May 15: The Ambassadors of Death Episodes 4 & 5

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.

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 touch⁵⁶ 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.

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...

May 13: Doctor Who and the Silurians Episode 7 / The Ambassadors of Death Episode 1

Episode 7 is a bit less morally complex than the other episodes.  The cure has been found, the Doctor has been taken into the Silurians' base (merely incapacitated, not killed by the Silurians), and a scheme is hatched by the Silurians to destroy the part of the atmosphere that keeps things cool (Liz Shaw says they want to destroy the Van Allen belt, but we'll assume she misspoke and meant the ozone layer).  The Silurians hope to kill off humanity and make the planet more habitable for them at the same time.  This also leads to the wonderful juxtaposition of seeing the Silurians inside the Wenley Moor research facility, menacing the scientists and setting up their molecular disperser.  But thanks to some quick thinking from the Doctor, the reactor goes into overload (fun fact: dropping all the fuel rods into the reactor at once will only lead to a slow-building overload rather than an instant catastrophic explosion -- well, maybe things are designed differently in the Doctor Who universe) and the Silurians decide to go back into hibernation before the whole place becomes radioactive.  Fortunately, you can rewire a console to prevent a nuclear meltdown (fun fact #2), so the place is saved.

The Doctor watches as the Brigadier blows up the Silurians' base.
(Doctor Who and the Silurians Episode 7) ©BBC

But then the Doctor wants to go back and talk to the Silurians again: "One at a time, so that we can reason with them.  There's a wealth of scientific knowledge down here, Brigadier, and I can't wait to get started on it."  This alarms the Brigadier (and, presumably, the government as well), so as the Doctor leaves to gather equipment and scientists, the Brigadier wires the place with explosives and blows it up -- much to the appallment of the Doctor.  "But that's murder.  They were intelligent alien beings.  A whole race of them.  And he's just wiped them out."

Doctor Who and the Silurians is a pleasingly nuanced and complex story.  Malcolm Hulke's aforementioned complaint about only having mad scientists and alien invasion stories available to the series has been sidestepped by Hulke himself with a lovely "what if?" serial about prior inhabitants of the planet.  There are also some nice morally ambiguous puzzles: do the Silurians have any right to the planet still?  Is there a way to coexist peacefully?  Could humanity -- who aren't averse to killing each other over squabbles, never mind a completely different intelligent species -- actually accept the presence of Silurians?  And then laid over this is an engaging story about reptile men and their effect on people; in other words, something for everyone to enjoy, not just those willing to engage with the philosophical questions.  In this regard, Doctor Who and the Silurians is one of the most adult (in the positive sense of the word, as opposed to the Torchwood meaning) stories the series has yet produced.  More like this, please.

But now we move on to another seven-part story with The Ambassadors of Death.  This is the earliest episode of Doctor Who to exist on its original 2" Quad tape, rather than on a 16mm film telerecording -- so you can get some idea of what the picture quality of these episodes originally was.

This one opens a bit differently: we get the Doctor Who title sequence and then we start the episode, as the basic set-up is laid out (spaceship Recovery 7 is trying to link up with Mars Probe 7, because "something took off from Mars"), and, with the first use of the "sting", normally associated with the end credits, we get the title: "The Ambassadors", followed a beat later by "OF DEATH", appearing with a sproing.

Other than that what we have is the makings of a good thriller.  There's trouble afoot with the two spacecrafts' link-up, and a strange message is transmitted to Earth -- only to have a reply sent back from somewhere in London.  As the team at Space Control try to regain contact with Recovery 7, UNIT heads to an abandoned warehouse to find out who sent that signal.  We get a really exciting fight scene as UNIT has a pitched gun battle with whoever is sending that reply.  And great fun can be had spotting all the doubling-up of stuntmen: Derek Ware in particular shows up repeatedly on both sides, killed multiple times.

While that's going on, the Doctor is trying to translate the alien message.  When he goes to use the computers, Space Control's computer expert Dr. Bruno Taltalian pulls a gun on the Doctor and Liz.  And then finally, in its proper place, we get that glissando-like "sting" that will signify the start of the end credits for the rest of the show's run.  Hard to believe we got through six seasons without that.

