The Faceless Ones: Ranking - 158

 The Faceless Ones

(Season 4, Dr 2 with Ben, Polly and Jamie, 8/4/1967-13/5/1967, producers: Innes Lloyd and Peter Bryant, script editor: Gerry Davis, writers: David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke, director: Gerry Mill)

Rank: 158

'Welcome to Earth's intergalactic airport in 2123 with an update of the latest invasion fleets. Arriving shortly at gate one are the Sontarons and Androgums on Singapore Airways. There may be a slight delay while they fight with Rutan Airways who are arriving at gate ten, while the Androgums are refusing to eat the airline food which they say doesn’t have enough meat in them. Cathay Pacific is heading back to the times of Marco Polo at gate two. The Menoptera are flying in at gate three and boy are their arms tired because they forgot to take their plane with them! There's no such place as gate four which is where the Macra are. There's a giant pink snake waiting at gate five to take you to Kinda, but the plane doesn’t actually go anywhere because it’s all inside your sub-consciousness. There's a rather long delay at gate six but the Eternals don't seem to mind. Be warned that a Xeraphin is buried under the airport at gate seven and is currently several million years late. Don't be late for gate eight where we are offering refunds for anyone willing to sit next to a Zolfa-Thuran cactus. Gate nine features the Navarinos going back in time to see Chuck Berry on stage in 1957, only they got it wrong and it’s some punks chucking berries on stage in 1977. Oh and there seems to be strange blue box arriving at gate eleven...'

It’s the Easter of espionage, an era of time which took place shortly before the Summer of love, the era when the Cold War has gone from the thing that might kill you quickly (in, say,, a gigantic explosion) to the thing that might kill you slowly, by infiltrating where you live and learning everything about you and turning it against you. This is an era when newspapers began to write lurid reports about how spying had crossed over the line to infiltration, when everything from political fringe groups to Irish terrorists to your local women’s guild meeting who’d once discussed holding a protest had been infiltrated by a jumpy government who wanted to know exactly what you were talking about, to the point where undercover agents created new aliases to uncover information, some going to the lengths of marrying and having children while still in character. ‘The Faceless Ones’ is a story where you can’t trust anyone because even the people you know to be good and kind and noble might have been ‘got at’ and taken over by shape-shifting aliens, where nothing and no one is safe. For a sign of how much this is in the air have a look at ITV’s big rival cult series to Dr Who, which had already been filmed by this point but wasn’t transmitted until September: The Prisoner, where our heroes are trapped in a destination that isn’t quite in one country or another, where everyone they meet could be taken at face value or might be lying – including, in different episodes, three of the Tardis crew. 

Dr Who had done spies before and stories about paranoia and loads of budget-saving character ‘doubles’, but ‘The Faceless Ones’ takes it up to a whole new level: they aren’t trying to break into where you live but are already here en masse and it’s all done so cleverly you didn’t even notice. Malcolm Hulke’s first script for Dr Who (here alongside co-writer David Ellis, a writer’s pseudonym for Derrick Kerkham) is an anomaly in so many ways, the most socialist of Who writers coming up with perhaps its most anti-communist tale, in which shape-shifting faceless aliens without identities of their own come over here, stealing our jobs, taking over our identities, living our lives. It seems deeply odd watching the writer who created The Silurians and gave them an even deeper claim to ownership of the Earth than the Humans (because we’re the interlopers and refugees) writing such a story, but even Hulke doesn’t write the story you expect him to: people miss it now only episodes one and three of this six parter exist so fans tend to read about this story in guidebooks rather than watch it and come to this story after so many others that are complete (‘The Faceless Ones’ was the equal last Who video released by the BBC, in an odd team-up with ‘The Reign Of Terror’) but the twist at the end is that (spoilers) the Chameleons have a legitimate reason for taking over Earth that almost makes you feel sorry for them. They haven’t come to take over our resources or money or turn us into slave labour or to live in power over us. They’ve come to take us over because a nuclear accident on their planet, something that could so easily happen on our own (we’re nineteen years before Chernobyl), made them lose their identities and they don’t know who they are anymore. It’s not really fair that they take us over, but they’re only taking some of us over – 50,000 if they’re to be believed in episode five, which might seem like a big number but in modern terms means a city with approximately the population the size of Dunfermline, Perth, Stirling, Hereford or Lichfield today, not the most impressive invasion force we’ve ever seen in this show. This isn’t an invasion it’s a work of last minute desperation and survival that, could, in theory happen to us one day. The Chameleons, when we finally see them, even look charred and disfigured as if they’ve been in a huge nuclear accident or perhaps a war (or, dare I say it, a plane crash?); indeed the way they’re presented to us they might even be us from the future when we’ve conquered time travel and can create airplanes that can shoot several hundred miles up into the air. They’re our deepest fears and phobias all rolled up into one: death by scary technology we don’t quite understand, twice over. 

