The Face of Evil Part Four

The one where the Doctor removes himself from the mind of Xoanon...

Pennant Roberts, a director new to Doctor Who, was not the best at fight or action scenes (prime evidence: Warriors of the Deep). The struggle at the start of this episode between the Doctor, Leela and the Tesh is staged quite clumsily, with very little natural fluidity. The stuntman was Terry Walsh, who I'm guessing also arranged the fight scene, but this time around Walsh fails abysmally, perhaps restricted by the set, who knows? The struggle ends with the Doctor pushing the Tesh against the wall, which Xoanon has made lethal, and so yet again the Doctor is responsible for somebody's death (albeit in self-defence).

Meanwhile, the Sevateem are making their way through the mouth of the idol towards the Tesh ship, and when Calib and Tomas see the (really unconvincing model of a) Mordee ship, they realise that the Doctor was right all along. The ship, to them, is the gateway to paradise, and it's both heartening and tragic to see everything seer Neeva believes unravel before him. He now realises Xoanon is his enemy, and is determined to seek revenge for his tribe.

The Face of Evil Part Three

The one where the Doctor realises this is all his fault...

The lumbering shadow turns out to be a man in a spacesuit resembling the one worn by Neeva as a sacred garment. It's at this point that the Doctor sees a spaceship on a distant plain beyond the mountain, in a model shot which looks simply awful. It's a very plain plain indeed, and looks just like a toy spaceship, having no sense of scale or environment. When he sees the ship, it all comes back to him: "I remember now. The Mordee expedition. And I thought I was helping them."

We discover in this episode that everything we see on this planet has come about through the past involvement of the Doctor. The Sevateem, the Tesh, the time barrier, the mountain idol, Xoanon and the Evil One, they're all a direct result of the Doctor's previous visitation. Ironically, he has failed to recall this previous visit until now, until he sees the Mordee ship. You'd have though his memory would have been jogged by the word "Xoanon" more than the distant view of a spaceship, but who am I to question the way the Doctor's mind works?

The Face of Evil Part Two

The one where the Doctor faces the Test of the Horda...

It's so intriguing that the Doctor cannot remember how his face came to be carved into the side of a mountain on an alien planet he's never been to before. It's like something Steven Moffat would write, pulling the audience in with a seemingly impossible truth, then showing how that impossibility is possible (although with Moffat, the solution wasn't always very clear to me!).

I love the relationship that's developed so easily and swiftly between the Doctor and Leela. It feels like they have been companions for longer than one episode, the two actors appear to be quite at ease in one another's company. The thing is, I know that this was not the case, that Tom Baker was quite dismissive of Louise Jameson, feeling the character was not needed and that he could carry the series by himself. Behind the scenes, tensions ran high, so the fact the Doctor and Leela seem to gel so well on screen is testament to the professionalism of both actors. I think the tension would be more evident in other stories, but here, it feels lovely.

The Face of Evil Part One

The one where the Doctor is mistaken for the Evil One...

There was a whole seven weeks between the end of The Deadly Assassin and the start of this next adventure, putting a sizeable gap right in the middle of Season 14. People didn't mind so much back then. There'd been a three-week pause over the Christmas period during Season 13, and the same would happen with Seasons 15 and 18 (indeed, Warriors' Gate was even promoted as the first in a "new season" of Doctor Who). When it came to inserting a pause of a few months into the middle of Series 6 in 2011, fandom was in uproar, but even that was nothing in comparison to the immense gaps between series these days (entire years can pass without so much as a peep from the Doctor).

The Face of Evil opens with an argument between a bunch of scantily-clad primitive types who accuse the beautiful Leela of blasphemy, by claiming their god Xoanon is not real. Leader Andor intends to cast Leela out from the tribe, and her father Sole agrees to take the Test of the Horda in his daughter's place (after both Leela and her maybe-boyfriend Tomas both declined!). Within minutes of the episode opening, Leela's father has been killed and she is ejected from her tribe into the jungle wilderness. And to top it off, the unpleasant shaman Neeva instructs two tribesmen to go after her and kill her!