May 12: Doctor Who and the Silurians Episodes 5 & 6

So here we start to learn more about the Silurians, and how they were in fact the previous inhabitants of Earth.⁵⁵  It seems they all went into hibernation when the Moon came along and they feared it was going to smash into the planet; they weren't ready for the possibility that the Moon would stick around.  So they believe they have a rightful claim to Earth and regard humanity as pests that have moved in while the real owners were away.  And interestingly, the Doctor doesn't dispute this claim but instead tries to argue for peaceful coexistence -- a plan which the Silurian leader seems willing to at least consider, over the objections of the young Silurian (well, that's what they call him in the credits).  And so we get a power struggle between the two Silurians, which makes for a much more interesting story than a unified block of creatures, and which also mirrors the struggle among the humans, with Liz Shaw arguing on behalf of the Doctor for a chance at peace, while Miss Dawson (presumably because of Dr. Quinn's death) is the strongest advocate for wiping them all out.

This debate is sidetracked a bit when the young Silurian decides to wipe out humanity by infecting Major Baker with a very virulent disease and releasing him back into the caves.  The Silurian leader learns of this and gives the Doctor a sample of the disease to try and find a cure (an event which leads to the young Silurian taking over by killing the old Silurian leader with his third eye) -- at which point the drama shifts to a race against time to both find a cure for this disease and to stop it from spreading.  Of course, that's a problem when infected people keep leaving the research facility.

The Doctor and the Brigadier find the body of Major Baker.
(Doctor Who and the Silurians Episode 6) ©BBC

Episode 6 is all about the disease, both finding a cure and watching as the disease spreads -- thanks primarily to Masters, who heads back to London and wanders around, infecting tons of people along the way.  We even get some montages, both of the Doctor analyzing blood samples and drugs while the Brigadier monitors the situation, and of people succumbing to the disease all around London.  This is the drama that drives this episode to the exclusion of anything else -- even Dr. Lawrence's death scene; as he finally snaps from the pressure of having his world collapse around him (the research facility's projects having ground to a halt) and attempts to throttle the Brigadier, he suddenly convulses and dies: another victim of the disease.  Although, given that Dr. Lawrence hardly starts out as any sort of sympathetic character, it's a bit difficult to muster up any sympathy for him as he dies.  Still, by the end the Doctor has found the cure -- only the Silurians break into the base and start to kill him before he can finish writing out the formula for that antidote...

(And I've gotten this far without mentioning the score by Carey Blyton, the most distinctive part of which is the crumhorn (the buzzing instrument) that signifies the Silurians.  There are also a number of other older instruments, such as an ophicleide and a serpent (both similar to a tuba), which are designed to evoke an "older" sound in keeping with the story's themes.  The score is quite distinctive and generally works quite well (although similar-sounding scores will be less successful when applied to Daleks and Cybermen).)







⁵⁵ Though not, it should be pointed out, during the Silurian era, which is far too early for complex forms of life like the Silurians to be around.  To his credit, writer Malcolm Hulke figured this out and attempted to rectify the error in this story's sequel, The Sea Devils, which has the Doctor saying the Silurians should really be known as the Eocenes.   Of course, that doesn't really work either, as that seems to be rather too late for large reptile people to be walking the planet.  The books sidestepped the issue and settled for Earth Reptiles, while the BBC Wales series eventually went with Homo reptilia, when it can be bothered to remember.

May 11: Doctor Who and the Silurians Episodes 3 & 4

We continue on with episodes 3 and 4 of Doctor Who and the Silurians, and episode 3 gives us a really lovely comprehensive search across the moorland for the creature who found Liz in the barn before escaping.  It's very well done, with helicopters sweeping across the countryside as a number of troops search on foot.  This also gives us our best look yet at Captain Hawkins, being played by future Blake's 7 star Paul Darrow.

The other purpose this episode serves is to show us just how lousy Dr. Quinn is at keeping secrets.  He does manage to rescue the wounded creature, but then he keeps it locked up in his cottage in order to use as a bargaining chip.  And he's hardly subtle in his efforts, with the end result being that he throws a huge amount of suspicion on himself and ends up being killed by a Silurian.  Still, as a side effect we get a lovely scene between the Doctor and Miss Dawson, as she catches the Doctor searching Quinn's office for evidence of his actions and he tries to convince her that he only wants to help Quinn.  The way she seems about to tell the Doctor what she knows until the Brigadier enters the room is really quite nice.

But still, Quinn is killed and the Doctor finds the body when he goes to the cottage to check up on the man -- and then he finds himself face to face with a Silurian.

The Doctor encounters a Silurian. (Doctor Who and the
Silurians Episode 4) ©BBC

It's really a quite lovely cliffhanger, even if the effect is spoiled at the beginning of episode 4, as the Doctor pertly asks, "Hello, are you a Silurian?"  But we should take a moment to appreciate the design of the Silurians, which are pleasingly reptilian yet not too much like humans (beyond the limitations of having to put a man in a suit).  The face in particular is quite wonderful, with the strange eyes (the top third one in particular) and the recessed beak-like mouth giving it a nice unusual look.

