Doctor Who: The Claws of Axos (1971)
There are some good and interesting ideas at the heart of The Claws of Axos. However the two big drawbacks in the serial as it actually exists are 1) the lack of budget and 2) a story that has some fascinating concepts but a script and production values that fail to draw those interesting ideas into the light. So how could this have been done differently?
“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” is an absurdist play by Tom Stoppard, which partially tells the story of Hamlet from the point of view of two minor characters. In that vein, I’d like to see The Claws of Axos told from the point of view of the unseen characters who occasionally telephone in to the story in order to tell Chinn and/or the Brigadier who is actually in charge of the operation.
There’s a running plot point through the first three episodes involving confusion concerning how UNIT (a UN organization) and the Ministry of Defense (a UK organization, albeit one run by a member state of the United Nations) interact with each other. (Indeed, while viewing a prior serial, Terror of the Autons, I was curious how a UN Brigadier was easily able to order a Royal Air Force air-strike on British soil to kill people who would presumably be British subjects.) One can easily imagine a political satire in the style of Yes, (Prime) Minister or The Thick Of It where various bureaucrats and ministers argue about who has jurisdiction over an alien spaceship that’s landed buttocks-up in a rock quarry next to a British nuclear reactor. (“It’s in Britain!” “But the UK is in the UN!” “But the UK has national sovereignty over our land!” “But UNIT was formed as a world-wide organization!” “Well, we have a guy with a bowler hat already on the spot!”)
Speaking of Chinn, his minister makes a point of saying that Chinn is going to get the responsibility and blame for anything vaguely negative that happens. But we can’t seriously believe that he’s actually in charge, can we? Axonite represents unlimited food and unlimited energy. Is the British government really going to let the guy who was only in the room because he happened to be running a human resources audit be the man to shepherd the UK into a post-scarcity economy?
Again, we can imagine a huge amount of wrangling going on behind the scenes in our satirical “…Are Dead” reimaging of the story. You’d have ministers ignoring the potential ending of all world hunger and instead focusing on what this would do to the stock price of companies involved in mass food production or energy. (“A technology that will allow anyone to turn one drop of oil into 100 barrels in a matter of minutes? You know, British Petroleum isn’t going to like this.”) I could imagine a subplot of Britain determined to get their hands on Axonite exclusively, not to reap its benefits, but to suppress it. Or perhaps to sell the rights to it to whichever multinational oil company provided the highest bid.
Still, flipping the story completely around like this would lose us the comforting performances we’ve come to expect from this era of the “UNIT family”. That said, on the DVD/Blu-Ray extras, Katy Manning — while appreciating the serial’s visuals — does mention that the sheer amount of in-camera special effects work did have a negative impact on her and Jon Pertwee’s ability to act convincingly. So perhaps the main cast would have appreciated a story where they were given four weeks off. It would be a shame though, as Pertwee does get a few good moments of outrage in the beginning of the story before the effects take over. Roger Delgado, of course, is wonderful even when he’s arguing with a giant prop eyeball suspended from the ceiling.
So perhaps the cast may have welcomed the extra vacation time. And a studio-bound production of character actors yelling bureaucratic phrases at each other on a soundstage would have been much more economically feasible and realistic compared to the Claws Of Axos that we did get.
