"The Claws of Axos" - Episode Three

Doctor Who (1963) - Season Eight

Airdate: March 27, 1971
Jon Pertwee, Katy Manning
Written by Bob Baker and Dave Martin
Produced by Barry Letts
Directed by Michael Ferguson

As for the direction, it's every bit as busy as the script. Much of it is very effective, but I do think that it can go a bit too far. As I said yesterday, the script is cluttered to the point where some of its best ideas get lost in all the muddle. The direction doesn't help matters in this regard. The way this story was edited was obviously designed to keep the pace up, but the result is that much of the story just sort of washes past. Scenes are extremely short, so the episodes are constantly cutting back and forth from place to place. In places, it looks as though what was written as a single scene gets chopped up and intercut with another scene, and that's not exactly good for clarity.

But it certainly does work for pacing. This story has a really striking dynamism to it, because it's almost always rushing along at breakneck speeds. That also contributes to the muddle of the whole, but it paradoxically makes it less of a problem. The story doesn't really give the viewer much to think, so the muddle doesn't really matter.

Besides, there's so much to look at. Michael Ferguson's directorial approach seems to have been to fill the screen with as much stuff as possible. Take the interior shots of the Axon spacecraft, for instance. The sets are designed to make it look organic, and they includes lots of different textures, no straight lines, and an abundance of stuff all over the place. On top of that, the director super-imposes strange psychedelic imagery that just sort of floats somewhere between the actors and the camera. It creates a good effect, but I have no idea what any of it is supposed to be, exactly. It's not clear if these weird visual effects we're seeing are visible to the characters. They don't seem to be, but then, what are they?

Obviously, this being "Doctor Who" made in the early 1970s, lots of the special effects don't hold up particularly well. But quite a lot of them do, actually. Besides, I've always thought that realism was an over-rated virtue in a series like this. It's more important to create memorable images than believable images, and this story is chock-full of memorable images. It's very much of its time, thanks to the psychedelic imagery, but it's also quite striking, highly stylized, and surprisingly effective.

But by this point, some of the cracks in the story are beginning to show. Once they've secured worldwide distribution of Axonite (by making an exclusive deal with the UK, then using the Master to expose that deal, thus prompting worldwide demands for immediate access to Axonite... like most of this story, clever but overcomplicated), all the Axons have to do is wait. Instead, they decide to pursue their other objective, achieving time travel, at the same time. To do this, they attack the nuclear power complex in order to gain access to sufficient power to achieve time travel. So while they're banking on the humans not realizing their hostile intentions, the Axons decide to show their hand by killing a bunch of UNIT troops. Well, it makes for a good action sequence, at least.