‘THE FACE OF EVIL' (TOM BAKER'S DOCTOR WHO)

Written by Chris Boucher
First broadcast Jan 1977
Plot spoilers happen!

“At last we are here. I shall be free of us.”
- Xoanon

When Two Tribes Go To War

As we all now know, this is the one where future companion Leela is found. She’s not fitting in terribly well amid her tribe, the Sevateem. Who seem remarkably similar to the Tribe of Gum way back when, as if savagery hadn’t advanced much in the meantime. There's the same machiavellian power struggles, and so on. In fact the differences only occur when the plot compels them. Not only is their religion different, if equally plot-driven, this becomes more central to the story so they have a shaman to reiterate it. (Rather than just the power struggle over leadership.)

In fact it can feel like they've come back to savagery to complete the quota of colonialist tropes. They missed some last time, such as cargo cults and foreigner-as-divinity. It's useless complaining these aren't really common features of tribal societies. One only ever really happened during a narrow time period in the south Pacific (and some doubt even there that 'cargo cult' is an accurate term) and the other only happened to the Aztecs, who weren't a tribal society but an ancient civilisation.

But they allow us to indulge in infantalisation of primitive peoples. Cargo cults demonstrates them playing at things they don’t understand the way children do. Which is of course required thinking for colonialists, to see other people as our charges. And so people want to believe them, and so here they are.

As from it's early days science fiction aped and echoed colonialist fiction, it's scarcely a surprise that this stuff got absorbed along with everything else. 'Star Trek' did it on less than three times, with 'The Apple', 'Return of the Archons' and 'A Piece Of the Action'. About which Josh Marsfelder says this, and there's not much point me paraphrasing him.

But of course, here there’s a twist. Which, as we all now know equally well, is that the Sevateem and their arch-enemies the Tesh both turn out to be descendants of an original landing party, respectively the Survey team and the Techs. The fact that they've created a cargo cult around their own history is, true enough, a tasty paradox. My favourite moment is when they use a steel panel from the spaceship as a gong, which may well be because they're not mimicking its original purpose but finding their own.

Commentators often talk about this story in terms of its influences, which may be understandable. The Baker era has, up to now, done their take on Frankenstein, on Triffids, on Mummy stories and all the rest. In a way the show hadn’t since the decline of the historicals. But here it’s misplaced. This story may well have had influences, but its not taking a recognised trope out for another spin. Its basis is more the classic science fiction extrapolation of a high concept. Which, as we all know was, What If God Went Mad? (More on Gods going mad later.)

And this may be partly why the story’s so under-rated, normally ranked below Chris Boucher’s other two scripts, ’The Robots of Death’ and ’Image of The Fendahl’ - despite that introduction of fan fave Leela. People aren’t looking at it in quite the right way.

More strangely, those same commentators often overlook what must surely be its biggest influence. Mostly it channels ’Zardoz’, just with Leela taking up the Sean Connery role of the half-naked savage who crosses the threshold to civilisation. (Through a big stone head, even.) There's the same exotic science-fictiony names which turn out to be corruptions of more familiar ones. The evil overlords even have similar names, from the titular Zardoz to Xoanon.

Well, except... ’Zardoz’s theme was civilisation leading to decadence and ennui, and therefore needing the odd bit of prodding by some passing half-naked savage to liven life up a bit. While this goes back to that great SF staple of the division between mental and manual labour. (Seem most clearly in the influential ’Metropolis’.) While the Tesh are ascetically religious, as fixated upon the life of the mind as the Sevateem are on physical prowess. (Their mind control powers should really have extended to telekinetic abilities, allowing them to carry out their daily tasks without sullying their fingers.)

Though while they guard the inevitable sentient super-computer and see themselves as superior to the brute Sevateem, unlike the Eternals of ’Zardoz’ they're ultimately as clueless as to what's really going on. (There's a touch of ’Canticle For Liebowitz’ in their turning science into religious litany.)

