Ambassadors of Death

One of our biggest and best caveats regarding Doctor Who is its versatility. With the series having covered so much different ground over the years, it's never hard to find something you like. But the downside to Doctor Who being able to "go anywhere and do anything" is that sooner or later you'll stumble across a "type" of Doctor Who that you simply don't like. For me, it's anything to do with the gritty realism of space travel.

The TARDIS is quite clearly magic, hence why it's so great. It can take you anywhere, travel through time, looks cool on the outside and comes with a swimming pool. It's utterly fantastical - ask someone at NASA when they hope to come up with such a machine and they might not give you a clear date. So why Doctor Who had to ever try and "do" real space travel is beyond me. Put simply, the TARDIS is everything that's good about space and time travel (voyage of discovery, space adventures) with all the boring stuff done away with (angles of descent, fuel considerations, airlocks, dull people in control rooms). So Season 7, which gets rid of the TARDIS and brings back all the dull space travel stuff, suddenly seems like less of a good idea.

Yet Season 7 is a fantastic season. Why? Well, because most of the season retained and exhibited the other major ingredients of Doctor Who very, very well. The Doctor is great - serious, dynamic, biting in the face of bureaucracy and childlike all at once; remember Jon Pertwee was known for a silly voices radio comedy and don't write Shane Ritchie off just yet. There are lots of good monsters - the Autons smashing through Shop Windows echoing the Cybermen rampaging through London the year before, and the Silurians establishing the most visible monster presence in the present day yet. Plus Liz Shaw is very good, literally stepping into the role of assistant and with a great wig and a pleasing streak of rebellion to boot ("I wish that was all I didn't like about you!" she tells the Brigadier in "Inferno"). Yet Season 7 is, be really honest here, not 100% Doctor Who is it?

It's really good, yes, but it's only 60% really good Doctor Who. The rest is 40% really good Moonbase 3, Quatermass and all the other "serious" sci-fi programmes I've never seen. I've probably never seen them because they aren't around today, where-as Doctor Who is. The reason why can be explained by looking at why Season 8, which features no rockets, astronauts, space control centres or anything called a "probe", is ultimately more loved. We think Season 7 is better, but as a majority we still all like Season 8 more. "Terror of the Autons", "The Daemons" and "The Sea Devils" or "Spearhead from Space", "The Silurians" and "The Ambassadors of Death"?

Unfortunately "Ambassadors" is the epitome of that 40% of Season 7 that isn't really the Doctor Who we know and love. Pertwee is great ("let me explain this in very simple terms!") but would we rather see him taking off in the TARDIS or spending a whole episode in orbit of Mars Probe 7 trying to seal an airlock? There is some genuine curiosity to be had in wondering who the strange aliens are, but it's not a trick they'd have been able to repeat too often, and anyway, we never actually find out. Don't get me wrong, a lot of "Ambassadors" is very good, but it's major failing can be summed up by the ending. After seven episodes of trying to find out who the strange aliens are, just when the 'astronaut swap' is about to take place and we look like finding out, the story suddenly ends. That's when you realise that what you really wanted all along was simply to see under the mask, and that singular excitement is not even on the stories agenda.

The rest of it, space walking, oxygen problems and lots of white models moving silently about in space, should be the window-dressing, but without us actually properly meeting anyone not from Earth, it's not even very interesting window dressing. In fact, in "Ambassadors" it's all we have, leaving whatever strange horror mankind has encountered unseen. That's why "Ambassadors" will only ever be 60% Doctor Who, and 60% fun, for me.