Doctor Who/Recap/S7/E03 The Ambassadors of Death

"I don't know what came down in Recovery 7, but it certainly wasn't human!"

- The Doctor

Mars Probe 7 disappeared with three astronauts on board several months ago, and now the British Space Agency's "Recovery 7" mission is in trouble. UNIT asks the Doctor to go and investigate.

Recovery 7 returns to earth, but the astronauts are kidnapped as soon as they land, and Liz notices that the capsule registers off the scale on her geiger counter. The "astronauts" are in fact aliens, dependent on radiation, who have swapped places with the humans for some reason.

The Doctor takes a solo flight in Recovery 7 and finds Mars Probe 7, still orbiting the red planet. A huge alien spaceship appears and the Doctor is taken on board. He finds the real astronauts, unharmed, and a very cross alien captain who threatens to destroy the Earth unless his "ambassadors" are released.

It turns out that General Carrington, in charge of the Space Agency, has kidnapped the ambassadors to provoke the aliens into attacking Earth, whereupon humanity will have to defend itself and destroy the aliens. Carrington had been on Mars Probe 6 which had encountered the aliens on Mars, where they accidentally killed his comrade by touching him.

The Doctor and UNIT stop him and arrange for a return of the ambassadors.

This story was recorded in colour, but the only surviving colour copies of episodes 2-6 are very poor quality ones recorded from broadcast by a US fan using early home video technology, from a Canadian station at the very edge of its transmitter area. Any colour video release will require very heavy restoration work.

Watch it here.

Tropes

 * Everyone Knows Morse
 * I Did What I Had to Do: General Carrington belives firmly in this.
 * I Love Nuclear Power
 * Innocent Aliens
 * Rank Up: Corporal Benton is now a Sergeant.
 * Retroactive Recognition: Five years before becoming the first actor to play Davros, Michael Wisher has a fairly minor role as a broadcaster in this serial.
 * The Teaser: The only classic Doctor Who serial to use them for cliffhanger reprisals, though they actually occur after the title sequence but before the title itself appears.
 * Vulnerable Convoy
 * What the Hell Is That Accent?: Professor Taltalian can't make up his mind whether he's French, German or something else entirely.
 * The X of Y