The Claws Of Axos: Ranking - 152

  The Claws Of Axos

(Season 8, Dr 3 with Jo, 13/3/1971-3/4/1971, producer: Barry Letts, script editor: Terrance Dicks, writers: Bob Baker and Dave Martin, director: Michael Ferguson)

Rank: 152

In an emoji: 🐸

'Red Racnoss, Orange Axons, Yellow Eternal Dalek, Green Slitheen, Blue Moxx of Balhoon, Purple Hath (who fell in a purple bath), We've teamed up to shoot you like a rainbow, like a rainbow, like a rainbow too. Exterminate!'

I really can’t escape this show, dear reader, it seems to follow me everywhere. Even into the hospital. After being hit in the first wave of covid in 2020 and already damaged by m.e. my nervous system shut down on me almost completely in early 2021 (and yes it was before the vaccines if you’re asking because, y’know, a rampaging deadly virus is enough to be afraid of as it is). I couldn’t digest anything properly, could barely sleep, my temperature gauge had gone haywire and I lost half my body weight in a week. Finally I managed to hear from somebody what was wrong with me. ‘It’s your axons’ they said ‘They’re not connecting properly’. ‘Pardon?’ I said hazily. As a true blue Whovian the only axons I knew about were from this story. I mean, it made sense that there were evil orange alien blobby things running around inside me but that didn’t seem to fit the story I knew. ‘But I’m getting smaller not bigger. And I’m not a frog!’ I think I added groggily, remembering the moment the Axons in this story tried to show their goodwill towards humanity and end our food shortages by making a frog grow in size. It turns out writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin got their name for their alien from the electron neural pathways that connect our senses to our brain; it’s the bit that goes wrong in multiple sclerosis and POTS among lots of other nasty things. Forty years of collecting guidebooks, watching videos and DVDs and reading interviews and I never ever knew. Thankfully my axons - or at least one specific one, my vagus nerve, others include the sciatic nerve - got better after the intervention of a, ahem, Doctor (I don’t think it was an interstitial timeloop but I could be wrong) but whenever I have a dizzy spell I still picture them as blobby orange masses running rogue inside my body. 

 As for the characters in this story: For Earth the future’s bright – in fact the future’s, well, bright orange. In a shock twist, after a season of being stuck on Earth dealing with invading grey monsters, it turns out that the day-glo gold ‘n’orange Axons are benevolent and can replicate anything, including crops that will ease all the world famine. How utterly groovy! Let’s roll out the red, sorry orange carpet for them and greet them as heroes! Except of course (and this doesn’t really need a spoiler but I’ll give you one anyway as I haven’t used one for a while) that both plant and planet are not what they seem and are both actually draining energy from the Earth and every living thing. Well you don’t get anything for free do you? Even alien axonite. Sheesh, you do a guy a favour one time by ending world hunger and then you think you own the place… 

Writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin have an interesting place in Dr Who. They start out as its new kids on the block, around a decade younger than everyone else, and end it by being two of the longest serving writers who in many ways become seen as part of the establishment. They’re also the only writers in the Jon Pertwee/Terrance Dicks/Barry Letts era that are new to the series and hadn’t either written for it before or been a friend of someone who did. Indeed they’re new to scifi in general: they got the job thanks to a colossal mistake by their agent who, not quite understanding what Dr Who was, sent in their pilot script for ‘A Man’s Life’ a military comedy on the line of Dad’s Army about their experience as juniors in the Second World War. Everyone in the Dr Who production office pretty much was a war veteran and both Dicks found it funny so they invited the writers to come all the way out from Bristol to have lunch and see if they were interested in working on a different show. Still not quite comprehending, the writers tried to ask sensible questions about budget and whether there’d be any action sequences. Then they started talking about tanks. Dicks was surprised but figured they did have UNIT as starring roles so talked about that for a while. It was only after that the writers realised they were being asked to write scifi, gulped heavily, admitted they’d never really watched any then decided that they’d have a bash at anything.

