"The Faceless Ones" Episode 4

Doctor Who
Airdate: April 29, 1967
Patrick Troughton, Frazer Hines
Written by David Ellis and Malcolm Hulke
Produced by Innes Lloyd
Directed by Gerry Mills

Spencer immobilizes the Doctor, Jamie, and Sam, sets up an elaborate trap involving a slow-moving laser beam, and then leaves them to die¹. Naturally, they escape. The Doctor convinces the Commandant's assistant to feign an illness, getting Nurse Pinto out of the medical unit to give him time to look around. He finds the original Nurse Pinto, deeply unconscious, and a pair of arm bands. Meanwhile, Sam books herself on the next Chameleon flight, determined to find out what happened to her brother. Jamie steals her ticket and gets on board himself. Once in the air, Jamie gets airsick and runs to the bathroom, so he isn't "disappeared" with the rest of the passengers. In the air, the plane's wings retract, and it ascends straight up into space, where it rendezvous with a huge satellite.

Wow, look at that. An alien spacecraft disguised as a terrestrial airplane. Where have I heard that before? Did L. Ron Hubbard write this?

Anyway, after quite a lot of build-up, things are finally happening. In my view, six episodes is way too long for most "Doctor Who" stories. In this case, what we have is a strong story with plenty of elements, but there still has to be action and danger in each and every episode. That's why you get ridiculous nonsense like that stupid stunt with the laser beam.

But the real issue is pacing. Television simply wasn't as fast in the 60s as it is today. If this story were to be made for modern "Doctor Who", there wouldn't be all this business about painstakingly collecting evidence to convince the authorities to help. David Tennant would just jump in and sort it all out in a little over forty minutes. Of course, there are drawbacks to the modern approach, and sometimes there are real benefits to the slower pace. Usually, though, you just get padding.

Part of the problem is that the series is gradually transitioning its format. Look at something like the first Dalek story, for instance. That was seven episodes long, but it was structured like a weekly serial. Each episode had its own story to tell, and when you watch it one episode at a time, with a week in between, it all works very nicely. When you watch it all in one go, it's way too long (which is why the theatrical version of that story, starring Peter Cushing, is much, much shorter than the television version). The same problem applies here, except that the episodes aren't clearly distinct anymore. So there's a lot of material that exists only to pad out the story to the pre-determined length of six episodes.

¹ Yeah, I know. I'm guessing that the original human Spencer, from whom this alien version was copied, must have been a big James Bond fan.