The Faceless Ones

Have you considered the possibility that they went up?

I was surprised as to how much I liked this story. It doesn't get a lot of discussion other than it being the story where Ben and Polly leave and being the second of three tie-ins to July 20, 1966. But it was quite enjoyable.

Plot Summary

The Doctor and his companions land in the middle of a airport runway. Attempting to avoid arrest, the group splits up. Polly hides in a hanger and witnesses a man being shot with a ray gun. She flees and tells the Doctor. The Doctor, Jamie and Polly go to the hanger to examine the body. After leaving to go tell the authorities, Polly is abducted by the murderers and replaced with a double. The Doctor finds the authorities but they don't believe his story and when they examine the hanger, the body is gone and the evidence of the crime dismissed. The two men who murdered the third then take a faceless alien up to the medical area where he is hooked up to a machine with an air traffic controller. The machine transfers the image of the controller and his memories into the alien who then poses as the controller.

The Doctor, Jamie and Ben split up to investigate. Jamie goes to the Chameleon Tours kiosk where he keeps an eye on "Polly". There he meets a woman named Samantha who is looking for her brother who has disappeared. Ben sneaks back into the Chameleon Tours hanger and discovers Polly in a trance, packed in a crate. Ben attempts to contact the Doctor but is captured. The Doctor attempts to see the Commandant of the airport but must flee before being arrested again. He does catch the attention of a detective-inspector who is looking for a colleague of his (the man who was murdered). The Doctor meets Jamie and sneaks into the Chameleon Tours offices. He sees Ben being captured and hurries to the hanger where he also finds people in a trance and packed in crates. Lured by a call for help, he is trapped in an office which begins to fill with freezing gas.

The Doctor stops the cold gas with his handkerchief and is released from the sealed room by Jamie. The Doctor sends Jamie and Samantha back to the kiosk to learn anything and the two discover that postcards are written by the passengers before they leave and then posted from the foreign location to make it appear that they have arrived. The Doctor presents this evidence which convinces the detective-inspector to go to Chameleon Tours himself. Jamie, the Doctor, and Samantha head back over to look for additional evidence at the Chameleon hanger but are overpowered by Captain Blade, the head of the Chameleon operation. Meanwhile the detective-inspector watches from the cockpit as the passengers seemingly disappear.

The Doctor, Jamie, and Sam are set up to be burned by a laser when they manage to free themselves using a mirror from Sam's bag. Sam goes and buys a ticket on the next Chameleon flight to find her brother but when learning of her plan, Jamie steals it and goes aboard the plane himself. Sam learns of this when she tries to board and finds her ticket missing. But Captain Blade allows her back where she is captured again. The Doctor, having learned that operations are tied to the medical facility, enlists the aid of the Commandant's secretary and he sneaks into the ward. There he finds equipment for identity transference, which had just been used on another airport employee. He takes some of the equipment and heads back to the control tower. The Commandant has grown suspicious enough that he has requested an RAF fighter to tail the next Chameleon flight (the one Jamie is on). On the flight, Jamie gets queasy and goes to the bathroom. While in there, the rest of the passengers disappear and Captain Blade shoots down the RAF fighter with an electric weapon similar to the ray gun. The plane then climbs straight up into the docking bay of a space ship.

After seeing what happened, the Doctor convinces the Commandant to interrogate one of the air traffic control workers. When confronted with the arm bands the Doctor stole from the medical bay, he tries to run. He is restrained and tells of how they had abducted 50,000 young people for substitution due to their own planet dying. The Doctor and the police then go to the medical bay where the Chameleon nurse is subdued and the real nurse brought back around. Jamie meanwhile escaped the plane but is recaptured after finding the miniaturized bodies of the passengers. He finds the director of the overall mission has taken over the body of the Detective-Inspector and Jamie himself is then taken over. The Doctor learns that the Chameleon people are preparing to leave and he and the nurse board the last plane pretending to be doubles. Blade lets them come although he knows they are faking and takes them captive upon landing in the space ship.

Under orders from the Doctor before he left, the Commandant has the police and airport staff look for the bodies of the doubled workers. Samantha remembers something she saw in the Chameleon office and she and the Commandant's secretary Jean follow that to the airport parking lot. The Doctor meanwhile is going to be processed. He manages to sow doubt in minds of the crew who are dependent on the bodies left on Earth. They contact the airport and the Commandant attempts to bluff them. They don't believe him but the Doctor buys a bit more time by sabotaging the machine. The girls find the bodies in a group of cars in the parking lot and alert the police. As the Doctor is being set up to be transposed, the authorities remove one of the arm bands and one of the crew on the ship evaporates. Knowing they are not bluffing, Blade frees the Doctor and negotiates their release. They agree to let the captured people go in exchange for their lives. The Doctor even promises to offer a few suggestions to their scientists on how to survive their collapsing world. The Director and the Jamie Chameleon try to escape but Blade kills them. The Doctor then frees the real Jamie and detective-inspector. They return to the airport along with the first batch of unminiaturized passengers, which include Ben and Polly. Upon learning that it is the same day as when they left in The War Machines, Ben and Polly elect to say behind. The Doctor and Jamie say goodbye and then head off to find the TARDIS, which had been removed from where the police had taken it.

Analysis

Again, I am surprised as to how much I enjoyed this one. Being in a controlled location, it has an element of a base-under-siege story, but the threat is within rather than without and the primary enemy is time, both are elements that knock this story up a peg for me. I think it's greatest asset is the fact that that the Chameleons are not truly evil, they are just trying to survive. As a result, they never devolve into over-the-top antics or mustache-twirlyness. Captain Blade's cold resolve is far more effective than any maniacal laugh or other evil trope in expressing his power.

As might be expected, I didn't mind Ben and Polly being missing for four episodes as it kept the action tighter on the Doctor and Jamie. I also enjoyed Sam and I think she would have been a very good companion if she had elected to stay (supposedly she was offered the chance to be a companion but turned it down). She had very good chemistry with Jamie and it would have been interesting to see how the romantic element with Jamie would have played out over the future episodes.

Now there were a couple of downsides. Obviously the first is that only Episodes One and Three exist so you get bogged down in the recons. There is also a touch of bloat in Episodes three and four as there is some back and forth capturing and escaping and a slower play in finding out the full plans of the Chameleons. Four episodes might have been a bit rushed so I'd say it could have been done well in a five-parter. But it doesn't suffer overtly from that.

The story also peters out a little at the end. There is not much of a final confrontation and I thought Blade and the other Chameleons gave in a little too easy at the end. I wasn't expecting a big fire-fight or anything but after all that back and forth, I thought the Chameleons might resist a little more, resulting in a few more deaths. I wouldn't ding it significantly but a strong resolve would have been nice.

I would not say that this is a must for rewatch but I wouldn't have any problem watching it again if it were found. It might liven things up a bit to see the action when it is there rather than just have the stills shown. But it was a good story and not bad at all for a recon.

Overall personal score: 3.5 out of 5