Running Through Corridors: Rob and Toby's Marathon Watch of Doctor Who (Volume 1: The 60s) (51 page)

The Faceless Ones episode four

R:
I suppose you have a point, Toby... from our perspective as fans, we know that Ben and Polly are history, but the contemporary audience still doesn’t have a clue. And yet, I think that Jamie has an inkling; he’s now Top Companion, and he basks in it. There’s a greater ease and humour to Frazer Hines’ performance now that Jamie isn’t playing second fiddle to everyone else, and it’s the first sign of the Jamie that we’ll accept over the next couple of years as the second Doctor’s best friend – the cheeky boy with a protective eye for the girls. This week he gives a kiss to Pauline Collins – and picks her pocket in the process! It’s a far cry from the bemused kid who’d wonder if he’d meet the Man in the Moon, and who lay about in beds moaning for the Phantom Piper. I don’t know how Jamie gets away with it, but it might have something to do with his Scottish accent. I wish I sounded Scottish; it’s just so cool. Then I could have snogged and thieved like Jamie does. But I was born in Surrey, the blandest of the home counties. There’s little opportunity for snoggin’ and thievin’ in a county that gets excited by weekend visits to Croydon.

This is the mid-point of the story, and frankly it’s marking time. This is why the villains keep muttering darkly about how they should kill the Doctor, but always baulk at the chance, or decide to execute him in overelaborate ways involving moving lasers (without staying to watch, that typical failing of many a Bond villain). But the image at the end where the aeroplane just stops dead still in the air is wonderfully odd – as a mental image anyway, because from telesnaps alone it’s frankly hard to tell whether it actually looked good. And I love the way that Patrick Troughton charms Wanda Ventham, who here plays the Commandant’s secretary, into making a diversion so he can get into the medical bay. It’s a rare time when I’m actually glad the episode is missing from the archives; that telesnap he took of Ventham winking at the Doctor to let her know she’s faking may be the single sexiest thing John Cura did in his whole life... Oh, dear Jean Rock. What I wouldn’t have given to be Scottish at a moment like that.

And deliberate or not, I love the way that the script so subtly reveals that the bureaucratic jobsworth at immigration control in episode one is just someone who lives at home with his parents. It’s not necessarily meant to be pejorative – but it’s a lovely reminder that these figures of arrogant authority can really just be mother’s boys.

T:
Steamy Wanda Ventham aside, it’s all become a bit silly, hasn’t it? Despite my admiration for the actor playing him, Spencer now ranks amongst the stupidest alien henchman we’ve yet seen in the series. There’s a brilliant (for all the wrong reasons) moment where he says he’ll give Jamie just five seconds to obey, and Jamie replies that Spencer will just have to shoot him because he won’t leave the Doctor. Spencer then says, “I said five seconds...”, as if acknowledging that it’s Dim-Second-Fiddle-Alien etiquette to allow the heroes a window of opportunity to escape. And you’ve already mentioned the slow, unguarded death by laser, which saves me from frothing at the mouth and punching my monitor about it. It’s as if Malcolm Hulke and David Ellis aren’t able to pace the alien plot without making the Chameleons behave idiotically or slowly (or idiotically slowly, even). I do like, though, how it costs 28 quid to fly to Rome – does that include airport tax and luggage? You get the impression that Chameleon Tours are so evil, they don’t just indulge in a spot of kidnapping, they have all sorts of hidden charges and tariffs.

It redeems things immensely, though – as you’ve said – that the aeroplane turns into a spaceship. It’s pure, brilliant Doctor Who, isn’t it? I love it too, when the Doctor is told how a high current RAF fighter can climb, that he dismisses its abilities; it’s just like the Doctor to patronise modern-day technology, and it’s a stark reminder that no matter how clever and advanced we think we are, we’re in the company of someone who has seen the whole of space and time. The technological achievements of our brave new world – just like our petty squabbles over land or religious beliefs – can seem like trivial nothings in the context of the vast, boundless horizons that he’s witnessed. All this, and it’s the first acknowledgement of the existence of loos in Doctor Who! Ah, another milestone reached!