 One thing that never changed in the decade or so this pair wrote for the show is that their first drafts were so packed with detail and ideas and imagination that it would have taken an entire season to explore everything properly and probably five to have enough budget for everything. It seems likely to me that having heard the word ‘scifi’ the writers immediately thought not of TV but of comic strips, big bright and colourful things where there were explosions every frame and people going zap every page, which was a long way away from the rest of season 8 (by a quirk of scheduling ‘Axos’ was made immediately after ‘The Mind Of Evil’, as deep and grown-up a serial as Dr Who ever did). The first draft of Axos, submitted for the 2nd Doctor, featured a giant floating skull spaceship over Hyde Park that gobbled up millions of screaming extras, was involved in a big giant space battle and even features a giant mutated carrot that arrived out of the ground. The writers always passed Hinckley Power Station on their way to script conferences in London and incorporated that into their script too, with the aliens taking it over and holding the Earth to ransom. Dicks wrote back admiring their enthusiasm but asking for something a little cheaper, reducing the millions of extras in Hyde Park to a deserted beach in Dungeness. Keeping the nuclear power station and the food angle they finally (after multiple extra re-writes) came up with ‘The Claws Of Axos’ (or ‘Vampire From Space’ as it was known till very late in the day, to the point where it’s still the only Dr Who title where the captions were made and then had to be changed before broadcast; producer Barry Letts was worried viewers would get the wrong idea and expect it to be even more hammer horror than it ended up being) about an alien race that appeared to be benevolent and giving but was really on the take, out to zap our planet’s energy and leave us with nothing. 

 More by accident than design the final script ended up being pure Dr Who, to the point where I seems mighty familiar for anyone who knows their 1960s Dr Who (where every other Hartnell race and a fair few of the Troughton ones pretended to be benevolent and a good half of Dr Who stories before this have a similar moral message of ‘don’t believe appearances’) but it’s full of action and incident and a nice change of pace in 1970s Who. There’s usually a bit in Pertwee stories where the plot comes to a full-stop or we end up in a sub-plot cul-de-sac but instead this one is a rush to keep up, as breathless and incident-packed a four episodes as any in ‘classic’ Who, all delivered in bright shiny technicolour in contrast to all those brilliant-but-beige seven-parters that were on the year before. In a twist to how these things usually go in Dr Who the Axons themselves feel like a replica of the autonomous Autons from two stories ago painted gold and don’t have the deepest or most interesting backgrounds but they look amazing, with their perfect faces and their blonde hairdos. Admittedly their ‘real’ blobby orange form just looks stupid, looking like a dyed and deflated Mr Blobby, but they’re not on screen long and their Human ‘personas’ are sufficiently creepy to get you through the brief metamorphosis near the end. Best of all about these beings is their spaceship, which rather than being sterile and shiny and tucked away out in space is a fully living breathing organic being that’s parked itself in the ground near the (fictional) Nuton Power Complex. The second best thing of all is the unique idea of the Axons as being, like their medical definition, as sort of organic whole, a brain with people walking around as its equivalent of nerve endings submitting information back to the overall ‘hub’ to be processed: it takes the Doctor a while to work it out but (spoilers) everything we see of this race is all part of the same organic whole: the Axons themselves are merely part of the overall whole being just like the ship and the axonite that they’ve very kindly decided to offer to Earth so that we can overcome our food shortages by making all our crops and resources bigger (that’s where the incredible growing frog comes in, Axons having apparently picked up on our medical science). 