An artificial barrier has been constructed by that super-computer to keep the two apart, and the story's largely predicated upon bringing this down. In short, despite the technophobia you might expect, it's not technical development which has placed people on either side of it, the early adaptors versus the stuck-in-the-mud Luddities with their hunting knives and dial-up connections. Xoanon represents a false consciousness which needs throwing off. Social stratification has a social cause.

And if the plot has Leela lead the way, the Sevateem eventually follow. They cross the same physical and psychological barrier as her, they just do it a bit later. Intra-story at least, they make the mental leap of their own accord. The shaman plays a crucial role in overcoming Xoanon, with the Doctor admitting he's underestimated him.

And the name ‘survey team’ suggests they weren't colonising invaders, so would most likely have been of the same scientific bent as those who stayed in the rocket, suggesting this difference wasn’t innate but developed over time. (Which may explain how they're able to carry crossbows, which seem well beyond their general level of development. Perhaps.) But that’s not really the point of the thing.

And this is accomplished by the same thing happening in microcosm – a team-up between the Doctor and Leela. When Leela first encounters the Doctor, she crawls up to his feet. But that turns out to be something of a throw, as they soon shape up into a team. If Leela’s from the Sevateem, the Doctor's not of the Tesh in the same way. It’s that in their cosmology he belongs that side of the barrier, and is more associated with brain work.

But for their team-up to be effective the differences between them need to be overcome. When the Doctor insists on imposing that division of labour, Leela guarding the door as he confronts Xoanon, it becomes cliffhanger time and she needs to rescue him. And just as he teaches her the rudiments of science, at one point he has to uncharacteristically resort to fisticuffs.

So all this could end up with any essentialist difference between the two tribes erased, the sides learning to just get along. That would after all take us back to how things were before this even began. But the story pointedly shows us neither before nor after, it ends with no-one knowing what to do and with everyone arguing. As do many ’Who’ stories, it’s true, such as ‘Power of the Daleks’. But that doesn’t change the basic fact – we don’t see any of this happen, it essentially ends on a freeze frame.

”I’m Not Feeling Myselves Today”

As things progress, we gradually discover Xoanon has some kind of split personality. He later states the split he's created in society is a duplicate of his own mental state, which most commentators take as gospel. But it isn’t at all. You could have written an evil computer who comes unplugged in the end without any of the tribal conflict, or have the two groups separated by some natural force, a gorge or raging river, or a force filed without any sentience behind it. The real split's in the story itself.

In almost a reprise of 'The Ark’, the Doctor caused all this on an earlier visit when he tried to fix the computer. That face of evil, it’s his! This is most obvious in the blatant ’Forbidden Planet’ borrow, where the invisible monster is revealed to have his face, as if it's his rampaging id. (Just his face. But still able to leave footprints.) There’s multiple mirror and fractured screen scenes.

The literal going inside of the Doctor’s head (if in carved form), the appearance of a couch, that most Freudian item of all furniture… these are two heavy hints among many that we should be seeing this as a psychological story. It’s probably unsurprising that the Black Archive book for this was written by a psychologist, Thomas Rodebaugh.

But rather than offer a talking cure the story seems as beset by confusion as Xoanon. The Sevateem believe Xoanon is held prisoner behind the barrier by the Evil One, who the Doctor looks like. Yet when Xoanon talks to the tribe on the cosmic walkie-talkie he has the Doctor's voice. And why, if its too insane and conflicted to even know itself, has it embarked on this human engineering programme in the first place?

Xoanon is really a whole bunch of cultural signifiers for a troubled mind pasted together. (Rodebaugh states politely “Boucher thinks psychologically [but] does not think psychoanalytically, which is a different matter entirely.”) Which shouldn’t be seen as altogether surprising. Professional scriptwriters are more likely to go with what they half-remember on a subject than decide to read the complete works of Freud and Jung before starting on scene one.