March 23rd

The Faceless Ones episode five

R:
It’s the third story in a row to deal with possession and identity loss, and I think that a lot of its impact is necessarily lost through overuse. But the simple idea of having the actors lose their regional accents when turned into Chameleon simulacra is very neat. It speaks volumes about Bernard Kay’s attempts at Scottish that Jamie doesn’t even notice that Inspector Crossland is now speaking in RP – but when later on we see the same thing happen to Jamie, and after five months of accepting this Scottish companion we now hear Frazer Hines talk in cold English pronunciation, the effect is honestly chilling. It doesn’t make much
narrative
sense, let’s be honest; if the whole point is of taking people’s identities, and playing every little detail of their lives, then you’d have thought it was a fairly basic failing of the plan that they couldn’t preserve their
voices
. Be a bit of a clue something was up in Air Traffic Control, I’d have thought, when you sat at work one day next to a broad Mancunian, and the following to someone who sounds like they’ve been to Eton. But as a dramatic device, it works because it’s just so
simply
achieved; in years to come, we’ll have glowing eyes, or snakes on arms, or suchlike – just removing the vocal inflections we’re used to makes Frazer Hines seem suddenly genuinely alien and unknowable.

And I think a lot of credit must go this week to George Selway too. The plot requires Meadows to give in to the Doctor’s demands for help immediately, as soon as he reveals he’s an impostor. In narrative terms, again, it’s all a bit clumsy and convenient. But Selway plays very well the part of an alien aggressor who
won’t
die for the cause, who’s quite prepared to sell out his entire race for the sake of his own life. We’d accept it very easily if the storyline was reversed – the scared human who’ll betray everyone else is a common stereotype – and that Meadows does the same thing suggests that the Chameleons aren’t just another bunch of generic aliens all speaking with one voice and one agenda, but a race of people with different and individual characterisations. It’s only inasmuch as they claim to have lost their identities in a big explosion that makes this so ironic. I suggest that when Chameleon Meadows finds out who
he
was, he’ll be disappointed to realise he was the nasty weaselly one that, as a kid in the playground, none of the other Chameleon children wanted to play on their football team.

By the way, I love the tinkling sound effect of the space station, which has a little of the cheeriness of an ice-cream van. It feels so incongruous against the scene in which Jamie finds the human captives in miniaturised form – and makes that sequence one of the tensest we’ve had in the story for ages.

T:
I have some misgivings about this, but I’m prepared to stick with it, as director Gerry Mill and his cast are working hard to keep things believable and menacing – to make what we’re seeing concurrently realistic and unearthly. The accent thing is a bit daft yes, but a neat shorthand – and we see now why Bernard Kay went to such great lengths to make Crossland so affable and polite, in order to contrast with his harsher, more conceited doppelganger. It’s nice when an acting choice yields a payoff, even if you can’t immediately see the thought behind it at first.

But it’s now episode five out of six, and I’m thinking that the motives and actions of the Chameleons should be making a little more sense at this stage. Captain Blade is in a glass house when he keeps banging on about how unintelligent humans are, as the Chameleons themselves haven’t exactly displayed gargantuan levels of intellect. Then the leader of the Chameleons – “the Director” – has the arrogance to big himself up: he’s so inappropriately self-aggrandising, you almost think it’s a joke at the expense of a group of aliens who are increasingly looking so inept, they’d probably lose against the Moroks in an edition of University Challenge – The Aliens. And it’s a tad jarring that the Chameleons refer to
each other
by the name of the person whose identity they have assumed – do they not have their own monikers, or did they lose those along with their identities? It’s a pity this wasn’t cleared up, although we might have then taken to referring to them as The Nameless Ones, which isn’t such a cool title.

Blade himself, at least, correctly guesses that the Doctor and Nurse Pinto are imposters – so he’s not all that stupid (even if he’s suddenly decided that he needs to ask permission to kill them). Fortunately, Donald Pickering was born to play smooth, cold villains – he’s been a consistently inscrutable menace throughout, wonderfully underplayed. It just goes to show that whilst big juicy performances can be fun, it can be just as effective if you play the part as an altogether calmer Chameleon.

