Plot:
A UNIT monitoring station spots a UFO heading for Earth. Meanwhile, UNIT HQ has two visitors, a government official, Chinn, enquiring after the Doctor's immigration status, and Bill Filer from Washington, who's trying to track down the Master. Somehow both of them, even though they have nothing to do with it, end up involved in the UFO investigation alongside our favourite UNIT family: Doctor 3, Jo, Brig, Yates, Benton and the lovable rogue uncle of the family, the Master (who's already on board the UFO, Axos, having brought it to Earth in exchange for his freedom). Despite Chinn's attempts to blow it up, Axos lands in the South East of England. When our heroes enter, the inside is organic and plays psychedelic sounds and film clips on loops, like an alien version of a happening at Andy Warhol's Factory, and just as scary. A family of "Axons" appear and offer the Earth a rare element from their planet called Axonite, that can absorb and transmit energy and make things grow and such like. Despite this not seeming like that big a deal if you ask me, everybody's very keen to get their hands on Axonite (it was the 1970s, and people had to make their own fun, I guess).
Anyway, Chinn wants Axonite exclusively for the UK government, but the Master - released from Axos - leaks the information and it is sent out to various places around the world. It's a trap, of course: Axonite, the ship and the Axons are all part of one parasitic organism that plans to suck all the life out of the Earth, once the distribution of Axos material is sufficiently spread around the globe. With the Doctor and Jo now held by Axos, the Master helps UNIT to destroy the alien. It doesn't work, the Doctor and Jo escape, and the two Time Lords work together to stop Axos. It looks for a while that the Doctor is going to betray the Earth and escape with the Master, but that's just a bluff to keep the bearded naughty one engaged. The real plan is to trap Axos in a time loop. When the Master realises this, he makes a break for it. The Doctor also manages to break free, but finds that his newly working TARDIS can only travel back and forth to Earth, and his exile has to continue.
Anyway, Chinn wants Axonite exclusively for the UK government, but the Master - released from Axos - leaks the information and it is sent out to various places around the world. It's a trap, of course: Axonite, the ship and the Axons are all part of one parasitic organism that plans to suck all the life out of the Earth, once the distribution of Axos material is sufficiently spread around the globe. With the Doctor and Jo now held by Axos, the Master helps UNIT to destroy the alien. It doesn't work, the Doctor and Jo escape, and the two Time Lords work together to stop Axos. It looks for a while that the Doctor is going to betray the Earth and escape with the Master, but that's just a bluff to keep the bearded naughty one engaged. The real plan is to trap Axos in a time loop. When the Master realises this, he makes a break for it. The Doctor also manages to break free, but finds that his newly working TARDIS can only travel back and forth to Earth, and his exile has to continue.
Context:
Haven't had a lot of time for watching Doctor Who recently, but did manage to find 25 minutes each Sunday, once a week across four weeks, to watch The Claws of Axos. Each time, I was accompanied by all three of the children (boys of 12 and 9, girl of 6). My viewing companions were good value from the off, with the boys describing the funny looking Axos spaceship seen in flight at the beginning as a "flying bone" (younger) and "rubber chicken" (elder). My youngest was a little scared of the monster versions of the Axons, but happy with everything else. By far the most comment, though, was reserved for the character of Pigbin Josh, who stumbles across the ship early on, and gets zapped. It wasn't this that caught their attention, or the strange bumpkin language he mutters under his breath, or his hackneyed and possibly offensive characterisation in general. No, it was before his encounter with the ship, when he stops in the snow to scavenge in a pile of fly-tipped junk for a bike, when he's already got a bike. They talked about that for ages afterwards. It's strange what tiny things can fire their imagination.
First-time round:
Monday 11th May 1992 was a good day to be a Doctor Who fan, but might have been a bit hard on The Claws of Axos. After sporadic releases on VHS in the late 1980s, the turn of the decade saw a burgeoning interest in, and supply of, new titles. It didn't quite make up for the programme no longer being on TV, but it was great to have two stories released on tape every couple of months. And although they were not exactly new, most of them were new to me. On that particular Monday, though, we fans were extra blessed, as we had no less than three new releases to buy. One of them was The Twin Dilemma, yes, but that didn't take away too much of the excitement.
I snapped up all three on the day of release, but even as a layabout skiver with lots of time on my hands as I was then, I couldn't watch them all on that day. Obviously, the first of the three to be viewed was the recently discovered Tomb of the Cybermen. Colin Baker's debut was next in line, despite - because of? - its infamy. This left the final one of the three, which was The Claws of Axos, a little overshadowed. As I remember, myself and my friend Mike - the only person I knew who had a VCR in my first year - only got through the first three episodes of Axos before getting distracted by other things. Before long, the term and the academic year were at an end. I caught up with the final part at home sometime during the long Summer vac, but I don't know if poor Mike ever found out how it concluded.
