Inspirations - The Face of Evil

The Face of Evil was initially advertised by the BBC as the first story of a new season. The Deadly Assassin had finished in the run up to Christmas, and it was decided to have a short break before the next adventure aired. Episode One was broadcast on New Year's Day, 1977.
The writer is someone we haven't met yet - Chris Boucher. You will have seen that very few new writers have come on board since the 1970's began. Boucher had submitted a script called "The Silent Scream" which had impressed Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe. He was asked to go away and come up with a new storyline based on that old chestnut, the Mad Computer. They're ten a penny these days, but Doctor Who had only featured deranged computers a couple of times before this - e.g. The War Machines and The Green Death.
As the story developed, it went through a number of title changes. Initially it was "The Dreamers of Phados", and then "Prime Directive", before becoming "The Mentor Conspiracy". After a spell titled "The Tower of Imolo" it settled upon "The Day God Went Mad" - possibly one of the best titles we never had. With Mary Whitehouse causing problems for the BBC, it was decided that this was a little too controversial, so The Face of Evil ended up as the title under which Boucher's scripts were eventually broadcast.

Boucher was given one story element which he had to include - a one-off companion for the Doctor. She was to be someone whom the Doctor could mentor, a character unlike the recent contemporary Earth companions such as Liz, Jo, Sarah and Harry.
Whilst Holmes tended to look to classic Horror / Sci-Fi movies for inspiration, Boucher has stated that his main inspiration was a science fiction novel named Captive Universe, written by Harry Harrison, and published in 1969. This tells the tale of a young Aztec man named Chimal, whose people have been cut off within an isolated valley by an earthquake which occurred generations ago. There are two villages, separated by a river, and both societies live under strict religious laws which ban the two groups from intermingling. An evil goddess kills anyone who ventures beyond the river. Chimal wants to know what lies beyond the valley and falls foul of the priests who run things. Facing sacrifice, he is helped to escape by his mother - who is then killed in his place once he has gone.
In The Face of Evil we have two societies separated by a barrier which is patrolled by a deadly god-like entity, one of which is dominated by its priest or shaman (Neeva), and Leela is the young tribe member who questions things. He father is killed in her place.

Once he escapes from the valley, Chimal discovers a network of strange tunnels, and emerges to find that he is actually on board a vast generational spaceship. His people are the passengers, being taken to a new life on another planet. The crew of the ship have been in command so long they have forgotten their true purpose and the ship has flown past its target world. They resemble the Tesh, seen in this Doctor Who story, whilst Chimal's people are clearly the Sevateem equivalent.
Chimal's presence outside of his own community eventually leads to the ship being set back on its intended course.
Taking this story as a backdrop, Boucher develops his two societies, who have been separated by their spaceship's computer, Xoanon. A xoanon was an ancient Greek statuette of a god.
Way back in 1966, there was Doctor Who story called The Ark - about another generational spaceship. This story had been structured in two halves - with the second pair of episodes showing the TARDIS return to the Ark to show the consequences of the Doctor's intervention in the first two episodes. The Face of Evil also shows us the consequences of the Doctor's previous interventions - this time referring to some unscreened adventure.

At some point in his current incarnation, the Doctor had helped a spaceship crew known as the Mordee Expedition, who we will later discover had originally come from Earth or one of its colonies.
Their computer was damaged, and so the Doctor used his own mind to help repair it via a memory transfer. What he hadn't realised was that the computer was just developing its own artificial intelligence. His memory print caused the computer to become mentally unstable. When the Survey Team set off to explore the planet, leaving the technicians behind on the ship, Xoanon decided to embark on a eugenics experiment. It set up a force barrier to keep the two groups apart, in order to study how they developed in isolation.
Cut off from their ship, the Survey Team degenerated technologically over the centuries to become a hunter-gatherer society, dominated by superstition based on ancient memories of their origins. Xoanon set itself up as their god. The Technicians, confined within the ship, developed an ascetic lifestyle, also dominated by the computer.
Xoanon by this time had developed a split personality - its own in a constant struggle with elements of the Doctor's personality which had been left behind.
When the Doctor arrives he can't recall being on this planet before - yet the Sevateem he encounters all recognise him as the Evil One who has imprisoned their god. He discovers why this should be the case when Leela shows him a mountain beyond which Xoanon is said to be held captive. This has the Doctor's face carved into it - an image clearly inspired by Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, which has the features of four US Presidents carved into it - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Construction began in October 1927, and it was finally completed in October 1941.

The story thereafter is pretty much the Doctor having to navigate between the two societies as he endeavours to undo the damage he did when he first tried to fix the computer.
He is joined in his adventures by Leela, who was named after the Palestinian hijacker Leila Khaled. She came to prominence when she took part in the hijacking of TWA Flight 840 on 29th August 1969, which was en route to Rome from Tel Aviv. All the passengers and crew were released unharmed after the flight had been diverted to Damascus, though the aircraft was subsequently damaged by the hijackers. After her photograph had appeared in the international press, she underwent plastic surgery so that she would not be recognised when she carried out further hijackings. In September 1970 she was part of a team which attempted multiple hijackings. The El Al flight she was on was diverted to London Heathrow where she was arrested, though she was released soon afterwards as part of a hostage exchange.
Cast as Leela was Louise Jameson. Tom Baker took an instant dislike to the character, which resulted in him being less than cordial towards the actor playing her. He was unhappy with her skimpy leather costume, and Leela's propensity towards violence - especially her use of the knife and the toxic Janis Thorns. The latter were supposed to be pronounced as in Janice, but this was changed to sounding like the Roman god Janus when Baker and Jameson thought they sounded like a one-hit wonder female singer from the early 60's.
The revealing costume was designed deliberately for the benefit of the dads who would be watching.
Whilst Baker hated the character, Holmes and Hinchcliffe liked Leela and decided to keep her on for further stories.
One of the Tesh is seen briefly wearing a spacesuit. The helmet which forms part of this costume has an interesting history. It was first seen being worn by one of the alien delegates in the Dalek stories Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks' Master Plan It was then reused in Season 10, appearing in both Frontier in Space and Planet of the Daleks. Its last outing was in The Android Invasion. It had originally been made for the ABC science fiction serial Pathfinders to Mars back in 1960.

Fans have long debated just when the Fourth Doctor first encountered the Mordee expedition, as many of the Tom Baker stories up to this point don't have much opportunity for missing adventures to be slotted in between them. It can't have been a previous incarnation of the Doctor, due to the whole Face of Evil bit.
One popular theory is that the Doctor slipped away from the UNIT HQ sickbay just after his last regeneration and met the expedition then. This might explain why he made such a botched job of things, if he was still getting over the regeneration trauma.
The Doctor does not intend to take Leela with him when he departs. She rushes into the TARDIS ahead of him and somehow manages to dematerialise the ship all by herself - something which has annoyed fans ever since.
Next time: Agatha Christie meets Dune. With robots.