The Face Of Evil
(Season 14, Dr 4 with Leela, 1-22/1/1977, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, script editor: Robert Holmes, writer: Chris Boucher, director: Pennant Roberts)
Rank: 82
'Well then Leela, what do you think of this mountain that your ancestors carved then eh? Just like back home for you. That George Washington you know, very good kisser, never told a lie. Well except when we got home that night as I recall. Next to him is Thomas Jefferson - I took him down the Haight Ashbury in 1967 and turned him on to the Jefferson Airplane. He was tripping acid when he signed the American Declaration of Independence you know! I went out shooting with old Teddy Roosevelt. Actually it was the Brigadier in a fur coat but never mind. And then there's Abraham Lincoln. I'll show you his Gettysburg address on the space-time visualiser sometime. Awful picture though doesn't look a thing like him...'
This is one of the cleverest scripts of the entire 20th century run, all the more so given that it plays with the sort of tired old ideas we’ve seen in Dr Who dozens of times before: there’s a planet in the future that’s run by a mysterious force that turns out to be a computer, while the savage life we meet on this planet turn out to be a colony of humans in a few millennia’s time who’ve reverted back to their primal ways because they’ve forgotten how to work it. This is yet another possession story in an era full of them. If you’ve come to this story after the Hartnell and Troughton eras you’re permitted to start yawning now. Only (spoilers) the possession is technological and Xoanon the computer isn’t like any we’ve seen before: it’s having a bit of a breakdown and not in a ‘gee I wish there was a pc world on this planet so I could fix my spark plugs’ way either but by actually going downright raving bonkers. As a lot of computers tend to do to be fair, only this one happens to be running the planet, even when everyone has forgotten what it is, which is a bit of a problem when the locals are the things it starts de-fragging. And what causes this breakdown? The repairman. Who happens to be The Doctor. By accident. In an unseen but very Dr Who-sounding story in an attempt to help the local population re-discover their lost knowledge – only the Doctor forget to remove his ‘dataprint’ from the computer, leading it to think that it actually is the Doctor and causing it to develop a split personality (the novelisation says this happened the first time this Doctor took off in the Tardis in ‘Robot’ when he was still a bit manic, well OK a lot manic, which might be why he didn’t do a thorough enough job and by the look of things can’t remember ever turning up here before. Unless somehow he first turned up on this un-named planet in a different body and the computer knows to update its depiction of him depending on what age he must be now. After all, this meddling without having thought of the consequences sounds a lot like something the 1st Doctor might have done in the days before we met him and might explain why it was so longer the Doctor is struggling to place being here. No? Oh well, please yourselves).
In many ways this is the most 21st century of all Dr Who plots: we’ve had computers in Who since the 1960s but they tend to be distant, colossal, impenetrable unknowable, doing the routine things humans can’t do, driven by tape machines and used for nefarious purposes by an Earthbound baddy. This one is almost human –well, timelord anyway – and as to err is to be human it’s no wonder he’s got his wires a bit crossed. Xoanon doesn’t just have one identity but two: he’s remained part computer but he also had the Doctor’s personality imprinted on his datacore, so that he’s torn in two: a machine that sees things absolute and a personality that, perhaps of all the Doctors, is mercurial and malleable. Chris Boucher’s debut script for the series feels much more like how we’ve come to think of computers in the present day, as something that could both do great harm and great good: Xoanon runs the entire planet and was doing it nicely until it went wrong, when it starts developing a mind of its own and killing people off, while given his power it’s not a simple case of turning him off and on again. He’s a person now and regrettably people don’t come with a re-set button: we just have to muddle on through with the best of what we’ve got. For Xoanon being ‘alive’ isn’t easy. He’s used to the safety of numbers, of binary code, of things either being one thing or another. Even as a futuristic impossibly brilliant technological creation he simply hasn’t got the bandwith to cope with all of the feelings that come with being alive and especially all the conflicts. For who we are is a shimmering, ever-changing state that changes depending what you learn and who you’re with and how you interact with them, updating second by second as your view of the world and your part in it changes (it might be significant that the split personality of Xoanon features a father, a mother and a child: we are different things to each of these people depending on their needs and life experience, however much we think we’re essentially the same: the people who potty-trained you, for instance, will never view you the same way as the people you potty-trained even though you stay just as clever as you always were with many of the same mannerisms your whole life). Being alive is a bundle of contradictions and paradoxes, of grey areas in between the black and white thinking that computers enjoy. The Doctor tells Leela in episode one to ‘never be certain of anything’ (a sentence rather undercut by his need to have her trust him a couple of episodes later but no matter): The Doctor knows that everything on this un-named planet is a lie. But computers can’t tell lies and they have to be certain in order for their programmes to run. The Doctor also says, in the story’s most quoted speech, that ‘very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alters their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit the views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering’ (It’s a wonder there isn’t a picture of Donald Trump on the mountain alongside him as the ‘evil one’). Little does he know about Xoanon when he says it but Xoanon is this way of thinking precisely: it cannot compute being wrong so instead it computed everyone around it as being wrong. Xoanon is neither powerful nor stupid really though, just ill with schizophrenia, that impulse to believe in two separate contradictory statements, of being different things in different situations. Only Xoanon literally controls life on this planet, being in charge of the life support systems, dividing the human population on this planet as if they were binary code and leading them to grow up resenting and hating each other even though – in s shock twist (spoilers) - they turn out to be one and the same all along.
