035 - The Faceless Ones

Broadcast:

8^th April - 13^th May 1967

Doctor:

Patrick Troughton

Companions:

Ben, Polly, Jamie

Adversary:

Chameleons

Written by:

David Ellis, Malcolm Hulke

Director:

Gerry Mill

Music:

Stock

Script Editor:

Gerry Davis

Producer:

Innes Lloyd

Average Viewers:

7.38m (8.0, 6.4, 7.9, 6.9, 7.1, 8.0)

Summary: Gatwick Airport is the gateway to adventure for many people but some of them are never heard from again. Meanwhile something sinister seems to be going on in one of the hangers. Could the two be related and will the missing people ever be found?

In the early stages of my Doctor Who collection I came across The Faceless Ones on the "Lost In Time" box set. Only two episodes exist (1 and 3) but they captured my attention with a fairly gritty style and very little science fantasy. It is set on contemporary Earth and has a strong drama base. It has since remained one of my most wished for Missing Stories so I was looking forward to at least seeing the Loose Cannon recon. As a six part story it is one of the longest with only two episodes in the archives, and the missing ones weren't presented in audio form on "Lost In Time". Since the existing episodes are both at the beginning of the story, there was a strong sense of mystery as the main truth of events simply wasn't there. There was potential for the recon to shatter the illusion, but it did not disappoint.

On the evening that the first episode of The Faceless Ones was broadcast, Sandie Shaw won the Eurovision Song Contest for the United Kingdom with "Puppet On A String" while Engelbert Humperdinck's "Release Me" was on its final week of six at the top of the charts. Nancy Sinatra and Frank Sinatra would replace him for two weeks with "Somethin' Stupid" before Sandie Shaw climbed to the top with her winning song. Manchester United won the first division title and Scotland beat England in the British Championships, ending their 19 game winning streak. Other achievements during the serial's run include the Surveyor 3 probe going to the moon (the first to include a soil scoop, which it used to dig trenches 7" deep before holding sample up to its camera), the first Boing 737 took it's maiden flight, and Elvis Presley married Priscilla Beaulieu. In Cuba, Fidel Castro announced that all intellectual property belongs to the people and that technical literature would be translated and published without compensation, while closer to home, Harold Wilson announced that the UK would be applying to join the EEC.

Protests and marches against Vietnam War continued and Muhammad Ali refused military service, leading to a conviction, loss of his boxing title and not being allowed boxing until the conviction was overturned in 1971. Greece was taken over by a military dictatorship that would last until 1974 and clashes between striking workers and police in Hong Kong left 51 dead and 800 injured - the riots would continue until December when 18 months of disputes finally came to an end. A plane crash in Cyprus killed 126 people, while 33 were killed by tornadoes in America's upper midwest. Finally, Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die on a space mission when the parachute of his space capsule failed during re-entry.

In the entertainment world, Tom Stoppard's play "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" premierred at the Old Vic and cinemas were showing such films as Hombre staring Paul Newman, Caprice with Doris Day and Richard Harris, and The Double Man featuring Yul Brynner and Britt Ekland.

In the world of Doctor Who it was looking like Gatwick airport would feature two departures and an arrival but first the travellers had to escape security...

The Faceless Ones was not only the first serial to feature the great Malcolm Hulke as a writer, it was also the first serial longer than 4 episodes to not feature the Daleks since The Web Planet in 1965 but it set the standard for the coming year. The following story ended the fourth season with a seven part story (again it was the Daleks pushing the limit) and the Season five opener would be a quick four part return for the Cybermen, but then six parters became standard fair until 1975 with just a few going a little shorter or longer (though it is worth noting that three of the four serials in 1970 were seven parts long). Then from 1975 up to the show being taken off air the standard returned to four part stories (though the last two years saw an even mix of three and four parters). But for now The Faceless Ones develops as a slow but dramatic four part story before taking a sudden kick in a new direction for the two concluding episodes, a format that would help many long serials to come.