I snapped up all three on the day of release, but even as a layabout skiver with lots of time on my hands as I was then, I couldn't watch them all on that day. Obviously, the first of the three to be viewed was the recently discovered Tomb of the Cybermen. Colin Baker's debut was next in line, despite - because of? - its infamy. This left the final one of the three, which was The Claws of Axos, a little overshadowed. As I remember, myself and my friend Mike - the only person I knew who had a VCR in my first year - only got through the first three episodes of Axos before getting distracted by other things. Before long, the term and the academic year were at an end. I caught up with the final part at home sometime during the long Summer vac, but I don't know if poor Mike ever found out how it concluded.
Reaction:
The Claws of Axos might just be the most archetypal UNIT story ever made. For a start, the full extended family is in place: Doctor, Jo, Master, Brig, Yates, Benton. It's got an Earth Invasion with a twist - the invaders pretend to be nice; yes, it's not the most original twist, but it's there nonetheless! It's got a bumptious government type, a comedy yokel, a research centre with a scientist in conflict with the Doctor, freak weather conditions, and the regular army taking over and imprisoning UNIT partway through. It's only missing a hovercraft to complete the bingo card. It's also early enough - the seventh Pertwee story, and only the third of the "UNIT family" era that started with this season - that nobody wants to mess too much with the formula. One deviation is the inclusion of, presumably, an American UNIT operative (he's introduced as being from Washington HQ rather than a separate agency). This was a broadening out of UNIT to reflect its intended international nature that would not be tried again until Battlefield, over 20 years later. From this point on until then, while it may police global conferences (so many global conferences), we only really get to see the Home Counties England division of the UN's Intelligence Taskforce.
The script was the first from Bob Baker and Dave Martin, a duo of young writers without much experience at the point where they wrote Claws of Axos, but who would go on to become seasoned contributors over many years. Their first script, with no doubt lots of careful midwifery provided by script editor Terrance Dicks, is very strong. Apart from a few tiny moments (in the space of one short section, for example, we establish that the aliens have an intimate knowledge of chameleons, describing Axonite as "the chameleon of the elements", but don't know what a frog is) there's nothing to suggest this story wasn't created by the experienced hacks - in the best kind of way - that Baker and Martin would become. The main issue is the scale of its ambition, which is a hard quality to fault. It had nothing to do with their being newbies either: right up until their very last scripts for the series, a Baker and / or Martin script could always be recognised by the sheer scale of the events it expected the poor production team to depict within a small studio in Television Centre.
Compared to their subsequent asks - a singularity in the centre of a black hole, say, or a new planet being formed around a spaceship, or the inside of the Doctor's brain - creating an organic space ship that bombards one's senses with technicolour imagery was relatively easy. It's achieved very well by director Michael Ferguson. The Axons in all their forms are very striking, whether appearing as the "golden family" or the very memorable globby tentacled versions that attack UNIT in a couple of sequences choreographed by the HAVOC stunt team. Tiny moments of action are unclear or rushed - at one point, someone does appear to get turned into an Axon-themed duvet - but mostly the visuals are very visual, and the effects are effective.
Another thing I've never noticed before, and which may have been a result of the inexperience of the writers, is that the opening of The Claws of Axos is pretty much a shot-by-shot recreation of Spearhead from Space: a model scene of an object approaching Earth, then cut to a UNIT monitoring station manned by two uniformed staff, a local stumbling across the object as it comes to ground... It may be coincidence, of course, but there's lots of scenes throughout that also parallel Pertwee's debut (the fight between aliens and UNIT troops in an industrial complex is another good example). Perhaps the writers were reassuring themselves by emulating something that had worked well from the year before. Where the script breaks from that template, though, is where it is most successful: in the last couple of episodes, Roger Delgado's silky, amoral Master takes centre stage, working with UNIT as a substitute Doctor when the latter is trapped inside Axos. Then, he and Pertwee get the first opportunity to play a sustained sequence together in the later sections where we suspect that the Doctor might have gone rogue and aligned himself with his fellow Time Lord. Great stuff.
Compared to their subsequent asks - a singularity in the centre of a black hole, say, or a new planet being formed around a spaceship, or the inside of the Doctor's brain - creating an organic space ship that bombards one's senses with technicolour imagery was relatively easy. It's achieved very well by director Michael Ferguson. The Axons in all their forms are very striking, whether appearing as the "golden family" or the very memorable globby tentacled versions that attack UNIT in a couple of sequences choreographed by the HAVOC stunt team. Tiny moments of action are unclear or rushed - at one point, someone does appear to get turned into an Axon-themed duvet - but mostly the visuals are very visual, and the effects are effective.
Another thing I've never noticed before, and which may have been a result of the inexperience of the writers, is that the opening of The Claws of Axos is pretty much a shot-by-shot recreation of Spearhead from Space: a model scene of an object approaching Earth, then cut to a UNIT monitoring station manned by two uniformed staff, a local stumbling across the object as it comes to ground... It may be coincidence, of course, but there's lots of scenes throughout that also parallel Pertwee's debut (the fight between aliens and UNIT troops in an industrial complex is another good example). Perhaps the writers were reassuring themselves by emulating something that had worked well from the year before. Where the script breaks from that template, though, is where it is most successful: in the last couple of episodes, Roger Delgado's silky, amoral Master takes centre stage, working with UNIT as a substitute Doctor when the latter is trapped inside Axos. Then, he and Pertwee get the first opportunity to play a sustained sequence together in the later sections where we suspect that the Doctor might have gone rogue and aligned himself with his fellow Time Lord. Great stuff.