It’s the single best use of computers in the series because it’s so original and unexpected, a long way ahead of where the technology was at the time and far more in keeping with how we see man’s greatest technological friend today in our age of AI and sophisticated programming. Usually in Dr Who the computers go wrong and the Doctor has to solve them, but in this story it’s his solution that’s gone wrong and the computer isn’t really the baddy at all. Back in the 1960s and 1970s the big fear with computers was that they would replace us and make humanity redundant as it did all our jobs for us and a lot of stories like ‘The War Machines’ and ‘The Green Death’ built on this, making computers that are scarily human-like, taking on all our bad character traits like jealousy, ego and anger. But ‘Face Of Evil’ feels more like a story from now, where computers become smarter than us, as smart as a timelord, so smart we don’t know how to turn them off. It’s at one with series like ‘Humans’ and ‘Intelligence’ from recent TV history where computers don’t just allow humans to turn on humans but where they run the show with a callousness and efficiency that puts our worst dictators to shame. There’s no scarier threat than one that thinks you’re just a bunch of binary code and which wasn’t born to cope with all the subtleties that come from being a person, all the contradictions and paradoxes involved in being alive and which can’t show mercy or give second chances and whose only response to the contradictions of everyday life is to keep people apart, creating divisions in this society that huge ramifications for all of them. It’s not for nothing that this story was submitted with the title ‘The Day God Went Mad’, a title the production team would never have allowed out for reasons of being both controversial and out of keeping with their set format (it’s hard to imagine a target novelisation with the subtitle ‘Dr Who and The Day God Went Mad’ for instance). However it’s a fitting one: for the Sevateem and Tesh alike their computer is their God, with the same mercurial temper that changes with the wind, utter control over all life and a background that’s impossible for the locals to understand.
This unusual script was commissioned in an unusual way too, with Boucher sending in a script to the production team unsolicited: not this one but a different script, lost to time. This might seem to outsiders like an obvious thing for a writer to do but maybe only three Who writers ever did it that way: one of them was Andrew Smith, who shocked the production team as an eighteen year old when he came u with ‘Full Circle’ and the other was Robert Holmes, who tweaked his submission ‘The Krotons’ from his original intended for the series ‘Out Of The Unknown’ and with perfect timing it landed on Terrance Dicks’ mat just when he was low on stories. Holmes was by 1977 working as script editor himself and it might have struck him that he’d found just such a writer who had been in his shoes a decade or so earlier, so he tried Boucher out on a script that’s very similar all round, with a mad computer whose divided its planet into two warring tribes (‘Face Of Evil’ is, in many ways, ‘The Krotons’ ‘cubed’, from the blocky designs on down!) Originally called ‘The prime Directive’, Boucher found while writing the script that it was developing almost a mind of its own – a bit like Xoanon – and was turning into a very different story, more of a philosophical story than the runaround he’d been commissioned to write. Thankfully Holmes saw what he was doing and rather than make him change it, as a lesser script editor might have done, encouraged him to see the idea through to the end.
