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?

"Doctor, what happened?" questions Leela. "I'm rather afraid I did," he replies. The Mordee expedition became stranded on this planet, and while the technicians stayed with the ship, the survey team went out to explore. The technicians tried to fix the broken ship's computer, but over time the computer evolved into its own, new species, becoming a living creature (essentially artificial intelligence). The computer, Xoanon, had only just been "born" when the Doctor arrived, and was still in shock. In an effort to help, the Doctor programmed Xoanon with his own brain pattern, but this gave the computer his personality. It then began to develop its own separate personality, until it ultimately became schizophrenic, a living computer creature with a split personality. And all because the Doctor interfered, or, as he says himself: "I thought I was helping."

This is all wonderfully intelligent stuff, proper science-fiction which pushes the viewer to think, especially younger viewers. And the implications are fascinating: the entire civilisation has come about due to the Doctor's intervention, and he barely even remembers visiting. It's a wonderful example of the consequences the Doctor must face when travelling unchallenged through time and space, impacting on every time and place he visits, but never stopping to consider the after-effects of what he's done. It's the sort of thing the series would focus on more and more, in the 1980s and beyond, and is an early example of a scriptwriter stepping outside of the normal Doctor Who box and thinking about the Doctor as a character, and the life he chooses to lead.

The Tesh and their spaceship are aesthetically underwhelming, and John Bloomfield's costume design for the Tesh is particularly poor. I mean, mint green pumps? And the regularity with which the Tesh enact their sacred greeting is annoyingly frequent. Why do the Tesh have yellow skin? And why does Jabel brand the Doctor an enemy of Xoanon as soon as the Doctor insists it is Xoanon who opened the barrier, and not the Sevateem? It's a little muddled as to why the Tesh see the Doctor as an enemy, when at first they see him as a god.

The Doctor goes to see Xoanon to try and work things out, leaving Leela outside to guard the door against Tesh snipers. That makes it sound infinitely more exciting than it is, because Pennant Roberts directs these "battle" scenes so limply that it's actually really dull. We're supposed to believe the Tesh are an army of crack marksmen with guile on their side, but they're actually a bunch of inept buffoons in mint green pumps.

The cliffhanger has the Doctor confronting Xoanon, and the wall-sized projections of the Doctor's face that surround him as the computer's overlapping voices drown the room are really effective. And then everything goes quiet for the one, final "Who am I?", voiced by an innocent boy-child (actually Anthony Frieze, the young winner of a competition to visit the Doctor Who set). It's a chilling moment, suggesting that Xoanon has developed yet another new personality (he already has three others, voiced so far by Tom Baker, Pamela Salem and Rob Edwards (all of whom would pop up in the flesh in the next story)).

While I think the depiction of the Tesh and their overlit spaceship corridors is disappointing, the plot itself, and the ideas at its heart, fascinate and inspire me, and I can't praise Chris Boucher enough for injecting some intellectual sci-fi into Doctor Who at a time when it was becoming highly derivative.

First broadcast: January 15th, 1977

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: "Who am I?"
The Bad: John Bloomfield's Tesh costumes are awful.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 06

NEXT TIME: Part Four...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Four

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: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/07/the-face-of-evil.html

The Face of Evil is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-Face-Evil-DVD/dp/B006LI4XG2