And now that we've actually seen a Silurian, we can move on to seeing them in their base, rather than just having them hiding in the shadows.  Thanks to Dr. Quinn's map, the Doctor and Liz get a chance to explore the caves -- though not before Major Baker wanders down there, looking for his saboteurs (and finding them, albeit by being captured by them).  The Silurians' base looks a bit odd, with a lot of textured surfaces, but it also looks very spartan.  But hey, we get our first use of colour-separation overlay (CSO)⁵⁴ in Doctor Who, as the Doctor and Liz see the dinosaur that was in earlier episodes.

And so the Doctor returns to Wenley Moor, where he finds the permanent undersecretary Masters (as played by British national treasure Geoffrey Palmer, in one of his earlier roles) waiting.  It seems everyone but the Doctor wants to send troops into the caves to flush out the saboteurs/monsters (delete according to who's talking), and they refuse to listen to the Doctor's belief that these are sentient creatures that can be reasoned with.  But when they won't listen, the Doctor decides to try and reason with the Silurians (which leads to the rather wonderful moment where the Doctor is standing in their control room while the Silurians all have their backs to him; "Ahem," the Doctor says, startling the lot of them).  Except they seem just as unwilling to listen, and one of them decides to kill the Doctor with its third eye...







⁵⁴ Better known as chroma key or blue-/green-screen.  CSO was the BBC term for this technique.

May 10: Doctor Who and the Silurians Episodes 1 & 2

This is Barry Letts's first story as the producer of Doctor Who.  It's also the first (and only) story to have the words "Doctor Who and" in the episode title -- is this because he didn't realize the stories weren't normally called that?  (Some stories would have that prefix during the scripting stage, but it would be dropped by the time production happened, so you can see why Letts might not have realized it wasn't typical.)

The other thing to note is that, although all of Pertwee exists on video, it's not all in the original format -- those tapes having been wiped and reused just like the black-and-white ones.  So we get a hodgepodge of quality during the Pertwee years -- this particular story being a mix of a low-quality NTSC copy and a high-quality black-and-white film copy.  It's a very good restoration, but you can still tell sometimes.

We're also introduced to that staple of the next few years: the isolated scientific research establishment.  UNIT has been called in to investigate inexplicable power losses at Wenley Moor, which is running experiments on the nature of the atom.  We're introduced to the head of the project, Dr. Lawrence, who seems pretty stressed out about the situation.  We also meet the second-in-command, Dr. Quinn, who seems much happier -- but then it's soon clear, from his conversations with the perpetually unhappy-looking Miss Dawson, that he knows something about what's been happening at Wenley Moor.  Major Baker, the chief of security, thinks it's internal sabotage, but UNIT doesn't seem so sure.  The Doctor and Liz find enough to be concerned about things, but not enough to know what the nature of the problem is.  But when they learn about a potholer named Spencer (who was attacked by a dinosaur in the opening shots of the episode), the Doctor decides to investigate the caves for himself, and is also attacked by a dinosaur for his pains.

Of course, as we see in episode 2, the dinosaur is called off before it can do any serious damage, and the Doctor returns to Wenley Moor to inform the Brigadier, who decides to take a party into the caves to investigate.  Major Baker fires at a shadowy figure before being attacked by the dinosaur.  Whatever Baker shot at, it's wounded.  We get some nice first-person shots, with a reptilian claw visible and, intriguingly, a red filter over the top center third -- one can only guess at what the people with black-and-white televisions thought of that.

And we learn that Dr. Quinn is in fact working with these strange figures, who have a base in the caves and instruct Quinn to recover their wounded comrade.  That comrade has, meanwhile, taken refuge in a barn, only to be discovered by the farmer.  It kills the farmer and terrifies the wife, who eventually manages to tell the Doctor and the Brigadier that it's still in the barn -- the barn which Liz Shaw is currently investigating on her own...

So far it's been a slow burn, but these two episodes are paced very well, meaning that they remain highly watchable.  There are quite a few questions being raised (What's causing the power losses?  Who are the people in the caves?  Why do they have a dinosaur?  Why do they strike terror into humans?  What's Quinn's relationship with them?), which are compelling enough to maintain interest for the next episodes.  So far so good then.