The idea of the story having implications for the Doctor and caused by his visit some time before came from producer Phillip Hinchcliffe who was becoming worried that the Doctor was too infallible, with no uncertainty as to whether he might come out of a story on top. ‘Face Of Evil’ is thus the first story since ‘Planet Of The Spiders’ to really ask questions about the Doctor’s morals and why he goes about the universe trying to save it, more often than not while leaving before anything better can be put in its place and hoping the people left behind are smart and kind enough to follow his example while he moves on to something more ‘exciting’. In many ways the 4th regeneration of the Dr is the most blasé: he swans in, topples empires he thinks are ‘wrong’ and then leaves again with a swish of his scarf but in this story, for pretty much the first time, there are consequences to his actions. Even though everything he did both before and during this story was designed to be for the greater good, inevitably somewhere sometime that slapdash approach is going to cause harm. The modern series has tried this a few times now (notably ‘Waters Of Mars’), suggesting that he too is fallible and can get carried away with his own brilliance. In another sense that title isn’t just about Xoanon; it suggests that the Doctor, too, is a ‘God’ that can ‘go mad’, one that through his interactions with so any different civilisations has perhaps more universal influence than anyone and wonders what would happen if he did. It’s unusual indeed to see this Dr, whose usually so many quadzillions of steps ahead of everyone, look guilty and admit he might have got something wrong (I’ve always thought the scenes where this works so well and gives Tom Baker a new emotion to play with gave in-coming producer Graham Williams the idea of adding Romana, who is always proving the Dr ‘wrong’).
There are a few interesting pot-shots at religion here too: both sides have ‘faith’ in something that really happened, but not in anything like the way they think it did, a case of science being turned through the Chinese whispers of the centuries into blind worship. It turns out that the people we meet here are the descendents of Earth explorers who crashed into an unknown and still un-named planet generations ago – we don’t know exactly how long but it’s long enough for the history of their mission to have been lost in the mists of time, twisted and re-worded and adapted into a entirely different history. Boucher was a committed atheist who thought the Bible was a misinterpretation of events that had really happened, distorted by time, much like what happens here. The word ‘xoanon’ in fact comes from the Ancient Greeks where it was used as a word for as ‘fake’ God, a representation generally carved out of wood that was thought to be imbued with special Godlike powers even though it had none of its own. Xoanon lives (if that’s the right word for a half sentient computer) in a ship marked ‘survey team’, only nobody on this planet can remember what the words ‘survey team’ means, so they have concocted their own history based on things they half-understand. They’ve divided up into two tribes: the technological experts (the ‘Teshnishians’ in local speak, the tribes having forgotten what the word really was and what it means) and the survey team (‘Sevateem’ in local speak), who rejected the technology to forge out a new home for themselves in the local jungle. The story goes that when Xoanon went mad and blocked entry to the ship the survey team were outside and the technicians inside, trying repairs, when the Doctor showed up to give a hand, both sides devolving once their technology is beyond repair. We’ve had lots of savage tribes in Who before and indeed this whole plot is not new (see, umm, ‘The Savages’ for a simpler take on it and yet another story about two polar opposites at each other’s throats learning they’re secretly one and the same). Only Boucher is smarter than most. He doesn’t write the Sevateem or the Tesh as being stupid, just savage and superstitious; the two tribes are every bit as clever as each other, its just that this one have developed more of their primal instincts as befits a tribe of hunters and the Tesh’s have more logic. Everyone on this planet ruled by computer have, ironically enough, eschewed logic in favour of what they need for survival on an ever-changing planet in the wilderness: intuition, a sixth sense that senses danger and which is impossible for a computer to understand: logic is a luxury that comes with civilisation when we’re protected enough to make sure that the local wildlife won’t kill us. Technology is a measure of intelligence in Dr Who across all species, because it means that particular race have conquered the things that might kill them, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re any better suited to survival if something goes wrong. Sometimes technology can be a trap, blinding us to where we came from – especially when there’s an error code in the computer left in charge.
