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Doctor Who: The Faceless Ones

We're pretty now.
Talk about identity theft...

Season Four, Story 8 (Production Code KK)

Starring Patrick Troughton as the Doctor

With Anneke Wills (Polly), Michael Craze (Ben) and Frazer Hines (Jamie)
  • Written by David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke
  • Directed by Gerry Mill
  • Produced by Innes Lloyd
  • Associate Producer – Peter Bryant
  • Script Editor – Gerry Davis

Broadcast Dates, Viewership, Appreciation
  • Episode 1 – 8 Apr 1967 (8.0m, 51%)
  • Episode 2 – 15 Apr 1967 (6.4m, 50%) **MISSING**
  • Episode 3 – 22 Apr 1967 (7.9m, 53%)
  • Episode 4 – 29 Apr 1967 (6.9m, 55%) **MISSING**
  • Episode 5 – 6 May 1967 (7.1m, 55%) **MISSING**
  • Episode 6 – 13 May 1967 (8.0m, 52%) **MISSING**

How To Watch
  • The fully animated version is available on demand on the BBC's Doctor Who Classic YouTube channel.
  • Loose Cannon reconstructions of the four missing episodes are paired with the CD audio release narrated by Frazer Hines and are available here.
  • The 2020 DVD and BluRay release features all six episodes animated in color or b/w. The two surviving episodes are included as extras.
  • The two surviving episodes, with surviving footage, are included on the 2004 Lost In Time DVD release, as well as included in the 2003 VHS release of the Hartnell story "The Reign of Terror"

Synopsis

The TARDIS lands on the runway of Gatwick Airport. Our heroes scatter to avoid airport security, and Polly hides in the hangar of an airline called Chameleon Tours, where she witnesses a police inspector shot and murdered by an airline pilot bearing a ray gun. The Doctor and Jamie investigate and notice that Chameleon offers discount package tours for young adults 18-25. After Polly is abducted, they later see her working behind the counter at the Chameleon gate, but they are mystified when she claims her name is Michelle, hails from Zurich, and doesn't know them.

They meet a young Liverpudlian woman named Samantha Briggs inquiring about her brother who had flown to Rome on a Chameleon flight but apparently never arrived. Ben discovers an unconscious Polly in the hangar, but then is abducted. Eventually the Doctor, Jamie and Samantha win the confidence of the airport commandant and Inspector Crossland of Scotland Yard, and they discover that a group of aliens are using the Chameleon airplanes to abduct young people and steal their physical forms; their bodies were horribly disfigured following a planetary catastrophe. Some of the aliens have infiltrated airport staff. The abducted humans are then miniaturized mid-flight and stored on their orbiting spaceship.

While Samantha assists the airport staff to look for the originals of the main leaders, Jamie has stowed away on a Chameleon flight. The Doctor follows and ends up on the aliens' orbiting craft. The alien leader, The Director (the duplicate of Inspector Crossland) finds him and intends to take his physical form and absorb his mind. The Doctor manages to stall for time, sewing dissent among the alien leadership, until the originals of the their leaders' duplicates are discovered in cars in the airport parking lot. When the control discs on the originals' wrists are disrupted, the duplicates dissolve. Now with a bargaining chip (i.e. threatening to dissolve the lot of them), the Doctor forces the aliens to negotiate. Blade kills the Director and agrees to the Doctor's terms. The aliens abandon their plan and release all the captured humans, including Ben and Polly.

When Ben and Polly discover that it is 20 July 1966, the same day that they first encountered the Doctor, they elect to stay behind and return to their normal lives. The Doctor and Jamie realize the TARDIS has been stolen...

Insights and Analysis

If you can get past the slightly jumbled central concept, this is a cracker of a story. Contemporary and relatively well-paced, it's arguably the change of the guard from the last connections to the William Hartnell era (i.e. Ben and Polly) to the true beginning of the Troughton and Hines partnership that defined the Second Doctor era. By the next story, it's as if they've been flying thru time and space for decades.

BREAKING NEWS: Snogging!

