In this serial, the Second Doctor (Patrick Troughton) and his travelling companionsJamie (Frazer Hines), Ben (Michael Craze) and Polly (Anneke Wills) arrive at Gatwick Airport where identity-stealing aliens known as the Chameleons have taken refuge after their planet was destroyed, preying on university students by abducting them using the false holiday flight organisation 'Chameleon Tours'. It sees the departure of Craze and Wills as Ben and Polly. Only two of the six episodes are held in the BBC archives; four remain missing.
An animated version of the serial from BBC Studios was released on 16 March 2020.[1][2] It became the eighth incomplete Doctor Who serial to receive full-length animated reconstructions of its missing episodes.
The TARDIS materializes on the runway of Gatwick Airport. The Second Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie emerge only to discover that they are in the path of an oncoming plane. They see a police officer coming for them, so they split up to flee him. Airport security confiscates the TARDIS after thinking the police are playing a practical joke on them. Polly ducks into the Chameleon Tours agency hangar, where she sees Spencer kill another man and report to his superior, Captain Blade. Polly flees, and runs into the Doctor and Jamie. After telling them what she saw, she brings them to the hangar. They examine the body and the Doctor notes that the victim was electrocuted by a weapon that can't possibly exist on Earth at that time. They leave to find someone in authority, and Blade captures Polly without the Doctor or Jamie noticing. He hides her along with the corpse before Jamie and the Doctor return with sceptical airport authorities.
Alone again, Spencer revives an alien, a faceless green humanoid with prominent veins. Nurse Pinto brings in unconscious air traffic controller Meadows, and connects him to the alien and a machine. The alien transforms into a doppelgänger of Meadows, and goes to his airport job.
Polly exits from a newly landed plane, but rejects the Doctor and Jamie, claiming to be Michelle Leuppi from Zurich.
At the Chameleon kiosk, they meet Samantha Briggs who is searching for her brother. On a Chameleon youth tour, he sent a postcard from Rome, but nobody saw him there. Breaking in, the trio find fake postcards from missing tourists, and a monitor of the Tours hangar. The Doctor sees Ben find Polly suspended comatose in a metal cabinet, then himself gets caught and frozen by Blade and Spencer. The Doctor escapes and goes alone to the hangar and tells Jamie and Samantha to stay.
They meet Detective Inspector Crossland investigating the disappeared Chameleon customers, and realise the first body was his missing partner, DI Gascoigne. The Doctor finds only comatose Meadows and returns to demonstrate the freezing gun to the Airport Commandant, who gives them 12 hours to investigate. Blade points the ray gun at Crossland to stop him boarding the next flight, and shows him that all the passengers have vanished.
Spencer attacks Jamie and Samantha, but they escape. Jamie steals Samantha's ticket and boards. Samantha finds Spencer instead of the airport manager; he ties her up for Pinto to duplicate. The Doctor and Commandant learn from other airports that Chameleon passengers never arrive.
Blade eliminates a pursuing RAF fighter and diverts Jamie's plane up to dock in a vast alien craft. When an airsick Jamie emerges from the toilet, he finds the passengers miniaturised in drawers. Blade's assistant Ann catches him, and traps him in a room with two misshapen aliens.
The Doctor follows the radar signals to the plane's destination, threatens to remove alien Meadows' life-supporting black armband, and elicits an explanation. An explosion damaged the alien home world, so they want to use 50,000 humans left comatose in orbit as replacements. The Doctor uses the alien Meadows to get at the alien Pinto. She resists and disintegrates, so the real Pinto revives and frees Samantha. She tells the Doctor that Jamie left.
Jamie meets the Director of the aliens, a Crossland copy, who says the plane will return to the airport for the remaining Chameleons. The Doctor keeps the identities of copied staff secret, so the Commandant can find their hidden originals.
The Doctor pretends to be the alien Meadows and Pinto impersonates her double. They board the last flight to space. The alien Jamie reveals the threat of the Doctor, so Blade sends undisguised Chameleons to capture them. The Doctor offers to spare Gatwick's original aliens, when one onboard disintegrates, proving that Samantha found the real staff in cars in the car park. Blade and Spencer kill the Director and the fake Jamie, whose originals revive. Crossland stays behind when the Doctor, Jamie and Pinto return with freed humans.
In the airport, Samantha kisses Jamie goodbye. Ben and Polly learn that the day is 20 July 1966, when they first left in the TARDIS. They leave for home. The Doctor reveals to Jamie that the TARDIS has been released from airport storage, and stolen.
Production
David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke had both been attempting to write Doctor Who properties (since the programme's beginning in Hulke's case), including a rejected joint effort in 1966.[3] Instead, script editor Gerry Davis tasked the team with a story with a scientific concept and menace, as well as a singular set such as a department store.[4] Hulke and Ellis created a storyline called The Big Store in which the Chameleons took the form of mannequins.[5] Producer Innes Lloyd suggested the setting change to an airport instead and be a six-part story instead of four.[6] The story was officially commissioned as Dr Who & The Chameleons on 3 January 1967.[6] A storyline for the first four episodes was submitted 7 January.[6] Scripts were delivered from 24 to 31 January.[7]
Some of The Faceless Ones was filmed on location at Gatwick Airport in March 1967.[8]Heathrow also accepted the production team's offer, but the team chose Gatwick as the cost was lower. Doctor Who would later film at Heathrow for Time-Flight in 1982.