Where Boucher’s script soars is in the way that he manages to juggle both contradictory points of view, recognising that unlike Xoanon Dr Who audiences can see more than one point of view at a time. While the Tesh and Sevateem are both at each other’s throats over fundamental differences in how to live both views make sense: living in a jungle is hard work but at least you’re freer than living your lives to a computer’s say-so. It’s a shame we don’t see more of the Tesh as potentially they’re the more interesting of the two, having grown up around technology they don’t understand (what did they think was going on this whole time?) Boucher is clearly trying hard to be fair to both sides but clearly likes the Sevateem more: they’re all intriguing characters in their own ways but by far and away the most interesting is Leela, who becomes the new companion. Louise Jameson is excellent from the first and what could have been an irritating thicko becomes a fascinating character whose bright but inexperienced yet always learning, always questioning, always living off her instincts. We start off with Leela rebelling against the law of the land because instinctively she knows it’s wrong and in that regard she’s very much like the Doctor, courageous and moral and bright, just with less experience. Leela is very different: we’ve had no end of orphans in Dr Who before and since but only Leela witnesses her own kin die in the opening episode and because of her own defiance of the tribe (though if Leela is troubled by this she’s learned not to show it). Boucher wasn’t asked to write a companion for more than just one story – like the David Tennant specials of 2009 there was meant to be a different one each story – but the production team really liked Leela. Boucher modelled her on Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled, who came across innocent and glamorous despite being a mass murderer and how contradictory Boucher found those two aspects of her personality (no wonder Dalek creator Terry Nation poached Boucher for the ‘terrorists as our heroes’ series Blake’s 7 as this ability to juggle multiple viewpoints is fundamental to that series). Louise Jameson nails a tricky part from the first, capturing the contradictions of a character whose both incredibly pure (with no idea of science or how the universe really works) but also a true warrior, happy to kill in defence or for a greater cause. Jameson says she got a lot of Leela’s personality from watching a neighbour’s child who lived up the stairs from her and the way she would eye Louise suspiciously like an old man before realising she was ‘safe’ and openly being her boisterous self in front of her; another source was Louise’s pet dog Bosie who would sense danger by cocking her head to one side and listening, a mannerism Louise adopted for Leela; the end of this story when she wanders inside the Tardis and the Doctor debates about keeping her is exactly like he’s adopted a stray canine). It’s a sad fact of ‘old’ Who that with so many writers and not enough time to tweak scripts companions tend to all end up the same eventually and that any character development they make in one story is forgotten by the next but Leela does better than any character till Ace: she stays fundamentally the same intuitive warrior whose part animal, always on the alert for danger and willing to fight, yet also learns knowledge along the way. It helps considerably that Boucher writes three of her scripts including the next one ‘Robots Of Death’ so that future writers have a much better understanding of her than some companions down the years. She’s the perfect companion for the Hinchcliffe years that were a similar mix of innocence and knowingness, more child-orientated in some ways and more violent in others – alas she won’t be allowed to be quite the same in the Graham Williams era when the BBC demand the series get softer and more peaceful.
Poor Louise went through hell in this part in a highly revealing costume (that was originally even more revealing, as just a leather cat suit before the leather straps at the front were added), with painful contact lenses that changed her blue eyes brown (because it made her look more like a ‘savage’ apparently, though I’m not at all sure why), a liberal layering of dirt and months of jibes from salivating technicians (no wonder Leela hates the Tesh). That scene when Leela has to run past the invisible monsters was particularly difficult: the effects were on wires that could have garrotted her if she’d memorised her steps wrong and the contact lenses meant she couldn’t see properly where she was going. That wasn’t the half of it though: lots of people working on the series made cracks about her revealing costume, the most infamous a lighting director on this story who asked to stay on for the rest of the series because ‘I wouldn’t mind lighting that for the next six months!’ So much for progress and civilisation: it doesn’t take a mad computer to take us back to the dark ages and it really wasn’t that long ago. The ‘old’ team were far more welcoming: by chance Louise had tickets for a play Elisabeth Sladen was starring in the day after learning she got the job and nervously went backstage to say ‘hello’ – Elisabeth was due at TV centre the week of recording and left Louise lots of ‘best wishes’ messages and cards with the BBC staff to pass on for her first week.
Though they clashed a lot in the recording of this and most future stories (mostly because Tom wanted to work on his own without a companion and thought the production team were ignoring his suggestions) Louise also brings out the best in Tom Baker: his Doctor is less flippant in this story (though still often very funny) and his horror at realising he’s been the cause of the events in the second half brings out an earnest wisftulness we won’t see again till his closing trilogy. Tom got few chances to be subtle during his seven years as the Dr but he’s actually surprisingly good at it when the script demands it and this script demands much more from him than most; he also re-wrote perhaps the best scene where he threatens the Sevateem, by threatening them with a ‘deadly jelly baby’ rather than use violence (he probably meant the green ones – they never did taste very nice. Leela’s comment: ‘They say the evil one eats babies!’) There’s another very ‘Doctory’ scene where he fools the local monsters who work on vibrations with an alarm clock he just happens to have in his pockets: this gag appears to be in the original script but I would happily believe that this was a Tom Bakerism too. Given that this is the period when Tom Baker was taking over it might also be that this was a message to the actor that he wasn’t infallible either, though if so it’s a shame that the story ends with the Doctor having apparently learned nothing (‘Are you always right?’ asks Leela just before they leave. ‘Invariably’ he replies). Notably the Doctor never tries to put things right by going back in time and fixing it: he treats the ‘mistake’ as if it’s a fixed point even though he only did at most a century or so ago (that’s peanuts by Dr Who standards!)
