The Faceless Ones Episode 5

The one where the Doctor loses a third companion...

The Doctor proves to be a pretty ineffective force for good in this story. I've already written about how writers David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke seem obsessed with having the Doctor seek the support of the authorities, and despite making some of his own investigations last episode, he's still at it now, in episode 5, where he questions the fake Meadows in an effort to convince the Commandant once and for all that something alien is afoot. It doesn't make for very dynamic viewing when your hero spends most of his time lobbying middle managers.

"First Polly, then Ben, now Jamie!" laments the Doctor when Sam tells him that the Highlander has disappeared aboard Flight 419. The Doctor has been clumsily remiss with his burgeoning bunch of companions in this story. Not content to have one companion to get into danger, here he has no fewer than three, who he mislays with the greatest of ease. We haven't seen Ben or Polly since episode 3, and are to understand that they have been taken aboard the Chameleon satellite. Now Jamie's stowed aboard too.

Jamie's discovery on the satellite is a pretty startling one. Rifling through a filing cabinet he comes across drawers of miniaturised human passengers, represented as sweet little dollies on screen. Do the Chameleons have a Tissue Compression device, like the Master would in the future?

Fake Meadows lifts the lid on what the aliens are up to - it seems a giant explosion robbed his race of their identities, and their scientists developed a way to appropriate the physical characteristics of humans. But what I don't understand is why the Chameleons are called Chameleons? If they only developed their face-changing abilities as a result of the catastrophic explosion, it suggests they were not chameleonic beforehand. So why are they called that? Maybe they changed their race name to suit their new status, but it still begs the question of why the aliens don't have individual names. They may have lost their physical identities, but surely they still have names? All we ever know them as is their human counterparts' names (Blade, Pinto, Meadows, Jenkins etc), and the writers' refusal to give the creatures individuality leads to the awkward moment where the Doctor is able to pretend he is the same alien that copied Meadows - but he is still referred to by his alien colleagues as Meadows! Huh?

The Chameleons are pretty spooky though. The episode 1 cliffhanger still sticks in my mind as one of Doctor Who's eeriest, and the telesnaps for the missing episodes make them look mottled, mutated and facelessly unpleasant to look at. They could have been fantastic Doctor Who monsters if only we could see them properly!

Thanks to fake Meadows spilling the beans in a convenient eleventh hour info-dump, the Doctor ascertains that the Chameleons are nearing the completion of their plan to abduct and duplicate no fewer than 50,000 young people from Earth. How it got to the stage where 50,000 aeroplane passengers had gone missing during flights from Gatwick, and no international crisis alarm was raised, is too far-fetched. And the idea that the aliens have miniaturised 50,000 humans to the size of dollies and filed them in drawers on their spaceship is also a little silly, if practical. Maybe they shop at Ikea?

The plot continues to plod along steadily, with this episode's main revelation being that Inspector Crossland has been duplicated and his appearance adopted by the Chameleons' leader, the Director (he has a rank, if not a name!). Bernard Kay cleverly drops Crossland's Scottish accent to play the fake version, as does Frazer Hines when Jamie is duplicated.

The Doctor (pretending to be "Meadows") teams up with the real Nurse Pinto (pretending to be her fake self) to get aboard the last Chameleon Tours flight into space, and it's great to have another female presence in the mix. The Faceless Ones is a strong example of a Troughton story with more than one strong guest female credited (indeed, The Faceless Ones is the Second Doctor's most feminine story, with a full 30% of the credited cast being female), although Ellis and Hulke seem unable to juggle more than one woman at a time (Polly disappears and is replaced by Sam; Sam loses prominence once Nurse Pinto returns etc). But once aboard the satellite, the infiltrators are soon rumbled by a sly Captain Blade, who made me laugh with his less-than-subtle way of saying he's going to kill them. "You two won't be needing living space," he smarms.

I'm intrigued as to what the mysterious "cargo" is that has caused the Chameleons to have to change their living conditions aboard the satellite. I look forward to finding out in the "gripping finale"!

First broadcast: May 6th, 1967

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: It's great to have the Doctor actually get physically involved at last, but even then it's right at the end of episode 5.
The Bad: Am I going crazy or does Patrick Troughton keep saying "comedians" instead of "Chameleons"? There's also some poor script editing when the Doctor has to get Meadows to tell him where the real Nurse Pinto is hidden - he's already found her hidden in the medical bay in episode 4!
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆

NEXT TIME: Episode 6...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Episode 1; Episode 2; Episode 3; Episode 4; Episode 6

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: http://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/the-faceless-ones.html

The Faceless Ones is available on BBC soundtrack CD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Faceless-Frazer-Hines/dp/0563535016. Episode 1 and 3 are the only surviving episodes, and can be found on the Lost in Time DVD box set here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Lost-Time-DVD/dp/B0002XOZW4