35: The Faceless Ones

Before Watching

I know a couple of things about this one which do lead me to anticipate and speculate. I know that the co-writer is Malcolm Hulke, in his first story for Doctor Who – well, his first one to get made, anyway. He went on to pen some of the more memorable stories of the Pertwee era, giving us the Silurians and Sea Devils, for instance. I’ll be interested to see whether his story sticks out from what we’ve seen in this series so far.

That;s anticipation. As for speculation, well, it’s the last story for Ben and Polly, which leads me to wonder just how Troughton’s Doctor handles companions leaving. We’ve seen a couple of fantastic scenes from Hartnell on such occasions, but somehow I can’t see this Doctor going in for that. I imagine something much more understated, more sort of ‘off you go then’. Time will tell.

After Watching

There was much to enjoy about this particular story. You have to remember that I was at an impressionable age during Jon Pertwee’s tenure, so I’m very used to stories set on contemporary Earth, yet it strikes me that we’re 35 stories into the series now, and this is only the second, following g the trail blazed by The war Machines. While we’re making a comparison, in the War Machines the Doctor was able to effortlessly walk into the middle of the action, and be accepted seemingly by everyone in authority. This is a huge contrast to the first couple of episodes of The Faceless Ones, where absolutely nobody in authority seems prepared to listen to the Doctor at all, which is frankly far more believable.

The TARDIS materializes on the runway of Gatwick airport, giving Jamie the chance to ask about ‘yon flying beastie’. What they find out eventually is that based in a hangar, and calling themselves Chameleon Tours, a race of aliens – the Chameleons – are using the tour company as a front to carry out their dastardly purposes. They use what appears to be a Vickers VC10 airliner – incidentally one of the most beautiful airliners Britain even built. Young people are given the opportunity of taking incredibly cheap flights. During the flight, they are all miniaturized. The wings of the VC10 retract, and it becomes a spaceship, presumably a rocket. It docks with the mother ship, where the miniaturized humans are stored, ready to be transported to the Chameleons’ home planet. It transpires that the Chameleons are victims of nuclear war. As a result they need to use human beings. When processed properly, a black armband connected to both human and chameleon enables the chameleon to assume the human’s identity. The key plot point which enables the Doctor to triumph is that once the armband is removed from the human original, the Chameleon suffers what might be termed a spontaneous existence failure. The Doctor’s companions du jour – more about that later – find the originals hidden in cars in the airport car park, and use these to convince the Chameleons to leave the Earth and its humans alone. He also promises to give their scientists a few ideas about other ways to solve their problems.

Alright, written on the page in a few lines like that it doesn’t look like much. But there’s far more to making a good story than just having a good plot idea or two, although that obviously always helps. 6 parts means padding, but it also means you can afford a more leisurely storytelling approach, and sometimes this can build real mystery and suspense in the way that it does during the first couple of episodes of The Faceless Ones.

Then you’ve got performances from the guest stars. Donald Pickering is suitably chilling as the leader of the Chameleons’ Earth task force, Captain Blade. He was last seen in the trial sequences of “The Keys of Marinus”, but he’s here for the long haul in this story. Then, just as action seems to be flagging a little as the Doctor is just going round and round in circles with the Commandant in the airport, who should arrive but Bernard Kay, playing Inspector Crossland of Scotland Yard, investigating the disappearances of young people who have flown with Chameleon Tours. He’s a Doctor Who stalwart is Bernard Kay, having added quality to both The Dalek Invasion of Earth and The Crusade already. Crossland finds his way onto a Chameleon Tours flight, and is actually used as the original for the leader of the Chameleons. Good choice. The list of memorable guest stars goes on. Wanda Ventham (does she ever get sick of having people begin their description of her career with the phrase ‘Benedict Cumberbatch’s Mum’?) plays a terrific cameo as Jean, the Commandant’s assistant, who doesn’t have much to do, but does it extremely well. Then there’s Pauline Collins.

Right, this gets a little complicated. Ben escapes from the bureaucracy in the airport, and sneaks off to investigate Chameleon Tours’ hanger. He gets caught, and frozen, and apart from a few minutes at the end of the story, that’s Michael Craze’s time on the show either. Polly also gets caught by the Chameleons, and she is copied. This gives you the great scene where the Polly copy, asked to verify the Doctor and Jamie’s story, denies that she has ever met them. At first this looks like yet another case of a companion being brainwashed, until it becomes clearer that it’s far more sinister than that. Like Michael Craze, that’s it for Anneke Wills until the end of the story. This sidelining of Ben and Polly leaves a vacuum, into which steps Pauline Collins, playing Samantha Briggs. She does it bloomin’ well too. Sam Briggs has come to Gatwick to investigate the disappearance of her brother, who was last heard from taking a Chameleon Tours flight to Rome. Sam is sparky, feisty, bright, brave and decent – in other words perfect companion material. She also seems to have a bit of a thing for Jamie. She announces she has bought a Chameleon Tours ticket, and won’t let Jamie taker her place, despite the danger. So Jamie engages her in a bout of tonsil tennis, neatly stealing her ticket at the same time. In the end, she even forgives Jamie, and gives him another snog before they part. I can’t help thinking that maybe she was being lined up to join the crew, but for whatever reason it was decided not to go ahead with it. If Pauline Collins really was offered the chance to come on board as an assistant and turned it down, then you can’t really say that she made the wrong decision, looking at her career since, compared with many of the other companions. It’s a shame, though. She was one of the huge plus points of this story.

I already know that Jamie and the Doctor would pick up Victoria in the next story ‘Evil of the Daleks’, and when she left she would be replaced by Wendy Padbury’s Zoe Heriot, but I can’t help wondering if they ever considered having at least a few stories with just the Doctor and Jamie. The chemistry between Troughton and Hines is so obvious in this story that it would probably have worked pretty well.

Right, the leaving scene. This was, as I suspected it would be, a little low key. Not as emotional as Susan’s, not as reluctant as Ian and Barbara’s, not as congratulatory as Steven’s, and thankfully nowhere near as perfunctory as Dodo’s – well, she never had one. It’s a little low key, although it was nice to see Ben offer to stay if the Doctor needed them – he was a sailor and knew all about duty, that man.

What Have We Learned?

Jamie is a bit of a ladies’ man, and not above using his manly wiles to get what he wants.

The Doctor is always more happy to negotiate than annihilate.