The conspiracy thriller vibe continues with these two episodes. Episode 4 has Liz Shaw helping the people who kidnapped the astronauts, but under duress. She also gets a subplot of pure padding, as she escapes for five minutes only to be brought right back, with virtually no consequences or changes to the status quo. Actually, that sort of describes this episode -- there's a lot of treading water and little plot advancement. But it's to its credit that you don't really notice this while you're watching, since the wheel-spinning is reasonably exciting. Really, the main things that happen are that Liz starts working for the enemy and Taltalian blows himself up while trying to kill the Doctor. (Though, to be fair, that's because Reegan, the astronauts' kidnapper, changed the timer on the bomb to zero; it's not because Taltalian is clumsy or inept.) All right, there's also some stuff with General Carrington trying to convince the Doctor and the Brigadier that the bodies found in the quarry (you know, Reegan's henchmen) were foreign agents kidnapping the astronauts, but the Doctor doesn't appear to believe a word of it and so therefore neither do we.
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An astronaut advances on the Doctor as he checks Quinlan for
signs of life. (The Ambassadors of Death Episode 4) ©BBC |
At the end of the episode, though, there's a great action sequence as one of the astronauts rampages through the Space Centre, killing both soldiers and Sir James Quinlan with a touch
56 and destroying presumably important documents inside Quinlan's safe. There's some great direction here too, with the astronaut framed against the sun as it stalks toward the gate. (And side note to retract a comment last time about color recovery being a bit rough; episode 4 is entirely color recovered and it looks very impressive -- probably more so than episode 5, which is entirely color restored with an off-air copy. Seriously, look at that picture there. That color was pulled off a black-and-white film print. Tell me that isn't incredibly cool.)
Episode 4 ended with the Doctor discovering Quinlan's body, unaware of the astronaut behind him, and he's only saved at the last moment by the Brigadier entering the room. But there's nothing anyone can do about the astronaut, so the Doctor continues to help prepare
Recovery 7 for another launch to check on the missing people still believed to be in orbit. Carrington continues to be obstructive but offers no real reasons for doing so -- we know he has some ulterior motive, we just don't know what it is. But Liz manages to convince Dr. Lennox to leave and tell UNIT about the astronauts -- and we also see the return of Benton (last seen in
The Invasion), now a sergeant. Unfortunately, Reegan's boss has men everywhere, so Dr. Lennox is served a fatal meal of an unshielded radioactive isotope.
But the real drama is the sabotage of the launch by Reegan, who pumps too much of the unstable fuel into the rocket (the M-3 varient [sic]), thus sending the Doctor into space far too quickly. This was the episode transmitted immediately after the Apollo 13 disaster (the splashdown happened the day before), which apparently lent this moment an extra frisson of danger for the viewing audience -- and as it's reasonably tense even without real world events, this must have been quite a thrill. But fortunately the Doctor makes it into orbit safely and links up with
Mars Probe 7 -- only to see a large UFO out the window...
56 Well, except that the thing everyone notices is that the guard who's "killed" at the gate in episode 4 appears to be alive and back at his post in episode 6, so the astronauts' touch might not always be fatal. Of course, this is the same story that keeps killing Derek Ware, so maybe we shouldn't read too much into it.