Doctor Who 0035 The Faceless Ones Six part story that aired April 8 to May 13 1967. Written by David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke, directed by Gerry Mill. Linking script by Michael Stevens, read by Frazier Hines.
Between the DVD and the CD releases there are multiple versions of this partially lost story. One and three are the only complete episodes, they were first released in 2003 as part of The Reign Of Terror VHS box set, in 2004 they were included in the Lost In Time DVD set. When I watched the series for the first time in 2013 I watched those 2 episodes back then. I didn't have the audio CDs back then and neither did the local library system.
The 2020 3 disc DVD set has color and B&W versions of the whole 6 part story, episodes 1 & 3, and Telesnap versions of the missing episodes. I wound up watching the B&W animated version with the missing episodes inserted in the run.
The Tardis lands in the middle of the Gatwick Airport runway. An airport security officer sees them exit the police call box and gives chase when they scatter. Polly hides in Chameleon Tours hanger and sees a murder done. Polly is seen and runs away. She finds the Doctor and Jamie and tells them what happened. They see the dead man and the Doctor tells them that the man was killed by a weapon not available on the Earth at that time. They leave to report the death and on the way Polly is kidnapped when she lags behind.
The corpse isn't there when they bring the authorities to the hanger. We've been seeing stuff that the Doctor hasn't and it turns out that the Chameleon Tours is really a front for aliens. They've been infiltrating the airport personal with a machine that can turn one of their race into a human. They need a person to do it and they've been kidnapping the passengers on their low cost youth package trips. The man Polly saw killed was investigating the company, people had been noticing that their family members have gone missing after flying Chameleon.
Since it's a 6 part story it moves along a bit slower than the 4 parters. There are a good number of characters introduced and plenty of things happening. The authorities don't believe the Doctor at first but things get too weird to deny his story. There's plenty of running about Gatwick and people get kidnapped and released quite often. Jamie winds up on one of the Chameleon flights and we get to see the alien space base. The aliens have been miniaturizing the humans and storing them in drawers.
The Doctor eventually defeats the head alien and the other aliens leave without any more struggle. Ben and Polly decide to leave the crew as they are back to their time. Jamie and the Doctor exit stage left to look for the Tardis. All in all a fair decent story
There's a commentary with a few of the surviving people involved with the show and old interviews with ones that have passed away. I listened to those and enjoyed them. The only other special features are the making of for the animation version and some PDFs. Still, more than enough to get through. I didn't listen to the audio version yet but will during the week.
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