 All the people who go ‘missing’ aren’t expected home for a while anyway so the Chameleons can have time to get away with their plan, because where’s the best place to take humans over without anyone noticing? A place where strangers pass each other all the time and put themselves in the hands of people they’ve never seen before, risking their lives because they’re told it’s all going to be okay. The place that, in 1967, was the closest thing you could do to being the Doctor and enter the Tardis to travel to an alien world so unlike yours…an airport. This was also the era when package holidays were luxurious, something to savour once a year at most if you were lucky and something your parents probably didn’t do at your age (and your grandparents could never do, unless your granny was Amelia Earhart or something). We forget nowadays but the idea of ravelling around the world, the idea that it was all somehow interconnected and you didn’t have to say in the continent you grew uyp in, is relatively new. Gatwick Airport was the cheapest place to get back to the BBC’s request about filming (they turned down Heathrow for asking too much but will be back for 1982’s ‘Time-Flight’; Gatwick agreed if the BBC kept to certain filming times and didn’t film in any of the planes for safety reasons in return for publicity, although the BBC graciously handed out free tickets to the filming of a show they were launching and hoped would be a suitably internationally hit…The Rolf Harris Show. Oh dear) and they’d only been around thirty years (and then as a more private airclub for several years); Britain didn’t have an airport open to international flights until 1920, a generation or so before ‘The Faceless Ones’ was on. It was still slightly forbidden, slightly exotic and potentially slightly scary (as much as they like to say that travel by plane is safer by car airplane crashes involved a lot more people at once and chances are in the 1960s you knew someone who knew someone who’d either been in an accident or had just avoided one). International travel might not have been as good as intergalactic travel and the closest you got to travelling through time was waiting for your luggage to arrive from three months ago once you’d got back home, but it was sort-of the same thrill, exciting yet frightening, a journey into the unknown where you didn’t quite know what was going to happen and which involved putting your lives in the faith of a pilot you’d never met and a mechanical machine you probably didn’t quite understand. Stories of accidents, incidents and people being stranded on connecting flights abounded: getting lost on an alien location where you didn’t understand the language with no way to get home suddenly made the perils of the Doctor and his companions seem all the more real. So no wonder then that the Dr Who production team decided to do an episode about aliens taking over an airport – the wonder is more that it had taken them four years to think of it. 

The airport angle wasn’t actually Hulke’s or Ellis’ idea, however, but outgoing producer Innes Lloyd, who’d been pushing since ‘The War Machines’ (a story set on the exact same day, July 20th 1966) to out more real life into Dr Who. The writers’ first draft, submitted for season three and thus written for Hartnell’s Doctor with Ben and Polly, had the aliens taking over a department in central London that made much use of the futuristic furniture then arriving from America that Britons didn’t quite understand. This plot still revolved around The Chameleons trying to take over people’s identities but was also like a first draft of ‘Spearhead From Space’, with mannequins coming to life and transforming into the people they captured (Including Polly), with a sub-plot about the release of some sort of invisible space plague that nowadays sounds an awful lot like covid. The Doctor might not seem the sort of person to want to hang around a department store but the Tardis has gone wrong again and he spends half the story in the electrics aisle trying to find out all the right tools he needs to repair it! (Interesting as I don’t think any other writer ever suggested the Tardis ran on electricity. Would the plug be bigger on the inside too. Would one of the wires be called ‘Gallifrey’ rather than ‘Earth’? And what on Gallifrey would the electricity bill be like?) Titled ‘The Big Store’ I like to think it was just like The Marx Brothers film of the same name and included a scene of an alien menace being foiled by the press of a button that made a bed come out of the wall and squash it. Lloyd and script editor Peter Bryant loved bits of it and hated others, coming up with the airport as an easier place where aliens could hide. 