As The Macra Terror saw the debut of a new title sequence, The Faceless Ones saw the minor revision of the theme music that accompanied this new sequence introduced in Episode 2.[9]
Cast notes
Both Michael Craze and Anneke Wills were released from their contracts after episode 2, leading to their departures during this serial.[10] Their contracts originally ran out in episode two of the next serial, and they were compensated for this.[10] The characters appear in episode 6 in scenes shot on location prior to the studio recording.[11] Meanwhile, Frazer Hines was contracted through The Faceless Ones and the following serial, The Evil of the Daleks.[10]
Pauline Collins was offered the chance to continue playing the character of Sam Briggs as a new companion, but she declined the offer.[12] The character was originally named Cleopatra Briggs.[13] Collins guest-starred, years later, as Queen Victoria in "Tooth and Claw" (2006).[9][14]
The Faceless Ones was broadcast in weekly installments on BBC1 beginning on 8 April and ending on 13 May 1967.[17] The serial had ratings standard for the programme at the time with an average of 7.4 million; the first and sixth episodes had the highest rating at 8 million, while there were dips at episodes two and four with 6.4 and 6.9 million respectively.[18] Episode Six achieved the highest chart position at 33.[17] The Appreciation Index scores were an improvement on the previous serial.[19] On 10 May, the BBC Programme Review Board discussed Doctor Who's oscillating ratings between six and eight million, with head of drama serials Shaun Sutton commenting that he wanted them to stay closer to eight million.[19]
The serial was broadcast in Australia in October 1967, with Episode One receiving three edits to gain a G rating.[17] It was broadcast in Uganda, Singapore, and Hong Kong in 1969; it was also aired in Zambia by 1973.[17]
Reception
Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping gave the serial a favourable review in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), writing that "the realistic backdrop works very well, and the script is well constructed, augmented by the terrifying appearance of the aliens".[20] In The Television Companion (1998), David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker wrote that "the positive aspects of the story probably just about outweigh the negative."[21] They remarked that the "special effects tend to be rather lacklustre" and there was "far too much talk and not enough action to maintain the viewer's interest over the full six episodes."[21]
In 2009, Mark Braxton of Radio Times noted that there were plot holes but the story "unveils its mystery with ease and elegance".[8] Reviewing the animated reconstruction in 2020 for The Guardian, Martin Belam gave the serial three out of five stars, noting that "the story drags a little" and, aside from Pauline Collins, did not have a memorable guest cast.[22] Kayti Burt from Den of Geek noted that the serial had a "slow start," but it had "generally nail-biting moments of suspense," particularly in the fifth episode.[23]
In the Doctor Who Magazine poll for the show's 60th anniversary in 2023, The Faceless Ones was voted the fourteenth best story of the Second Doctor's tenure, out of a total of 21.[24]Charlie Jane Anders ranked the serial as the 244th best Doctor Who story (out of 254) and a "disappointment" in 2015, writing, "Ben and Polly wander out of the story halfway through, and you wish you could too."[25]
Missing episodes
Only episodes 1 and 3 of this serial exist in the BBC archives. All episodes besides the fifth were cleared for wiping on 21 July 1969; Episode Five was cleared 22 September 1969.[17] In addition to the complete version, the archives also holds an incomplete print of episode 1, returned from ABC in Australia in late 1978. The print itself was given to ABC from a private collector living in Australia. The Australian Film Censorship Board removed the following scenes: Spencer killing Inspector Gascoigne with a Chameleon ray-gun; the alien arm emerging from the cupboard; and panning shots of the alien figure (seen only from behind) at the end of the episode. The missing scenes were later recovered along with the other copy of episode 1. A copy of episode 3 was returned to the BBC in 1987 from a private collector living in the United Kingdom. However, 20 seconds of material is missing from episode 3, due to damage to the print. A brief, 3-second moment of the impostor Polly brushing off a remark from the Doctor survives from episode 2. Two brief plane shots used in episode 4 also survive.
The 2020 animated reconstruction aired in the United States on BBC America in two installments on 7 and 8 October 2020.[26]
A novelisation of this serial, written by Terrance Dicks, was published by Target Books and WH Allen in December 1986.[27] Hulke had been interested in novelising it in the 1970s, but he died in 1979.[27]
Home media
As with all missing episodes, off-air recordings of the soundtrack exist due to contemporary fan efforts. In February 2002 these were released on CD, accompanied by linking narration from Frazer Hines.[27] The soundtrack was also included in the 2012 CD Lost TV Episodes: Collection Four: 1967 from AudioGo, accompanied by PDFs of scripts and interviews with Hines and Wills.[27] In November 2003, episodes one and three of this serial were released on VHS by BBC Worldwide, along with episode one of The Web of Fear, as part of The Reign of Terror boxset;[28][27] this was the final VHS release, coinciding with the programme's fortieth anniversary.[28] In November 2004, the surviving episodes were included in the three-disc Lost in Time DVD set.[27]
A DVD and Blu-ray release occurred on 16 March 2020; this release included both surviving episodes accompanied by an animated version of all six episodes (using the original audio).[29] It was decided to animate all of the episodes despite two surviving to appeal to both new fans as well as the old.[26] Also included is the surviving footage and a photographic reconstruction of the missing episodes.[29]
Wright, Mark, ed. (2017). "The Macra Terror, The Faceless Ones, The Evil of the Daleks and The Tomb of the Cybermen". Doctor Who: The Complete History. Vol. 10, no. 49. London: Panini Comics, Hachette Partworks.
* Story is missing all episodes. † Missing content has been or is due to be reconstructed for commercial release using animation. ‡ Missing content has been or is due to be reconstructed for commercial release using available visual material.
