‘The Face of Evil’

Tonight we watched all four parts of “The Face of Evil,” par examplar of classic Doctor Who cheese.

This serial marks the debut of Leela (Louise Jameson), a companion from the future whose people have regressed to a preindustrial level of technology. Leela is a forerunner of later action heroines: She’s athletic, fearless and more than willing to fight her way through danger to protect herself or the Doctor.

“The Face of Evil” is Classic Who’s treatment of the ancient astronauts fancy, the idea that our distant ancestors encountered aliens, mistook them for gods and developed religions around those meeting, much like the cargo cults that developed in the South Pacific during and after World War II.

And that’s part of what makes this episode such corny fun. In addition to posing questions like “Why is Leela the only woman on her entire planet?” the show entertains us with holy relics such as the Crown of Xoanon that couldn’t be more obviously the glove of a spacesuit if it tried, and a shaman’s cloak that also comes from an old spacesuit.

Props and costuming like that help to telegraph plot twists two episodes away, but it’s nice to see the Doctor confronted for once with a problem that he created. If the Sevateem tribal politics get a little too shouty, the Tesh a little too ridiculous, and the anti-religious message a little too heavy-handed, the story is still a fun trip through the TARDIS.

Like a lot of other Tom Baker serials, “The Face of Evil” hints at a fantastic world that the viewers are left to fill themselves. It’s implied that the “ancient astronauts” aspect of the story happened centuries earlier. It would make a tremendous story to fill in the history between that incident and the moment the Doctor first meets Leela — and to see how the Tesh and the Sevateem find their way forward after the serial ends.

Especially when it appears the only woman on the planet stowed away on board the TARDIS and left with the Doctor.