Innes Lloyd just needed to find the right balance for the TARDIS twosome, and had the writers of both this story and "Evil of the Daleks" write a character that could potentially work as a female companion. It's truly a pity that Pauline Collins didn't agree to stay, as the pairing of Sam and Jamie would've been awesome. There was chemistry, the incongruity of their backgrounds, their feisty interplay, their mutual attraction (though imagine all the snogging going on in the TARDIS), and Samantha was headstrong and independent in a way that would've been a refreshing change from the past companions. It was certainly a different direction than the companion they ultimately created. (I'll refrain from my Victoria-bashing early.)

This is the second story in a row where we can't trust the companions. Polly is replaced by a duplicate, which leads to two unsettling scenes where Polly has a twinge of a Central European accent and a new name, and where Ben finds her comatose body in a box. And not only is there a duplicate Jamie, he doesn't have his Scots accent, which is creepy AF. What makes the TARDIS team function is the sense of trust between the Doctor and his companions, and how rootless and untethered things feel when that trust is gone. We'll see more of this in the next story.

This is another story that features curious insight into the Doctor's ethical principles. The aliens don't necessarily want to destroy or invade the Earth, there's no doomsday device that could collapse the fabric of space and time. It's still an evil plan, kidnapping young adults and keeping them alive in stasis, occasionally killing to protect their cover, but it's arguably an act of desperation out of the need for survival. Ultimately the Doctor saves the day by engineering a coup among the alien leadership and outmaneuvers them. Does he destroy the aliens? Nope. Although he does engineer the death of one of the aliens, he just says basically, "You lost, give us our people back, and go home." And then they... do.

In a way, he's acknowledging the aliens' right to exist even in the face of their ghastly actions, whereas in the previous episode he destroys a relatively functional parasitic relationship between humans and giant crabs. I suspect some humanoid bias is at play here, though I suspect it's the writer's bias as opposed to the Doctor's.

The way that their plight is phrased isn't particularly helpful; following a catastrophic explosion they "lost their identities." What does that actually mean, literally as well as philosophically? Identity is internal, mental, surely. All that is accomplished by taking the appearance of someone else's body is a purely external reconfiguration. In the end, it seems, the aliens just want to look prettier. Even if they do take on the physical forms of Earthlings, what next? Are they able to reproduce, and if so, will the babies look human? This was a case where I don't think the writers really thought through the implications of what they were writing; they were after all on a tight deadline.

It is intriguing to me just how long it takes the Doctor Who production team to realize just how effective the show can be with stories set on contemporary Earth. So far, this is literally the second story completely set in modern Earth (not counting "Planet of the Giants" because our heroes are one inch high). From a technical standpoint, I suppose that means there's more location shoots, which especially in season four must've been a scheduling nightmare (they were STILL taping episodes a week ahead of broadcast), but this was a blueprint for the direction the show would take a couple years later.

Also, perhaps it's a flaw in the writing, or maybe we could get a better sense of the passage of time with the actual original episodes, but consider that the TARDIS lands in the airport, out heroes uncover the alien plot, and apparently manage to foil it all in the course of a single day. If episode one of "Evil of the Daleks" takes place around 3pm (when Bob Hall notes the pickup time of the TARDIS), that means they were probably finished with the Chameleons by noon! That must've been one of the craziest days in Inspector Crossland's professional career. I'd like to think that the return of the 50,000 abductees might've taken some time, so I suppose they must've had opportunity for a good night's sleep or two.

Trivia and Tidbits

For this story to be set on the same day as when Ben and Polly first met the Doctor, that means that in London on July 20th 1966, there was simultaneously a pack of killer machines controlled by WOTAN being subdued by the First Doctor, an alien species' mass abduction of young people being foiled at Gatwick Airport, and a mysterious antique shop owner conspiring to steal the TARDIS and kidnap the Second Doctor as part of the Daleks' sinister plot. What a day!

Malcolm Hulke and David Ellis had previously submitted several story ideas, but this was their first to make it to the screen. Originally the story was to be set in a department store, but Innes Lloyd suggested they move it to an airport. This was Ellis's only contribution to Doctor Who, but Hulke would have a long association with the show, writing numerous adventures and penning several Target novelizations.

The Chameleons have not returned in any TV or Big Finish adventures, but the Sixth Doctor encountered them in a short story "Face Value" as part of the Short Trips And Side Steps anthology published in 2000.

This story featured the debut of a revision of the Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the theme music (though it doesn't appear until episode two). There are now some twiddly bits!

