicker, higher-octane spy-thriller stuff that aimed for the less campy, more serious side of James Bond and The Avengers. The gloriously lavish action sequences here are the most blatant part of that, like a big neon billboard, but there’s subtler stuff percolating in the story too, particularly in the way it strives to suggest that its titular aliens might be truly out-of-this world, in the sense of perhaps being too strange for us to meaningfully communicate with or understand. And it also rests on a more-complex-than-usual motivation for its lead villain, General Carrington—arguably, he’s not a bad person, but a decent man twisted by his own inner trauma. (If only the presentation of that had been less murky, this could have been a much better story—but I’ll get to that in a moment.)

Originally published Jan. 6, 2013 on avclub.com. Read the complete article.

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