Look at ’Face Of Evil’ up close, and the sense of it dissipates. But its like looking at a painting up close, and getting surprised it goes abstract. Stand back, stupid! This isn’t something that’s intended to make sense. Its trying to be stimulating, not polemical. It throws a bunch of stuff at us, and gives us the job of sorting it.

Okay then, let’s get started on that.

So, the Doctor repairs the faulty computer, but in so doing he creates Xoanon, who is modelled on him. And Xoanon could be seen as an abandoned child, both modelling himself on his parent and wanting to establish his own self by breaking away from him. God went mad because of Daddy issues. As the child rebels against parental authority, that control seems not just bad but definitional of evil. To the child, after all, this is the point from where all authority seems to stem. And the solution can seem to be to rid yourself of the parent, allowing you to replace them.

It’s perhaps possible to see the two tribes as a child mind obsessing over sorting, over putting things in their place. Of course the Tesh and Sevateem cannot mix, any more than the land can meet the sky.

And in the one way you could say the story is psychoanalytical, its cool that the super-computer doesn’t just become a life form, its allowed to stay one. In a longstanding Who tradition it doesn't need defeating but curing. To overcome our reliance on our parents and become our own self, the paradox is that we need our parents to help with that. It gets harder when your Dad keeps shooting off. But works out alright in the end.

The rest of this review will be a semiotic analysis of Louse Jameson’s legs.

A Semiotic Analysis Of Louise Jameson’s Legs

Told you.

The Sevateem seem to have one other woman amongst them, whose role seems to be to stop anyone saying Leela's the only woman among them. (Nor do they have any children or old people.) Because of course she’s a blatant example of the nubile savage. The classic version of which is Raquel Welch as Loana in 'One Million Years BC' (1966). Not only does she illustrate that TV Tropes entry, the fur bikini she sports even has its own Wikipedia page. (Even the names are suspiciously similar,  Leela and Loana. But then primitive languages don't use consonants much. Or at least that’s what I was told by Looalla.)

The Nubile Savage’s ability to scour her environment for naturally occurring hair and beauty products is much-mocked. But if it’s effectively a form of fancy dress, the Doctor’s an example too. Closer to the point is the double standard rolled up in the popular term for the sexy companion figure, Something For The Dads. The Mums are presumably in the other room, making everyone’s tea, so let’s not worry. Arguably this is almost the norm with the companion figure. But with her skimpy leathers upping the sexiness, Leela brings it more out in the open. Though there’s more specific things to bring up…

First off, Google-image the term and see how many Nubile Savages are white girls hanging around in black parts of the world. One very common iteration is the Jungle Girl, the female Tarzan. Because after all we wouldn’t want that lechery getting inter-racial, now would we?

Moreover, and put bluntly, the supposition is that primitives will be unconstrained by our social norms and so make for better shags. But at the same time a recurrent feature of the Nubile Savage is her sexual innocence. Unsocialised, with the mind of a child in the body of a woman, she doesn’t know what her parading about in her skimpies does to the rest of us. The number of times she’s made some solitary figure, discovered by some expeditionary party, attest to this. Which of course is about making her unthreatening the same time as sexy.

How much of this applies to Leela? She’s white, and living in a jungle. And she’s isolated from her tribe after the first scene. While this is a family show, so subject to obvious constraints, no mention is made on-screen of her sex appeal despite that being blatantly what she’s there for.

I’ve peppered these reviews with personal recollections of first watching them. But this one’s not quite as charming as a wide-eyed boy having nightmares about Daleks. Leggy Leela’s arrival was for me just at… um, well, the right time. I’ve no idea what my Dad thought of her, but I got to be pretty keen.

What if we were to ask the young me what made him so besotted? There’s little point pretending I‘d have been the same had they made her an Inuit wrapped in furs, instead of what ’Futurama’ would call “a compelling short garment”. But maybe it wasn’t just that…

There was then something of a negative feedback loop between girl characters in popular dramas and boy audience response. There just to give the hero someone to rescue, they spent a lot of time screaming and simpering. A little young for terms such as ‘media construct’, my schoolmates and myself tended to conclude “girls spoil it”. Why not get straight to the fight scene, we reasoned, past that lovey-dovey stuff?

