“Look, Lois, ever since
marijuana was legalized, crime has gone down, productivity is up, and the
ratings for Doctor Who are through the
roof!” - Brian, Family Guy, “Episode
420”
For no less than three
different reasons, that remains some of my favorite Family Guy dialogue ever
written. It’s anyone’s guess how many Doctor Who fans watch the show in altered
states of mind, but now, here in the States, folks in Washington can at least do so openly and
without fear of persecution. They can hold massive, marijuana-fueled Who
marathons, and any such festival will most surely want to include “The Claws of
Axos,” which is not necessarily one of classic Who’s greatest stories, but it’s
certainly one of the trippiest.
The plot is no great shakes.
It’s a standard alien invasion yarn, that’s hook is “they appear to come in
peace, but actually have ulterior, sinister motives.” This is the sort of
sci-fi tale that’s been told thousands of times, and by that measure, “The
Claws of Axos” will not rock your world. However, Roger Ebert’s old rule – one
by which I live and never pass up the opportunity to quote - is, “It’s not what
a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.” And it’s the “how” of “Axos” that
makes it such a classic. Just recently one of my Whovian brethren, Lee Hurtado, of The Hurtado Street Theater,
was telling me how he got into Who, and explained that even though he’d seen
several stories prior, it was “Axos” that eventually sold him on the series. The
serial is so damn committed to its own weirdness, that you really cannot take
your eyes off of it, and it does sort of beg the question, for the uninitiated at least, “What the fuck is this!?!?”
The first ten minutes of the
first episode alone declare, like Laverne and Shirley, “We’re gonna do it our
way,” due in no small part to the character Pigbin Josh, a filthy, disgusting,
seemingly homeless man (played by stuntman Derek Ware), whose sole function in
the story is to be the first victim of the claws of Axos, so that the viewer
knows right off the bat that the golden Axons are hostile, despite their benign
presentational ruse later on in the tale. Anyway, during this first ten
minutes, the action cuts back and forth from the arrival of the Axons, to the
Doctor and UNIT, to this character, Pigbin Josh, wandering around in the snow,
doing an awful lot of talking to himself, and none of it intelligible.
Thankfully, somebody has transcribed some Pigbin speak and put it on the official
BBC classic Who website for all to attempt to decipher:
“Furge thangering muck
witchellers rock throbblin' this time o' day Ur bin oughta gone put thickery
blarmdasted zones about, gordangun, diddenum? Havver froggin' law onnum,
shouldnum? Eh? Eh? Arn I?”
Ahem. Ah, well, yes. If you’re an American fan raised on the Peanuts, you’ll quickly begin referring to
him as Pigpen Josh, because that makes more sense to a Yank. Now if only Josh
were the end of The Weirdness of Axos, which would’ve been a wholly appropriate
name for this tale. The Axon ship, years before Farscape’s Moya, is a living
ship. Its organic interior is the sort of thing to be hallucinated in the most
unsettling of LSD trips, and even as I sit here trying to think of how to
describe it, I’m resigning myself to falling back on some sort of clichéd “it
defies description” type of line. Really it does, much of which is due to Who’s
low budget. Had millions been pumped into this, we may have had a place from
which to start talking, but as is, it’s just weird a hodgepodge of bizarre soft
angles, vaginal doorways and the occasional crab claw. Oh, and plenty of acid slides.
Nothing will prepare you
for the arrival of the eyeball of Axos, which dangles in exactly the same way a
limp penis might, and issues commands and orders in a creepy, hollow voice. Then there are the golden Axons themselves, who are such a
striking creation that even in a story that’s as visually whacked as this one,
they’ve sort of become the thing “Axos” is most well known for. Or are they?
Because later in the story, the Axons reveal another form, which is a hulking,
red mess of tentacles - a look which is almost as iconic as the golden versions
of Axos. It is debatable, I suppose, which Axon form is the more iconic; the
tentacled version has actually been turned into an action figure, while the
golden has not (updated 01/06/2014 - now it has), which could be part of the debate. In any case, the fact that
the production team achieved two entirely different looks for this race that are
both iconic to such degrees is high praise indeed.
So, I’ve pretty much gotten
to the point where I’m realizing exactly how balls out crazy I’ve made “Axos”
sound, which was sort of the point, because you’ll see things here you can’t
unsee, or see in any other Doctor Who story. Should you, as Dazed and Confused
advised upon its release, “See it with a bud!”? Most certainly, if and only if
that’s your sort of thing. The story works just fine, however, if you’re sober.
For a more coherent breakdown, and one mired in actual criticism, I turned to
the aforementioned Lee Hurtado, who, to the best of my knowledge, does not
engage in the sorts of activities spoken of here. He laid it out thusly:
“There was alchemy at work
in the story, something that brought its disparate elements together in a way
that shouldn't have worked as it did. The limited production values, the garish
visual aesthetic of the Axons, a plot that's at once simple and well over the
top, and (of course) the marvelous performances of [Jon] Pertwee and [Roger] Delgado
- all combined to create something I recognized as truly alien, and therefore
truly original. From then on, my fate was sealed. I was, and am, the Doctor's.”
On a completely different, and
in my opinion far less interesting level, anyone who owned the original DVD of
“Axos” no doubt knows that the quality of Episodes Two and Three was dodgy at
best. New tech has emerged since then, bringing both eps up to a quality
comparable to Episodes One and Four, and therefore totally justifying this
special edition. For the hardcore Who nut, this isn’t just double-dipping for
double-dipping’s sake, it’s quite possibly an essential.
DVD Extras: Almost
everything that was on the original DVD (including the commentary with Katy
Manning, Richard Franklin, and Barry Letts) has been ported over onto this new
double-disc set, except for a ten-minute documentary entitled “Reverse
Standards Conversion: The Axon Legacy,” which was a look at the restoration
given to the story for the original DVD release; that information is not
applicable to this new release, so it has been excised. No new doc, detailing
the recent restoration work, was produced to take its place, however there is a
fresh, new article up at the Restoration Team’s website detailing the
work that went into this special edition.
New to the table is a 26-minute making of doc entitled “Axon
Stations!,” which, amusingly, goes into detail about the sheer drugginess of
this story, and also spends time discussing the story’s writers, Bob Baker and
Dave Martin (the former went on to write Wallace and Gromit). Quite possibly
the best extra, however, is “Living with Levene,” in which Toby Hadoke spends
the weekend with John Levene (Sgt. Benton), who comes across as a fascinating
eccentric, and quite possibly Doctor Who’s most uncelebrated MVP. Finally,
partially new to the table is 73 minutes worth of rare “Axos” studio recording,
some of which appeared on the old disc in a much shorter version (inexplicably
duplicated here as well on Disc One). The Radio
Times listings are also presented in PDF form. Additionally, there’s a
coming soon trailer for the long awaited release of the unfinished story
“Shada,” which will be hitting DVD in January, in a box set along with the 1993
documentary “More Than Thirty Years in TARDIS.”
