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The Half-Face Man was a Clockwork Droid assigned to the SS Marie Antoinette sometime in the 51st century. At one point, the ship crashed on Earth in prehistoric times and remained stuck on the planet for millions of years.
Biography
Early life
The Half-Face Man was originally the Central Command Node aboard the time-travelling ship, SS Marie Antoinette, sister ship of the SS Madame De Pompadour. At one point, the ship crashed on Earth sometime before the Mesozoic Era. With the ship damaged and all the crew dead, the clockwork droids aboard the ship remained stuck on the planet for millions of years, replacing their parts time and time again as they got older until there was virtually nothing left of their original selves at all.
Harvesting organs
By Victorian times, the Half-Face Man had begun harvesting organs from humans in the city of London. This included the eyes from a man named Alf and the hands from two separate humans. The droids incinerated their targets to conceal what had been taken from them, ensuring their presence in London was invisible. The Half-Face Man at one point also acquired Mancini's Family Restaurant and turned it into an organ-harvesting factory, whereby guests unlucky enough to enter it would be taken down below into the droids' crashed spaceship and their organs used to repair the ship.
When a dinosaur mysteriously appeared in the Thames, the Half-Face Man extracted tissue from its optic nerve to use as part of his ship. He then incinerated the creature so as to leave no trace of his presence. This did, however, alert the Doctor, newly regenerated into his Twelfth incarnation, to their nefarious activities throughout London.
The Doctor and his companion, Clara, were led to the restaurant by a mysterious coded message left in a newspaper. They were then taken down to the spaceship and accosted by the Half-Face Man, who revealed to them that his sole objective was to reach the "Promised Land". While Clara and the Paternoster Gang fought the clockwork droids, the Half-Face Man escaped to the ship's escape capsule, a hot air balloon made of human skin. There, the Doctor managed to convince the droid that the Promised Land did not exist, and so the robot either fell — or was pushed — to his death on top of Big Ben. His death deactivated the rest of the clockwork droids, saving the Doctor's companions.
The Promised Land?
After his death, however, the Half-Face Man found himself in some sort of garden, where a mysterious woman explained to him that he had reached the "Promised Land" — he was now in Heaven, at last.
Personality
The Half-Face Man was a wholly unemotional and logic-driven individual. He showed no remorse when killing humans (and dinosaurs) for their organs and was more than happy to use force in order to extract information. He cared little for his clockwork subordinates, and was happy to leave them on their own while he escaped his crashed spaceship. He was, moreover, a very driven individual, his entire life dedicated to finding what he called the "Promised Land".
As he became more and more human, however, he began to feel some small degree of emotion. He could, for example, with some encouragement from the Doctor, appreciate the view of London while in his escape capsule, calling it "beautiful".
Abilities
The Half-Face Man was equipped with a blowtorch hidden underneath one of his human hands. He used this both as a torture device and to look threatening as well as, presumably, to incinerate his victims so as to remain undiscovered. While he was immensely clever in some capacities, he was also rather stupid in others, and was, like his fellow clockwork droids, fooled into thinking an organic was a droid like him as long as they were not breathing. (TV: Deep Breath)
Behind the scenes
The Half-Face Man was a villain created for the episode Deep Breath, the first episode of series 8 of Doctor Who, released on 23 August 2014. He, as well as his clockwork counterparts, were a homage to the earlier Doctor Who story The Girl in the Fireplace, penned by Steven Moffat, which also featured clockwork robots who used human organs as "spare parts". In the episode he was played by Peter Ferdinando, while in some scenes an animatronic model was used.