May 25: The Mind of Evil Episode Six / The Claws of Axos Episode One

Well, turns out it wasn't Mailer's pistol going off; it was the Brigadier shooting Mailer.  What a cheat of a resolution.  Although full marks to the Doctor's ungrateful response: "Thank you, Brigadier.  But do you think that for once in your life you could manage to arrive before the nick of time?"

The parasite inside the Keller Machine. (The Mind of Evil
Episode Six) ©BBC

It's an odd episode, this -- particularly for a closing installment.  Rather than a race against time to stop the Master's evil scheme, the attitude here is one of mopping up.  There's still the matter of the Keller Machine and the Thunderbolt missile, but the Doctor thinks he can stop the former and the Brigadier is confident he can handle the latter.  It's only a curious conversation between the Master and the Doctor, where the Master agrees to take his dematerialization circuit in exchange for control of Thunderbolt, that really sets the final act in motion.  And since the Doctor has learned that Barnham causes the parasite inside the Keller Machine to go dormant, he can use that to his advantage.  So a plan is formulated where the Doctor will distract the Master long enough to get the Keller Machine out and near him, and then blow them all up with the abort function on the Thunderbolt missile (once the Doctor can reconnect it).  The most curious part of this, though, is the Doctor's willingness to leave the Master to die, at the mercy of either the Keller Machine or an atomic explosion.  It seems rather out of keeping with how we like to think of the Doctor typically behaving.  In the end, it's only the intervention of Barnham (who apparently can't bear to see someone suffer) that saves the Master's life, leaving him to escape with the dematerialization circuit after callously killing Barnham by hitting him with a car.  And then the episode ends with the Master taunting the Doctor over the telephone: "So, we won't be seeing you for quite some time," the Doctor says.  "Not for quite some time.  But one day, I will destroy this miserable planet and you along with it.  Goodbye, Doctor.  Oh, by the way, enjoy your exile." 

It's a bit of a curious story overall.  There are times when it feels like Doctor Who's answer to a James Bond film (and it's been three years since their last attempt, 1967-68's The Enemy of the World) -- particularly the bit with the missile and the Peace Conference -- but these get interspersed with the stuff about the Keller Machine, which is a lot more like a B-movie.  These two approaches are both fine, but they never quite gel together to form a cohesive whole.  Still, it looks great, and there's enough incident here to keep the audience happily entertained.  And the Master firmly establishes himself as a threat in his own right, even more so than in Terror of the Autons.  This alone makes The Mind of Evil worth watching.

Next up is The Claws of Axos and the debut of the "Bristol Boys" (as Terrance Dicks nicknamed them), writers Bob Baker and Dave Martin.  It certainly starts promisingly, as a strange golden ship flies through space, being tracked by UNIT radar, with (presumably) weird red tentacled monster-like creatures aboard (fandom often describes them as "spaghetti bolognese monsters").  But then we cut to an incredibly officious chap from the Ministry of Defence named Chinn, who is clearly earmarked to be as obstructive as possible throughout this story, and Peter Bathurst (last "seen" in The Power of the Daleks as Governor Hensell) plays him in such a way as to engender no sympathy in the viewers whatsoever.  And add into the mix Paul Grist as an American agent (presumably CIA, but it's never explicitly stated) named Bill Filer who's there to discuss the Master (in case we'd forgotten about him since last week), and we have a mix ripe for conflict.

Into this situation comes the golden spaceship, apparently called Axos, which lands on the southeast coast of England near the (fictional) Nuton Power Complex, after Chinn tries and fails to shoot it (Axos, not Nuton) out of the sky.  "There are freak weather conditions over the whole area... Sudden snowstorms, sir.  Dense fog's covering the area," Corporal Bell reports, in order to explain the ludicrous filming conditions experienced by the location crew.  So we're treated to the amazing sight of the tramp named Pigbin Josh cycling through snowy fields, looking through trash piles and mumbling incoherently to himself.  It looks an awful lot like they've decided to insert part of an episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus into this thing (and the fact that David G. Marsh, playing the second radar technician, bears a resemblance to Terry Jones doesn't help this any).  His story ends when a glowing yellow tentacle ensnares him and drags him into Axos.

Our heroes, on the other hand, are invited in.  Here we really get to see the interior of Axos, which looks a lot like the designers have decided to take full advantage of this new color system Doctor Who is being made in, so we get rather creepy organic textures painted in lots of lurid shades of red, purple, and gold.  The other thing we see (not that the Doctor and company know it yet) is that Axos is holding the Master prisoner.  So, "not for quite some time" translated to roughly 18 minutes or so then.  (Or a week and 18 minutes, if you want to think of it in terms of the original broadcast.)  We find this out because Bill Filer (who's around because of the Master, remember) decides to go investigate Axos on his own and gets captured.  "Who are you?" Filer asks the man he's there to help track down.  What, did UNIT not even provide a photograph of the Master?

The Axons themselves appear to the Doctor's party as golden-skinned humanoids, there with a promise of limitless energy and power in exchange for a bit of power to refuel their spaceship.  Somewhat naturally, the Doctor seems suspicious: "And yet you still ran out of fuel?" he asks after the properties of the Axons' gift, a substance called axonite, are described.  But Chinn is more blinded by the thought of limitless fuel for England.  We'll have to see how that works out for them in future episodes, though, as episode one ends with a shot of the hideous spaghetti monster appearing in front of Jo Grant, who naturally screams as a result.