Adieu, Ben & Polly

See ya 'round.

Ben and Polly will be missed. I do get the sense that Polly was one of several characters who didn't pan out as intended, we had a young professional single woman, intelligent and spirited, who on paper could've been awesome (and at times was), and I don't think Anneke Wills necessarily was the problem, even if she occasionally performed like she was reading a children's story. It seems like the writers were always at odds with how to write a modern young woman with her own agency (see also: Dodo), and often by default made her a damsel in distress. Maybe Pauline Collins sensed that this would happen to her as well, which factored into her declining to stay.

And I feel for Peter Craze. What Ben lacked in booksmarts he compensated in loyalty, willingness to jump into danger, and good ol' pluck. He too seemed adrift, especially after Jamie was introduced, because the two characters pretty much served the same purpose: handsome young men of action. Ben quickly became redundant.

As a contemporary fan, I think Ben & Polly (or at least Anneke and Michael) deserved better. And as they only had one story in which all episodes existed, we only saw them at the beginning, and only lately are we starting to appreciate their special uniqueness as we are getting more familiar with their tenure on the TARDIS. I would've liked to hear more of Peter's recollections on the convention circuit, but sadly he died in 1998. His only son, charmingly, was named Ben.

Though I must say, I have no doubt that Ian and Barbara probably ended up married with a half dozen kids, I suspect that Ben and Polly's relationship, if it endured, remained platonic.

Innes Lloyd decided in February that Ben and Polly were not working as companions – which is to say, they were not part of his vision for the future of the program – and decided that even though their contracts were to expire after episode two of "Evil of the Daleks," they'd be written out of this story's second episode apart from a pre-filmed farewell scene (somewhere Dodo Chaplet is outraged). The chemistry between the Doctor, Jamie and Samantha was so strong that when they appear at the end of episode six, it's almost like "Wait, they're still here?" They still got paid for the remaining six weeks they were contracted for, so that's something.

I am curious. This means that the decision was made during the production of "The Moonbase," so at what point were Anneke and Michael informed? Did they tape "Moonbase" and most of "Macra Terror" unaware of their pending unemployment, or did they know they were lame duck companions, and how did that impact the on-set relationship with the rest of the cast? They certainly would've known before the time they pre-filmed their departure scenes, shot before the episodes were taped in the studio, during the production of "Macra Terror."

Haven't I Seen You Somewhere In The Future?
  • Pauline Collins (Samantha) went onto a long storied career on stage and screen, and appeared as Queen Victoria in the New Series story "Tooth and Claw"
  • Wanda Ventham (Jean Rock) also appeared as Thea Ransome in "Image of the Fendahl" and Faroon in "Time and the Rani." She is also the mother of Benedict Cumberbatch
  • Donald Pickering (Captain Blade) also appeared as Eyesen in "Keys of Marinus" and Beyus in "Time and the Rani"
  • Christopher Tranchell (Jenkins) also appeared as Colbert in "The Massacre" and Andred in "The Invasion of Time"
  • Bernard Kay (Inspector Crossland) also appeared as Tyler in "Dalek Invasion of Earth," Saladin in "The Crusades," and Caldwell in "Colony in Space"
  • Gilly Fraser (Ann Davidson) was married to Peter Purves (former companion Steven Taylor) from 1962-82.

Does the BIPOC character survive? n/a

Sausage Factor: 68.75% (16 credited guest characters, 11 males)

Rating: Three out of Four Freezy Pens
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John Geoffrion is a semi-retired semi-professional thespian, a professional data guy, and a Dad. He usually falls asleep to the Classic Doctor Who channel on Pluto.tv

1 comment:

  1. I have to agree with your take on the companions here, John. Ben and Polly do seem to be among the least remembered companions, and with so many of their stories missing full or in parts, it doesn't help the situation at all. Neither are bad characters or bad actors playing them, but they just kind of fall through the cracks and it's a bit sad. Jamie and the 2nd Doctor just gel so well together that it's easy to see why they kept Jamie and dropped Ben, but it still isn't ideal. At least they got an actual send off, unlike poor Dodo.

    I found this one a bit dull really. It's an interesting idea, and has some cool moments, but it did go on a bit too long and had parts that dragged on a bit. I'm still glad we can see the whole thing, even if 4 episodes are animated.

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