4.31-36 The Faceless Ones

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Episode 1 (animated):
This is the animated version of The Faceless Ones.
The TARDIS lands on a runway at Gatwick Airport but Polly and Ben are each get separated from the Second Doctor and Jamie.
Fun on noticing Easter Eggs with a couple of Masters at Gatwick.
During the said separation Polly goes to the hangar for Chameleon Tours and this is where she witnessed a murder.
Polly gets made in witnessing this murder but managed to escape and tell the Doctor and Jamie about it.
However afterwards Polly gets taken by the aliens from Chameleon Tours.
Having now noticed Polly is no longer with them, the Doctor and Jamie tried to someone in authority.
Funny when they kept being asked for their passports which they hadn’t got.
The Commandant looked into this but didn’t find anything wrong at Chameleon Tours. These aliens have covered their tracks.
Things become worse for the Doctor and Jamie when they see Polly only for this woman not to recognise that name and neither does she seem to know the Doctor and Jamie.
Intriguing cliffhanger with a creature being escorted to the medical centre and the state it is in.

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Episode 2 (animated):
The woman that the Doctor and Jamie had thought was Polly says that her name instead is Michelle Leupi and that she doesn't know the Doctor and Jamie.
Michelle Leupi says that she is from Zurich and she came to Gatwick Airport on a work permit.
As the Doctor and Jamie could not get their story corroborated, with the Doctor later saying that he doesn't think that this is Polly, they quickly make a run for it with the Commandant ordering their apprehension.
This is probably not in the original episode but the animation had the Doctor and Jamie sitting together covering their faces with newspapers.
With the animation it was funny that Jamie had his newspaper upside down especially when a policeman walked by.
Surely that would have gotten the policeman's attention especially since he was on the hunt for the Doctor and Jamie.
Whilst the Doctor was looking at the newspaper the Doctor figures from an ad that Chamelon Tours is a clue to all this.
So it is hardly a coincidence that the Polly-lookalike Michelle just happens to be working at the Chameleon Tours kiosk at the airport.
The Doctor went to talk to Michelle but Michelle says she does not know about anyone being shot or murdered.
However the Doctor says no such thing to her.
The Doctor and Jamie met Ben at the photo booth. It was funny when an old woman looked in and them having to smile for the camera!
Jamie is near the Chameleon Tours kiosk when he sees Samantha Briggs talking to Michelle.
Samantha went there about her brother Brian who went missing after taking a Chameleon Tour and all she got was a postcard from him from Rome where his tour is.
Unsurprising Michelle does not tell Samantha that is of help to her.
Jamie talks to Samantha saying the Doctor may help her.
The Faceless Ones was the last story with Ben and Polly but neither was heavily involved with it as they got gradually written out of the series.
For Polly she got taken in the previous episode and Anneke Wills only turning up here as the duplicate Michelle and we don't Michelle again after this episode.
This episode it is Ben's turn to be taken when he tried to find the real Polly.
Jamie and Samatha sees a different woman, not Michelle, at the kiosk and gives passengers of Chameleon Tours postcards to write on before departing.
This established the significance of the postcards as earlier brought up by Samantha in her search of her brother.
Earlier in the episode we see a duplicate made of Meadows the air traffic controller.
The final scene has the Doctor finding the real Meadows in a trance like state.
This leads to the cliffhanger where the Doctor is trapped in an office whilst a freezing vapour comes through the grille.

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Episode 3 (animated):
Impressive the cliffhanger that the Doctor got himself out of when he tricked Spencer as he used the freezing device pen on him and makes his escape.
Threads are coming together when the Doctor, Jamie and Samantha meets DI Crosland and the man who got killed in the first episode is identified as Crosland's colleague.
The Doctor spends some time in air traffic control after the Commandant gave him a couple of hours for the Doctor to conduct his own investigation and after talking to Crosland.
Whilst in air traffic control, Meadows placed a device on the Doctor.
This device came into play when the Doctor and Jamie searched the Chameleon office and the device got activated by Spencer watching them from the kiosk.
The device causes pain to the Doctor but Jamie quickly takes it off him and destroys it when he stomped on it.
This occur at the near end of the episode and given how this one started this could easily have been the second episode in a row showing the Doctor in danger.
However the cliffhanger instead has Crosland on a Chameleon plane when he became an unwilling passenger as it took off.
Crosland sees on a monitor that the passengers have disappeared!

