Doctor Who A-Z #35: The Faceless Ones (1967)

The Patrick Troughton era had no right to start off as well as it did. It’s not just that regenerating the Doctor was an insane gamble to begin with, though it was. It’s that Troughton tumbles into what seemed to be another season of William Hartnell just two stories in and instantly makes the whole show his own. The Power of the Daleks is absolutely the first Troughton story in ways that – say – Deep Breath isn’t quite the first Peter Capaldi story; it sets out the agenda the rest of this era will follow, rather than tidying up the loose ends of the previous age.

This seems to have caught some of the production team by surprise. There are two more stories in Season Four that already feel quintessentially Troughtonian – The Moonbase and The Macra Terror – but to get there you have to go through two stories which would fit snugly into any given Hartnell season but are wildly out of place here. Moreover, the last two stories are designed to dispense with characters from the First Doctor’s era; the “final end” of the Daleks in The Evil of the Daleks, and the departure of Ben and Polly in The Faceless Ones.

As a result, it can be hard to work out what standards we’re meant to judge The Faceless Ones by. As a valediction for Ben and Polly, it’s absolutely pitiful. Polly, in particular, jumps right into the action, uncovering an alien murder at Gatwick and being duplicated by the alien Chameleons, then… disappearing until episode six, where the Doctor suggests she might want to stay behind on Earth to look after Ben. Oh, OK then. Ben and Polly might not be top-tier companions, but they represent Doctor Who‘s most focused effort to date at imagining the kind of contemporary kids who watch this show. Surely treating them in this way is an expression of contempt for the audience?

Well, you’d have to ask the audience. I’m not the biggest fan of social realism in my adult life, but as a kid I was fanatically opposed to anything that was trying to be ‘relevant’ or ‘gritty’. Had I been watching this in the late ’60s, I would have heartily approved of binning off the two club kids in favour of the Jacobite soldier from the sixteenth century, particularly when Jamie is as entertaining as he is here. Indeed, removing the companions from a modern social context allows them to be more rebellious without fear of attracting the attention of BBC Standards and Practices. Initially suspicious of the 20th century, Jamie comes to life when an attractive Scouse girl – a young Pauline Collins! – starts flirting with him. At one point he kisses her in order to pickpocket her, an action which is completely justifiable in the context of the story, but is still the sort of thing that – say – Ian or Dodo wouldn’t have been allowed to do.

The other big signpost for the future here is Malcolm Hulke. The script is co-credited to him and David Ellis, a writer who’d been relentlessly pitching at the production offices for the whole of the Hartnell years. Ellis moved on once he’d achieved his goal, but Hulke became one of the show’s stalwart writers. He was actually my favourite Doctor Who writer as a child, which has less to do with the quality of his scripts (although they were often very good) and more to do with the Target novelisations that were the easiest way for me to get hold of many stories in those pre-Britbox days. Hulke took a great joy in reshaping his stories for the novel format, a process that sometimes involved expanding them to include scenes the BBC would never permit or afford.

Sometimes, though, it involved doing the exact opposite, which leads us to Hulke’s Achilles heel as a scriptwriter. It’s not a bad flaw to have – he was just slightly too good at banging these things out, to the point where the production team took it for granted that he could fill up a six or seven-parter with ease. And he did – certainly The Celestial Toymaker racks up more pointless filler in four episodes than Hulke’s The Silurians does in seven. He might be alone among Doctor Who‘s stalwart writers in never writing a four-parter, and there are stories where you wish he had, if only to have a comparison point. The Faceless Ones is one of those stories. It has lots of interesting ideas and set-pieces, but this isn’t a six-parter because it has a fearsomely intricate plot or a broad cast of characters. It’s a six-parter because script editor Gerry Davis suggested they film it at Gatwick Airport, and when you’re filming at Gatwick Airport you want to get your money’s worth out of it.

And yet there is still plenty of promise here. Even with a co-writer Hulke’s first story has a pleasing dose of his eccentricities. He loves to pit the Doctor against institutions, which in the Pertwee era would become a substantial pleasure – who doesn’t enjoy watching an arrogant alien in a velvet jacket yell at boring bureaucrats? With Troughton’s more humble Doctor, though, it just looks like someone arguing about their flight. This aspect of Hulke’s writing needed a change of leading man before it caught fire. The other quirk of his that pops up in The Faceless Ones, though, is very interesting.

The opening episodes of The Faceless Ones lean very heavily on the series’ still-developing horror style. The Chameleons look like burn victims in their natural state, and the scenes of them transforming into human replicas are extremely unnerving. The core idea of whole planeloads of people vanishing is disturbing now, but it must have hit extra-hard in the Golden Age of air travel. Yet the Chameleons are not all bad, just as the Silurians and the Draconians would be redeemable in Hulke’s later stories. The other half of the equation – that Hulke’s humans would often be significantly worse than the series norm at the time – isn’t quite in place yet, but this is still a remarkable twist for a show that, in its next season, would go all-in on scary evil monsters as its core subject matter. Not only does Season Four establish the Troughton era, then, but in this story it establishes the post-Troughton era, a preview of what Doctor Who would be about as it moved into the 1970s.

Next: The Evil of the Daleks (1967).

Graham’s Archive – The Faceless Ones

Full Doctor Who Archive Here