Whereas Leela didn’t simper much, which wasn’t always true of the type. Loana is simultaneously Nubile Savage and Damsel In Distress, her Fay Wray role in the film is to get captured by various kinds of dinosaur, who may well have been queuing up offscreen. Whereas Leela, strong-willed and resourceful, is Savage as much as Nubile. (Or, more accurately, cross-bred her with the Action Girl trope.)

Previous woman companions, such as Liz Shaw, had been given agency by beefing up their brains. Leela might seem to go in the other direction. Her role in terms of plot function is less Liz and more a throwback to Ian, Steven or (another primitive from a fightin’ background) Jamie, sometimes clashing with the Doctor over the use of force.

But while her educational record may have gaps, its also established from the get-go that she’s savvy. Jameson has said she played the character as “very intelligent but uneducated”, and part-based her on a child she knew.)

As said, she soon strikes up a rapport with the Doctor. The story opens with her decrying tribal customs like a one-woman Enlightenment, and getting exiled for her pains. She elects to travel with him. And her rejection of tribal leader status is a more stammering version of how he’s responded on other occasions. (Essentially “you are making a category error here.”) It's strange to read that two endings were deliberately written, to keep their options open with her. You can't imagine the other having worked half as well.

It’s true we have Jameson herself to thank for much of this. While Walsh figured her best response to being cast as Loana was to “strut my stuff”, she became more protective of her character. Frequently given scripts saying “girl companion screams” she’d simply state “Leela doesn’t scream”. From Susan on, the standard pattern for the girl companion was to establish someone as more interesting and then progressively wear them back down to cliche. Jameson didn’t make the feisty Leela up, but she took the character from this story and stuck with her.

I’d like to look back and believe this planted some early seed in my young mind about how different women characters could be depicted. Perhaps to some extent it did. But my reaction at the time was something else…

Jameson’s best-known comment is that what they gave Leela in proactivity, they took away from her in clothes. But what she saw as a trade-off my young mind took as a combination, it was legginess plus knife-wielding which made her sexy. (Leela replaced Sarah-Jane, who didn’t simper much either. But whenever she did anything pro-active I suspect my young mind went ‘honorary boy’.)

The Action Girl overlaps with what, in the terminology of the day, was called a Tomboy – a girl who takes to boy's stuff. You see the same trope at a similar time in Leia's anti-Dale Arden act in 'Star Wars' (1977). The figure’s appealing to young boys partly because it’s a girl coming into your world, doing your things, not asking you to move too much.

Which also exposes the limits. A girl who survives in a boy's world by doing boys' stuff, the Action Girl sidekick doesn't break the presumption that an audience is bad default a male audience. (Quite often she'll be just bad enough to be sexy, hence the hero keeping her in line.) it's also implicit that there's something unorthodox in hers heroics, and with it something kinky.

Rodebaugh states Philip Hinchcliffe, then the producer, thought the character might lead to more girls identifying with her. I’m not sure of this. Emma Peel from ’The Avengers’ had a lot of… well her name was devised as a homonym for ‘Man Appeal’. But I’ve also met not a small amount of women who took her as a kind of role model, even if that wasn’t the original plan. I’m not heard anyone say anything similar over Leela. She was made for the males. And if she did anything progressive, it was to the males.

Further reading: “You could argue that this is the personification of the core divide at the programme's soul at this time. Threatening to destroy the series is the untapped ego of Tom, with the self-reflexive query ‘Who, am I?’ an internal debate over whether or not he's bigger than the programme itself. Nah, not really - but food for thought, innit?”
- Tomb Of the Anorak

Coming soon! Further disruptions in the space-time continuum…