14x4. The Face of Evil
Writer: Chris Boucher
Director: Pennant Roberts
Script Editor: Robert Holmes
Producer: Philip Hinchcliffe
Synopsis: The Doctor arrives on
a planet where the Sevateem tribe, which worship a god they call
Xoanon, is preparing for battle against their rivals, the Tesh. As he
is drawn into the conflict, the Doctor comes to a startling discovery:
Xoanon is in fact a malfunctioning computer that he had attempted to
repair on a previous visit to the planet but left with a split
personality (partly the computer's and partly his own). Leela, a member
of the Sevateem, helps the Doctor to correct the malfunction and
eventually leaves with him in the TARDIS.
Review: "The Face of Evil"
works for me not because it does any one single thing spectacularly,
but because it does a number of things very well. It's an involving
story with an interesting twist, the characters are drawn with some
complexity and originality, and it has an underlying theme that it
articulates competently.
It would have been easy to portray the Sevateem as uniformly ignorant,
violent, and hostile, but Chris Boucher's script allows them more
complexity than that. Some of them are honest believers in the myths of
Xoanon and The Evil One, but not all of them (though the cynicism
displayed by some of those who don't is not exactly endearing). Leela
is the exception to both rules: she dismisses these myths as
superstition and she maintains an open mind, but does not seek to use
her intelligence to gain power over others. At the same time, she is
quick to resort to aggression and violence, for which the Doctor
rebukes her. And while we might expect the Tesh to be more
sophisticated and skeptical given their technological advantages, they
are just as much in the grip of unquestioning belief in a distorted
myth as the Sevateem are, the only real difference being the value they
place on formality and calm.
It would not be out of bounds to inquire as to whether "The Face of
Evil" has a somewhat anti-religious bent, in that the believers on both
sides are seen as naive and perhaps overly predisposed to use force.
What makes it more than simply a screed against organized religion,
however, is the way that Xoanon reacts when the Doctor tries to explain
what has happened. Faced with a threat to its own understanding of the
world, it reacts with the same sort of denial and violence we see from
the Tesh and the Sevateem, demonstrating, as the Doctor comments, that
"The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common.
Instead of altering their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts
to fit their views." The script is not so much an attack on religion,
then, but on its most closed-minded variants as well as all other forms
of unwillingness to have one's assumptions challenged. Still, it must
be said that no one in "The Face of Evil" comes off as a particularly
positive example of religious faith.
"The Face of Evil" is also noteworthy for its approach towards the
Doctor, who has to confront a mistake he made long ago in an encounter
he barely remembers at first. This is an interesting choice for the
script, and while it does not dwell on the point, it allows us to see
the character as fallible in a way that is not typically emphasized,
and it casts his rather abrupt departure after his repair of Xoanon (he
explicitly refuses to try to settle the remaining differences between
the Tesh and the Sevateem) in a somewhat curious light. At first, my
reaction was that it seemed a bit irresponsible for him to just waltz
away after all the trouble he'd (unintentionally) caused. On the other
hand, perhaps it's a touch of understated humility from a Doctor that
one certainly wouldn't expect to be prone to overt self-castigation:
now that he's rectified the immediate damage he caused, he's not going
to presume to meddle in this situation any further. Either way, it's a
departure from the standard "Doctor solves everything" formula, and it
emphasizes the Doctor's capacity to make mistakes more explicitly than
any serial since "Planet of the Spiders."
The script raises another question about the Doctor as well, though I'm
not sure whether it means to. Namely, if the Doctor's original arrival
on this planet took place so long ago that he now barely remembers it,
just how long has it been since his last regeneration, given that
Xoanon is clearly modeled after the Fourth Doctor and not some previous
incarnation? More to the point, how long has he been traveling alone
since leaving Gallifrey at the end of "The Deadly Assassin"? Since
Sarah did not visibly age much during her time in the TARDIS, we can
assume that only a few years passed while she was still with him,
meaning that either he has been alone for quite a while, or else his
memory is just not very sharp given how long he's been traveling. The
latter seems hard to swallow -- obviously memory is not equivalent to
intelligence, but I still don't imagine that the Doctor would be
lacking in this area.
It's hard to pin down exactly why I enjoyed "The Face of Evil" as much
as I did -- if not for the ambiguity over the Doctor's reason for his
quick exit, I might have been inclined to view it as the sort of subpar
ending that I've found to be too characteristic of other recent
serials, and the question over the Doctor's time alone may be more an
accident than a deliberate mystery. But despite these possible flaws,
the plot and characters really drew my interest, and the ideas are
creative enough to earn a strong recommendation even if I'm not 100%
comfortable with how they were resolved.
Rating: ***1/2 out of four