stunt_muppet

Having seen a few more Third Doctor and Second Doctor serials by now, I’m not sure “Claws” was the best serial to start with as far as getting to know the characters goes, if only because there are stretches throughout the episode where everybody remains quite inactive – the Doctor, the Brigadier, and the Master all spend a good deal of time trapped in something or other, and Jo has very little to do except scream. However, once the Master gets out of the Axos spaceship, the pace of the serial picks up considerably, and there are several nice moments between the Doctor and Jo, the Doctor and the Master, and the Doctor and the Axons themselves.

 

Actually, let’s start with them, shall we? I was impressed with the design of the Axons myself, both in their humanoid and non-humanoid forms. The golden-skinned humanoid Axons seemed to fit in perfectly with the human conception of a benevolent alien race – were it not for their jumpsuits they’d look positively angelic. It makes for quite a contrast between the neon-pink spaghetti-monster Axons we see later, and it makes the Axons as enemies more insidious than any ol’ space monster.

 

Now, I did have a little trouble taking the spaghetti-monster Axons seriously, but that’s because I kept thinking of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and making tasteless “have you been touched by His Noodly Appendage” jokes, so that’s hardly the costume department’s fault. What did get me, however, was the very short sequence where we see an Axon “dehumanizing”, or turning back into its spaghetti-monster form. There’s a moment where we see the tentacles beginning to emerge from the Axon’s hands and face as it runs away; it looked like it was melting, which was rather freaky.

 

I think the whole concept of Axos, the living spaceship, was nicely done too – it’s hardly a new idea, I know, but the idea that the ship itself could spawn guards from the walls or reach out and grab you as you tried to run away is an effective one. The slightly psychedelic, almost tropical turn the sets took inside Axos conveyed the ship’s organic nature worked nicely. Anyone ever played The Legends of Zelda: Ocarina of Time? It reminded me of the Jabu-Jabu dungeon, where you’re literally inside the body of a giant whale. It looked organic, threatening, and like it would be very slimey if you actually touched it.

 

With regards to the Doctor:

 

I found it amusing that the very first thing the Doctor did when he showed up in this serial was bitch about doing paperwork. Hee.

 

Anyway, as you may have gathered from my recent macroing efforts, I’ve fallen sort of in love with the Third Doctor. I think Three places an emphasis on the difference – the alien-ness – of the Doctor, which is something I don’t see as often in the more recent series (except, possibly, for Season 1 – more on that later). He’s still a likable protagonist, yes, but he’s also very clearly Not Us. We as an audience can relate, on a superficial level, to the Doctor’s exile on Earth, in the sense that most of us are familiar with being stuck somewhere we don’t want to be. But can we really wrap our minds around what it must be like to have the whole of time and space in your grasp, if you could only remember how to get back? Or of knowing literally no one else who thinks like you do, not just in an intellectual sense but in a sense of basic understanding of the universe and how it works? (Witness his exceedingly low tolerance for bureaucracy, incompetence from authorities, and generally not being allowed to do what he thinks should be done. There’s a lot of frustration pent up there.)

 

Which is what makes the Doctor’s relationship to the Master so intriguing, I think. While the Doctor’s obligated to oppose the Master, foil his plans, etc., I can’t help but notice that he wasn’t all that enthusiastic when he theorized that the Master was trapped in a time loop with the Axons. The Master’s a captial-letter Bad Guy, but he’s also the only person like him that the Doctor has any hope of meeting. Goes both ways, too – the Master’s an exile from Gallifrey just like the Doctor, though he’s not stuck on Earth, so the only one who’s going to think like him is the Doctor. And once they have a goal in common (in this case, once the Master thinks the Doctor has betrayed his UNIT comrades), they settle quite comfortably into technobabbling at each other and bickering in a sort of adorable way.

 

About that: I think the fact that, in spite of what they’ve been through, Jo really thinks the Doctor would abandon her on a doomed Earth speaks further to the other-ness of the Doctor. After all, by this point, they’ve spent at least a year together (vis. the time gap between “Terror of the Autons” and “The Mind of Evil”), and have faced killer daffodills and Stangmoor Prison, possibly among other things (I haven’t read any of the novels yet, so I don’t really know what other shenanigans they got up to in the intervening year). They are, by this point, fairly close – but the Doctor still isn’t really one of them, still doesn’t really belong there. He knows it; she knows he knows it. And so why wouldn’t he take the chance to escape? It’s a very sad moment, and I felt quite sorry for Jo right then, especially after “I shall miss you.”

 

Of course, the tricky thing is that, no matter how different he is, the Doctor’s still a sympathetic, identifiable, and, in some way, human character – not in the literal sense, but in the sense that we can relate to and understand him even if not completely. He’s still very protective of Jo. He still risks being trapped in the time loop in order to rid the Earth of the Axons. He may be alien, but his actions are not completely severed from our morality nor are they inexplicable. The line between human and alien has been negotiated differently in every Doctor I’ve seen so far, and I’m becoming quite fond of how it works with the Third Doctor.

 

In fact, the Third Doctor’s human/alien dichotomy reminds me very much of the same in the Ninth Doctor. Granted, Nine had considerably more freedom of mobility than Three did here, and the sense that there’s no one else like him is made much more intense and sad by the Time War, but there’s still that touch of frustration with humanity in Nine, that sense that he Knows Better and everyone else should stop asking stupid questions.

 

Final Point of Squee: How awesome was it when Jo started to panic and lose her head during the escape from Axos, and the Doctor managed to keep her focused by shouting math problems at her? I think that might be one of my favorite moments of the whole story, with the possible exception of: “Isn’t that a rather primitive way to forge a connection?” “Would you stop pestering me?”

 

Moving on…

 

Forgive me, New!Who fans everywhere, but I have a confession to make: I think I like Delgado’s Master a bit more than Simm’s Master. Not that John Simm didn’t do an excellent job with the script he was given, but the Master is so different in New Who than what he used to be, and I think I just prefer this version of him.

 

The defining attributes of Delgado!Master are, at least in this serial, intelligence, manipulativeness, and resourcefulness. He rarely resorts to violence (at least direct violence) if he doesn’t have to. He’s cooler, more calculating, more reserved. Compare that to Simm!Master, who retains the charming, hypnotic aspect of the Master but who spends about half of The Sound of Drums and most of Last of the Time Lords being completely off his rocker. I find I prefer this calmer, controlled Master, who I think seems, at first glance, to be less prone to violence and evil, which makes him more surprising and unpredictable. Plus, he’s too controlled to be simply written off as insane or sadistic, the way I think Simm!Master could be. He’s not a mental case, he’s just…amoral. Self-interested. And again, Not Us – just more so than the Doctor.

 

(But then, I’ve always found villains who were coldly, unmistakably sane to be far more satisfying than raving lunatics. Your milage may vary.)

 

Of course, there’s also the shallower aesthetic reasons for liking Delgado!Master; John Simm is very pretty, yes, but Roger Delgado raises his eyebrows in a frankly magnificent way. The perpetually dry, measured voice – even when he’s got a gun to his head – doesn’t hurt, either.

 

I didn’t get much of an impression of the Brigadier here because he really didn’t have all that much to do besides be under arrest and make the occasional phone call. My thoughts on him (and oh, there are many :) )shall have to wait until I review “Spearhead from Space” and “The Mind of Evil”, where he has substantially more of a role. Same goes for further thoughts on Jo, but replace “Spearhead” with “whichever Jo-era serial I watch next”.