Connectivity:
This is the hardest connection to make so far, I think. Because of the previous story's spin-off nature, they don't even have the Doctor or the TARDIS as a link. K9 and Company is set in a fictional village probably in the Cotswolds; The Claws of Axos is set in a fictional power station probably near Dungeness. Those areas, both with a strong Middle England Pertweeshire aura, are really not that geographically close, though, so I don't suppose that counts. That leaves me only with the desperate assertion that they both feature someone who knows the Doctor and UNIT. It'll have to do.
Deeper Thoughts:
Baker Bob and Oscar. One of the two writers of The Claws of Axos, Bob Baker, gained kudos later in his career for being in a different two man writing team. He co-authored with Nick Park the scripts for all the Wallace and Gromit shorts from The Wrong Trousers onwards (and also co-wrote the feature-length W&G movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit as part of a larger writing team). Two of these shorts - Trousers and A Close Shave - won Academy Awards for best animated short, and Were-Rabbit also won in 2010 for best animated feature. A third short, A Matter of Loaf and Death, which has a cameo from an in-jokily named character called Baker Bob, was nominated but didn't win. Out of all the cast or crew of Doctor Who over the years, Bob Baker is therefore the person connected to the biggest Oscar haul. He isn't on any list of Oscar winners, though, as the categories mentioned are awarded to the producers of the films, but - you know - he was one of the writers, the people without whom the winning films would just be blank pieces of paper, so I'm letting him have it rather than get hung up on technicalities.
It's even more impressive for being so rare. Doctor Who is a long-running show that has been blessed with some very talented individuals both in front of the cameras and behind, but as a UK show it's perhaps not surprising that this hasn't translated into too many careers later gaining golden statuettes from Hollywood. Just under Bob Baker in the chart (or in the lead if you do want to get hung up on technicalities and somehow think that films write themselves by magic, grumble, grumble) is the mighty Jim Acheson, who has won the Academy Award for Costume Design no less than three times. He also designed some of the most memorable costumes for Who including the Mutts from The Mutants, the Giant Robot from Robot, and the magnificent Time Lord costumes from The Deadly Assassin (used and reused, but never altered, for decades afterwards). With no wish to slight Bob Baker, one probably didn't think watching his Doctor Who stories go out that the he'd one day be writing scripts for award-winning things. Acheson, though, always stood out as talented, and one might have forecast such future plaudits in his case. But everyone's go to start somewhere, and we fans are blessed to have had both their inputs into our favourite show.
Beyond that, though, there's not a lot. Many one-off guest crew and actors have gone on to be lauded stateside, but we can't claim any ownership of someone like Olivia Colman, say. She's been in everything, anyway, and her cameo appearance in The Eleventh Hour was not the best use of of her talents (Steven Moffat recently went on record as regretting not using her better). Of all stories, it is 2003 online animated curio The Scream of the Shalka that has the best record for regular cast with both Doctor (Richard E. Grant) and companion (Sophie Okonedo) being acting Oscar nominees. Derek Jacobi, who played the Master in that story, has had Golden Globe and International Emmy nods too. It doesn't really count, though, as Shalka was never developed into a regular series, so they're still essentially one-offs (though each member of those three has appeared as a different character in subsequent stories).
One final honourable mention goes to the person who garnered an Academy Award for best live action short with "Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life" in 1993. Surprisingly, he was the writer and director rather than the star, as he was mostly known before and since for acting. The winner in this instance was a fellow by the name of Peter Capaldi. Now, whatever happened to him?
Beyond that, though, there's not a lot. Many one-off guest crew and actors have gone on to be lauded stateside, but we can't claim any ownership of someone like Olivia Colman, say. She's been in everything, anyway, and her cameo appearance in The Eleventh Hour was not the best use of of her talents (Steven Moffat recently went on record as regretting not using her better). Of all stories, it is 2003 online animated curio The Scream of the Shalka that has the best record for regular cast with both Doctor (Richard E. Grant) and companion (Sophie Okonedo) being acting Oscar nominees. Derek Jacobi, who played the Master in that story, has had Golden Globe and International Emmy nods too. It doesn't really count, though, as Shalka was never developed into a regular series, so they're still essentially one-offs (though each member of those three has appeared as a different character in subsequent stories). One final honourable mention goes to the person who garnered an Academy Award for best live action short with "Franz Kafka's It's a Wonderful Life" in 1993. Surprisingly, he was the writer and director rather than the star, as he was mostly known before and since for acting. The winner in this instance was a fellow by the name of Peter Capaldi. Now, whatever happened to him?
In Summary:
Ambitious, archetypal and very 1970s, but pretty good for all that.
It also has Jo Grant in a very short skirt; which is fine by me ... :)
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