The Claws of Axos - Episode 2

Today I am on episode 290 which means that I am 10 episodes away from the tercentenary of Doctor Who. Recently I decided that I would read the target novels that went along with the story and read it during the course of the story. It’s interesting to think about scenes of the TV story when I’m reading the book. Chinn is described as a hard-driving human dynamo, cutting through the restraints of red tape” and also “a vain and rather stupid man, but he was also ruthlessly ambitious and tirelessly energetic”. Chinn is letting the power goes to his head as he negotiates a deal with the Axons and gets the army involved. Chin goes from being an annoyance in the first episode to someone that has developed and becomes a rather dislikeable character.

A large part of the episode takes place on the spaceship which I have to comment on how the set is impressive. There are occasional CSO moments but for the large part of it its all real and looks quite organic and helps create the right atmospheric. I cant make my mind up about the eye because at times I thought it looked quite good and other times I thought it looked quite silly. Hopefully time will convince me one way or the other. There was another moment on the spaceship which looked very 1970’s and that was when they are doing the copy of Filer and the effect used seems to imply some recreational drugs may have been consumed that day but I’m probably wrong.

After the rather less than impressive use of CSO in the previous episode, I have to say that I was impressed with how the technology was used when trying to create the impression that the facility that Winser uses is high up in the air. It’s clear that the majority of the shot is a freeze frame shot but its still well used and much better than the enlarging frog we saw in the previous episode. Another good shot was when there were suppose to be two Filer’s face to face and even though it looks like one is a stunt double of sorts its still done well and Michael Ferguson has done a good job of making sure that the action flows well.

The best moment of the entire episode actually came from Roger Delgado who’s involvement becomes clear during the course of the episode and at the end he does something that you would expect the Doctor to do. After leaving the Axon’s ship he manages to get ontop of a UNIT van and via a mirror manages to hypnotise someone

The cliffhanger is rather poor as it didn’t have any dramatic weight as far as I was concerned and it was a shame because the for the vast majority of the episode, the story worked well and I found myself interested in the story but it seemed like Bob Baker & Dave Martin were so focused on the main story that they didn’t give much time to the cliffhanger.