 The Faceless Ones run Chameleon Tours (‘Pied Pier Tours’ in the first draft, which was much more about luring humans into danger rather than brainwashing them), a new airline service running out of Gatwick airport that hypnotise you and steal your identities when you hand in your passport, while leaving no trace of where you went – your family just never hear from you again apart from a few cryptic forged postcards. Nobody knows where to look because, in those days, there were no CCTV cameras every five minutes to track you and, besides, if you report it to the Gatwick police they’ll just take you over too and keep the real you out of sight, as the Tardis crew all find out to their cost at various points in the story. The threat isn’t that you would be killed or tortured or zapped to an alien planet like other stories, but that one day you just wouldn’t exist anymore. Of all the many varied Dr Who plots, this is one I find chillingly plausible. I mean, I still half-suspect budget airlines do hypnotise you and have the rights to take you over buried somewhere in the small print, while air disasters like MH370 and terrorist attacks like 9/11 reminds us all just how alone you can be up in the air in airspace this big, at the mercy of other people or natural disasters. I mean, I fly with my eyes tight shut and as far away from the windows as possible, so I couldn’t actually tell you if a plane is going from side to side or up into the air anyway. The creepiness of the Chameleons, who play their cards much closer to their chests than say the Daleks or Cybermen, is intense indeed when they want to be yet they’re all too believably personable and sweet to their passengers at times too (just like many a real air steward or stewardesses who all look alien anyway in the same distinct uniforms and fake smiles that never quite reach the eyes). This isn’t a mass invasion or a base under siege then like so many Troughton stories but something much subtler, a chess game where the aliens are always one step ahead of the Doctor right up until the very end. 

 There are lots of great little memorable moments in this story. The moment the Commandant dismisses the Doctor’s claims because the radar shows the plane would have crashed and the Doctor interrupts to say its gone up into the air instead of into the ground is a thrilling one: the airport have been looking in entirely I the wrong place because they’re still judging this technology by their own Earthly standards and its revelations like this one, that make sense but you don’t see coming, that are this series’ bread and butter. We only have the soundtrack for the creepiest parts nowadays but I reckon the discovery of the misshapen alien bodies, shrunk to the size of dolls and kept in a filing cabinet (actually the actors shot on an over-sized set) was quite a sofa-mover in its day, right up there with the entombed Cybermen, sewer Cybermen and killer seaweed as scary as Troughton-era cliffhangers get. Not to mention the charred alien wheeled through the airport lounge in episode one and the sight of all the kidnapped passengers lying comatose in the airport car park in episode six There’s also a sequence where the plane Jamie is travelling on under-cover is shrunk in size. It sounds nothing on audio but if you read the book and study the telesnaps, its haunting – especially when you don’t quite know what’s going on. How does Jamie escape this awful fate? Well, that’s the other clever thing: after four years of such imaginative stories this one is all very down to Earth (despite being mostly set in the air) with scenes of such banal everyday life. Jamie, you see, was in the loo and missed the very thing he was investigating– somehow that’s very DW that is. Other scenes have the Doctor, Ben and Jamie look for somewhere to hide where they won’t look out of place or be overheard so they all dive into a photo-booth and discuss how scared they are in between smiling merrily for the cameras (a neat inversion of the fake personas of all the Gatwick staff). In another scene a Chameleon whose just been rumbled gets felled by a humble office chair whacking him in the stomach. Dr Who is often at its best when the ordinary hits the extraordinary head on and Hulke was a master of the art-form, with only the third trip to contemporary Britain (following the opening episode ‘An Unearthly Child’ and the post office tower shenanigans of ‘The War Machines’) as thrilling and unexpected as any alien planet. The Chameleons themselves look deeply menacing too, like they’ve taken a Jagaroth (from ‘City Of Death’), wrapped him in seaweed and then kept him underwater for a year. It’s a real shame we can’t see more of them in the surviving footage whereas, say, every single scene The Quarks are in somehow survive. 

