The Faceless Ones episode 2 discussion:
P: So, that guy wasn’t faceless, he was featureless.
Sp: He was all kind of lumpy. That reminds me, Sweetie, we still have some banana bread.
K: Huh?
SG: The alien looked like the texture of banana bread.
R: He looked like he had a face until someone sanded it off.
Sp: So Der Kommissar…
H: Commandant
Sp: has quickly become my favorite character of the story.
SG: My god, yes.
R: Coolest cucumber ever.
P: I’ll just catch the grenade. Oh, it’s a ball.
Sp: I mean, he is long suffering and competent and unflappable, and a great straight man for the Doctor’s antics.
R: Exactly the guy you’d want in charge of an airport.
P: But not curious enough.
R: Being in charge of a major metropolitan airport, he has reason to think he’s seen it all.
P: True.
H: And to be fair, he did investigate the Doctor’s claim.
P: I’ll buy that.
R: After that it’s just Occam’s Razor.
<Occam’s Raisins, the breakfast cereal that keeps you regular. The only reasonable choice in a breakfast cereal.>
R: We now return you to your regularly scheduled commentary.
<Sometimes jokes are made based on my live spelling, which is corrected before it’s posted on-line. We usually don’t type those jokes, but this one was just too special not to include. We call it Ketina’s “typoetry.”>
R: I have to say, this episode moved fast. The end really caught me off guard.
K: I only knew it was the end because the pictures started moving, so I figured it was the cliffhanger / beginning of the next episode which moves. But it seemed like it came quickly to me too.
R: I sort of felt like, “aww, it’s over?”
H: A lot of stuff happened in this episode. It just had a really good pace. Even including the wonderful scene of the Commandant sighing.
K: That scene was why he’s awesome.
R: I liked him on the phone. “Situation changed. They made a run for it. I’ll give you their descriptions.” That was just beautiful.
SG: He’s not going to run or anything.
K: He has minions for that.
Sp: More proof of his unflappability.
SG: The only real thing that I call into question was Polly’s alibi. Because the Chameleon Polly is supposedly Swiss on her first trip to England with a very British accent.
Everyone: The Doctor asks her about that.
SG: But she still wouldn’t pick up the accent just because you were taught…
R: There was definitely something off about her explanation.
H: On the other hand, there are plenty of people out there who learned English from British and speak it perfectly well when they first visit and English speaking country.
Sp: So her background is sketchy. Her English is perfect. She’s not really helpful. And she works in customer service. Her alibi is airtight.
H: You can’t argue with that.
R: I thought the Doctor’s word game trick with fake Polly was really clever.
Sp: “I never said murderer.”
R: And frozen Polly is angry. Maybe it was just the shot that they picked. But frozen Polly in the case was all “grrrrr.”
Sp: No, Polly definitely does NOT want her cracker!
R: “oil can!”
Sp: Yeah, frozen airline pilot.
H: Meadows.
Sp: Yeah, Frozen Meadows…
R: Bond chick!
Sp: Worst stripper name ever, by the way. Frozen Meadows was actually really creepy. There’s his body in the case. And then disembodied voice crying out because it was suffocating…
H: It was a ruse. The Doctor saw it was coming from the speaker – that’s why he ran into the room.
Sp: That didn’t come across.
R: “Help me. I can’t breathe. Which is something you humans need to do.”
P: And talk. In order to communicate you have to breathe. It seems to me that someone who can’t breathe wouldn’t be able to cry out that he can’t breathe.
R: The impression I got was that he was supposed to be someplace without air. Not in a vacuum but somewhere with no oxygen.
K: Some of the telesnaps were unfortunate this week. However I loved most of the shots of Samantha..
H: And her awesome hat.
R: Her cake hat. It looked like it was made out of fondant.
H: Perched fetchingly on her head. She wasn’t actually wearing it.
R: It was just kind of hanging out with her.
H: But yes, early television appearance for the actress Pauline Collins. Among many other things in her distinguished career, she was in “Upstairs Downstairs,” numerous movies, and of course, played Queen Victoria in “Tooth and Claw.”
A: I liked the music. It was very Brian Eno music for airportsy.
H: It’s almost as if these guys might have influenced Eno at the time. Radiophonics workshop was extremely influential.
R: There was a 2-second attack of the sound track. When the Doctor throws the ball it was “drum circle! Okay, stop.”
Sp: It was a legitimate music sting. It sold it.
H: Ronelyn, have you ever seen the Avengers? That’s the way 1960’s music was.
R: It’s like lens flare in 90’s movies and shaky-cam in 00’s movies. Just because it happens a lot doesn’t mean it’s good.
Sp: While we’re on questionable judgment, “now Jamie, I need someone to observe Polly. I need them to be discrete, and I need them to look for anything unusual. Now, go, person who is shocked by airplanes, holds newspapers upside down, dresses like a girl…”
P: Hey! Just dresses in a conspicuous way.
Sp: “And, otherwise has no cultural context whatsoever. You’re the perfect man to notice things from a time you don’t come from. Now go, and don’t be scared.”
R: <Scottish accent> “Doctor, now she’s talking into some kind of thing that looks like a horseshoe! And she’s writing on sheepskin with some kind of a stick.”
H: Come-on, he’s not quite Katarina.
Sp: Open door in space, air go whoosh. What did Ben do?
R: Got caught.
SG: He found Polly. The real Polly.
