May 14: The Ambassadors of Death Episodes 2 & 3

To digress for a minute: while The Ambassadors of Death Episode 1 is the earliest episode of Doctor Who to still survive on the original tape, we don't have another episode still on videotape until episode 1 of The Claws of Axos.  So that means that the remainder of this story is, like Doctor Who and the Silurians, recolorized.  Now, there is, like The Silurians, an off-air NTSC color copy of this serial -- unfortunately it suffers from a rainbow patterning fault through large portions of the broadcast (you can see an example of this from episode 4 here), rendering the color useless.  But it turns out that the color signal is still present on the 16mm black & white film telerecordings in the form of a chroma dot pattern, and, in what is seriously one of the coolest things ever, people have worked out how to recover the color based on those chroma dot patterns.  It's a little rough at times, but given that this color comes from a b&w film print, it's still very impressive.  The remainder of The Ambassadors of Death is therefore a mixture between color restoration (as on The Silurians) and color recovery.

Recovery 7 is loaded onto a trailer to take back to Space
Control. (The Ambassadors of Death Episode 2) ©BBC

But back to the actual story.  We continue the thriller feel established in episode 1, with Recovery 7 unexpectedly returning back to Earth, despite the loss of radio communications.  Although the spacecraft returns successfully, its transportation back to Space Control is interrupted by a successful attempt to hijack the trailer containing Recovery 7.  This is quite the battle scene, with lots of guns, explosions, trucks, motorcycles -- even a helicopter!  Oh, and note the blue background in some of the shots inside the trailer cab: this will become relevant when we get to The Claws of Axos.

But the thieves are successful in capturing the spacecraft, only for the Doctor to recapture it using his wits and a bit of technical wizardry (aka a plot convenience), and return it to Space Control.  Only problem is, the astronauts refuse to come out, instead repeating the same sentences over and over again, so Space Control is forced to cut the capsule open.

Episode 3 reveals that the capsule is empty; apparently a bogus security check allowed the thieves from earlier to take the astronauts away.  The atmosphere that this serial is generating means that this is moving into conspiracy thriller territory.  And there's another problem: the inside of the capsule is highly radioactive, so how can the astronauts still be alive?  But then, in a twist, we learn that the man who's been orchestrating the kidnapping is in fact a general and former astronaut named Carrington, who's been operating with the approval of the British government.  Allegedly.  The Doctor doesn't seem entirely convinced, and when it turns out that the astronauts have been kidnapped by a third party, we see Carrington and Sir James Quinlan (representing the government) still involved in some sort of cover-up which is obstructing the actions of Space Control, who intend to send another spacecraft up to Mars Probe 7 based on the Doctor's belief that the astronauts are still up there, and that "I don't know what came down in Recovery 7, but it certainly wasn't human."

And it seems that the Doctor and Liz are getting in the way, and so that third party is instructed to take them out of the picture, which leads to sending Liz off on a wild goose chase that results in her being chased by some goons out onto a slippery weir...