 There’s a great sub-plot here about the importance of identity. The Chameleons have lost theirs and want to feed off humans, adopting our lives as a means to fill in the boredom. Why don’t they just all start again? Well, finding out who you are, going through that learning process all over again, is hard work (especially if these are long-lived aliens who have a long time to spend in eternity, though presumably they can’t remember that either: for all the Chameleons know they only live for a year anyway). A lot of this story takes place on CCTV cameras, used for ‘our’ security in the real world but so easily manipulated by aliens to spy on us and our everyday lives. This is back in the days when chances are you only ever saw security cameras in airports and they were yet another new piece of technology you never quite understood. Airports are very faceless places that reduce you to names and dates on a passport: nobody processing you cares who you really are or what you’re doing – you’re just a commodity to be exported and then imported again, with passengers airplanes treating you in much the same way as airmail and transporter planes. It only takes a tweak to think that an airport might forget you or lose you, even in the days before the missing Malaysian airlines plane. Note the Doctor’s dismissal when he’s asked for his passport as a load of ‘mumbo jumbo’; to a space-time traveller there are no borders and no rules telling him where to go: everywhere is his birthright. Some fans have wondered if this is a story about refugees coming over and appropriating our culture and if this was any other writer but Hulke I might be worried, but really its’ about the importance of assimilation. The Chameleons don’t need to adopt our identities to live on our world, we can live side by side no trouble – after all, that’s what’s been happening before the Tardis shows up and nobody’s noticed. In ‘The Faceless Ones’ the Earth’s plenty big enough for everyone to rub shoulders together. Notably the Doctor doesn’t kill the Chameleons at the end, he offers to help them get back to their own planet in the Tardis (which, erm, doesn’t happen given events at the start of ‘The Evil Of the Daleks’, making you wonder…Are The Chameleons still at Gatwick waiting? Something to think about next time you fly…)

 This is part of a run of stories in 1967 about not knowing who to trust and where the authority figures who should be our first line of offence are really the first line of attack. In that sense it very much does feel like a natural Hulke story; even though he’s 43 (and his co-writer is 49) it’s very much part of the ‘younger hippy generation’ talking in the ongoing ‘family’ discussion between regenerations of Dr Who in the 1960s where you can’t trust anyone over thirty because they’re part of the ‘system’. After all, it’s mostly young people who seem to have gone missing (is this a club 18-30 plane? Or did the Chameleons think they’ll live longer in younger bodies?) and can be seen as the young being conscripted to fight in Vietnam, where friends and classmates either came back a broken parody of who they once were or simply disappeared, to never be mentioned again. I wish we’d had a nit more of that actually: the Doctor’s the only grownup in this world who can be trusted and Sam’s paranoia, far from being the rantings of a clueless young girl easily dismissed by her elders, are spot on. Sometimes it pays to listen to the young: the story would have been cleared up a lot earlier if the people in charge here had actually listened (again, it’s amazing Gatwick let this story through when they really don’t come out of it well at all). Once again, Dr Who takes ‘The Invaders’ as its source material, about a very American invasion where no one can be trusted, with the people being taken getting closer and closer to the star as he tries to work out what’s happening(it’s a highly under-valued work for its influence, although admittedly if ‘The Faceless One’ seems slow then ‘The Invaders’ seems like a three day trip to Australia with a five hour queue for the loos, where time stands still). 

