Doctor Who has long been my favorite show, but it’s been a couple of years since I’ve actually watched anything but the newest episodes. Before that, I was making a respectable run at getting through the original series, most of which I haven’t seen for decades. For various reasons, lately it has felt like it’s time to get back into it. 

The Claws of Axos

Starring Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor.
Companion:  Katy Manning as Jo Grant.
Recurring Characters: Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, Roger Delgado as the Master, Richard Franklin as Captain Mike Yates, and John Levene as Sgt. Benton.

Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin.  Directed by Michael Ferguson. Produced by Barry Letts. Script Edited by Terrance Dicks.

Format:  4 episodes, each about 25 minutes long
Originally Aired:  March – April 1971 (Episodes 11-14 of Season 8)

The Third Doctor’s era was one of the first ones that I became familiar with, but traditionally I’ve not been the Third Doctor’s biggest fan. Lately in my rewatches, however, I’ve found I’ve enjoyed the stories more. Maybe the reliability brought on by the frequent earthbound settings and the recurring cast is becoming more appealing to me in my advancing years.

Spoilers Ahead!

The Claws of Axos lands square int he middle of…not the first Third Doctor season, but the first season where the era really fell into its most familiar patterns. In this season, the Doctor is still (mostly) trapped on earth, encountering his adventures in his role as UNIT’s scientific advisor. Jo Grant, his longest-lasting companion is faithfully at his side, and the supporting cast has been fully rounded out to include not only the stalwart Brigadier, but also Captain Yates and Sgt. Benton. And maybe most importantly of all, the Master is there, in every single story and almost in every episode. The villainous Time Lord had not yet worn out his welcome (the same can definitely not be said today), although the production team were having to work on ways to include him into their narratives that did not feel repetitive.

In this case, they came up with the interesting idea of having the Master be the prisoner of serial’s main monster, Axos. This helps to create some interesting dynamics, which leads to what I believe is the first ever Doctor / Master team-up, a tried and true trope of the classic era. The Master even ends up functioning as a bit of a reluctant Doctor-type character while the actual Doctor is being held prisoner for a while. And there is an interesting dynamic where the Doctor attempts to trick the Master that he’s given up on earth, in an effort to persuade him to give him the secrets of time travel. I enjoyed all these bits of characterization.

And I also enjoyed the concept of Axos itself–a being that shows up in many forms over the serial, all of which are part of the same composite creature.

We get to see Axos the organic spaceship, the golden-hued humanoid beings, monstrous creatures with lots of tentacles, and a sort of living molecule that is just pretending to be a piece of advanced technology. Axos’ plan is to trick humans into getting excited about the many uses of this so-called “Axonite” and to distribute it all over the earth, thus furthering its plans to suck the life out of the planet and to feed its hunger. Conceptually, it’s all incredibly interesting stuff.

Unfortunately, much of the production itself lets down this potential. (And I don’t mean because of problems with the special effects–that is a seemingly unavoidable aspect of classic Doctor Who, and though it’s okay to complain about it once in a while, if it’s really a problem you should just find something else to watch.) No, the specific problems here that stand out to me are to do with some pacing elements, and for the lack of a better word, with some of the “world building”.

What I mean by that is that in spite of the global threat, there is a decidedly “small scale” feel to things. There’s talk about how the events going on are potentially going to impact the entire planet, but we scarcely see anything outside of the Axonite spaceship, UNIT headquarters, or a nuclear power station that feels strangely undermanned. So the production lacks the sense of scope that would be fitting for events as they are being described. Consider, for instance, all those images of the Autons smashing through department store windows in Spearhead from Space for an idea of what I’m talking about.

It makes The Claws of Axos one of the few Pertwee serials that one wishes was actually longer, but in truth the existing screen time could have been repurposed to better effect. There is a bunch of unnecessary material setting up the soon-to-be-dead character of “Pigbin Josh”–the tramp who witnesses Axos’ arrival on earth. And there is decidedly too long with UNIT and the Master trying to stop the nuclear power plant from going critical. That sounds exciting but because the Doctor isn’t involved (he’s just being held prisoner in the Axonite ship during all of this), there’s a feeling that the plot is just twiddling its thumbs, running out the clock on the episode. This is a shame because there’s more that the story could be doing to help make the larger story feel more meaningful.

One the other hand, the fourth episode gives us a cool action scene where Benton and Yates have a harrowing battle with some Axonite creatures that I quite enjoyed. That gives the action a bit of that broader scope that I was wanting.

So it’s not a bad adventure, but the story as written and produced doesn’t fully do justice to the concepts that are being introduced.

Other Thoughts

• In a “What if?” post that I wrote a while ago, I suggested that this story would have been a good one for us to have had a visit from Caroline John’s Liz Shaw, in order to give her character a bit more closure. In actually re-watching the episode, there’s not an obvious place to slot her in, unless she were to fully replace American operative Bill Filer. If she had, though, it would have been very cool but also kind of jarring–the show from this time period definitely did not generally give its female characters such decisive action roles. If they had had Liz doing all the things that Filer does here, it might have made poor Jo Grant look pretty tame in comparison.

• Chinn, the bureaucrat played by Peter Bathurst, is a pretty obnoxious character, but he in his reactionary self-interest he turns out to be right more than he is wrong. First, he assumes the Axonite spaceship is a threat, which of course it is–it’s the Doctor who argues that everyone should hold off trying to shoot this thing down. Second, he stalls the distribution of Axonite because he’s hoping to hoard it for Britain, but of course this also slows the Axonite plan to destroy the earth. The Doctor acknowledges the latter of these, but nobody ever mentions the former.

• Corporal Bell of UNIT makes her second of two appearances in the series (after debuting in The Mind of Evil, the serial that preceded this one).