May 27: The Claws of Axos Episode Four / Colony in Space Episode One

Axos is tearing itself apart, with lots of psychedelic lights and overlayed figures floating around as the Doctor and Jo try to escape.  Jo is in sheer hysterics -- so much so that the Doctor slaps her to bring her back (well, that's what it looks like; it's admittedly a bit difficult to tell for certain, what with all the flashing lights and superimposed images, but careful viewings would seem to indicate that a slap does occur).  But it's not the end for Axos, as they manage to redirect the power back into the light accelerator and save themselves -- but at least Jo and the Doctor manage to escape in the confusion.

Once free, the Doctor explains that "the claws of Axos are already deeply embedded in the Earth's carcass", but that he might be able to stop Axos before it activates the axonite and consumes the world -- only he'll need the Master's help.  Except inside the TARDIS the Doctor admits that he doesn't have a plan, and he wants the Master's help in order to get the TARDIS working so they can both escape.  The Doctor certainly seems earnest enough when he discusses this plan -- enough so that you worry that he might be telling the truth about things.

The Doctor brings the Master back to Axos. (The Claws of Axos
Episode Four) ©BBC

Meanwhile, Axos is coming to life, so Yates and Benton (who've been watching it) have to fight off attacking Axons as they make their escape.⁶⁰  And while that's going on, the Doctor reveals his plan and dematerializes with the Master in the TARDIS -- only to rematerialize inside Axos.  Apparently the Doctor wants Axos's help to overthrow the High Council of the Time Lords (the first mention of this piece of Doctor Who mythology), so he's willing to give Axos the secrets of time travel in exchange.  But not really (did you think he would?); he's actually putting Axos into a time loop that they'll never be able to break free from, and he's willing to sacrifice himself to do so.  The ruse is successful and Axos is time-looped; the Doctor boosts the circuits in the TARDIS and manages to break free (whether Axos would be able to do the same thing isn't addressed), although it's pretty clear that the Master escaped before the loop was activated.  Still, Earth is saved, even if while the Doctor was away Axos overloaded the light accelerator, which blew up and destroyed a lot of the building it was in.  (Let's be charitable and assume that the nuclear reactor at Nuton which powered the light accelerator was somehow unaffected by the surge and explosion, or else everyone's happily wandering around a heavily radioactive area with no concerns whatsoever.  Although the next time Bob 'n Dave do this, we'll be less forgiving.)

In many ways The Claws of Axos is a pretty workman-like story; there's an interesting big idea at its core (aliens give Earth a gift that turns out to be a Trojan horse), but it's buried beneath layers of what one might call "typical" Doctor Who -- so, e.g.,  the Axons are naturally evil, and they attack soldiers more when it's time for some action in the episode rather than because it makes logical sense.  There's nothing really that new or unusual here -- even the Doctor working with the Master scenes had been done in The Mind of Evil (though to be fair they're better in this story).  But then, overlayed on top of that, are some really lovely alien designs (both the gold-skinned Axons and the spaghetti version) and some trippy psychedelic effects inside Axos -- certainly the interior of Axos is more wonderfully strange than anything we've seen thus far (or will see again until arguably Terror of the Zygons in 1975).  It's these things that help make The Claws of Axos a little more than a bog-standard story -- not to the standard of a true classic, mind, but enough to make it worth your while to watch.

The next story, Colony in Space, opens with the Time Lords gravely concerned about the actions of the Master: he's stolen a file about a doomsday weapon, and it seems only the Doctor can stop him.  But to do that, the Time Lords will have to send the Doctor to a different planet and a different time.  So after a brief discussion with the Brigadier about the Master, the Doctor and Jo enter the TARDIS and are forcibly transported away, Jo refusing to believe anything the Doctor has said about the TARDIS in the meantime.  (What, did she forget about everything that happened at the end of the last story?  Mind you, she also seems to think that the colonists left Earth in 1971.⁶¹)  She's therefore quite surprised (and a little alarmed) to learn she's on the planet Uxarieus in the year 2472.  And look!  It's the first alien planet we've seen since The War Games, and Jo Grant's first trip in the TARDIS.  Or, as Arthur Dent might say, "'this is the first time I've actually stood on the surface of another planet . . . a whole alien world . . . !  Pity it's such a dump though.'"  Yes, it's another bleak BBC quarry, and without black-and-white film to help give it a sense of atmosphere it just looks like a lousy desolate world.  Still, better than nothing, even if they've screwed up the TARDIS materializing/dematerializing effect since the last story.  (Oh, and the TARDIS doors open with the Dalek door sound effect too.)

And on this world are a bunch of colonists struggling to survive; apparently their crops refuse to grow, and nothing they do seems to change that.  The Doctor thinks there's an external force at work, but that's not the only problem: giant lizards have been spotted, and one of them attacks and kills two of the colonists.  Although the Doctor is suspicious: if the lizard was really twenty feet tall as it was described, how could it have gotten into the colonists' dome to kill them?  But then another person is discovered, from a previously unknown colony, who describes how his colony was destroyed by giant lizards, which would seem to lend credence to the lizards' existence, even though no one had seen them until very recently.  (Or, as Mary Ashe puts it, "There's no animal life [on Uxarieus], just a few birds and insects.")  But when the Doctor goes back to the Martins' dome to investigate the attack, he's set upon by a terrifying robot...







⁶⁰ All right, let's discuss the backdrop/sky issue here.  As Benton and Yates are fleeing, shots of them from inside the Jeep appear to have what might be a dark backdrop placed behind them.  It's sometimes suggested that this might be a CSO cloth that nothing was keyed in over, as a) the color doesn't match any of the long shots of the sky, and b) the lighting in the Jeep makes it looks like they're inside something, not out in the open.  But no, we're told, no CSO work was ever attempted or even planned on film, so this can't possibly be a CSO backcloth and instead it's just a weird color of sky.  Except it doesn't look like sky (although, compounding the problem, there are some similar shots which do appear to be the sky -- but it's not the same shade as the controversial shots).  Fair enough on the CSO issue (particularly since it doesn't look like a very useful shade of blue to chromakey out), but given that the last time Michael Ferguson directed a story (The Ambassadors of Death), we had another unconvincing backdrop placed in the windows of vehicles, can we not just consider the possibility that hanging sky-colored cloth in vehicles is Ferguson's method of (say) hiding the fact that the background isn't moving when the vehicle allegedly is?  It's also a bit odd that no one seems to bring up this issue in The Ambassadors of Death -- though that might be because the scenes in question have only recently been restored to color.
⁶¹ It's sometimes suggested that if you flip the order of The Claws of Axos and Colony in Space so that Colony is first, a lot of these issues go away.  The main problem with this theory is that at the beginning the Doctor is explicitly attempting to "bypass the Time Lords' homing control", which he only found out about at the end of The Claws of Axos.