 There are a lot of things this story handles well, most of them featuring Jamie. As much as the 17th century Scotsman is teased for running away from ‘flying beasties’ this is the story where he really comes into his own as an independent character, away from Ben and Polly’s side, and his traits of loyalty and resilience are tested like never before. Frazer Hines just glows with the chance to make more of what had till now been rather a low-key bumbling sort of character heroic and bold and by the end of the story Jamie has more than earned his stripes as a companion, rescuing damsels, being courageous and getting intro trouble even when he half-knows the danger he’ll be in, even standing up to the Doctor (for all the strong feminist characters who’ve joined the Tardis nobody’s really done this since Steven left last year and even Ben never argued with the Doctor quite like this: the tension is that Jamie’s happy to risk all to save any one person, especially the brother of a girl he’s only just met but clearly fancies, while the Doctor wants to find the bigger picture and save everybody, not the first time they’ll clash over ways and means). Troughton, too, has slowly been finding his feet and pitching his Doctor somewhere between the seriousness of the scripts still being written for Hartnell’s Doctor and the comedic vision Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis had for him and is getting much better at switching between the two. This is the first time we properly see the Doctor as a detective and he’s in his element piecing clues together even though they make no sense to ‘us’ (they include a mark on the ground, a burnt fibre and some blank postcards, not much to go on). After half a season where the Doctor’s an irresponsible child it’s good to see him be the cleverest person in the room again, even an room the size of Gatwick terminal. While a lot of the dialogue is perfunctory and there simply to service the plot there are a few really great lines in there to: my favourite being the joke ‘I am the long arm of the law’ ‘I don’t think it will reach where you’re going!’ (If nothing else the Chameleons have adopted our sense of humour and sarcasm!) 

 There are faults though. ‘The Big Store’ had been a four part story but Lloyd had taken one look at the colossal predicted overspend for ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ and decided to turn this story into six pretty much at the last minute. Six episodes is, as with so many stories this length in the black and white era, at least two too long and the story runs out of steam somewhere around episode four, while this story doesn’t have the excuse of expensive sets or pricey monsters for the extended running time as a lot of it, in truth, looks quite cheap (though the location filming at Gatwick is a rare treat). There’s an awful lot of escaping and being captured going on, even for a Troughton Who, and enough dead-ends plotwise to fly an airplane through, little scenes that seem to be leading to something big that are just parked on the runway that never quite take off(at the start its suggested that the Chameleons might have taken over the world but nope – it’s just the airport, while there’s also a hint that The Chameleons are working for somebody bigger, but nope – just themselves). There’s a moment of sheer stupidity as our heroes are tied up in front of killer lasers, like the worst spy films, the threat of course walking away without watching to check they’re dead (something the Doctor solves with a mirror he happens to have on him). Given how much the rest of the story has being going for reality, it seems even more out of place (Who only ever tries this again once, in ‘The Creature From The Pit’ and it doesn’t work any better there). It’s unfortunate that only two episodes exist because for a lot of this story people are just running around not talking and with only the soundtrack to go on this isn’t the most scintillating of Dr Who audios. It is one of the better animations, partly because they’ve done it in colour that makes it look how it might have ‘really’ looked (as opposed to a lurid Pertwee Who that just happened to be filmed in black and white, a subtle difference but much less distracting and easier other eyes) and partly because this is such a visual story a half-asses narration over the top never really did this script justice. Still, that last one at any rate is not the production team’s fault (they didn’t know this story was about to be wiped after all, or more likely they never figured someone would care enough to use a precious and pricey reel-to-reel tape recorder on their humble programme) and after a couple of talky stories this one must have really stood out at the time for its action sequences and how visual it all is (even if it’s a second story in a row all about brainwashing and humans walking round with fake smiles, a theme ‘The Macra Terror’ did rather better on that score: you see, it really was in the air this type of story, everyone was writing it). Aptly for a story set in an airport there are just too many unforeseen delays that leave the plot parked while you wait for something deeply uninteresting to happen before all the pieces can slot into place. It’s the script equivalent of being stuck in a queue at border control while other less interesting destinations seem suddenly very tempting simply because the line for them is moving and you’re stuck. 