Having helped overthrow the Macra dictatorship and slipped away from the revelries to avoid having leadership thrust upon them, the travellers now find themselves at Gatwick airport in the mid 1960s. Not just at the airport, but actually on one of the runways! Jamie is scared witless by "a flying beasty!" until the Doctor explains about aeroplane, but they are still in a vulnerable position. As airport security chase after them they decide to scatter which results in them spending much of the story apart. Their paths cross several times and they are ultimately working as a team but several separate strands are allowed to unfold in parallel, including the introduction of Samantha and individual abductions of Ben and Polly! Curiously, although Anneke Wills and Michael Craze were contracted to the end of the story, they were both absent for three episodes and only returned at the end in pre-filmed location scenes. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The opening episode not only sees the foursome separated, but the TARDIS gets taken away on the back of a truck, a man is seen being shot but appears to have been electrocuted - the gun is described by the Doctor as "not yet developed on Earth" and described as a ray gun - Polly seems to have her old hairstyle back (after being given a make-over in the previous story), is abducted and when she is seen later she says she's not Polly and doesn't know the Doctor and Jamie. She identifies herself as Michelle Leupi from Zurich and explains her well spoken English as being thanks to her English governess... As the story unfolds, the Doctor tells Jamie that a passport is "some sort of official mumbo jumbo" and pretends a rubber ball is either a bomb or a detonator, Jamie meets a ballsy but naive scouser called Samantha (played unmistakably by Pauline Collins who turned down the option to remain as a new companion but would return as Queen Victoria 39 years later in Tooth And Claw) who's brother has gone missing on one of the Chameleon Tours trips (expanding the missing persons strand of the story) and who gets very friendly with Jamie with several unexpected hugs and kisses.

The bulk of the story concerns young passengers flying abroad and vanishing after sending a postcard home (a postcard which they were told to write before they even boarded the plane because they "won't have time once they arrive"), other older personnel being murdered but reappearing and the regular cast being caught the wrong side of boarder control without any ID or travel permits and trying to bluff their way to finding and resolving the true situation. At the story's dogleg at the end of episode four, a Chameleon Tours aircraft goes off radar with Jamie on board and is seen (through CGI in the recon) flying vertically up to a space station/mothership of sorts. The final two episodes focus on the unravelling of this backstory, the Chameleon people have lost their identity due to a gigantic explosion on their home world and are going to die unless they transport enough humans whom they can take over or clone... all a bit sketchy and not entirely convincing, but there is a nice touch in the way the passengers are miniaturised and frozen mid-flight so they can be stored neatly in a large set of drawers and take up a far more manageable amount of space to be transported to the home-world. The non-passenger's who have already been cloned are the airport personnel running the scheme on Earth while the originals are sat somewhere safely frozen and out of harms way because should anything happen to them or their 'control armbands' are removed then the Chameleon clones will be destroyed... only this doesn't seem to be the case when Jamie and the Detective Inspector are rescued!

The story ends happily of course with passengers being returned safely but as the Doctor is ready to fly off in the TARDIS again, Ben and Polly are reluctant to leave so soon having arrived on what they consider to be contemporary Earth. Almost randomly, they realise the date is the very day they first left Earth and so it is decided that the Doctor can do as he pleases, but Ben and Polly will remain behind to continue their lives as normal and Ben might even make it aboard his ship and sail off on his naval adventure. The Doctor mentions that he never got to go back to his home world then realise that the adventure isn't yet over for him and Jamie as they now have to find the TARDIS before they can go anywhere!

The Faceless Ones started strongly and left me with the aching desire to see more when I first saw the surviving episodes. The Loose Cannon reconstructions proved that my assessment of the stories quality was correct, a deep mystery that evolved into a cracking innovative adventure. Not only is it a shame that four of the six episodes are missing but also that 14 seconds of episode three are damaged and were noticeably replaced by repeated frames that had been zoomed in. Some of it is quite subtle but some is very grainy and unmissable and I can't help thinking that a modern cleanup and repair job might be more successful, but as the raw footage isn't presented anywhere, it isn't clear how badly the film was damaged and it is perfectly possible that little improvement could be made. The resulting hope is that one day this damaged episode will be found safely with the missing four... but it is a lofty hope.

When scoring The Faceless Ones, I had to mark it down on humour but drama scored well. However, the enemy and fear factors were mostly mediocre so the resulting score was perhaps lower than I might have predicted. It does come in as the second highest of the series so far with 77%, beaten only by Troughtn's debut The Power Of The Daleks. Looking further back, the last story with a higher score not featuring the Daleks is The Time Meddler two years earlier and it currently sits in the top ten along with all four Dalek stories. Although viewing figures were starting to take a slight dip again, the Appreciation Index was on the rise. Could the Daleks end the fourth series on another high?