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| The Faceless Ones |
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 Name: The Chameleons
Format: Television
Show and Book
Time of Origin: Precisely planet unspecified,
but it was spatially close to Earth in the 1960s.
Appearances: "The
Faceless Ones" and "Face
Value"
Doctors: Second
Doctor and Sixth
Doctor
Companions: Polly, Ben Jackson and Jamie McCrimmon
History: One of the most advanced and tragic races
that The Doctor had ever encountered, he might have been inclined
to sympathise with the Chameleons if it weren’t for their
arrogant dismissal of virtually all other forms of life as inferior;
they even considered The Doctor to only be ‘almost’ as
intelligent as them, regarding themselves as the most intelligent
race in the universe.
Due
to some unspecified catastrophe on their planet, the race that
would become the Chameleons lost their identities and were left
with serious physical deformities, their natural state possessing
scarred, globby faces and bodies that would suffocate in Earth’s
atmosphere. Attempting to save their race, they travelled to
Earth, their scientists devising a means of saving themselves
by creating a process that would allow the Chameleons to take
on the physical characteristics of another being, using specially-designed
armbands to maintain a link between the ‘donor’ and
the Chameleon, although these armbands would have to remain on
at all times or their removal would awaken the original humans
and cause the Chameleons to disintegrate. The duplications could
even correct certain characteristics of the donor, such as a
Chameleon duplicate lacking the need for glasses that the original
human possessed.
During The Doctor’s encounter with them,
the Chameleons attempted to abduct 50,000 young people - although
their words implied that there had been other abductions -, taking
control of Gatwick Airport and miniaturising people who travelled
on their fake airline Chameleon Tours so that they could be replaced
with Chameleon duplicates. Having materialised at the airport
- and with the TARDIS having
been confiscated as a hazard -, the Second
Doctor, Polly, Ben and Jamie witnessed
someone being killed with a non-human weapon while hiding in
a Chameleon Tours
warehouse to avoid being arrested, but Polly fell behind while
they were trying to find and warn the authorities.
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| Short Trips and Side Steps |
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Realising
that something was wrong when they witnessed a duplicate of Polly
calling herself Michelle Leuppi from Zurich - as well as Jamie
meeting a young woman called Samantha Briggs who was looking
for her missing brother -, The Doctor and Jamie discovered fake
postcards that were allegedly from the people who had gone missing
on the tours while Ben discovered the real Polly, only to be
captured himself. Using alien technology to demonstrate what
they were up against, The Doctor was able to take charge of Gatwick
for the next twelve hours to carry out his investigations, eventually
realising that the flight controller, Meadows, was one of the
alien duplicates. Confronting Meadows, The Doctor learned what
had happened, subsequently posing as the Meadows Chameleon in
his form to confront the rest of the race.
With the Chameleons having recently duplicated Jamie
after he tried to infiltrate another flight, the Jamie duplicate
convinced his superiors to make contact with The Doctor in the
belief that he could be useful, The Doctor was forced to take
more drastic measures by helping Samantha sneak on board the
Chameleons’ spacecraft where they kept the miniaturised
humans. Since breaking the link between the Chameleons and the
humans would kill the Chameleons, The Doctor was thus able to
blackmail them into returning the humans and leaving Earth, The
Doctor did offer to give them some suggestions to solve the problem
of their loss of identity when they returned to their home planet.
During a later trip, the Sixth
Doctor visited the Leisureworld
amusement complex on the planet Krennos to investigate reports
that visitors had been acting strangely after their visits ("Face
Value"), quickly deducing that the manager and his staff
had been replaced by Chameleons in an attempt to repeat their
original plan. Unfortunately, their efforts had backfired as
Leisureworld was already a trap; Krennos was a living planet,
with the Leisureworld staff sapping the visitors’ vitality
to feed it so that they could study it, and the Chameleons’ intervention
had cut off the planet’s food supply. As the planet tried
to attack them, the Manager, accepting responsibility, used the
Chameleon mind-transfer machine to link himself to the attacking
plants, the shock of trying to take on a planet’s personality
killing him and stunning the planet back into a dormant state,
allowing The Doctor time to convince the Chameleons to free their
prisoners and depart. |
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| A Chameleon |
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| Captain Blade with a Chameleon
and The Doctor |
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| Captain Blade Threatens Inspector
Gascoigne |
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| A Chameleon |
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