“We are the most intelligent race in the universe,” boasts the Chameleon Director (Bernard Kay) during The Faceless Ones. Well, I’m not so sure. I think their convoluted plan to kidnap fifty thousand young tourists and steal their identities has one or two flaws.

  • Firstly, let’s say you need to kidnap fifty thousand people and you’re an advanced alien race. There were 3.4 billion people on Earth in 1966. Wouldn’t you quietly pick off people one by one, scattered around the world, to avoid attention? I’m not sure my first thought would have been to establish a fake airline, offer package tours to young tourists, send postcards home to their families and fly them to a waiting satellite. That’s the sort of convoluted planning we usually leave to the Cybermen.
  • Upon arrival at Gatwick Airport the Doctor and his friends start snooping about. Although Chameleon Tours has been operating under cover for months without detection, Polly (Anneke Wills) wanders into the wrong hangar and witnesses a murder, thus kicking the whole thing off. But when the Chameleons capture Polly, they choose not to simply hide her. They make the odd decision to duplicate her, send her Chameleon counterpart into the airport to interact with all her friends and try to pass her off as someone else entirely. (Which, it turns out, she’s not very good at. She fumblingly reveals herself after about 20 seconds of talking with the Doctor.) If you wanted to duplicate her to progress the plan in some way, why not just pretend to be Polly, gain the confidence of her friends and spy on their actions? Inventing a Swiss alter ego seems unnecessary to say the least.
  • Poor old Chameleon Spencer (Victor Winding, who I hope invented those peculiar text symbols in Microsoft Word). He gets charged with trying to kill the Doctor (Patrick Troughton, by now far less enigmatic than in last random’s, The Power of the Daleks) and he’s utterly rubbish at it. I get the feeling that his human counterpart must have watched a lot of Bond movies, because his methods of attack are unnecessarily supervillainy. There’s a room which fills with icy gas, a wee button gadget which incapacitates its victim when stuck on their back and, most stagily, a slowly moving laser beam which inches its way to our prone heroes. Thankfully, not directly at their crotches as in Goldfinger. This is a family show!
  • “I’m quite sure the first thing you want to do when you get to Switzerland is write home to your parents,” Chameleon flight attendant Ann Davidson (Gilly Fraser) tells a group of young travellers. Here, they clearly haven’t done their research into the 18-25 age bracket they claim to cater too. My bet is the first thing they’d want to do is find the nearest bar, load up on schnapps and make good with that cute blonde in seat 22d. Only after a few weeks would they want to send a postcard home and then only to ask Ma and Pa to send more money.
  • Aviation must have been very different in 1966. Apparently no-one tracked planes in flight all the way to their destinations, and no-one at those destinations noticed that no passengers ever disembarked from Chameleon Tours flights. Not until plucky Jean Rock (Wanda Ventham, but hang on a mo, Jean Rock – what a great name! I hope she had side career as a pop singer. Jean Rock and the Trolly Dollies, or something) checks with the destination airports in Episode 4. After which the Commandant (Colin Gordon) tells her off for incurring the expense of phoning internationally! (And hang on another mo, in a story which is at pains to give most characters first and last names, the Commandant doesn’t even get one. That’s right – he’s the Nameless One.)
  • The Chameleons’ duplication process doesn’t pick up Scottish accents. Which means that when Jamie (Frazer Hines) and Inspector Crossland (Kay again) are copied, they revert back to English accents. Clearly there’s a dial on those armbands set to ‘received pronunciation’. It’s a bit strange that a group of faceless aliens, looking to regain a sense of identity, would then homogenise all the little details that add distinctiveness to those identities. Unfortunately, they never get around to copying almost companion Samantha Briggs (Pauline Collins), so we’re stuck with her would be Liverpudlian accent throughout, flippin’ heck, ta ra luv and so on.
  • The ‘originals’ – the paralysed human beings copied by the Chameleons – have to remain untouched for their Chameleon doppelgängers to survive (which itself is a unfortunate flaw in the system). Luckily, they have been hidden where ‘they will never be found’. Or so the bad guys boast. Actually, they’ve been hidden on site at Gatwick, in the car park. The car park! A place that hundreds of people traverse through and where the originals could only have been spotted through the rigorous investigation of looking through a windscreen. The height of villainous cunning, it’s not.
  • Finally, there’s the real schoolboy blunder of making your own people’s survival dependent on some natty arm bands (all about wearables, these Chameleons) worn not by them, but by their originals. Which you’ll remember are safely stored, where they will never be found, in the car park. So of course when they are found, that enables the Doctor to fiddle with the armbands and blackmail the Chameleons into giving up their nutty scheme and head home. I mean, if the originals and their armbands are so vital to the survival of your species, then take them with you. You could store them on your own satellite, which might be marginally harder to locate and infiltrate than the car park. Just sayin’.

The Chameleons keep up an ongoing stream of insults about the intelligence of human beings through out The Faceless Ones. “Their minds can’t cope with an operation like this,” Captain Blade (Donald Pickering) sneers at one point. Well, you’re right there, mate. I certainly can’t make head nor tail of it.

LINK TO The Power of the Daleks: Both Troughtons and both from Season 4, but also, both start with a man being shot.

And as we’re talking, hasn’t it been a while since we had a new series story?

NEXT TIME: You will run, it will walk. You will rest, it will not. We’re trapped in the puzzle box called Heaven Sent.