Review of The Faceless Ones (#35)

DVD Release Date: 20 Oct 20
Original Air Date: 08 Apr – 13 May 1967
Doctors/Companions: Two, Ben Jackson, Polly Wright, Jamie McCrimmon
Stars: Patrick Troughton, Michael Craze, Anneke Wills, Fraser Hines
Preceding Story: The Macra Terror (Two, Ben, Polly, Jamie)
Succeeding Story: The Evil of the Daleks (Two, Jamie, Victoria)

Welcome to the first installment of the new review series Highs & Lows! We’re starting off with a story only recently added to the DVD ranks with an animated reconstruction. The Faceless Ones is a six-part Second Doctor story with only two extant episodes, but the animation team has recreated all six episodes for this late-2020 release. One has the choice to watch the story with the existing episodes (1 and 3) interspersed, or as a fully animated version.

Although it is certainly not the first such reconstruction, the animation here is less to my taste than some of the others. The movement and detailing of the scenes is fine, and certainly didn’t bother me, but I don’t find the character design particularly flattering to the original actors. I kept getting distracted by Jamie’s or the Doctor’s oddly-shaped faces.

Looking beyond the mechanics of the reconstruction to the story itself, though, I find it surprising that its ranking on the io9 list is so low (#244 of 254). Charlie Jane Anders, the list’s author, says that the main premise of The Faceless Ones, in which young people’s forms are being copied as new identities for aliens “isn’t enough of a plot to sustain six episodes.” (She ranks Terror of the Zygons at #84. I guess those two extra episodes were too much.)

But I didn’t think Faceless Ones was particularly slow. In fact, although it is my usual practice to watch an adventure I’m reviewing at 1.5x speed (I’ve seen them all several times, and it reduces my time commitment without impacting watchability), I often found things moving a little faster than I’d have liked in order to take proper notes that way. Perhaps that can be put down to my particular state of mind when I watched, but to be honest, I straight up enjoyed this story more than I expected to.

For me, a great deal of what made it enjoyable was the inclusion of almost-Companion Samantha “Sam” Briggs, played by the fabulous Pauline Collins (whom new-Who-only fans would recognize as Queen Victoria from the Tenth Doctor and Rose adventure Tooth and Claw.) She has all the qualities one usually looks for in a Companion: perseverance, intelligence, a willingness to stand up to others, and a hint of recklessness. Plus, she and Jamie get to have a couple of brief smoochies (which, sadly, are both in the missing episodes).

I’m given to understand that Pauline Collins was actually offered a chance to become a regular Companion, but chose to turn it down. While I totally respect that decision, I kind of wish we’d had more of Sam; she’s a great character whom I’d have loved to see again. (Of course, that might have thrown an early wrench into the “no hanky-panky in the TARDIS” rule that seemed so important in the later days of the Classic era, but I digress.)

At any rate, Sam serves as the catalyst for moving the plot forward more than once, and it’s clear she’s a bright, self-sufficient young woman. Her inclusion gives Facless Ones all the hallmarks of a Companion introduction story, and I’m here for it.

Meanwhile, outgoing Companions Ben and Polly are almost immediately sidelined. Ben gets maybe three minutes of total screen time (barely an exaggeration), while Polly gets a slightly bigger role. She is the first to find the aliens’ air charter company Chameleon Tours, and she is also the first to get copied where the Doctor (and the audience) can notice. Chameleon-Polly has decent screen time in Episode Two, but both Ben and Polly disappear at the end of that episode until the very end of the story.

At that point, they discover the date is July 20, 1966—the very day they first met the Doctor and all of their adventures began. They choose to part ways with the Doctor and remain at home in London in a logical but unsatisfying conclusion to their TARDIS tenure. Then the Doctor and Jamie wander off in search of the TARDIS.

While Anders is correct that the plot of Faceless Ones is not complex, I still found it engaging. Even if it’s not one of Troughton’s best stories (he has a lot of really good ones), I think it’s more of a relative Low than the overall Low Anders claims; it would probably be regarded more highly if the Companions had had a complete changing of the guard, rather than Ben & Polly kind of just disappearing from view and Sam not coming on board. Even so, I’m glad we got as much of Sam as we did. In my book, even she alone is enough make The Faceless Ones worth the watch.