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Episode 4 (animated):
Antepenultimate episode.
Thrilling point of this episode is when the Doctor, Jamie and Samantha were tied beam when a laser came at them something they got out of thanks to Samantha's mirror that she got from her bag.
Quite a trick of Jean Rock faking illness so that Nurse Pinto could be called away from the Medical Centre to attend to Jean.
This allowed the Doctor to look into the Medical Centre where he misses seeing the real Nurse Pinto.
Funny that the Doctor got away from the Jenkins duplicate when someone came by.
Samantha buys a ticket to Rome in order to track down her brother Brian but Jamie steals it and takes the flight.
Unfortunately this did not prevent Samantha from being in another round of danger as she got tricked in seeing Spencer who held her at gunpoint.
On the plane, Jamie became sick as he is not used to plane travel.
He got off his seat just before his fellow passengers got shrunken to small size.
The cliffhanger has air traffic control losing track of the said plane as it reaches in an orbiting satellite in outer space!

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Episode 5 (animated):
Penultimate episode.
Jamie has been hiding in what appears to be a mostly empty plane.
To his shock he finds his fellow passengers miniaturised humans in a file drawer but is then captured.
Meadows is exposed by the Doctor to the Commandant as a duplicate thanks to his armband which are a part of the process to assume the identities of others.
Meadows, having no choice, reveals the Chameleon's operations with Nurse Pinto being the key part to this.
Nurse Pinto has Samantha tied up to undergo that process.
The Doctor, Meadows and a couple of policemen then comes to the Medical Centre and Nurse Pinto restrained.
The Doctor then sees and unties Samantha and found the real Nurse Pinto.
The Pinto duplicate meanwhile took a fun that she had hidden and kill one of the policemen and then went to kill Meadows.
Meadows however quickly grabbed the real Pinto's armband and her duplicate dissolves into an amoebic mass.
Just as the real Pinto is being revived, the Doctor finally learns that Jamie was on the plane when he was told by Samantha.
Jamie is tied up in the satellite when he gets a visits by Crossland and what a shock that Crossland revealed himself to be the Director.
Just as the Director is in Crossland's form, the near end of the episode has Jamie's form too being duplicated.
The Doctor comes up with his plan to pretend to be Meadows pretending as him so that he and the real Nurse Pinto can get on the plane.
They got on the plane after apparently selling this deception to Captain Blade.
However Blade wasn't deceived by this and the cliffhanger has the Doctor and Nurse Pinto surrounded by faceless Chameleons.

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Episode 6 (animated):
Conclusion.
Noticed in the animation that there is a Magpie store at Gatwick.
Just as the Doctor and Nurse Pinto are held captive by the Chameleons in the satellite, the Commandant orders a search for the originals.
Luckily the originals are found in time before the Doctor could be processed.
The Chameleons received proof that the originals have been found when the duplicate Jenkins disintegrates as the armband got removed from the real Jenkins.
The resolution is achieved when Blade and others went against the Director to cooperate with the Doctor to ensure their survival,
They agree to the Doctor's demand of finding another way to survive instead of what they have been doing in this story.
Everyone is restored to normal.
A sad goodbye between Jamie and Samantha. In fact Samantha had been intended to become a companion at the end of this story but Pauline Collins who played her had declined to become a series regular.
The new companion that got introduced in the next story The Evil of the Daleks was Victoria Waterfield played by Deborah Watling.
Victoria came from Victorian times and who knows perhaps that is how she got her name.
Somewhat ironically when Collins next guested on Doctor Who in 2006's Tooth and Claw it was to play Queen Victoria.
The episode ends with Ben and Polly, after minimal involvement earlier in the story, being reunited with the Doctor and Jamie.
However not for long as they realised that the date is July 20 1966.
It is the same date that Ben and Polly went off with the TARDIS at the end of The War Machines.
Now Ben and Polly are back in their own time and on the same day as if everything they had gone through with their travels in the Doctor didn't happen at all and is therefore able to resume their normal lives.
The Doctor accepts that they want to stay and lets them go.
It is just as well that the Doctor lets Ben and Polly leave without telling them the pressing problem that he and Jamie has to face and that is the TARDIS is missing.
The Doctor and Jamie are then off to look for the TARDIS leading into The Evil of the Daleks.

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The audio for the animated Episode 3 of The Faceless Ones is the same used on the surviving original episode but curiously the subtitles for both versions are not consistent with each other on when the Commandant asked Detective Inspector Crossland if he could take the Doctor into custody.

The subtitles in the original episode presents Crossland's answer to this question as this:
"He's only broken immigration law and that's not my responsibility."

However that is a simplified correlation to what he said.

In contrast the subtitles in the animated version presents Crossland's exact wording:
"Well, I'm very sorry sir, but you know he hasn't broken any law, except for this immigration business and that's not my responsibility."