Given that Baker and Martin seem to be writing from 1950s B-movie comics I have often wondered if they’re really talking about the evils of communism here. The Axonites are pretending to be – quite literally – a golden couple with a couple of golden children to go along with it. Talk to any of them upfront and they seem nice and sweet and generous, full of gushing praise about how wonderful their way of life is. It’s only when you scratch the surface you find out that it’s all gold-plating and fake. What’s more the Axonite is designed to over-come the Earth’s greatly uneven economic climate where some countries have all the money and resources and some don’t and most are somewhere in between by distributing a substance that makes everyone equal, though admittedly nobody as equal as the whacking great Axon whole which is set to gain more than anybody. Note the eventual title the writers chose for this story, ‘Claws’ – technically the Axons in their pure ‘ravioli’ blobby form have tentacles not claws, but there’s a long tradition of American films about the horrors of Russia giving them lurid details like this (perhaps, too, because the symbol of Russia is the bear and they very much do have claws). So then, this is a story about communists serving an evil mass whole wanting to overthrow capitalism (because everyone would have the same amount as everyone else there’d be no monetary system anymore as such) but secretly plotting to keep everyone poor and themselves rich. Job solved! 

Except…Dave Martin had only just quit his job in advertising to become a writer along with his friend. He’d spent nearly a decade trying to come up with copy that would make people who couldn’t afford anything buy stuff they didn’t really need. Splashing your cash and making things gold really isn’t a communist way of going about things, but it is very much a capitalist one. The scripts detail the Axons in humanoid form as looking like ‘the perfect Coca-cola nuclear family’ and they do: they share those same fake smiles that everyone in advertising seems to have (and especially in 1970s coca-cola adverts, one of the biggest franchises on the planet where drinking soft drinks became equated with world peace, weirdly) and it’s a smile that, notably, never reaches the eyes (in the Axons’ case because they’re painted on). The moral: The Axons are made to look presentably perfect in every way on the outside but on the inside have dropped their dinner down them just like the rest of us (ravioli and marmalade by the look of things). The suspicious Humans who are prepared to blow the Axons out of the sky and steal their resources and hoard it for themselves even before they know it’s all a trap are every bit as despicable. Both capitalism and communism, then, end up as systems that don’t work and will never make the majority of people satisfied when they can be used for exploitation by people in power. 

 That might be why this story suddenly and uniquely introduces an American branch of UNIT. We’ve never heard from them before, will never hear from them again, technically a European organisation like The United Nations shouldn’t have an American base anyway (at least in ‘our’ universe) and agent Bill Filer has gone down in Dr Who folklore as being a possible second agent secretly working for the FBI or CIA who somehow hypnotises all UNIT personnel into just accepting who he is at face value even though they have a huge amount of secrets to cover up and a renegade timelord criminal on the loose. He leaves most viewers scratching his head why he’s there at all, given that he doesn’t do anything in the plot one of our regulars like Benton or Yates couldn’t do better, has a love interest with Jo that goes precisely nowhere (it doesn’t help that Katy Manning and Paul Grist share hardly any screen time and Filer seems to spend most of it shouting at someone angrily when he’s in her proximity) and hasn’t really learned anything by the end of the story, not to mention the fact they cast someone with the world’s least convincing American accent to play him (if you’ve been struggling out what state Bill seems to come from the answer seems to be all of them, at once). I think he’s there because a story about capitalism and communism needs an American there; capitalism tends to be something Brits go along with rather than the way of life our yank cousins seem to enjoy. The British branch of capitalism would be to have a mad professor augmenting axonite and selling it from his garden shed. As involving as ‘Claws Of Axos’ is, as much as our token British bureaucrat has thrown his lot in with the capitalists trying to take control of an alien gift, it still feels like a fight we’re not really involved in. Note, however, that the fight is mostly for control of a nuclear power station that just happens to be on ‘our’ patch: to this day the Americans lumber us with storing a lot of their nuclear missiles for them because we’re closer to Russia (especially Scotland) while those same nuclear missiles make us an easier target for Russia to nuke without necessarily triggering immediate American retaliation. The Axons are after our nuclear energy from power stations technically, but it’s not a million miles away. 

