Doctor Who: The Faceless Ones

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The Faceless Ones is the eighth serial of Season 4 of the classic Doctor Who television series. It was originally broadcast in six weekly parts from 8 April to 13 May 1967. It was written by David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke, and directed by Gerry Mill. It stars Patrick Troughton as the Doctor, Anneke Wills as Polly, Michael Craze as Ben Jackson, Frazer Hines as Jamie McCrimmon, Pauline Collins as Samantha Briggs, Donald Pickering as Captain Blade, and Colin Gordon as the Commandant.

The TARDIS lands at Gatwick Airport in 1966, where passengers are vanishing and a budget airline called Chameleon Tours hides a chilling secret: aliens are stealing human identities. The Doctor investigates with his usual quick wit, while Jamie and Samantha follow clues across terminals and aircraft, and Polly and Ben face danger as the truth comes out.

With tense chases, suspicious officials, and a plot to replace people on a massive scale, the Doctor exposes the impostors and ends the threat. In a gentle ending, Ben and Polly decide to remain in their own time, leaving the Doctor and Jamie to continue their travels. Only Episodes 1 and 3 survive in the BBC archives, but the entire serial has been reconstructed through animation.

Episode 1

The TARDIS materialises on a Gatwick Airport runway, forcing the Doctor, Ben, Polly, and Jamie to dodge a taxiing plane and sprint for cover. Inside the terminal, uniforms swarm them as trespassers, and the harried Commandant wants them gone. While the Doctor argues for a few minutes to prove their innocence, Polly wanders into a maintenance hangar and witnesses a man collapse under a silent flash from a peculiar gun.

With his dying breath he gasps about “Chameleon Tours.” Before she can fetch help, two cold, efficient airline men tidy the scene and close in. Polly flees into a medical centre, only to be trapped by a smiling nurse who locks the inner door. The Doctor and Jamie, following the trail, find scorch marks but no body, and a brochure for the budget airline everyone praises.

Ben checks flight gates and notes the same cheerful slogans, the same fixed smiles, the same closed doors. The Commandant refuses to shut a successful operator over a “story.” In the hangar office, a pilot with a too-perfect manner takes orders from someone unseen. A flight departs, and passengers wave. Polly does not return. The Doctor studies the brochure and the burn pattern and decides the danger hides in plain sight.

Episode 2

The Doctor forces a return to the hangar with airport security, but the corpse he expects to show them has vanished. The airline’s people are polite, helpful, and obstructive all at once. In the terminal, a young woman named Samantha Briggs confronts the desk: her brother flew out with Chameleon Tours and never wrote again, yet she has a postcard from him: one that matches dozens of others, word for word.

The Doctor tests the terminal’s “relaxation room,” finds odd coils in the walls, and concludes minds are being softened around key doors. Ben tails a groundhandler into the medical centre and is ambushed, strapped, and wheeled toward a humming cabinet. Jamie prowls the baggage tunnels with Samantha, collecting identical postcards and a list of “holiday hostels” that do not exist.

When the Doctor finally locates Polly, she stands calm in the check-in hall, spotless uniform, distant eyes. She smiles at him and says she has never seen him before. The Commandant takes that as proof the trespassers are lying; the Doctor hears it as proof she has been copied. A flight boards at Gate 2 under the gaze of a precise, watchful pilot. The air seems to hold its breath as another plane lifts into cloud.

Episode 3

Jamie volunteers to shadow the next Chameleon Tours departure and slips past the gate as a baggage handler. Samantha is stopped short, then turns her anger into a campaign: phone calls, loud complaints, planted questions that keep the airline in view. The Doctor meets Inspector Crossland of Scotland Yard, who has his own missing man and the authority the Doctor needs.

Together they search the medical centre. Locked drawers yield miniature tags and delicate instruments; a side room hums with unfamiliar power. When the Doctor triggers a panel, a glass cabinet slides out, revealing a human figure compressed and suspended, alive and catalogued. Elsewhere, Ben wakes numbed and obedient, answering to a voice through an earpiece and carrying out tasks for the same smiling nurse who took Polly. Crossland pushes the Commandant to place the airline under watch; the Commandant reluctantly agrees, still wary of panic.

Jamie wedges himself into a service nook on the aircraft and hears the steward’s patter falter into mechanical silence once the cabin lights dim. Mid-flight, the plane’s signal stutters and (without changing speed) drops off radar, as if it has slipped somewhere no transponder can reach. The Doctor marks the last coordinates and speaks a quiet truth: the passengers are not going anywhere on Earth.