The problem’s not just with the plot either. Our quartet of adventurers are split up as soon as the Tardis lands – this team work better together and splitting them up is a shame, especially given how little time is spent following Ben and Polly. I’ve seen longer departure times from John Lennon Airport than Ben and Polly get here after so many adventures when they’ve risked life and limb to be with the Doctor and the fact they disappear partway through episode one and only really feature again when hypnotised until the very end, when they leave in a terrifically rushed scene when they realise that implausibly they’ve mysteriously landed back in London on the very same day they left, is a real shame. After all this is their home, contemporary London, they belong here and ought to be the ones showing us around– it’s the Doctor and Jamie (‘Flying Beasties!’ he says of the planes when he first sees them) who are strangers here and don’t understand this little world quite so well. Their homecoming after all those adventures, after thinking they would never ever get back to normal life back in the days when the Doctor couldn’t steer the Tardis and never landed in the same place twice, should be as moving as Ian and Barbara’s. However Innes Lloyd had got it into his head they weren’t really working (with rumours that Anneke Wills had been leaving him too many messages complaining about the quality of the scripts, particularly in the wake of the ‘Underwater Menace’ fiasco though everyone shared her grievance on that story) and were ‘so last year’ so he writes them out in a hurry before they’ve served the end of their contract (which technically occurred after episode two of the next story). For half the story they’re brainwashed and their human selves locked up in a cupboard, though for all we know at the time they might be dead – that’s a horrible thing for an impressionable child audience to think about their friends they’ve followed for a year by now. Their ‘goodbye’ speech clearly written at the absolute last minute, is appalling: Jamie says nothing, Ben barely says a word, Polly gets sniffly and the Doctor comes out with one of the most oddly sexist moments in all of Who (‘Ben you can catch your ship and be an admiral and Polly…You can look after Ben’). Polly’s been every bit as brave and inventive as Ben by now and you’d think a timelord, of all people, would see beyond the natural sexism of the times. They’ve already been brainwashed so many times before that it’s a waste, but there’s nothing much left for them to do. It became a sort of unwritten rule that writers who’d never written for these characters before and had maybe never even seen them on screen would cobble together a simple leaving scene at the last minute that the regulars worked on in rehearsals over and over because they understood their characters that much better, making them say what they as actors wanted to say to the other. Not here: everyone’s keeping strictly to the script and the script is rubbish in this scene (so much so you have to question who actually wrote it: this is by far and away the worst scene with Hulke’s name attached on it out of the many thousands he wrote for Who). 

 Instead of Ben and Polly we get surrogate companion Samantha Briggs, investigating what happened to her brother, who the production team genuinely thought would be their next companion until actress Pauline Collins (Queen Victoria from ‘Tooth and Claw’) unexpectedly turned them down, not wanting to be tied down to a regular job so soon out of drama school. She’s awful; her Scouse accent is worse than Dodo’s cockney and her constant I-know-best attitude alternating with bursting into unconvincing tears at any moment annoys me every bit as much as it seems to annoy Jamie. I’m amazed Pauline Collins ever worked again after this, never mind go on to become one of the biggest stars who wasn’t already big when they appeared in Who. The second half of the script depends a lot on us being invested in what happened to her brother but we didn’t even see a joyful reunion at the end, while the script seems to alternate between scenes whether she and Jamie have fallen so passionately in love with each other he’ll risk life and limb by stealing her passport or whether he leaves because she’s getting on his nerves so badly. I’m with the latter: a full year of that accent and Sam blundering into trouble while boo-hooing until Jamie got her out of it would have really pushed my loyalties to the show the same way Adric, Mel and her eventual replacement Victoria do. As teary eyed as Jamie gets at leaving her behind (such a contrast to how un-moved he is at Ben and Polly leaving: you think he’d want to see round his friends’ backyard for starters after so long travelling together) I feel like cheering. The rest of the cast are pretty, well, faceless too, even when they’re meant to be human: The Commandant is the weakest of Bernard Kay’s four roles in Who, with no discernible difference between when the Doctor’s talking to him in his human form and when Jamie’s talking to him in his alien form (see ‘The Crusade’ or ‘The Dalek Invasion Of Earth’ for how good he can be in his role as the baddy Saladin or the rebel Tyler). Other members of the cast are just as good in other things too (Wanda Ventham as secretary Jean Rock, Benedict Cumberbatch’s mummy in real life, is a star in ‘Image Of The Fendahl’ a decade later but rather anonymous here; Gilly Fraser, then married to Peter Purves who ends up a stalwart Border TV, is forgettable as Ann Davidson) but make little impact here. This story relies a lot on the regulars, so why for goodness sakes aren’t Ben and Polly in it more to fill up that hole? 