Those monsters are perhaps the weakest link in the story, yet more invisible beings to save on budget that live on the other side of a barrier (a sort of firewall, only because this is Dr Who it’s carved out of stone and the two halves are taking place a few seconds apart in time). While the idea of having two separate things co-existing uneasily on a planet is very in keeping with a script about binary code versus schizophrenia it’s never fully explained how that barrier got there and why. The monsters also seem like they’re there purely because a computer doesn’t give the characters in ‘The Face Of Evil’ much to face off against. Equally poor are the Horda, a cross between giant maggots and cybermats that crawl around in a way that’s meant to be creepy but just looks a bit silly (one of them at the front had a motor inside so they could move independently but the rest are all too visibly moved by wires). It doesn’t seem much of a threat for hardened warriors like Leela or her father to be thrown into a pit of them. In time we’ll see Leela defeat killer robots, gigantic killer slugs, killer Rutans, killer Sontarons and killer baking foil, so insects shouldn’t be that much of a concern for her really. ‘Horda’ is an interesting choice of word and we’ve seen already how much research Boucher did for his character names; it means ‘mob’ in Polish. Could it be that the Horda are more a symbolic monster? Boucher knows that in some ancient past when religious leaders were more jumpy he’d have been the first to be thrown in a pit for questioning the way everything is run and Leela and her father are basically tried by committee here without a chance to speak out what they believe: they’re killed by mob mentality that you have to fit to a set way of life as much as anything, the human race as inflexible in its own way as a computer that thinks in binary code. Alas, though, if that was the intention it gets a bit lost on screen.
It’s also a bit wordy without a lot of action till the last episode – oddly so given that most of the story revolves around two bloodthirsty tribes out to kill each other; the most ‘savage’ thing we see anybody actually do in this story is sit around debating the death penalty. It’s harder, too, to get a handle on this world and how it works than Dr Who’s very best planets – an inevitable consequence of the fact that we’re so many generations on that everyone’s forgotten their origins, but its a shame there’s never a scene where the Dr recalls landing there in flashback and talking about what it was like or looking through his 500-year-diary and showing us what it was like last time he was there. Doing jungle sets in brightly-lit colour is a whole lot harder than in black-and-white and this isn’t one of the more convincing ones - you never quite lose the feeling that you’re watching actors walking round a set. If I was going to be mean as well I’d point out that both Tesh and Sevateem look a pretty weedy bunch who more closely resemble goggle-eyes actors and extras looking uncomfortable half-naked and clearly working out what angry thing they’re going to say to their agent for getting them on this job next tea-break, not people hardened to living in the wilderness their whole lives. The costumes raise a few questions all round actually: where did they get the leather from? There’s no animal life on this planet that we see, unless they’ve killed them all off but the leather tunics look new. Wouldn’t they be more likely to be wrapped in twigs and leaves? (there’s no end of foliage on this planet after all). Although given how hot this planet appears to be its maybe a bit strange they’re wearing clothes at all – not that they could possibly have put that on TV at a Saturday teatime, but it’s not like a writer as smart as Boucher and script editor as smart as Holmes not to fit in an explanatory comment somewhere along the line.
