Perhaps you’d kindly explain why you have no passports?
Though it starts out as a bit of a farce, with the TARDIS materializing on an active runway at Gatwick Airport and our time travellers scattering to avoid the police, David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke’s “The Faceless Ones” (Story Production Code KK) turns into an oddly satisfying story of body-snatching aliens offering cut-rate tours for teens. But along the way to the good stuff in this six episode story, there’s a fair bit of filler to slog through.
Credit should be given to the writers for attempting to show the difficulties the Doctor and his companions would have trying to enter an international airport from the tarmac (back in pre-jetway days) without passports or other identity papers—such appearances have, in the past, been glossed over with nary a mention—but where some simple trick on the Doctor’s part to get into the terminal would have sufficed, instead we are treated to overly-long sequences with immigration agents and officious bureaucrats who are less concerned with a dead body than with a missing passport. Still, there’s some humor about the affair, and when they escape, an inspector wryly notes that it shouldn’t be hard to find a rumpled man in a frock coat and a young lad in a kilt.
Note the emphasis, however, on two individuals, rather than the current TARDIS complement of four. Ben and Polly make no appearance after episode two, save for a filmed inset of their departure in episode six. They’ve been written out of the show, and though their leaving is treated with substantially more dignity than Dodo’s abrupt rest cure in “The War Machines,” they could easily have played substantive roles in the events of the story. Instead, they are captured by the aliens and serve as spurs to action for the Doctor.
Events start quickly enough, with Polly witnessing a murder in the hangar occupied by the aliens’ tour company, Chameleon Tours, a name that sits a bit too much on point. Polly reports the murder to the Doctor, who is intrigued and determined to investigate. Though the story returns to the scene of the crime far too many times, a sense of mystery does surround the evil goings-on, with the aliens (who, chameleon-like, look like humans) not tipping their hands via narration or action. The viewer has no idea that aliens are even at work here, with the shady motives of Chameleon Tours completely opaque, beyond the fact that they killed a man for seeing the postcards. Sinister secret society? Corrupt corporate creeps? Dastardly devious deltiologists? The first episode ends with a monster teaser that, while very much in the show’s tradition, nevertheless feels fresh. There’s actual mystery here!
And then, in the second episode, everyone talks at length about how they figured out all the clues from the first episode (including the unsent Spanish stamp!), dispelling (almost) all the mystery.
