The Ambassadors of Death

Target novelisation Doctor Who - The Ambassadors of Death

Author	Terrance Dicks
Published	1987
ISBN	0 426 20305 4
First Edition Cover	Tony Masero

Back cover blurb: Seven months after it left Mars there has still been no radio communication with the Probe Seven spacecraft or the astronauts inside it. Back on Earth concern is mounting and eventually a recovery capsule is sent up to rescue the astronauts. But when the capsule returns to Earth it is found to be empty. As the Doctor and Liz investigate, they discover that the interior of the capsule is highly radioactive: if anyone was inside they would now surely be dead. Have the astronauts returned to Earth? And if not, who are the sinister space-suited figures who stalk the countryside and whose very touch means instant death?

• A Haiku by Finn Clark
• Half-Perfect by Jason A. Miller

A Haiku by Finn Clark 15/3/22

By Terrance, alas.
It's reasonably good, but
Nothing too special.

Half-Perfect by Jason A. Miller 11/1/26

The last of the Jon Pertwee adventures to be novelized, The Ambassadors of Death is slightly hamstrung by being limited to standard-sized Target length. Terrance Dicks crams seven action-packed scripts' worth of incident into the book but has to cut corners in order to fit everything in to the page count limit. The Episodes 1 through 3 material fare the best, with Terrance working in his trademark script-fixing exposition and wry observations, but things become noticeably more rushed during Episodes 4 through 7, with long dialogue passages condensed into single exposition paragraphs and action scenes going by in just a few sentences.

This is not a bad book; it's can't be, not when it's based on The Ambassadors of Death as written for TV by (mostly) Malcolm Hulke. Heck, even if the source material is bad, I think Uncle Terry was constitutionally incapable of writing a bad book. There's enough observational humor in here to make even the more compressed action fly. The character John Wakefield on TV is renamed Michael Wakefield, a possible nod to the actor Michael Wisher, whose longtime association with Doctor Who began as Wakefield in this 1970 story. That's a nice moment.

In addition to paying tribute to Michael Wisher (possibly), the description of Ralph Cornish in Chapter 1 is almost certainly a love letter to Ronald Allen; Cornish is described as "quite literally tall, dark and handsome", and "radiated confidence and reassurance". Less loving is the description of Cyril Shaps' Dr. Lennox as "a balding, ratty-faced little man". Ouch! And Terrance provides a clear narrative storyline to the warehouse fight scene in Episode 1 --- one of Doctor Who's most technically impressive fight scenes ever --- to make up for the lack of Michael Ferguson's visuals on the printed page. For example, explaining why Carrington's soldiers never actually managed to kill anybody.

The book seems based on the camera scripts rather than the video, as it restores some dialogue that the DVD production notes tell us were cut for TV. So in the Episode 3 material in the book, General Carrington refers to the alien astronauts as "ambassadors", but that scripted line was cut for time in pre-production, so on TV the term isn't used until Episode 6. Ferguson also intercut several scenes for narrative flow, which necessitated the removal of scripted dialogue, and, in one case, a minor character, but all those changes are reversed here, and the deleted character (a courier who doesn't speak) is restored. If you need him. The Doctor also gets a sharp line about democracy, which was similarly cut for TV, but would have been a wonderful bit of Pertwee authority-baiting.

Terrance throws in additional detail by way of exposition, mixed in with the novelized camera scripts, whenever he can, to improve the narrative. Jon Pertwee showed off his Royal Navy bona fides with a commanding-officer yell at General Carrington's sergeant on TV in Episode 2, but in the book, Terrance adds that the Doctor learned this parade-ground rasp at Waterloo. The Doctor, while waiting to get through decontamination after returning from space, wishes for "a few dog-eared copies of Punch" to read. Who knew that the Doctor liked to read Punch? Dr. Heldorf, played in two scenes on TV by German-accented actor Gordon Sterne, is given a bit of a tragic turn, as we learn that he "had been a refugee many years ago and his voice still held traces of a foreign accent". That almost certainly codes Dr. Heldorf as a Jewish refugee from the Nazis, which lends tragedy to the character's early death. He's killed on the orders of Reegan, who's also given a biography here, as an IRA bank robber who "was keeping more of the proceeds for himself than he was donating to the Cause". The DVD notes say that the Irish link was cut to avoid a heavy topical subject, but it works fine in the book. Lennox is also given a single-sentence backstory, hinted but not explained on TV, although I wish Terrance had the space to go more into this.

Even towards the end of the book, when Terrance is rushing --- the back episodes only get two short chapters apiece --- there are still moments of his trademark magical descriptions. The aliens, when revealed, are "humanoid, with a body, a head, arms, and legs --- but it wasn't human". And Terrance never misses an opportunity to both highlight and cover up a plot hole. "Somehow," he remarks, tongue planted firmly in cheek, "[Reegan] had obtained all the necessary passes to admit him to the Space Center's decontamination area".

Sometimes the rushing doesn't help matters. Without Ferguson's visuals, Terrance has to have Liz Shaw reflect that the astronauts look sinister. That's an unfortunate case of telling, not showing. But all is forgiven when Dicks manages to quote Casablanca on the very last page ("Not that the contact was likely to be the beginning of a beautiful friendship"). Casablanca is one of the greatest movies ever made, and Ambassadors is one of Doctor Who's best TV serials. So putting a Casablanca quote in the Ambassadors novelization, really is the beginning of a beautiful friendship ...