 Nowadays we’re spared the worst of their blushes because we can’t see it, but this was also one of those stories hit by endless technical gremlins, so many that Shawcroft Models, Dr Who regulars since the start, were never used again after this story. The satellite particularly gave the production team problems: the bulb broke (and they forgot to bring a spare) so the flashing signal in space didn’t work, the door didn’t shut properly and the model was too heavy to hang off a wire, collapsing and breaking when they tried to film it. The raygun used in the last episode broke and had to be mended. In all the delays cost the production two and a half hours and a time when every minute before the 10pm curfew (when everyone would have to be paid extra) was precious this was a big deal. To be fair everything we can actually see in the two episodes that survive look great, but there’s enough paperwork surviving to suggest that, for once, we might have been lucky with which third of this story survived the ravages of time. 

 Mixed results then, matched by both this story’s reputation (where it tends to come in the middle of other polls, not just mine) and how it’s been stored. Episode 6 was always kept in the archives – nobody seems quite sure why as it’s not a particularly famous or important episode – but episode three was recovered by a collector at a car boot sale in 1983 (alongside ‘Evil Of The Daleks’ episode two). It wasn’t in very good condition and had bits that couldn’t be played back – not because of how it was discovered but because the collector loved it so much he’d played it a lot before discovering how rare it was and kindly returning it to the BBC. I can see why, particularly that episode where the plot finally starts moving, but I can also see why, with so much of the story missing and trapped between two very gripping in-your-face stories, it gets kind of overlooked too. Just like my luggage. For some odd reason only known to The Sun they decided to give away episode one free with their newspapers in 2006 which is how a lot of fans first discovered it…Who were then annoyed that they couldn’t simply go into a shop to buy the rest. Because it didn’t exist anymore. Hmm, thanks for that publicity we could have done without! (I can tell you it was a test of my loyalty having to buy The Sun, which is far from a natural home for such an intellectual drama). It doesn’t feel like a natural 2nd Doctor story: the slow pace is more like a Hartnell, while the clashes with authority feels more like a Pertwee and you can see why for so long it was a curio cul-de-sac rather than a way forward (other stories this year are far more exiting, even if they’re moe generic and less inventive as a rule). This is one of those stories that doesn’t make the most of the great premise. Over-long it may be, a little clumsy in places too, empty and faceless at times, but ‘The Faceless Ones’ is overall still a cracking story, a neat twist on the usual ‘base under siege’ formula that makes even the staples of this series seem exotic. It’s only when you get home and back to real life that you realise that you might have been over-sold something that, underneath it all, ended up being much the same as usual but in fancy new packaging. A bit like duty free. 

 POSITIVES + I still can’t quite believe that Gatwick actually said yes to the location filming in the days when Who hadn’t really filmed anywhere like this before (the BT Tower and that’s it) and were so generous with their time, three whole days of shooting anywhere (except actually inside a plane for security reasons – the scene in the cockpit is a set, albeit pne good enough to fool the readers of ‘Airframe’ Magazine who write into the production team asking which plane had been used as it looked like lots of different ones cobbled together) effectively for free (unless you really count an hour of watching a creepy Australian play a wobble-board as proper payment). After all, they don’t exactly come out of this story well, half their staff being possessed and the other half being oblivious. Nobody got permission to film in airports back then, least of all drama programmes seen as being for children so seeing one on TV was really something new in a way it just isn’t now. It’s really quite a coup for most viewers who had never actually seen it (or indeed any airport a lot of them) and makes more difference than you’d think – it’s the first time Who visits a famous place that you too can visit in the same timezone (give or take Covent Garden in ‘The War Machines’ or the Empire State Building in ‘The Chase’, the latter of which was just a set and an establishing shot and the former of which you couldn’t see properly because there was a ruddy great war machine in the way). It’s also the first time you see truly lots of extras in the series (albeit most of them are real passengers who don’t know they’re being filmed). And the camera crew make the most of being able to run around the airport when its empty, showing just how eerie busy places are when they’re quiet and shooting from all sorts of unusual camera angles to make the ordinary seem extraordinary (such as going up from a ‘down’ escalator, which enhances the feeling that something’s not quite right). They should have done this sort of thing more Gatwick, unlike 99% of public places Dr Who goes on to film in (just compare with Heathrow fifteen years later), were incredibly helpful and even got into the spirit of things when they were sent a series of nervy letters from viewers the middle five weeks of this story, asking if everything was OK and they were safe to travel (the official response is a thing of beauty perfectly in keeping with the story: ‘We have now managed to rid the airport of these aliens and assure you that your journey through the airport will be just as normal and trouble-free as we can make it’. 