May 9: Spearhead from Space Episodes 3 & 4

Episode 3 is largely a delaying action, as apparently the meteor that Sam Seeley has is the swarm leader for the alien Autons, and is thus vital to their plans of conquest and without it their plans can't advance.  Nevertheless it's still entertaining.  Plus this allows us to see our first real look at an Auton in action, as one shoots at Ransome, the fired plastics factory employee, as he flees said factory, while another one ransacks the Seeleys' cottage looking for that swarm leader, taking a shotgun blast to the chest with no ill effect.

And then we also have Ransome's still-panicked discussion with UNIT about what's going on at his old workplace, and some guff about the Doctor trying to leave in the middle of the crisis⁵³, just to prove that the TARDIS isn't going anywhere for some time.  So all in all, not a lot of actual story advancement here: UNIT learns about the factory, sees an Auton in action, and finds the swarm leader and that's about it.  But it's all so well written, directed, and acted that the time never drags.

Episode 4 gives us the recovery of the swarm leader by the Autons, which means their plan can now proceed and they can unleash the Autons on the public.  The scenes of the mannequins in the storefront windows coming to life and smashing through the glass to kill the populace at large are justly famous (even if we never see any glass actually break), endowing a familiar object with deadly menace.  There's something chilling about those blank plastic faces walking toward you, with their fingers hinging down to produce a strange gun.  It's eerie in concept and, brought to life in such a memorable way by the production team, highly effective.

The Autons begin their attack. (Spearhead from Space
Episode 4) ©BBC

This is the high point of the episode, coming roughly at the midpoint; before that we get the Doctor and Liz investigating Madame Tussauds for strange goings-on and Ransome being obliterated by an Auton.  Afterwards it's a race against time to stop the Autons and their controllers, the Nestenes, from taking over the planet.  This does mean we get a rather nifty battle between UNIT forces and the Autons (at the same location as the battle between UNIT forces and the Cybermen in The Invasion, I notice), but it also means that, as the Doctor and Liz sneak off to fight the problem at its source, we get an awfully long stretch of the Doctor struggling with the Nestene manifestation (which is some sort of squid) while Liz struggles to work out what's wrong with the Doctor's Nestene-killing device.  And maybe it's because I've seen it before, but it takes an awfully long time for Liz to figure out that the reason the device isn't working is that the magic wand attachment isn't plugged into it.  All while Pertwee pulls faces and struggles with tentacles wrapped around his neck and slapping him in the face.  (And consider that this version was actually a remount for a take from an earlier day that was deemed even worse, and ponder what that must have looked like...)  But in the end Liz plugs the cable in and the Doctor saves the day, causing the Nestene to explode in the process.

Spearhead from Space is, it must be said, a triumph from start to finish.  The decision to go to an all-film production (thanks to a scene-shifters strike at the BBC) is a real benefit, as it allows Derek Martinus to be much more mobile with his cameras than he would have been if he'd had to do studio work.  This gives everything a much more dynamic feeling, and the sense of coherency by having everything look the same visually with no switching between film (25 frames per second) and video (50 half-frames (aka fields) per second, which are interlaced to provide a "smoother" motion -- this is putting it very crudely, mind) also adds to the effectiveness of the finished product.  To be honest, this isn't a story about the Doctor, and by the end we still don't have a firm grasp on who this new Doctor is, other than that he's definitely the Doctor -- but in terms of setting up the show's new Earthbound format, Spearhead from Space works marvelously well.  Robert Holmes's script knows exactly what it wants to do, and it has no problems doing it.

And as this is the last story to be produced by Derrick Sherwin (who only really became the producer for the last couple stories, but who's really just carrying on the style that Peter Bryant had, since Sherwin was Bryant's script editor), we can take a moment to evaluate his and Bryant's impact on the show.  A lot of their shows were made in moments of crisis, but there's definitely an effort to move away from simple monster stories and back to moments of human drama, of personalities reacting to one another rather than a generic alien race trying to take over everything (which isn't to say that those stories go away, but there's still noticeably less of them than during Innes Lloyd's tenure).  But their ultimate impact was probably in setting the stage for the next couple years of stories, limiting the Doctor to one time and place in an effort to create a more familiar setting for viewers (even if, as Malcolm Hulke famously complained, this meant that the only stories now available were mad scientists and alien invasions -- fortunately this turned out to be a somewhat cynical viewpoint).  But whatever their overall merits, you can't deny that they go out on a high note.







⁵³ Well, we call it a crisis, but to be fair all he's really got to go on at the moment he decides to try and take off is a piece of plastic that defies analysis.  He doesn't even know about the plastic factory shenanigans yet.  So from his point of view it's hardly the abandonment of his friends in a time of need that it's sometimes made out to be.