 Another theme in this story is of secrets and motives, of the chasm between your ‘public’ and ‘private’ faces. A lot of Dr Who stories are about people who usually think in black and white suddenly having to think in grey, to find compromises with a way of life so alien and different to their own. This one is the opposite about people who are now used to thinking in grey going back to people who are white pretending to be black and black pretending to be white (even if everything is painted orange). It would be fitting if Bill was working for a shadier organisation than UNIT because he’s about the only person who isn’t up to something in this story. Chinn is the epitome of stiff upper lip British generosity in public but in private he’s scheming to sell the Axons out for every penny he can get. He’s totally a Brexit supporter, an isolationist who believes in putting his country first over everyone else’s even though everyone could share what they have, who can’t see bigger picture. It’s a rare admission from the Doctor that in the end, by not handing out axonite to other world leaders Chinn has ‘done the right thing – but for the wrong reasons of course’. The Axons, naturally, would be lying through their teeth if they had any. They pretend to be givers but are really takers, out for our energy, sociopathic narcissists love-bombing humanity with false promises, which makes a nice change from aliens who want to kill or enslave us Even The Doctor, though, is as cagey as we’ll see him till the 7th Doctor, throwing his lot in with anyone when it suits him. There’s a moment at the end when you seriously wonder if his jealousy of The master’s freedom means he’s going to abandon The Earth and all his friends to travel the stars again, the one temptation strong enough to overcome his morals. Other writers wouldn’t go there – they know The Doctor’s moral upstandingness is his key feature – but Baker and Martin, of course, know nothing about past stories, they’re just going from the series ‘Bible’ laid out by Letts and Dicks that talks about the misery the Doctor feels at being stuck in one planet in one time for so long and how he’d do anything to leave. Jo, of course, is a sweet innocent – or at least she is in political terms; in her private life just look at how ready she is to switch partners. In her first two stories she’s had quite a thing going for Captain Yates and is, to all intents and purposes, leading him on even if she does it very charmingly. In this story, at least when he’s not there, Jo is all over Bill like a rash. Fickle: that’s Humanity in a word this adventure. Honestly, we don’t deserve axonite, even before it turns out to be sucking us dry. Greedy is another. Nobody is satisfied with their fair share: everyone wants more. But the grass isn’t always greener. Especially if it’s really orange and blobby. 

 The Master is an interesting case. He doesn’t always feel as if he belongs in this fight either, a late addition to the script added at Terrance Dicks’ insistence because every story in season 8 has him somewhere. Roger Delgado is basically the Axons already: he’s a charming schemer who can talk his way out of trouble and be everybody’s friend - often in contrast to the angry shouty less than diplomatic 3rd Doctor – and is used to pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes. Having him in this story adds another ingredient that just replicates what’s already there in many ways. And yet his half of the story works, partly because Roger Delgado is always so good he can still sell the B-movie lines even Pertwee is having trouble speaking and partly because, for once, you’re not sure which way The Master’s going to fall. He doesn’t want to serve the Axons and he wants Earth to himself, but then he also wants to beat the Doctor, so which way is he going to go? Following his first two stories, where he’s the personification of evil, it’s a twist for the character to suddenly end up teaming with the Doctor and even sharing some slight affection for him in some scenes, such as the one where he’s horrified at the desperate lengths the Doctor has gone to in order to tamper with his Tardis and try to make it take off again. In many ways it’s the last thing The Master does that’s surprising right up to the point where he shoots himself (in ‘World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls’ as late as 2017). This story really examines the Doctor and Master’s similarities for the first time, after a pair of stories emphasising their differences, something that couldn’t really be done with any previous foe like Daleks or Cybermen. 

