Who Review: The Face of Evil
The TARDIS materializes in a jungle, and the Doctor, now traveling alone, investigates. He doesn’t get far before a girl dressed in skins trips and lands at his feet. Her name is Leela, and she has been ejected from her tribe for blasphemy against their god, Xoanan. But Leela has seen the Doctor before–at least his face. He is “the evil one,” whose likeness is carved into the mountain. The Doctor’s curiosity piqued, he investigates Leela’s village and finds artifacts from a spaceship that the natives treat as sacred objects. The village shaman claims to receive messages from Xoanan, but the fact he receives them in a specific location suggests Xoanan uses some form of communicator. As the Doctor puts the pieces of the puzzle together, he comes to the conclusion that these savages are the descendants of a space crew that crash landed on the planet many generations ago. The Doctor visited an early generation of these people and helped them. But in helping them, he created a monster that is now determined to destroy everything. Starting with the Doctor.
SPOILER ALERT!! My comments may (and likely will) contain spoilers for those that haven’t seen this serial. If you want to stay spoiler-free, please watch the story before you continue reading!
The first Doctor Who serial of the New Year (1977) was written by a new writer for the show, Chris Boucher, and introduced a new companion, Leela. I have a vivid memory of watching the first episode of “The Face of Evil” when it broadcast. I was six, and we were visiting someone’s house on New Year’s Day. I don’t remember who it was we visited, but I do recall wanting to watch Doctor Who because there was going to be a new assistant (as we called them back then). Having been granted permission, I sat in our host’s living room in a large, beige comfy chair (it seemed large to me, anyway), and watched Leela’s inaugural episode on a big television. And that’s as much as I recall of that day.
Coming back to the story nearly forty years later, it’s another one of those Who serials that, I think, stands up very well. Boucher’s story is original, with a tight and engaging plot. He only wrote three stories for Doctor Who before going on to script editor success with shows like “Blake’s 7” and “Bergerac,” and it’s a shame; he was definitely one of the best Classic Who writers.
Boucher hasn’t given many interviews, and seems to be a bit of a recluse. I am aware of his rather devout atheism, and I think that bleeds through into the script (though the story had input from script editor Robert Holmes, and producer Philip Hinchcliffe). The idea of a technically advanced group of people who, over generations, become more “superstitious” is, however, counter-intuitive to most atheist thinking. Normally, secular anthropologists say that people, over time, grow less “religious,” with secularism being equated with progress, as primitive people shake off the shackles of naïve beliefs and embrace the “real world” as explained by reason and science. Perhaps this anomaly is due to the influence of Xoanan and his social experiment? Did Xoanan affect the generations that came from that initial crew such that technology and science wasn’t passed down to them, and they all grew up ignorant? I find that possibly the hardest aspect of the plot to swallow. Surely each generation would have taught the next, and given we’re talking about a limited number of people, it’s unlikely they would have “forgotten” so completely their history. Such things would have been passed down as more than just ritual. They would have been taught how to use the Medikit, and the rest of the surviving equipment.
In any case, this back story gives Boucher the opportunity to parody religion, though he’s careful to keep it general, and largely animistic, as opposed to taking on, say, Christianity or Islam too directly. Nevertheless, faith is firmly put in its place (as Boucher sees it), subservient to science and reason. I could get offended at this, but the serial is a work of fiction, so I can take it all at face value and enjoy it for what it is.
The subtle mocking of faith aside, this is a clever story. We have a tribe called the Sevateem, who were originally the Survey Team, but over time the name was corrupted. Xoanan, in his experiment, set them apart to develop their warrior instincts. Back on the ship live the Tesh, who were originally the Technicians, the technical crew, whom Xoanan kept on the ship to develop their mental skills. Xoanan’s plan was to see which turned out to be the superior tribe.
As for the identity of Xoanan, this is another clever and original plot twist. Xoanan is a highly sophisticated computer that the Tesh, over many years, developed to be independently intelligent. When the Doctor visited the first time, Xoanan was in need of repair, and to effect the cure he had to use his own mental energy. He thought he had fixed the computer, but it seems he had inadvertently left his own mental print behind. Xoanan, therefore, developed a dual personality, which drove it insane. The nearest thing we’ve had to a situation like this in any previous Doctor Who story is the First Doctor serial, “The Ark,” where, at the end of episode two it looks as if our heroes have saved the day, only to return some years later to find that they’ve actually made the situation worse.
Leela’s character is supposed to be intelligent, but technically ignorant. In other words, she has street smarts, and a rational mind, even if she doesn’t know a lot of facts. She has both the hunter’s instinct, and the ability to take information and form conclusions. A rather unusual traveling companion for the Doctor, which, perhaps, makes her most suitable.
Another interesting twist on the usual Doctor Who plot is the fact that the Doctor didn’t have to stay. For most of the first half of the story, he could have escaped back into the jungle, jumped in the TARDIS and left. But he doesn’t, and I think behind his decision to put things right is a sense of responsibility. It was his fault the computer turned out a mentally disturbed wannabe-god, so it’s up to him to fix it.
One little plot point that bugged me was how the Medikit was still functional after so many generations, and how the Doctor knew all the chemicals and medicines it used would still be viable. It seems the Medikit has not needed to be recharged for many, many years, and yet the guns can only carry a charge good enough for a finite number of shots before they need to be powered up again. The logic of that evaded me for all four episodes.
An interesting detail I noticed was at the end, when Xoanan makes a couch and table materialize for the Doctor and Leela to sit on while they talk. The Doctor picks up a cigarette box from the table, and inside he finds jelly babies. Many years later, in the Twelfth Doctor story, “Mummy on the Orient Express,” the Doctor will pull a cigarette case from his inside coat pocket, open it, and take out a jelly baby.
This is a great story, though perhaps just shy of “must-see.” I would certainly recommend it to all Whovians, and even perhaps to those with a less fanatical interest in the show.
