The Claws of Axos  (by The Secretive Bus)

Evenin’ all. The Bus here, deciding to waste time when he ought to be revising for exams. It’s a tough life. I’ve never before been massively keen on The Claws of Axos but when I saw it a few days ago for the first time in a fair while (I think I bought the DVD when it was released but never watched it – which often happens when I get classic Who DVDs) I found myself really rather enjoying it. What usually puts me off is the horribly choppy episode 1 and its sixteen thousand plot threads but by the latter half of the story it’s all settled down quite nicely and the story probably stands up as one of the most enjoyable and overlooked stories of the era. I’ve always wanted to have a go at one of those 24 Things pieces and this gloriously silly story seemed a good place to start.

1. The DVD booklet makes the following statement: "Although colour had come to Doctor Who the previous year, this story is made in COLOUR!" As well as looking like a pathetically stupid statement in its own right, to use Dennis Brent’s lingo, I’ve always thought that The Claws of Axos, with its combination of greys, dark browns and sludgy oranges, looks one of the murkiest stories of the Pertwee era. Surely it’s Terror of the Autons that’s the bright and cheerful looking story?

2. When Corporal Bell tells her superiors about the freak weather reports, absolutely nobody wants to look at her. Even Yates stoically refuses to actually face her even when he asks her to continue with the report.

3. There’s some utterly mental editing going on when the Doctor and co. are introduced to the geeky scientist and the bloke from It Ain’t Half Hot Mum; for roughly 40 seconds the entire ensuing conversation is conveyed via loads of choppy close-ups – even to people who aren’t doing anything – which makes it seem as if the characters could be in completely different rooms, buildings or even countries for all the sense it makes. It’s as if the director was desperate not to reveal the rest of the rather dull looking set.

4. So, Pigbin Josh, eh? It’s nice in a way that they decided to give the guy a back story to make us care that bit more when a random innocent passer-by is gobbled up by the monsters, but when that back story is, "The day I got myself a bicycle," you wonder why they bothered. He has three completely unnecessary scenes in an episode where no sequence seems to last longer than 45 seconds.

5. "England for the English: good Heavens, man!" is my favourite Pertwee line. So there.

6. The introduction of the Master into the story is a bit of a botch-up. Two insanely short scenes which could easily have been strung together and yet have their own musical cliffhangers; one in which the camera zooms in on him looked irritated, and one where he reveals his name to Bill Filer. A friend of mine on another forum put it best: "Are the audience meant to go, ‘Oh Hell, it’s the Master! … Oh Hell, he’s introduced himself!’"

7. UNIT security has always been lax but that shot where at least three soldiers stare directly at Jo Grant as she enters the alien spaceship on her own is ludicrous.

8. When the Axon man tells the assembled gathering of chaps that Axos wasn’t built but grown there’s a rather muted reaction from everybody except, bizarrely, the scientist, who instead of finding it rather interesting seems to react to it with sheer terror.

9. "This is one of your food animals?" asks the Axon man about the frog. "No it isn’t," replies the minister bloke. Now, I don’t want to say something silly like what about the French, but, what about the French? Or indeed the Chinese? Or people in the Caribbean and various other places where frogs are deemed a rather nice edible snack?

10. Strange that most of the Axon monsters are rather odd blobby things when there’s that absolutely fab extra red n’ rooty one that looks miles better than the others. Why couldn’t they all look like that?

11. There’s a bizarre bit at the beginning of part 2 where Jo is crying on the Doctor’s shoulder about having been menaced by a passing monster, whereupon she suddenly screams and whirls around 180° to stare at the Axon man. How did she know he was there? It’s akin to when companions seem to see something exciting happening off-camera three seconds before it actually happens.

12. I like the scientist character. He wanders around the whole story with an undeserved expression of authority and makes "Youuuuuuu stupid QUACK!!!" one of the best insults I’ve ever heard.