 The heart of this story comes in part three when the Brigadier, confronted with public enemy number one, is faced with the decision whether to trust him or let him help stop a potentially even bigger public enemy. The Brigadier, of course, is the one person in this story playing things straight: there’s no messing, no hidden agendas, no tricks. He means his word when he gives it and can’t understand why everyone else is running around being unfair when he has a job to do. Of all the Brigadier’s many stories this is the one that uses him best I think, as the one reliable predictable person left trying to the right thing as he sees it, for the greater good of everyone. he’s not an extreme but caught in the middle, the no nonsense sceptic who doesn’t believe the aliens but one of the few people who doesn’t necessarily believe the Doctor either and Nicholas Courtney can do more with a raised eyebrow than most actors with a monologue (a surprise, then, that this is the story where in his autobiography the actor says he was so overcome by anxiety he had to be excused shooting for the day; it says much about how close and kind the Dr Who team was in this era that, rather than be annoyed at holding up filming or leaking it to the papers, he got a standing ovation on his return; as much as Pertwee gets gently ribbed by the fanbase for his more narcissistic tendencies like having scripts just so or for making sure cameras got his hair right and shot his nose at certain angles to make it smaller, he was a very kind and gracious actor and set the tone for a lot of the general niceness guests always reported on set. Of all the many eras to have worked on DW the 1971 series seems to be the happiest, with Jo and The Master in place and everyone else confident with what they’re doing). 

So far so grown-up, but there’s also a side of ‘Claws Of Axos’ that’s silly indeed, bordering on stupid and it just keeps on coming with mistake after mistake. We open with another of the many comedy tramps in this era of the series (and arguably the worst) Pigbin Josh, whose notorious in Dr Who circles despite getting no lines beyond muttering and only a few seconds of screen time. It always strikes me as odd that this era of the series, in many ways the most progressive and left-leaning of Dr Whos run so far (give or take Andrew Cartmel’s pot shots at Thatcher in the 1980s) should be so rude to hobos, making them all out to be either stupid or greedy or both. That goes double for this story which, after all, is partly about the stupidity of the capitalist system and how it leaves people behind. Worryingly, he’s based on someone the writers actually knew: a pub regular. Who had a broad Bristol accent (but hopefully not as broad as the one on screen which is off the charts yokel). The orange blobby Axons in their true form are the epitome of slow limbering Dr Who monsters that don’t look scary. Can’t move very fast and don’t do anything: even though everyone in this story runs away from them screaming a more honest reaction (and this is a story about being honest after all) would be to laugh at them. There’s a moment in part three, when Jon Pertwee lowers himself to a chair covered in red-painted blobby bubblewrap, inside a blobby orange spaceship, worrying about orange blobby monsters, when a rather rude looking eye on a stalk comes and peers at him before he’s on the run from a blancmange-dipped duvet that’s a candidate for one of the silliest moments in the series as a whole (and boy are there some contenders for that accolade). Then there’s the giant frog or more particularly everyone’s OTT reaction to it when they can’t actually see it (given that it’s an ordinary frog rather too obviously added to the picture from another set via the wonders of Colour Separation Overlay). Indeed there’s more CSO here per scene than any Who story till ‘Underworld’, something which only adds to the not-quite-real cartoon flavour of the story (really, for us to believe in such a cartoony thereat, everything should have been extra real, not more phoney – it all feels like a camera conjuring trick, in a stiry about being wary of any and all tricks). Like the Axons this story is trying to do two very different things: offer the ideas of an intelligent literate scifi as good as any from the scifi greats Arthur C Clarke, John Wyndham, Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov with the visuals of a Saturday morning children’s show featuring gunge and clowns. Baker and Martin really don’t know who to pitch this story for do they? It’s as if they heard that ‘the key demographic is children’ and decided to write low with higher things smuggled in (I suspect Russell T Davies started from a similar place with the farting Slitheen of ‘Aliens Of London/World War Three’). Not that the dialogue is actually any more grownup: there’s a brave serious story at the heart of this but you wouldn’t know it from any of the actual lines, which are all B-movie clichés. Even the Doctor seems to have taken a stupid pill this story. 

