Doctor Who A-Z #57: The Claws of Axos (1971)

Bob Baker and Dave Martin have a reputation in Doctor Who fandom as undisciplined writers, a reputation that comes in part from the production of this, their first script for the show. The Claws of Axos was originally intended as a Patrick Troughton seven-parter and ended up being broadcast as a Jon Pertwee four-parter, which tracks. If ever a story felt like it was trying to cram the equivalent of The Evil of the Daleks into a hundred minutes, this would be it. It’s a relentless flurry of ideas, where each episode contains at least three twists that a Hartnell-era writer would build a whole story around.

This isn’t a bad thing. If you gave me a straight choice between watching a four-parter with enough plot for seven episodes or a seven-parter with enough plot for four, I know what I’d choose. The anecdotes about Baker and Martin’s unfilmable original script, with its giant flying skulls and skyscraper-sized carrots, are very funny, but they obscure an essential truth: the story got made anyway. After all, the other story that every fan knows regarding an unproducably ambitious script is the one about David Weir’s Killers of the Dark, where as soon as producer Graham Williams realised there was a scene involving a sports stadium full of humanoid cats he threw the whole script away. For all The Claws of Axos could not have been made in its original form, producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks clearly thought it was worth persevering with. Watching the first episode, you understand why.

Part one begins with a leech-like alien craft making its way into Earth’s atmosphere. UNIT, in a break from being chewed out by a rotund civil servant called Mr. Chinn, are called to deal with it, and much to the Doctor’s revulsion they choose the Silurian solution and try to blow it out of the sky. It crash-lands, where it ensnares the silliest of the Pertwee era’s comedy yokels as well as several less embarrassing characters. From these victims, it learns how to mimic human form, and appears to the Doctor and his allies as beautiful golden humanoids offering a wonder mineral – Axonite – to the human race.

This is a lot to chew on for a first episode, and there’s a fair bit I haven’t mentioned, like the brief insert early on of the Axons hideous, multi-tentacular natural form. This is worth drawing attention to because I’d misremembered this as a twist, thinking that the Axons manifested themselves as golden Olympians for the first two episodes or so before being unmasked as hideous monsters, a sort of condensed reprise of Galaxy 4. Instead, the viewer knows the Axons are presenting a false front inspired by their study of captive humans from the get-go, which puts us in the unusual position of knowing something the Doctor doesn’t.

It’s worth noting, before we go any further, that the worst of Baker and Martin’s scripts absolutely live up to their reputation for incoherence, but they won’t be coming for a long time yet. The Claws of Axos does not make perfect logical sense but it makes very strong metaphorical sense, something which can also be said for the rest of their Pertwee-era scripts. The Mutants arranges itself around a strong, graspable metaphor, while The Three Doctors is consistently themed around the Doctor’s personality and its antithesis. It’s not as if Doctor Who fans are unaccustomed to stories that work on a primarily metaphorical or character-driven level, it’s just that something like Ghost Light or Listen will use its pacing and tone to draw attention to the fact that this week’s episode won’t be a simple monster runaround. The Claws of Axos has the feel of a simple monster runaround, and a bloody good one at that – the stunt team pull off several raucous confrontations between the military and the Axons, and the sight of a gelatinous ‘natural’ Axon running through a power plant is one of the show’s best-ever collisions of the mundane and the extraordinary. It’s no wonder that so many viewers are entranced by the story’s dazzling surfaces, rather than what’s underneath.

What we have here, you see, is the first character study of the Doctor and the Master’s rivalry. Like all great Doctor-Master stories, it works with this Doctor and this Master rather than any other; a story about the Doctor trying to redeem the Master would be ridiculous if you played it with Tom Baker and Peter Pratt, but it worked very well with Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez. Baker and Martin start setting it up right at the start of episode one, with the Doctor even more frustrated than usual at the bureaucratic pettiness he’s subjected to on Earth. (The Doctor’s mockery of Chinn’s “England for the English!” politics is justly cherished among left-leaning Who fans. For all the Pertwee era can skew conservative, this and Chinn’s Dominic Raab-style belief that he can easily strike deals to distribute Axonite around the world on behalf of Britain make The Claws of Axos work surprisingly well as a premature anti-Brexit allegory)

It’s no surprise, by the middle of Season Eight, that the Master turns up. The surprise is how he turns up. We’ve seen two stories so far where the Master has struck a deal with some alien power then tried to wriggle out once things got tough; a less ambitious era of the show would continue working variations on this for the rest of the year. But The Claws of Axos cuts, without fanfare, to the Master tied up with some other captives in the Axon spaceship. This is a remarkably confident, self-aware narrative trick. The implication is that we’re watching the tail-end of another of the Master’s schemes, and this time he hasn’t managed to get away before his fair-weather allies turn on him.

It turns out to be a double-bluff, but just because the Master is still working with the Axons doesn’t mean the rest of the story follows a familiar course. Indeed, episode four plays out as a reversal of how the final episode of a Season Eight story usually goes, with the Doctor deciding it’s not worth saving Earth from the Axons and offering the Master the chance to escape with him. It is somewhat less surprising that this turns out to be a trick, although that’s not a problem. As with later variations on this theme such as The Invasion of Time and The Lie of the Land, the audience isn’t meant to think “I can’t believe the Doctor’s turned evil”, but rather “Why is the Doctor pretending to be evil?” What makes it sing, this time, is that we’ve recently seen how thoroughly fed up the Doctor is with his adopted home planet. We don’t believe he’d go so far as to abandon it to an alien parasite, but we can understand how the Master could be fooled into thinking he would.

That’s a lot of tight, clever plotting for a writing team who are supposedly incoherent. There are moments when The Claws of Axos‘s plot logic creaks a little, but it’s a problem of over-compression rather than being ill-thought-through. The proof is in the watching: whenever there’s a too-swift change of motivation or a twist that isn’t quite set up, the story just blasts through it and quickly lands on something entertaining enough to make you forget about it. Director Michael Ferguson, never happier than when he’s asked to break new ground, conjures up some psychedelic dream sequences that recall the avant-garde silent shorts of Hans Richter more than they do anything else on 1970s television, and the special effects are either convincing, outrageous or occasionally both. It’s a story that wins you over on quantity, but it’s no slouch in the quality department either.

Next: Colony in Space (1971)

Graham’s Archive – The Claws of Axos

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