Shawn's words grace the website again with another look at an upcoming Doctor Who disc, this time for the 1971 John Pertwee episode, The Claws Of Axos. I Always loved Pertwee's Doctor. Anywho check out Shawn's review after the jump.
Written By Shawn Francis
In
this episode from 1971, the Doctor (John Pertwee) and his companion,
Jo Grant, (Katy Manning) are already on Earth as a strange object is
caught on radar entering Earth’s atmosphere. Missiles are sent to
blow it to smithereens, but the ship “vanishes” before they
strike. Unbeknownst to the human populace, it has already landed and
burrowed itself into the earth, with only this weird, organic
aperture exposed for the aliens to come and go at their leisure.
A distress signal is
sent out from the ship, the Doctor, a group of scientists and UNIT
invite themselves in to investigate. The aliens—Axons,
non-threatening humanoids with golden skin, eyes and hair—welcome
them in, give them some bullshit story of their crashing and then
invite the group to take back some of their Axonite, a strange piece
of malleable matter that can do a lot of things, one of which is make
animals huge when injected with it, implying humans can solve their
food shortage with it.
Chinn, the politician they unfortunately brought along, decides this
Axonite is a good idea and brings it back to the base. In reality the
Axons are a type of universal scavenger that invades worlds and sucks
them dry of all living matter before moving on to the next.
To
complicate matters, The Master is in their employ, and the Doctor
must figure out why the Axons are in such a hurry to distribute their
Axonite across the globe, in reality it’s part of their planet
feeding process. We also learn the form they used to welcome the
humans is not their natural one. Their natural form is a blob-ish,
humanoid-ish, tendril sprouting shape that kind of reminded me of a
plant root.
The
1.33:1 transfer was very good and very clear.
There
are two discs, on Disc #1 you get roughly 27 minutes of Deleted &
Extended Scenes, which in reality are basically the scenes being
filmed, and when things aren’t as they should be, you can hear the
director call for another take and the actors reposition themselves.
Rounding out the disc is an audio commentary with actors, Katy
Manning and Richard Franklin and producer, Barry Letts. You also get
the customary trivia subtitle option, which dispenses factoids about
the show and the episode and the scenes.
On
Disc #2 you get ‘AXON STATIONS (26:38), this is your
standard doc about this episode, chronicling how the story came about
and then filming it. Two inexperienced writers were used and their
initial ideas for this tale included a giant skull and a human
changing into a giant a carrot, and that they equate some of the
visuals as having a very 60s/LCD trippy vibe. I agree with that
assessment one hundred percent; ‘NOW AND THEN’ (6:30),
this featurette takes a look back at the locations used in the
episode and how they appear today, and shockingly, most of them look
pretty much the same; ‘DIRECTING WHO’ (14:31), this is
basically an interview with director, Michael Ferguson about the
show; ‘STUDIO RECORDING’ (1:12:40), this is similar to the
deleted and extended scenes where various scenes are shown, with the
added bonus of giving you a look into the behind-the-scenes of
seeing how they are directed. Interesting enough this episode was
originally called, “The Vampire From Space;” ‘LIVING
WITH LEVENE’ (35:01), a very nice and revealing doc about
actor, John Levene, who played Sergeant Benton on this episode and
for a ton of other Doctor Who shows. It’s a BBC doc where’s he
interviewed over a period of a weekend, and where we learn about his
grim childhood and that he’s just dying to be asked to revisit his
character in the new Who series. Along with the AXON STATIONS doc,
this is the second best feature in this 2-disc set.
Rounding
out the second disc is a Photo Gallery (10:51) and PDF
Materials for this episode’s Radio Times Listings.
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