 Then there’s the notorious scene that wasn’t finished, the director messing up the lighting directions so he couldn’t add a CSO shot of a road behind Benton and Yates as they bump up and down in their UNIT jeep in front of what’s obviously a set backdrop (it’s a surprise they didn’t simply cut the scene altogether as it’s not a hugely important one). There’s a moment when Jo is aged by the Axonites (another power tjhey only seem to have for a few seconds): it ought to be the single worst thing Jo goes through during her time in the Tardis (she’s not scared of death but aging? For a hip young groovy thing like Jo that’s truly evil!) Only the actresses they bring in to replace Katy Manning for these sequences look nothing like her and Jo chooses this, of all moments, to stay calm and rational, not reacting at all – in contrast to 99% of her other scenes. It’s a promising moment wasted, like so much of this story. Then there’s the sub-plots that we don’t need and which we’ve had a hundred times before, all better, from The Axons suddenly creating dopplegangers to Bill and Jo’s sudden romance and the kerfuffle around nuclear power (it looks as if its going to be far more important to the story than it is: I love the fact even The Master laughs at us for our lack of safety and given that he’s not known for his carefully thought out plans and safety checks if The Master’s doing that you know you’ve gone wrong). Had this been a six parter like so many other stories in this era then maybe…though knowing how Baker and Martin work they’d have filled that up with another seven sub-plots that don’t quite work too. The Sarah Jane Adventures story ‘The Gift’ does this story practically word for word (albeit with Blathereen, the Slitheen’s cousins, instead of Axons) and is somehow far less silly and childish in every way. Remember, that’s a series whose chief demographic is ten year olds (smart ten year olds admittedly, but still). 

 ‘Axos’ is a silly story then in so many ways, the sort of thing that we fans tend to laugh at other series for doing compared to the ‘seriousness’ of Dr Who and hide whenever a non-fan comes into the room, a guilty pleasure we know is bad for us but still draws us in (like axonite), but at least it’s well made bit of silliness. The organic spaceship might look like a bouncy castle and everyone on location thought it looked awful, especially with the tunnel that extends from it and makes it look like an airplane on a runway, but on screen where you can’t see the joins it looks amazing and all too plausibly alien, as if something real has really made its way to an English beach, not just something cobbled together by a props designer in a hurry. There’s no metal, no hard angles and it really does look organic inside and out and therefore so very different to the streamlined hi-tech spaceships we usually see in Who. The Axon makeup is amazing. The location filming is exotic enough to make a change from UNIT bases and hangars and prisons, but not so exotic yet that it seems ridiculous (spare a thought, though, for the poor actors on Dungeness beach in January who were frozen, Katy Manning close to frostbite in her usual mini-skirt and warmed up by Pertwee’s cloak between takes and the weather so cold Nicholas Courtney’s fake moustache kept snapping off with the ice (the only time we see him with a real one is in 5th Doctor story ‘Mawdryn Undead’) while everyone else huddled round the prop UNIT jeep’s engine for warmth. Though filmed in a run of five days in the same place the weather in January was so changeable that they had rain, sun, snow and hail in different sense, leaving Terrance Dicks to add a last-minute line saying how the Axonite spaceship was messing with the British weather. The first time I saw this story I remember being amazed that they’d gone to such lengths to add all the different weather effects in…)The actors give their all (that’s Tim Piggot Smith in his first ever TV as a UNIT soldier – in the future he’ s one of those actor who’ll be in practically everything). There’s action and battles that are better shot and directed than a lot of the UNIT stories and they’re there to serve the plot not pad out time away from it. There’s a lot to love about this story, even if a lot will make you cringe in embarrassment too. The Dr-Jo team has never been better, while the Dr-Master clashes are some of the best too (it’s a clever ploy to have The Master as much a victim as The Doctor and have the pair temporarily working together in). Baker and Martin write for UNIT better than most and have great fun throwing in the sort of army action sequences they were expecting to see on TV from their unsolicited script, if never quite like this. Even the much-maligned music score is...different. I’m not sure I want every Dudley Simpson score to sound like this one, but the synths do add to the alien-ness of the story and you can tell that it’s a clever natural musician being imaginative and weird rather than a hack pressing buttons at random (like some other synth-driven Who scores out there where the buttons really do seem to have been pressed at random). This isn’t the deepest or greatest story in the world or even this season and a lot of individual scenes go very wrong, but like the axonite itself the real story is the quiet beating heart and intelligent brain that’s almost smuggled into a story that’s coloured bright orange and treated like a cartoon. It’s just that, well, there’s not much in the main plot about being careful who you trust that ‘Galaxy 4’ ‘The Savages’ or ‘The Macra Terror’ didn’t do better or at least deeper. ‘Tis only fair we should have got one story that did the benevolent plot in colour though – even if 99% of that colour seems to be orange. All good fun, then, but it could have been so much more. So much more!!! 