 NEGATIVES - The plot, which is never satisfactorily explained. The Chameleon home planet exploded and the aliens don’t know who they are so they decide to steal 50,000 humans and place their minds inside their bodies. Which, as motivations go, is kinder than most but absolutely nuts. Why does getting a body give them an identity? None of the people they’ve taken over have any memory of who they are while under the Chameleon’s spell – Polly even gets a new surname, which suggests their identities are being made up. Surely if there’s been an explosion they survived they’ve only lost their bodies anyway, not their memories? And why this planet? The Ice Warriors are only a planet away and I’d much rather be one of them if I had the choice, in my snazzy green shell suit with muscles. Plus if they’d lost all their memories and their bodies, how come they still have their spaceships and can remember how to pilot them? Something tells me the plot revelation was a last minute addition for episode six, long after the other five were written when somebody thought they’d better come up with something after five episodes of ‘we’ll fix it all later’. This is also surely the slowest means to taking people over, an airplane load at a time. And yeah, sure, taking over the airport security is a good means of making sure any snoopers get brainwashed now, but they can’t keep this up indefinitely: somebody’s going to nice one day and what do the Chameleons do then? Live up in space? Forget faceless, this lot seem to be brainless. Or maybe that explosion’s done them some brain damage?… 

BEST QUOTE: Commandant: ‘To get above our radar umbrella like that it would have to climb vertically until it was a hundred miles high. The darned thing would be in outer space!’ Doctor: ‘Exactly…’ 

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: ‘Time-Flight’ is also set in an airport – Heathrow to be exact. The story’s not all that different either, although the planes aren’t taken a hundred miles up into the air but instead Concorde has a one-way ticket to pre-historic Earth (of course it does). 

 ‘Face Value’ (2000) is a short story from the original ‘Short Trips’ anthology written by Steve Lyons and features an unlikely match-up between the 6th Doctor and the Chameleons. What’s weirder is that his companions aren’t Peri or Mel or even Frobisher the shape shifting penguin who accompanied him in the comic strips (don’t ask!) but his companions from the stage play ‘The Ultimate Adventure’ crystal, Jason and, umm, Zog (1989). They’ve landed on Krennos, a leisure spa that’s a sort of cross between ‘The Leisure Hive’ and ‘Orphan 55’ . Lots of people have gone missing and the Manager, naturally enough, blames these oddly dressed strangers. Deciding they’re a disruptive influence (especially poor Zog, the hairy one that looks like a cross between a Tetrap, Lurgi from ‘The Black Cauldron’ and an oompaloompa seen looming out of the pub in ‘Dimensions In Time’, his only TV appearance) he tries to have them killed. The Doctor sneaks around, discovers the staff disappeared mysteriously to be replaced by Chameleons and that they though the planet would be as easy to conquer as The Earth. Excpe this planet is filled with mud and trees that keep killing people. The Doctor manages to persuade them to leave after de-processing the real staff who manage to put the planet back to normal. A silly but also quite suspenseful storey that makes good use of the Chameleons’ identity-stealing powers. 

 Also our old friend ‘Who Killed Kennedy?’ (a book from 1996) features James Stevens continuing to investigate mysterious events on Earth. The short story features an interview with Samantha Briggs where she recalls the events and the mysterious ‘Doctor’ who helped her track down he missing brother and he gets excited that the event is the same day as another big event featuring a mysterious Doctor, but is shocked to hear that they don’t sound anything alike (because it’s the 1st Doctor investigating ‘The War Machines’!) 

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