Episode 4

Jamie crawls from his hiding place as the cabin tilts and the windows show stars. The aircraft docks to a silent platform, and masked figures move the sleeping tourists like freight. He follows to a chamber of numbered racks where humans lie in transparent cases, faces serene, identities harvested. A tall leader with a blank, plasticine visage studies Jamie like a specimen.

The aliens call themselves Chameleons. A cosmic accident stripped their people of faces and forms; now they take human templates and sustain the duplicates by keeping the originals alive elsewhere. Jamie is seized for “processing” and thrown into a cell with Inspector Crossland, who boarded deliberately and was captured. On Earth, Samantha steals a key from a suave pilot and delivers it to the Doctor, who uses it to open the medical centre’s inner ward.

There, he finds Nurse Pinto: two of her. One smiles and deflects; one lies unconscious in a cabinet, the genuine article. The Doctor realises the trick: each duplicate depends on its source, held prisoner and catalogued. If he can revive an original, he can break its copy. Above the Earth, a conveyor starts up; Jamie is pushed toward a machine that will make him someone else’s mask.

Episode 5

The Doctor revives the real Nurse Pinto and confronts her copy, which falters as the link wavers. With Crossland’s authority behind him, the Commandant finally seals the gates and clears the concourses, while Samantha keeps the press and public busy in the lounges to prevent a cover-up. The Doctor rigs a detector that hums when a duplicate approaches and begins separating staff who can be saved from those who cannot.

He opens a line to the Chameleons through the hangar equipment, warning that he understands their leverage: kill the originals and the copies die, but threaten the copies and the originals can be protected. On the satellite, Jamie and Crossland stage a daring escape, sabotaging a power relay and freeing a few dazed prisoners before being herded back at gunpoint.

The Chameleon Director appears on a screen in the hangar, using a human face borrowed from a captive. He offers a trade. Silence and cooperation for the safe return of a few, while more planes prepare to lift. The Doctor counters with a harsher arithmetic: he has the names, the locations, and the means to sever links in batches. Stalemate forms, tight as wire. One wrong move will cost hundreds of lives on both sides.

Episode 6

Negotiation becomes strategy. The Doctor directs the Commandant’s teams to isolate the cabinets and guard them as hostages; any harm to the passengers will ripple instantly to their duplicates on Earth. On the satellite, Jamie and Crossland bluff with shut-down sequences the Doctor has fed them over the air, making the Director believe the whole storage grid is at risk.

Beneath the threats lies the real offer: reverse the process, return every stolen human intact, and the Doctor will help the Chameleons search for a cure that does not require theft. The Director hesitates, then accepts under pressure from his own failing people. Machines wind down. Cabinets open. The duplicates collapse and are gathered up by waiting medics as their originals wake confused but alive. Crossland volunteers to accompany the Chameleons to ensure the truce holds; he will be their human liaison as they retreat to space.

Back at Gatwick, Samantha finds closure in a rush of relieved families. Ben and Polly discover the date and laugh in disbelief. It is the very day they first met the Doctor. Home is suddenly within reach. They say a fond, sudden goodbye. The Doctor and Jamie head for the TARDIS: and arrive to find nothing. The police box has been stolen.

Themes

As an airport thriller, The Faceless Ones is nimble and quietly confident. Less operatic than The Evil of the Daleks and not as suffocating as The Web of Fear, yet more assured than the gaudy fun of The Underwater Menace. Its investigative pace, cool location work, and eerie identity theft place it alongside The Invasion as a prototype for Earthbound conspiracy tales.

As a farewell, it gives Ben and Polly a dignified exit, landing just shy of the emotional punch of later departures but tidier than many. In Season 4’s run, it rates as a smart, slightly under-sung gem: tighter than The Macra Terror, just a step below the heavy hitters to come.

Linking past and future, it closes a loop back to The War Machines by returning Ben and Polly to the same day, while handing the baton to the Doctor and Jamie for the chase that leads straight into The Evil of the Daleks. Its themes of replacement and stolen identities echo forward to Spearhead from Space, The Android Invasion, and Terror of the Zygons, and later resonate in The Zygon Invasion/The Zygon Inversion.

The grounded, procedural feel points toward the UNIT-inflected style perfected in The Invasion and, much later, the modern show’s Aliens of London/World War Three. In short, The Faceless Ones is a hinge story: closing one team’s chapter while sketching the blueprint for many of the series’ best infiltration dramas.

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This is a chapter from Craig Hill’s book “Doctor Who – The Second Doctor”, chronicling every episode featuring the Second Doctor. It is available on Amazon.

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To view the list of other Doctor Who serials, please click this link

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