 POSITIVES + So far the 3rd Dr’s adventures have followed a pattern: a lot of setting up, a heck of a lot of dialogue and a lengthy talky sub-plot, all wrapped up in a rushed finale and interrupted by a few action-led cliffhangers. The early Pertwee years are Dr Who at its most cerebral and, out of the nearly 60 years of the show, one of my favourite eras of them all because you really have to thin. However, week on week, by story seven and episode 36 of the 3rd Dr era, the formula’s beginning to drag. Suddenly we get a story where everything happens so fast it’s difficult to keep up and – boom! - there’s a sudden explosion for no reason and – wow – did that UNIT soldier just fly through the air? Oh wait – Crash! - The Axons are doing something interesting again and wait – zoom – is it the cliffhanger already? Time’s just flown by. Nobody dies quietly or emotionally in this story – instead everyone’s exploded to death. If this had been one of several stories all doing the same thing it would soon get irritating but in context it’s a relief. Dr Who is suddenly madly exciting again and while it won’t last and while a lot if not most of the action is covering up where the plot would normally go, it’s all handled so well by director Michael Ferguson that for once I don’t care. Boom! Crash! Bang! Wait, I blinked, did I miss something again?! 

 NEGATIVES - As good as the regulars are, the new characters just here for this story are a weedy lot. All of them are annoying, from the tramp who lumbers into the Axons going ‘oo-arr’ to Chinn the one-dimensional head of the ministries who accept everything the Axons say without even the start of a debate (they’re not that naive when it comes to politicians from other countries, so why wouldn’t somebody think about questioning giant orange alien bouncy castles from space?) The biggest drip of the lot though is Bill Filer, this years’ token American character who sweeps Jo off her feet despite being more narcissistic and full of hot air than The Master. Hmm, an annoying American who assumes all women are going to love him and with a strange hairdo in a story about lying through your teeth that’s mostly orange...If this had been made 50 years later I’d totally assume they were trolling Donald Trump but at this stage he’s just a twenty-five-year old nobody. As opposed to a seventy-seven year-old nobody the way he is now. 

BEST QUOTE: ‘The timelords have programmed the Tardis always to return to Earth. It seems I’m some kind of a galactic yoyo!’

 Prequels/Sequels: ‘The Feast Of Axos’ (2011) is #144 in the Big Finish main Who range and is set decades after this story when the Axon spaceship is rescued from the timeloop The Doctor and Master banished it to by an eccentric millionaire whose heard the rumours about their special powers and wants them for himself. The 6th Doctor and Evelyn (middle-aged librarian and easily his best companion…sorry Peri!) end up in more Axonite shenanigans before (spoilers) sending the ship back there with the Tardis fast return switch. A good solid Big Finish sequel –the egocentric pontificating 6th Doctor makes for an even better contrast with the seemingly benevolent but duplicitous Axonites than the 3rd and Colin Baker is at his best here, as he so often is in these audios (with a softer, gentler personality than he had on TV but still with a sbit of a dodgy ego that makes him sharper than the others). Previous ‘The Mind Of Evil’ next ‘Colony In Space’