Doctor Who: ‘The Faceless Ones’ Review: A Regeneration of the Past

Written by Brian McNamara

In the mid 1970s, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was looking for a way to save money on film and thin out their physical archive of filmed television episodes. Part of those episodes destroyed – usually considered “wiped,” in order to have another show printed over them – included more than 100 episodes of Doctor Who. Before the age of home video, it was felt there was no more commercial value to the episodes and so they were gone. Fortunately, someone realized you could do more with them and the process was stopped before it destroyed the entire back catalogue. But all was not lost for these lost episodes, intrepid fans at home recorded each episode faithfully on their reel-to-reels and pointed home cameras at the screen. Today, audio for every missing episode of the show exists. Over the years, individual episodes have resurfaced and been made available, so now only 97 individual episodes remain missing. 

For many years, the raw audio was the only way to experience these missing episodes. At one time, the BBC commissioned versions of the audio with “linking narration” provided by actors in the episode to fill in the missing action. Photographs, continuity filming and production stills have also been used to make “reconstructions” of the episodes – mixing still photos with short clips to produce an approximation of the story. In 2006, the BBC decided to animate two missing episodes from one eight-part story. It was met with much praise but was deemed too expensive at the time to pursue further.

Over the years a few more episodes have been animated, but usually only to fill in missing gaps, never to replace a full story. That changed with Power of the Daleks four years ago, a well-received and seemingly more affordable animation style, and since then more episodes have been animated – The Macra Terror and Shada to date – and another, Fury from the Deep, was announced for next year. The Faceless Ones stands as the most recent and most polished effort to date and a sign that these episodes are closer than ever to being fully available.

The Faceless Ones is a six-part story typical of the Second Doctor’s (Patrick Troughton) tenure on the show. The Doctor and his companions – Jamie (Frazier Hines), Polly (Anneke Willis) and Ben (Michael Craze) – arrive in the TARDIS in the middle of the tarmac at Gatwick Airport. The four are quickly separated, with Jamie and the Doctor spending the majority of the time together. Polly sneaks into a warehouse and witnesses a pilot shoot a man with a ray gun. She reports the murder to The Doctor, who quickly investigates. In short order, Polly is kidnapped, Ben is on his own and The Doctor and Jamie are stuck trying to convince the airport staff they’re not sneaking past immigration without passports. The TARDIS team soon find themselves embroiled in a plot to kidnap young tourists and use their bodies for some nefarious purpose. Faceless green aliens stalk the airport in chameleon disguises to help hide the scarred visages they now have.

It’s a rather straightforward mystery, but one that’s very enjoyable. As with most six-parters in classic Who the plot is stuffed with a lot of filler. The episode could very easily be pared down and lose nothing. You’ll even note a scene or two with doubled dialogue – Jamie and Samantha talk and then a beat later recap their talk. There are fun moments and good humor that make it move pretty quickly, but it does take a little bit to get going. You can see where the modern Who writers turned to devices to explain away the Doctor’s entree into the plot. It can take nearly 40 minutes for The Doctor to even begin to take charge. You’ll probably have the plot figured by Episode 4 but you may not be able to guess how The Doctor gets himself out.

The Second Doctor and Jamie are a truly classic pair and anytime they’re “onscreen” together is quite fun. Oddly, despite the fact that this is their final story as companions, Ben and Polly disappear from the plot after the second episode and are only seen again in their farewell sequence, itself feeling rushed. This is particularly noticeable of Ben, a character who never quite got the spotlight he seemed poised for and who was quickly upstaged by the more engaging character of Jamie, the handsome Scotsman from the past. Episode 3 also introduces us to Samantha Briggs (Pauline Collins), a character poised to become the next companion only for the actress to not take the gig and thus need to be written out. A Liverpudlian looking for her lost brother, she takes a direct hand in moving the plot only to herself disappear for a large swathe of the final episode. A lot of time is given to character for a ’60s episode, which is nice to see. People talk to each other and quip about their lives. You feel like you learn a little bit about the side characters. In that way, it stands out as a memorable outing, if not necessarily an instant classic. 

The animation for these episodes has always been somewhat of a middle ground solution. Some of the previous efforts looked like Flash animation, in some the characters don’t resemble their actors as much as they should. Two episodes of The Faceless Ones still exist in the BBC archive which probably made this one a little easier to animate – most of the key locations exist to base art on, as did the character models. And it’s those two episodes that look and feel the best with the animation. Where the animation team had to fill in the blanks is where it can feel a little off or light. Some of the camera work also feels a little tight – you won’t see a lot of hands.

In previous animation reconstructions, there have been noticeable “hangs” in the episode where there is no script information or sound that gives a clue to what is supposed to be happening on screen and so characters will just stand around or walk in silence because there is still background music indicating something happened, just not what happened. There are very few instances of this across the episodes of The Faceless Ones and that contributes to the pace of the plot feeling faster. The animation style looks good, but there are certain times it can’t handle the action. Characters running in this style always look awkward – in particular a shot of Polly running toward the camera, her hair flapping in three long blobs, looks especially odd. An action sequence in the final episode of ‘The Faceless Ones’ doesn’t really match the music and thus feels off. At one point a character turns away from camera and it looks like he merges into the set, but it’s just the odd way they are depicting angles.

In other areas, it feels like they took their opportunity to play with the original setting. The airport set affords them some latitude and it’s populated with figures. You may notice some of the shopkeepers also appear to be tourists later on, but that’s probably also true of the extras in the 60s! The space station looks really great and is rendered in 3D animatics. The fighter plane sequence comes across better than 60s stock footage ever could do ot. They even slip in good gags – you can see newspapers referencing the classic First Doctor serial The War Machines strewn across the later episodes (both stories take place on the same day!) and as “future” easter eggs, there are Wanted posters for the War Doctor and the Delgado and Sascha Dawan Masters at the police station.

In all, it’s nice to see these older episodes brought forward in time and revitalized in a way that makes them available to a wider audience. While new viewers might find the tone or style a little different, you can find a lot of the DNA of modern Who at work here. The animation in these recreations is getting better and we’re slowly getting to the point where all of them may exist in some form again. ‘The Faceless Ones’ has its flaws, some inherent to its time and some being that it was a plot not built for animation and as such the animation is sometimes just characters talking and close-ups. It’s also not particularly visually interesting. The animators are locked into recreating the episodes as faithfully as they can and as such, it can feel at odds with itself.

The Faceless Ones aired over two nights, Oct. 7 & 8,  on BBC America and is available on demand at BBCamerica.com and will be available on DVD later this month.