Hopefully, my brother thumbs up my title (F standing for Face, not "the") ::snickers::
Ok, that out of the way, the Face of Boe (at our first encounter) looks like a member of some extraordinary race we have never encountered before... A very bizarre and creepy appearance, he seems to be just a gigantically swollen head with no body, and strange tendrils in place of hair, with odd egg like pods at the ends. My first notion was he was of a race where the brain enlarged through to sucking in of knowledge, and the limbs withered through lack of use. Which oddly made him very like the Mondasians who became Cybermen. But, my idea was wrong.
Our encounters with the Face of Boe have been nothing less than mysterious. In our first encounter in the story End of the World, he says nothing, does nothing....sitting in his jar of life-giving gas. (Making me think of the Paul Magrs novel The Scarlet Empress where the rulers of the world Hyspero rule from within a giant jam jar). We only learn the the Face was a major funder of the platform set up for watching the destruction of Earth.
The next time we see him is a very brief cameo in The Long Game, where a news report *surmises* that the Face was pregnant, but, as we know not everything that came out of Satellite 5 was accurate.
He reappears in the facial flesh again in New Earth.....and he speaks!!!
Telepathically....but....eh....its still communication. He tells the Doctor that he has some great and private secret that he needs to tell him, but in "textbook enigmatic" manner says that it can wait and teleports away from the hospital.
We finally see him in the story Gridlock where he tells us that the Doctor is not the last Time Lord (to all of our delight). Using his dying breath to save the trapped denizens of New(15) York on the freeway, even his revelation is a mystery, one the Doctor can scarcely believe. We learn that the Face was possible billions of years old and as lonely as our tenth incarnation of the Doctor. But we actually never learn what race he is.....nor what happened to them...
Until yet another enigmatic line.......from THIS man.....
Capt. Jack Harkness upon the finale of Last of the Time Lords explains that he comes from the Boeshane Peninsula where he was a bit of a poster child (not.....a.....bit.......surprised) and he tells us that the community had a collective name for him: The Face of Boe!
Since this audacious revelation.....we have not heard again from the Face of Boe...despite the time travel premise of the series. In Steve Lyons' novel The Stealer of Dreams, Capt. Jack does remark that he once saw someone dressed up as the Face of Boe. Highly unusual in itself (can't figure out the logistics of a Face of Boe Halloween costume) but even more unusual is, since Jack never met the Face, how does he know of the being and how would he not facepalm himself at the connection.
We may never know....
