The Faceless Ones
Aliens at Gatwick Airport steal identities of young travellers.
The Faceless Ones is the eighth serial of the fourth season of Doctor Who, first broadcast in 1967. It is notable for featuring the departure of companions Ben and Polly and for being mostly missing from the BBC archives, with only two of six episodes surviving. An animated reconstruction of the missing episodes was released in 2020.
Quick Facts
- Number
- 035
- Doctor
- Patrick Troughton – Second Doctor
- Companions
- Anneke Wills – Polly
- Michael Craze – Ben Jackson
- Frazer Hines – Jamie McCrimmon
- Director
- Gerry Mill
- Writer
- David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke
- Script editor
- Gerry Davis
- Producer
- Innes Lloyd; Peter Bryant (associate producer, episodes 1–3)
- Series
- Season 4
Facts from the source article.
Plot
The TARDIS lands on a runway at Gatwick Airport. The Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie split up when a police officer approaches. Polly enters the Chameleon Tours hangar and sees Spencer commit a murder, then reports to his superior Captain Blade. She returns with the Doctor and Jamie to find the body, but airport authorities impound the TARDIS. The murder weapon is extraterrestrial. Blade captures Polly unnoticed. Nurse Pinto brings in unconscious air traffic controller Meadows to be replaced by an alien duplicate. The Doctor and Jamie meet Samantha Briggs, searching for her missing brother. Ben finds Polly suspended in a cabinet and is captured. The Doctor meets DI Crossland, also investigating Chameleon Tours. The murder victim is Crossland's missing partner Gascoigne. The Airport Commandant allows an investigation. Samantha and Jamie find fake postcards. Blade captures Crossland, Spencer captures Samantha, and Jamie boards a plane. Emerging from the toilet, Jamie finds passengers miniaturised by Blade's assistant Ann, who catches him. The Doctor captures Meadows' double and threatens to remove his life-support armband. The alien explains their home world was destroyed by an explosion; they use comatose humans in orbit to survive. The Doctor and the duplicate rescue the real Pinto, causing her double to disintegrate. Pinto frees Samantha. Jamie meets the Director disguised as Crossland and is replicated. The Doctor and Pinto board the last flight to space; Blade sends Chameleons after them. The Doctor offers to spare the aliens in exchange for the humans. One alien disintegrates when Samantha finds the real staff in the car park. Blade and Spencer rebel, killing the Director and Chameleon Jamie. The originals revive. Crossland stays behind. The Doctor, Jamie and Pinto return with freed humans. At the airport, Ben and Polly learn the date is 20 July 1966, when they first left in the TARDIS. They depart for home. The Doctor discovers the TARDIS has been stolen.
Production
David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke had each tried to write for Doctor Who since its beginning; a joint effort was rejected in 1966. Script editor Gerry Davis asked for a story with a scientific concept and menace set in a single location like a department store. Hulke and Ellis created The Big Store, with Chameleons as mannequins. Producer Innes Lloyd changed the setting to an airport and expanded the story to six parts. The story was officially commissioned as Dr Who & The Chameleons on 3 January 1967. A storyline for the first four episodes was submitted on 7 January; scripts were delivered from 24 to 31 January. Location filming occurred at Gatwick Airport in March 1967. Heathrow had also been considered but Gatwick was cheaper. Doctor Who later filmed at Heathrow for Time-Flight in 1982. The serial introduced a minor revision of the theme music in Episode 2, following a new title sequence debut in The Macra Terror. Michael Craze and Anneke Wills were released from their contracts after episode 2, leading to their departures; their contracts originally ran out in episode two of the next serial, and they were compensated. Their characters appear in episode 6 in location scenes shot before studio recording. Frazer Hines was contracted through this serial and The Evil of the Daleks. Pauline Collins was offered the role of Sam Briggs as a new companion but declined; the character was originally named Cleopatra Briggs. Collins later guest-starred as Queen Victoria in "Tooth and Claw" (2006). Bernard Kay appears as Inspector Crossland, having previously played Tyler in The Dalek Invasion of Earth and Saladin in The Crusade. Donald Pickering and Wanda Ventham later starred as husband and wife in Time and the Rani; Pickering had appeared as Eyesen in The Keys of Marinus, and Ventham later played Thea Ransom in Image of the Fendahl. Christopher Tranchell previously appeared as Roger Colbert in The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve and later returned as Andred in The Invasion of Time.
Broadcast, reception and archive
The Faceless Ones was broadcast weekly on BBC1 from 8 April to 13 May 1967. Ratings averaged 7.4 million; episodes one and six reached 8 million, while episodes two and four dipped to 6.4 and 6.9 million respectively. Episode Six achieved the highest chart position at 33. Appreciation Index scores improved over the previous serial. On 10 May, the BBC Programme Review Board discussed the show's oscillating ratings; head of drama serials Shaun Sutton wanted them closer to 8 million. The serial aired in Australia in October 1967, with Episode One receiving three edits for a G rating. It was broadcast in Uganda, Singapore, and Hong Kong in 1969, and in Zambia by 1973. Paul Cornell, Martin Day, and Keith Topping gave a favourable review in The Discontinuity Guide (1995), praising the realistic backdrop and well-constructed script. David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker in The Television Companion (1998) felt positive aspects outweighed negative, but noted lacklustre special effects and too much talk. Mark Braxton of Radio Times in 2009 noted plot holes but praised the mystery's elegance. Martin Belam in The Guardian (2020) gave the animated reconstruction three stars, finding the story slow and the guest cast unmemorable aside from Pauline Collins. Kayti Burt from Den of Geek noted a slow start but nail-biting suspense in episode five. In the 2023 Doctor Who Magazine poll, The Faceless Ones ranked fourteenth best Second Doctor story out of 21. Charlie Jane Anders ranked it 244th out of 254 in 2015, calling it a disappointment.
Commercial releases
A novelisation of this serial, written by Terrance Dicks, came out from Target Books and WH Allen in December 1986. Malcolm Hulke had wanted to write a novelisation in the 1970s but passed away in 1979. Off-air audio recordings, made by fans at the time, survive; these were issued on CD in February 2002 with linking narration by Frazer Hines. The same soundtrack later appeared on the 2012 CD Lost TV Episodes: Collection Four: 1967 from AudioGo, which also included PDFs of scripts and interviews with Hines and Wills. In November 2003, episodes one and three were released on VHS as part of The Reign of Terror boxset, marking the final VHS release. The surviving episodes were then included in the three-disc Lost in Time DVD set in November 2004. A DVD and Blu-ray set arrived on 16 March 2020, featuring both surviving episodes alongside an animated version of all six episodes (using the original audio) with a redesigned look for the alien Chameleons. The decision to animate all episodes, despite two surviving, aimed to attract both new and old fans. This release also contained the surviving footage and a photographic reconstruction of the missing episodes.
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