R: “Grrr! Grrrr!”
<laughter>
H: He made the guy drop his freeze pen so the Doctor could pick it up later. The text went by pretty quickly, so I wanted to make sure you all got that plot point.
Sp: Because who was it… Chekov… if a freeze pen is dropped in act one it’s going to be fired in act three. <singing> “Doctor’s got a freeze pen, Polly never sleeps at night.”
R: But this one was dropped in act 2.
H: Well, it is a six parter, so it all works out.
K: Six parter! <groan>
R: That’s crazy talk.
H: Come-on, fully a third of it is moving pictures.
Sp: So I’m not getting a handle on the chameleon’s motives.
H: Yeah, it’s been pretty vague up to this point, hasn’t it.
P: It seems more like a casual slow paced invasion to me. “We’ll take 50 years to get our agents in place, and then we’ll strike.”
Sp: Invasion of the body shufflers.
R: “We just really all wanted to work at an airport.”
<30 seconds of silence>
R: So, final thoughts?
SG: I liked the episode. I think it’s fun. And I still like the Scooby Doo mystery that they have going.
H: We have a little less of the Scooby Doo-ness this week.
SG: I still think it’s a full on mystery.
H: Jinkies!
P: Zoinks!
SG: I would like it if they picked the pace up just a little bit though. I get they’re trying to build a sense of mystery and dread regarding what’s going on. But I want to get farther into the plot.
H: We did get one nice little clue with the postcards.
K: Yeah, but I figured that out last week.
H: Because we saw the postcards. We saw Blade and the other guy and he said they needed to post the cards. But it was cool that Samantha found the postcards, and is starting to put things together.
K: I hope we get lots of Samantha. I liked her.
A: I liked it.
P: Commandant, so kewl. I think the Doctor missed a few dots connecting the lines here, and I totally agree.
<connect-the-dots references puts already giddy group in stitches for a few moments.>
P: I totally agree that sending the Scotsman who can’t read, wearing a kilt, in for covert observations was a poor choice.
<apparently I am a typing “Porky Pig” regarding my word choices due to spelling. They are mean this week.>
SG: Though I think he was going to get picked up by Samantha. They’re going to go back to the photobooth…
H: The photobooth was so awesome. I just love that curtain – pose moment.
K: Perfect tele-snap.
P: In a literal sense too. Let’s see… I thought for sure Polly-clone was going to get caught because she arrived, said I’m going to work, and is now getting on a plane to leave. I’m sure a immigrations official would ask something.
K: She could just say she got fired.
H: The chocolate you have here is so inferior, I have to go home.
K: God forbid she comes to the US then.
Sp: So I realize it’s only act 2, of 6, and that the Doctor usually works by roaming about a bit until he stumbles upon the plot…
H: Which he seemed to do at the end of this episode.
Sp: But he seems a little more distracted, and distractable in this one. Like he couldn’t decide which problem to solve.
H: I don’t know, he seems to have this laser-like focus on the murder. Polly seemed almost a secondary thing.
P: “I guess we’ve had her long enough.”
Sp: Then why isn’t he talked to the Police.
K: He is.
SG: He keeps trying to.
Sp: He keeps talking to someone in authority, who keeps trying to get him arrested, but then when the Police are on their way he runs away. “Fetch! Ball-ball-ball.”
H: But the correct Police officer has found Jamie at the end of the episode. Inspector Crossland. Who’s investigating the disappearance of… did you remember his name… Inspector Gascoyne!
Cz: “DOC-TOR!”
Sp: That was the main thing that stood out to me.
Cz: What happened to the lady. Polly?
Sp: Polly’s in a box.
Cz: <bad British accent> “Wot’s she doing there?”
R: Going “grrrr!”
Cz: Why didn’t what’s his face check for a pulse or something. The idiot goes for a phone call instead.
H: And gets caught. But makes him drop his freeze pen which the Doctor later picks up.
K: And we’ve looped. Feeling caught up Cz?
Cz: Cold, or derped?
Sp: A little bit of column A, and a little bit of column B.
H: Anything else Spoo?
Sp: derp.
R: Grrr!
K: Is that all?
R: I thought the episode just had a really good pacing and <yawn> I’m really looking forward to next week.
Sp: Polly can you hear me? Hear me talking to you?
H: Polly can you see me? Can I help to cheer you? Polly… Polly…
K: You’re all just in my head anyway, right?
Sp: Yes.
K: Hum. Like it, even with the lack of moving pictures. This one’s fun. It’s got good levels of silly, some really nice acting, everyone (mostly) has something to do. Ben’s a little pathetic but at least Polly… is in a coma? Well, fake Polly has a lot to do. And lots of good Jamie bits. Overall this one’s been fun. Looking forward to more.
H: I had an interesting experience with this episode because I have seen a different reconstruction of it before. There have been a few times previously when Photobug has felt like he’d remembered things moving in recons that were just stills.
P: My memory plays back as a real show because the recon and the episode were so good.
H: I actually had that experience a few times watching this episode. My memory said “I remember seeing movement” when reading some of the captions, but clearly I hadn’t. Like when Meadows taps the guy on the shoulder to take his place in the control room, I swear I remember seeing that before, and I know I couldn’t have. So I’m really looking forward to seeing episodes 4-6 and whatever I don’t remember correctly. And, of course, I’m looking forward to moving pictures next week.
K: Not as much as we’re looking forward to moving pictures next week.
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