The third serial of the 8th season, The Claws Of Axos, was broadcast from March 13 to April 3 1971 and Jon Pertwee is the 3rd Doctor. The four part story is the 57th serial and another alien invasion story. I wonder if there is a statistic about the percentage of Doctor Who serials with alien invasions in them. I'm sure it's the majority of the plots. This time the alien is one big blob from space. Axos is a single living organism that arrives on earth to feed on our power. It's energy snackin' will kill everyone on earth so that kind of sucks, huh. I did like the alien in this one, even though some of the exectution isn't that great. It was early days of Chromakey but they were at least imaginitive.
After the thing hits the earth the UNIT team heads out to look at it. The landing site is right next to a nuclear research plant and there's an annoying guy from the Ministry tossing his weight around. The Doctor, Jo and the Brigadier discover the Master has returned, in a pink tardis, and he's working with Axos. The Master wants to kill the Doctor and he's such a twat that he'll destroy the whole planet to get what he wants. Of course the Doc and the UNIT gang fight back. The Doctor eventually locks Axos in a time loop and gets his tardis fixed by the Master who escapes when the Doc was busy. The Doc tries to leave earth but he can't. The Timelords made sure of that by fixing his tardis to always return to earth. I liked parts of the story but some plot points are kind of annoying. The Ministry official is a big stereotypical jerk that you've seen way too often.
Even as a 4 parter the story seems to drag on in the third episode. At least there's some good outdoor stuff. They mention the location shooting in an interview. The first day of shooting was foggy. Overnight it snowed so there was that on the ground for the second day of shooting. On the 3rd day it had rained and all the snow was gone when they went to shoot. The fourth day was sunny and they weren't shooting in order. They explained it away with a script change. A woman mentions the bizarre weather in the area to the Brigadier while they are all still at the UNIT HQ. At least you can't fault them for working with what they had and banging on no matter what.
There's a nice short about the filming locations, with clips from the show and recent shots, that's narrated by Katy Manning who plays Jo. She said she hadn't seen the place since they shot there nearly 30 years before. I guess it's not a touristy sort of place. From the video of then and now it seems that not much has changed in the Kent countryside. That's way over on the eastern side of the country near the bottom. It was there that you find the Dungeness Nuclear Power Station that was used for a fair bit of the location shooting. Looks like a 1960's power plant. Nothing too exciting, other than being the location for a fake alien invasion. I wonder if Doctor Who fans make the trip to see it? I'm certainly happy to see it on tv.
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