Day 162: The Faceless Ones Episode 6

Gerry Davis. He'll script edit the show for a couple more episodes, but seeing as he'll leave halfway through the next story, I thought it best that a general round up of his time on the show be posted at the end of his last full story for Doctor Who. And, like any other script editor, he has certainly left his mark on the series, making it more modern, removing the outdated historical genre (no matter how good it could be when placed in the right hands) and perhaps most importantly, introducing proper science fiction elements to the series. To say that it was a generic space adventure series before he came along is perhaps doing the previous eras a bit of a disservice, but there is no denying that when Davis came onto the series, the science fiction elements became that little bit more fascinating. No longer are adventures just about monsters, instead they take science fiction ideas and use them, with occasional additions of monsters. Take this story, for instance. At first glance, it is your basic Invasion of the Body Snatchers pastiche until you begin to notice the ideas bubbling under the surface. An alien race which has lost their identities thanks to a large explosion on their homeworld, and so they have to assume the identities of humans that they've captured. It's an idea at the centre of the story, and this idea is what drives it, people being steadily replaced by an alien menace who just want this to survive. Also The Moonbase, which is about gravity controlling the Earth's weather, or The Macra Terror which is about mind control of a colony, these are all science fiction ideas that Davis has brought on board. And whilst we might praise Doctor Who for being silly, it can also be wonderfully serious, and this is something that Davis brought us, so we thank him for the work that he did, bringing some hard science fiction to the world of Doctor Who.