It’s time to add another Doctor Who “Missing Episode” to the not-so-missing pile of animated recreations.  Simon and Eugene discuss The Faceless Ones!

Synopsis:

The Doctor, Ben, Polly and Jamie arrive on the runway at Gatwick airport in 1966.  It’s just an ordinary day as London recovers from yesterday’s War Machine attacks.  The travelers are forced to flee as first, a plane tries to land where they are and, second, a police officer wants to question them.  They scatter, never to be a team again.

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Polly enters the hanger of Chameleon Tours and witnesses the murder of a police inspector.  She is chased by the killer, but escapes, then rejoins the Doctor and Jamie.  The Doctor insists they return to investigate.  They find the body, but are observed by the killers.  Polly, who can identify the man who pulled the trigger, is quietly captured when they are heading to get official help.

On their way to find help, the Doctor and Jamie run afoul of Customs and Immigration because they don’t have passports. When they do manage to talk to the airport Commandant, it is as illegal immigration suspects, not helpful citizens trying to report a murder.

They convince the Commandant to check out the hanger, but the body is gone and Capt. Blade, pilot and head of Chameleon Tours let them check crates to search for the body, to no avail.

The Commandant takes the Doctor and Jamie back to be incarcerated, but they encounter Polly at the Immigration desk.  She claims her name is Michelle, she’s from Zurich, she’s never met them before and she has the proper passport documentation to prove it.

Elsewhere we witness a faceless alien being transformed into a duplicate of an abducted human.  The alien almost died because Earth’s atmosphere is not suitable for them.  This angle will play no further part in this story.

Knowing they’re going to be locked up, the Doctor and Jamie escape again, this time encountering Ben, who has avoided detection – and Immigrations, apparently.  They fill him in and he’s put to work investigating the Chameleon hangers.

Polly is now working the desk at Chameleon Tours.  The Doctor trips her up when she reveals she knows more about the murder than she’s pretending.  Later Capt. Blade says she’ll be sent back on the next flight for her failure.

Police Inspector Crossland arrives at the airport, searching for his missing colleague, the murdered man, and also investigating Chameleon Tours over a missing person’s report.

Jamie, watching Polly and the Chameleon Tours kiosk meets Samantha, who gives Polly the third degree about her missing brother.  It seems he went missing on one of these Chameleon Tours to Rome and their information about the tour doesn’t check out.  Jamie approaches her and says the Doctor might be able to help.

Ben, searching the hanger, finds Polly’s body in a crate, and then is captured when he tries to raise the alarm.  The Doctor comes to his rescue, but Ben and Polly are gone.  He finds the comatose body of Meadows, a flight traffic controller, just before he is lured into a freezing trap.

Which he escapes.

Inspector Crossland seems like a real police detective.  He is investigating Chameleon, and these strange intruders were claiming to have seen a murder in Chameleon Tours’ hanger – he should talk to them.  Unfortunately, they’ve been giving the airport police a merry chase the whole time.  Crossland just goes and finds Jamie like a pro.  They ally and he takes the Doctor and Jamie back to the Commandant’s office and makes him listen to them and let them investigate.

Crossland goes to talk to Capt. Blade and is taken prisoner.

The baddies at Chameleon Tours recognize the Doctor’s superior intelligence as a threat, so they engineer more overly-elaborate ways to kill him. All of which fail.

Samantha, impatient and headstrong, decides to get to the bottom of the mystery and buys a ticket on the next Chameleon Tours flight. Jamie steals her ticket and takes her place on the flight, unbeknownst to the Doctor.

The Commandant has the RAF chase the flight, but the fighter is destroyed and the Chameleon Tours jet flies straight up into space to an awaiting space station.

The passengers on the planes are being miniaturized.  Jamie escapes that fate by hiding and not eating the food.  He attempts to search the station, but meets Crossland, who is actually now the Director, head of the aliens.  Jamie is taken for processing.

The Doctor questions the duplicate Meadows and discovers that by turning off the device on their wrists, the aliens will die and the duplicated human will recover.  Under threat of death, Meadows tells all.  Their race have “lost their identities” in an explosion on their homeward and are stealing 50,000 young people to duplicate.  They’re almost done.

Most of the captured humans are miniaturized and on the space station, awaiting the return to their planet, but the human bodies of the airport staff duplicates are hidden somewhere in the airport – he claims he doesn’t know where.  The search is on.

The Doctor and nurse Pinto, a human who had been duplicated, but now restored, go on the final Chameleon Tours flight, pretending to be duplicates.  That ruse fails and they are taken before the Director, who orders them to be used for duplication.

The Doctor bluffs that they have the bodies at the airport and they will deactivate the devices, killing the aliens currently holding him prisoner if they don’t negotiate a deal.  This threat carries no weight to the Director, whose human body, like Jamie’s, is stored on the space station and is at no risk.  

No deal.

This doesn’t set so well with Capt. Blade and the others who’s human bodies are stored at the airport.  The Doctor tries to play up that divide.

At the last moment, Samantha works out that the bodies are hidden in the car park and one of them is revived, killing a Chameleon back on the space station.  Now, the vulnerable Chameleons turn on the Director, kill him, and make a deal with the Doctor.  

They’ll have to give up the bodies and go back to the way they were, but perhaps the Doctor has a few ideas how to solve their identity problem.

Back at the airports it’s congratulations and all smiles as the Doctor and Jamie say goodbye to their companion for this adventure, Samantha, and all the other people who played an important part in this story, the Commandant and his staff, and the police.

As an afterthought, they go find Ben and Polly, only to say goodbye when they realize no time has elapsed since they first left earth with the Doctor.

No time to rest for the Doctor and Jamie, though.  The TARDIS has gone missing.

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