Forget the body though, on more than the face of it ‘Face Of Evil’ has a lot going for it. There are lots of candidates around for Dr Who’s scariest moment/cliffhanger but one of the best ones comes at the end of episode three when the computer is having the sort of existential crisis computers should never have and screaming at the Dr in a child’s voice ‘Who am I?!’ Technologically for 1977 standards it’s a triumph and never more than the scene of the Doctor-Xoanon talking to himself, recorded using Tom’s face against black drapes, that footage re-recorded onto a video camera to be coloured and distorted, then played back to three monitors surrounding the set and recorded live with Tom Baker’s response. The lad, Anthony Freise, was a pupil in the class of director Pennant Roberts’ wife’s and he’s perfect, menacing and cute all at once; the other voices were ‘borrowed’ from actors then in rehearsals for ‘Robots Of Death’ Pamela Salem (Toos) and Rob Edwards (Chub). Even I’ve never had a computer breakdown quite like this (and believe me, my computers have found a lot of creative ways to break down over the years); I dread to think what Xoanon would have done with windows updates. That’s the moment that gets all the attention but the first cliffhanger is pretty thrilling too, as after ten minutes of people calling him ‘the evil one’ the Doctor sees a carving of his face, Mount Rushmore style, into the local cliff (a literal cliffhanger and another Hinchcliffe suggestion; despite the Doctor’s quip about not getting his nose or eyebrows quite right it’s taken from a plaster model of his face). It’s a clever twist that the story is solved by having the Doctor bridge the two worlds through the bridge in his nose, when his face happens to be the gateway between the two worlds.There’s a highly satisfying ending, too, where the Doctor cures the computer by doing the human equivalent of switching it off and on again, showing it how to integrate multiple personalities without causing harm to itself or anyone else, but it’s a closer run thing than most 4th Dr stories and he very nearly comes a cropper. This is one of those rare DW stories where there’s no baddy really, which makes for such a satisfying change: the computer doesn’t mean to be evil any more than the Doctor meant to make it that way and Xoanon’s attempts to destroy the Doctor come out of rage that his presence challenges its world view, not because it wants to rule this un-named world.
The result is a triumph, one of the most original stories Dr Who ever did: with practically every other story you can point to some source material somewhere (nearly always a combination of Nigel Kneale, H G Wells and Isaac Asimov, with a dash of John Wyndham, Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein and ‘Pathfinders In Space’ for variation). This is a rare story that doesn’t have any of that. Yes you could point to a few earlier stories, even a few earlier Dr Who stories, about a computer running a planet that goes wrong, ven a Bob Shaw story about a planet ruled by a being named Xoanon, but that’s only the starting point for a story that adds whole layers of identity and existential crises. It’s all the more impressive for coming at the tail end of the Hinchcliffe era that, for all its brilliance, was more about recycling than originality. I’ve always maintained that Dr Who is one of the smartest series around: not necessarily every week, not necessarily even in what’s presented on screen, but the way it’s format is so elastic that you learn a little bit about a lot of things if you watch it for long enough. It’s the sort of series where most showrunners and script editors throw ideas at you that you can either ignore while people run around doing things and be quite happy or can go away and look up afterwards, falling into a rabbit-hole of research following the breadcrumbs the authors have left for you. Quite often that’s with science, sometimes that’s with history, occasionally that’s with some other thing you might not have thought about regarding mathematics or geography or religion or literature or even home economics. My favourite Who stories though are the sort of things you can’t look up in books but which make you think all the same, about philosophy and bigger concepts about what it means to be alive and few stories are as strong in that regard as ‘The Face Of Evil’, a story about how you can be alive without having a face and how there might not be such a thing as evil, only perspective and mental illness. What seems, on the face of it, to be just another Dr Who story about jungles and computers ends up being one of the most intelligent and sophisticated Who stories of them all.
POSITIVES + Of all the clever things in this story one of the cleverest might just be the title. You spend the whole story expecting to see a monster with a face of such horror they even refer to it in name, which would after all be more in keeping with other Who plots, but no – it refers to the Doctor’s face, as carved into a Mount Rushmore style mountain, which Xoanon takes to be its evil side. On the face of it the face isn’t evil at all (and we know the Dr too well to assume that) but for the people of this world its symbolic of everything that went wrong, the ‘face’ of all the problems in this world. Even more than that it’s about how a face is evil if it only points one way: the Doctor’s face only peers out one way and is blind to the barrier on the other side and you can’t be a fair and powerful ruler if you haven’t got all your facts straight, perhaps especially if you’re a computer. And even more on top of that part of the problem of the story is that Xoanon has no separate personality, no body and no ‘face’ that exists that’s his because he’s everywhere inside the spaceship – and by having the Doctor’s identity inside him he desperately craves one even though he fears it, a ‘face’ that means he has a separate self, which it thinks is ‘evil’.
NEGATIVES - The ending needs the two tribes to come together for better reason than just the Doctor’s say-so (especially as he flipping caused the problem in the first place) – joining together to save everyone from a common foe rather than a mad computer whose been put right through the usual jiggery-pokery might have been the way to go, especially in a script that’s all about coming together despite your differences and contradictions. The last episode feels a lot more rushed than the rest, perhaps because by then Boucher has already been given the commission for ‘Robots Of Death’ (Holmes wasn’t used to his writers – shock horror! – getting their scripts in on time!)
BEST QUOTE: ‘Killing me is going to help you. It’s not going to do me much good either!’
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