13. The establishing long shot of the reactor room used for much of the story totally fails to tally with any future scenes set in that room – it looks as if it’s hanging in the middle of some sort of chasm, with the 4^th wall (closest to us) being a gigantic window and certainly not leading anywhere except straight down. We never see the shot again which is just as well, as later it’s implied that there’s a door where that wall used to be as an Axon stamps through it at the part 2 cliffhanger (and later still the Master and various UNIT troops will dash in and out of the room off camera that way as well).

14. Much is made of the whole "Greeks bearing gifts," concept going on with the Axons. Hardly anybody mentions how often the Axons seem to want to draw attention to themselves. They leave the tramp’s body only a short distance away from Axos itself and they think nothing of sending big tentacled monsters around the Nuton complex (and how did those monsters get there for the part 2 cliffhanger with nobody seeing them?). Their copy of Bill Filer decides to abandon a stealth kidnapping of the Doctor and opts to announce himself and his intentions as soon as he enters the room: "COME TO AXOS!" But they really take the cake by kidnapping the Doctor and Jo but leaving the real Bill Filer lying unconscious on the floor for no purpose at all – and the Axon man actually points the body out to the authorities in case they miss him!

15. When the Axon monsters repersonalise at the beginning of part 3, Jon Pertwee pulls a face and jolts himself upright as if he’s just been goosed.

16. It’s a joy to see John Levene continually on the verge of creasing up laughing in that scene when Roger Delgado has to talk to him whilst wearing an outrageously fake rubber mask. A joy almost as… joyous comes when the Axon man is staggering down a corridor, slowly turning into a tentacle fiend. The Brigadier’s reaction: "Hey! You there! Stop!" Courtney always seems to mix "aghast" and "casual" to maximum effect.

17. The Minister that Chinn talks to on the monitor has an absolutely chronic blinking problem; he does it three times per syllable of speech.

18. The Axons tell the Doctor that "Time travel will give us this power!" and then assail him with funny game show music for a few seconds. I like that. Not as much as I like that Axon scream sound effect, though, which is one Doctor Who’s best ever sounds.

19. Episode 3 is absolutely wonderful. There comes a point where you wish that the Axons would just keep the Doctor and fly away so that Roger Delgado could star for the rest of the era. I do like Pertwee but when he’s with the Master you’re always urging the Master to win, aren’t you? He’s infinitely more entertaining. Though the PDA "The Face of the Enemy" wasn’t. That made me feel sad.

20. Precisely what is the point of Bill Filer? He serves absolutely no purpose in the story at all; his capture and replication subplot is dealt with pretty quickly and nothing comes of it, and he does absolutely sod all later on. Everything he does could have been done equally as well by Yates or Benton, who serve little function in the story either. We’d actually care if Benton were captured; we don’t care about some bloke with ludicrous hair who we’ve only just met. And the Errol Flynn gag doesn’t make sense either. In fact I’m not sure if it’s even meant to be a joke. It’s possible that Katy Manning forgot a line. Or the bloke playing Filer did. Or the scriptwriters.

21. What about the tussle on the jeep between Benton and Yates and the Axons? It’s bloody lucky that Benton heard Yates’ rather wimpy "Down!" above the roaring engine and the Axon screams otherwise he’d still be in the jeep when it exploded. In fact, "Down!" doesn’t even come close to implying, "I’ve just dropped a grenade into the back of our vehicle!" so Benton’s probably the luckiest man that ever lived to actually work out what Yates was talking about. Notice also how the Axon seems to have some precognitive vision as he decides to explode a split-second before the grenade does. "HAR HAR, YOU WON’T CATCH ME!"

22. That light reactor dial thing’s a bit rickety. Why couldn’t 70s Who ever get dials with hands that turned round gradually, rather than something that leaps up several notches a turn? The rate it was going the reactor should have blown up within six seconds.

23. The music when everybody’s evacuating the complex – and then again when they return – is the aural product you’d get by allowing a litter of newborn kittens to walk across a Casio keyboard.

24. People bang on about the exploding nuclear complex but the model shot of the explosion makes it clear that only a small part of the complex explodes – perhaps the actual nuclear source that the reactor ran on was located in a different part of the complex? And the line, "Thousands of lives could go up with it!" earlier on could refer to… mice?