DOCTOR WHO: THE AMBASSADORS OF DEATH

Shawn Francis continues with his look at some of the older Doctor Who episodes, this one feature Jon Pertwee as the doctor. This is a review of the U.S DVD release. This one looks and sounds like a corker of an episode. Please check out Shawn's review after the jump...

Written By Shawn Francis

In this Jon Pertwee episode, which runs seven parts, each part twenty four minutes in length, something has gone wrong with a manned space flight returning from Mars. Once contact with the crew has been lost, a rescue mission consisting of one pilot is sent up to intercept the ship and find out what’s happened. This mission goes awry, too, but mission control is eventually able to bring the original ship down to earth via remote control.

The Doctor and traveling companion, Liz Shaw, are watching all this unfold on their monitor within the tardis, and the Doctor is unexpected pulled into these events when an odd noise comes through mission control’s audio, a noise that sounds awfully familiar to the Time Lord. But a noise he can’t precisely recall.

Once the ship has been retrieved and brought back to the space center, things get even stranger. The crew of two, who are presumably still inside, refuse to answer, or even open the hatch, forcing the space center workers to break into it. Shock of all shocks there’s no one inside.

It’s now presumed someone has taken out the astronauts before the ship was brought back, and it seems this faction has discovered there’s something wrong with the astronauts, for they need lethal doses of radiation to survive.

This faction also has sinister plans for these “beings,” and it’s up to the Doctor and Liz to find out what that is, foil it, and in the interim prevent an alien invasion.

The full frame transfer for episode one is pretty good, but the other six parts suffer a little bit in the visual category, especially scenes in the outdoors. Watchable they are, but I suspect these are the only surviving prints. Just a guess mind you.

There are two discs, with the bulk of the extras being on Disc #2. The first disc houses the episodes and a commentary with actress, Caroline John, actor, Nicholas Courtney, Peter Halliday, Geoffrey Beevers, director, Michael Ferguson, script editor, Terrance Dicks, stunt coordinator, Derek Ware, stunt performers, Roy Scammell, and Derek Martin and moderated by Toby Hadoke.

The two main extras on Disc #2 are ‘Mars Probe 7: Making The Ambassadors Of Death’ (25:49), which mostly centers around the stunt team they used, and ‘Tomorrow’s Times—The Third Doctor’ (13:06), a dissection of the Pertwee era through various reviews that were run in the various publication at the time. Interesting factoids you’ll encounter was how many reviewers thought Doctor Who was becoming too violent, and that the actor who played The Master was killed in accident in Turkey.

Other extras you’ll get are the trailer (1:28) for this episode, a trailer for the coming episode that’ll be hitting DVD, “Claws Of Axos,” (1:03), a photo gallery (14:26) and PDF Materials in the form of Radio Times Listings.

Not a bad episode and I look forward to seeing more of Pertwee’s adventures.