The Faceless Ones episode six

R:
When I was a kid, reading about this story in synopsis form, it all sounded a bit pat and twee. That at the end of the adventure, the Doctor just lets the Chameleons off – they promise never to be nasty again, and just disappear back into obscurity. Actually it’s nothing like that at all, and it continues the interesting process started last week of making the aliens a lot less simplistic than we’re used to. It’s an unsatisfactory ending, but it’s
deliberately
unsatisfactory. There’s a stalemate – the Chameleons realise the humans can kill them, so reluctantly sue for peace. And it’s telling that they
never
apologise for what they’ve done, for the people they’ve killed – that they still believe in their natural superiority. We hear a word that’s rarely used on Doctor Who – “negotiation” – and it’ll become a trademark of the writing of Malcolm Hulke, who’ll later give the action hi-jinks of the Pertwee years real moral dilemmas. The difference with his stories about the Silurians and the Sea Devils is that, for all Jon Pertwee’s attempts to broker peace, the compromise arrangements never work – aliens are either treacherous in the world of Doctor Who and have secret agendas for conquest (like the Axons), or the humans get cold feet and blow everybody up. The Faceless Ones is the single attempt in Doctor Who’s history to come to a compromise between humans and the alien aggressors, and stick to it for real. The aliens don’t get their conquest, the humans don’t get their revenge – and, tellingly, the audience at home don’t get their big climax and a big explosion.

And that means that the story doesn’t quite pay off. However deliberate that might be, as a viewer, after six episodes, you still
expect
a climax. Intellectually, I love the scrappiness of this, that everything at the conclusion is a bit messy and open-ended. (And it ties in nicely with the otherwise perfunctory departure of Ben and Polly, and also with the way that the TARDIS is stolen in the last scene, so that you never really feel this particular adventure has quite resolved itself.) It’s very real life, and I think it’s very bold. And it’s very
adult
in that, actually, in all the ways that fanboys like me want the show to be. But it does lay on rather thickly something that’s been affecting the series ever since Troughton took over. And that is...

... that he never seems to
win
in the way we’re used to. In The Power of the Daleks he plays off the idea that he’s beaten the Daleks accidentally, in The Macra Terror he only wins the day in the nick of time by someone else saving his life, in The Underwater Menace most of the climax of the drama comes from his attempts to
survive his own plan
. Here in The Faceless Ones, he wins the day by sheer luck – his challenge to the Chameleons that the airport authorities can destroy them turns out, at the last minute, not to be a bluff after all. There’s a wonderful tension on board the space station as Blade and Spencer are shaken by the Doctor’s insistence that they can be dissolved at a moment’s notice, and that comes of course from the contrasting scenes on Earth as everyone races around trying to make his threats a reality. But it becomes very clear, and more here than anywhere else in Season Four, that this new Doctor really
might
not win through. I love that, I love Troughton’s performance of a genius in spite of himself, and I love the new danger to the stories that suggests the Doctor may lose. But six stories in, with a new actor playing the lead, I think it’s time for a story which raises the stakes a bit, which really tests the Doctor so that he can be given a true victory. Troughton has been extraordinary since he took over, and there’s an invention to the performance each week that has breathed new life into the show. But he needs to be given a chance to stamp his authority on the series once and for all, to establish that Doctor Who really
is
his.

I’m looking forward to The Evil of the Daleks.

T:
Balancing out my constant niggles about the Chameleons being dim, some of the human characters in this story have been so well-written, they shoulder the weight of this final episode. I especially love the way Colin Gordon’s Commandant has thawed out over the last few weeks, and become rather wily and heroic in a stuffy way (it’s brilliant how he jauntily tells Heslington that the flap’s over, and now they have to get back to work). Sam Briggs’ character admittedly isn’t as satisfying, and seems to fizzle out in this final episode – she’s involved in the action, but she doesn’t actually say much, spending most of her time running around the car park. Fortunately, she gets a sweet and tender parting with Jamie, which beautifully complements her historical status as The Companion Who Almost Was. (Though I’d rather her and Jean Rock had got their own spin-off series – the story of two dolly birds having jet-setting, airport-bound adventures.)