The Faceless Ones - Episode 5

The previous episode was the first time that any enthusiasm was starting to wane a bit. Something that I hadn’t mentioned until now was the narration of Frazer Hines. I am a huge fan of Hines’ narration/performance in the Companion Chronicle stories he does for Big Finish and he won the Best Companion award in 2010. Hines manages to make the most inane dialogue seem fantastic or at the very least perfectly fine.  The episode starts off quite well and dispels any worry that I had that there would be a downward trend in my enjoyment. There is a nice scene where they mention the Director and it is then followed by a speech of how stupid humans are. Quite why they want to be dealing with a race that are intellectually inferior to themselves.

The explanation to why they are taking the humans and it involves the fact that their race is dying and they have lost their identity so they are taking the humans to take their form. On the face of it the plan seems quite fine. You can understand why they would want to take the humans and normally its not for reasons of invasion or conquest but for mere survival. I don’t know whether this was the intention of David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke to make us sympathise with the aliens but knowing that Hulke had a tendency to put political themes into his stories it seems plausible that this was probably what Hulke was intending.

Despite my feelings concerning how Michael Craze and Anneke Wills have been treated I must admit that I haven’t really missed them. The story has been moving along at such a good speed and I have enjoyed the characters and their performances so much that on the occasional mentions of their names reminds me that they are part of the show. The cliffhanger is somewhat of a disappointment as the previous ones have been so good. I think that it would have been better on DVD but I’m not going to go on about that particular gripe. What I will say is that episode five is better than four (even despite the ending). I think that the story moving away from the airport has helped breathe some new life into it and even though we occasionally go back to the control room, the focus of the story seems to be elsewhere and that can only be a good thing.