Day 82 — March 23rd 2021
The Faceless Ones Episodes Five and Six
The Faceless Ones — Episode Five
Once again, we’ve got loads of great ideas in this one, and I’d love to see them properly. I’m particularly keen on Jamie discovering the drawers of miniaturised humans. The tele-snaps for that moment look really effective, to the point that I can’t actually tell if it’s really people all laying together or if they’ve used dolls. It intrigues me because seeing it actually move would either make that moment brilliantly scary or vaguely ridiculous. I’m torn there — I’d love to see it, but I’m not sure it would be a good thing! I’d completely forgotten about the teenagers being shrunk on the way to the Chameleon’s satellite, and was even a bit confused when the plane suddenly appeared empty a couple of episodes back, because I could remember it transforming into a rocket.
I’m also quite keen on the idea of a ray gun being pulled on a policeman, and I wonder if this got some complaints at the time? We know that there was concern about the surgery in The Underwater Menace being portrayed as something scary, and here we’ve got a sinister nurse actively trying to kill a policeman. The series isn’t going out of its way to make people like healthcare professionals at this point, is it?
Nurse Pinto might be my favourite character in the story at this point though, because there’s something wonderfully creepy about her. The tele-snap of her pointing the ray gun is especially scary. I love that she keeps her human ‘original’ hidden in a closet, and it’s a nice way of signposting the idea that the originals are going to be key to saving the day in the next episode. I’d love to see her being dissolved when Doctor Who tampers with the arm band on her human form, but the tele-snaps don’t seem to cover that moment very well.
Most of this story continues to be a mystery to me — I can’t remember very much of it at all. For today’s episode, I’d completely forgotten that Jamie gets replaced with a Chameleon duplicate. I could remember Polly’s transformation earlier in the story, but this one came as a real surprise for me. They repeat the ‘losing his accent’ gimmick from The Macra Terror, and while it feels as though it should be really effective, it falls a little flat by being replicated so close to that story. I really enjoy Doctor Who pointing it out as a flaw, though;
Doctor Who: ‘I don’t think you’ve done a very good job on him.’
Director: ‘Why not?’
Doctor Who: ‘Well you’ve lost his Scots accent in the process. Oh, I much preferred the original.’
Troughton plays the moment with a great deal of fun, and it somehow feels right for his Doctor Who where I can’t imagine Hartnell doing that same brief moment.
The biggest issue with having our key players on the Chameleon Sattelite, and having Jamie taken over by them, is that it makes the absence of Ben and Polly all the more noticeable. Doctor Who muses that they’ve all been taken over (‘First Polly and Ben, now Jamie. We’ve no time to lose…’), but I want to see them! I want him to walk into a room and find all his friends waiting for him with ray guns pointed, all of them duplicates! I can’t help but feel like we’re missing a trick by not having that happen here, especially as Anneke Wills and Michael Craze were still under contract at this stage.
I’ve another favourite piece of dialogue to mention here — ‘He is not of this Earth or of this century. He has travelled through time and space. His knowledge is even greater than ours.’ — but the story still isn’t grabbing me as much as I think it should. I’m honestly baffled as to why, given that all the elements seem to be in place for me to rate this as an absolute favourite and all the notes I’ve been making are along the lines of ‘love this’ and ‘that’s great’.
I’m wondering if it may be worth picking up the animation of the story, and seeing if that gives it a boost for me? I’ve heard two opinions on it from different friends — one said it’s the best animation to date and is a great watch, the other said it killed the story dead for him, so who knows!
I will be doing an animation during Season Five, because it’s always good to give new things a try, so perhaps if that’s successful then this will be one to give another try next year once the marathon is over. Eaglemoss have recently revealed that the Chameleon figure they’re producing for their collection is to be based on the animated design rather than the one from the 1960s, and I think it looks pretty awesome, so that’s another point in favour of the animation.
Equally, it might be that watching this again at another time — out of context from the rest of Season Four — gives it a boost anyway. As much as I’ve loved this season, and this line up of regulars, sometimes you can find a bit of fatigue sets in, so you end up not appreciating things as much as you could. It honestly might be that we’ve had so many great episodes in a row that this just feels par for the course.
A 7/10 for this one. It’s a step up from the last pair of episodes, but it’s not as high as I’d like, or as I suspect it deserves…
The Faceless Ones — Episode Six
The narration really threw me during the cliffhanger to Episode Five and the reprise at the start here. It describes Doctor Who and Nurse Pinto being surrounded by Chameleons in their ‘raw state template’ form, and it niggled in the back of my mind because I’ve never imagined there ever being more than one.
It’s curious, but because we’ve only a single photograph of the Chameleon (taken, judging from the background, during this sequence) and we only see the one in the surviving episodes, it doesn’t feel like there’s lots of them. I’ll admit that I wasn’t looking at the tele-snaps while listening to this one (I was doing the washing up), but when I checked in afterwards I was surprised to discover that they weren’t surrounded by ‘raw state’ Chameleons at all — they’re menaced by the single one we’ve seen photographed and a handful in the guise of various airport personnel.
And d’you know what? It looked better in my head, based on the description given in the narration! I pictured the pair surrounded by three or four of the creatures, shuffling towards them from all directions, and it has to be said that they look a darn sight scarier than anyone dressed as a pilot!
That said, we do have a load of great images in this episode as broadcast, and they’re ones which I don’t think would feel out of place in something like The Avengers or Adam Adamant Lives!. Finding the human originals all sat in their cars in the car park is wonderfully sinister, and I don’t think there’s anywhere else I’d like them to have turned up. A little later on, all these people get laid out on the car park floor and it feels so unusual for Doctor Who that it almost feels more like Doctor Who than anything else. An alien invasion that all comes to a head in the car park at Gatwick Airport. Brilliant!
It does make the Chameleons’ brag that ‘Their originals are perfectly safe, hidden on Gatwick Airport where they will never be found’ a bit silly and boastful… but I think that’s sort of the point. They’ve spent a lot of time in both of today’s episodes proclaiming themselves to be the most intelligent creatures in the universe, so it’s only fitting that they should be revealed to be a bit thick. I especially like the director suggesting that Doctor Who is ‘up against a mind superior even to his’. With a boast like that, you’re bound to fail.
I really enjoyed all the bluffing and negotiation in this episode, and one of the Chameleons being destroyed as proof that the authorities on Earth really have found the originals. It’s a brilliantly tense bit of plotting, but after that… well it all seems to end quite quickly. Indeed, I only listened to it an hour ago and i’ve already sort of forgotten how things were actually resolved.
Of course the big thing to talk about here is the departure of Ben and Polly. I touched on it a couple of days ago, as we only get the one brief scene here, but it does feel like such a sad way to see them go. Especially as they don’t really discuss the decision to stay behind — Polly doesn’t even react when Ben tells her they’re in 1966. I feel like we needed an earlier scene of them deciding to stay behind now they’ve made it home, and if they’d not been so unceremoniously dropped after Episode Two, maybe meeting Sam Briggs and thinking about her brother might have pushed them in deciding to go and see their own families.
I’m going with a 6/10 for this final episode, meaning that The Faceless Ones has an overall score of 6.17/10. That feels about right. It’s a story packed with great ideas and dialogue, and I feel genuinely baffled to have not enjoyed it more than I have. Maybe that’s the way of things sometimes? It feels like a sad way to end Ben and Polly’s time, with more of a whimper than a bang. I’m definitely adding it to the list to be revisited again in future, and I’m really looking forward to finding out what I thought of it last time I ‘watched’, given that I’d forgotten so much of it this time around!
