The Claws of Axos Episode One

The one where a gibbering tramp makes first contact with an alien species...

The episode opens very similarly to Spearhead from Space, with an unidentified mass approaching Earth and being picked up by UNIT technicians on radar. Although he's a pretty poor actor, Michael Walker (as Harry, according to the novelisation) is very easy on the eye and manages to make it past this first scene to feature in two entire episodes. Was there an effort to introduce a wider "UNIT family" in Season 8 to back up the Brigadier, Captain and Sergeant, what with the introduction of Corporal Bell in The Mind of Evil, who also features here? I like Harry: he can stay...

It's a damn good opening to the story actually, showing a weird alien mass (ship?) approaching Earth like some giant galactic puffer fish (it even seems to have breathing "gills"). The glimpse we get inside the ship is a nightmarish collage of cross-fades and superimpositions of various strange organic beings. It's truly alien and I love it.

The Mind of Evil Episode Six

The one where a pure mind saves the day...

"Thank you, Brigadier. But do you think that for once in your life you could manage to arrive before the nick of time?" What an arse! The Doctor continues to be an ungrateful so-and-so, despite having his life saved by the Brigadier (who shoots Mailer dead). The Doctor was similarly ungrateful when Jo saved his life earlier in the story, and here he goes on to mock the Brigadier for losing the Master and the missile. If ever there was a Doctor I'd like to slap, this is the one.

The Master's plan is taking full form, as he threatens to blow up the world peace conference in London using the Thunderbolt missile, thus leading to a world war which will leave the planet in ruins. "Then I will take over," adds the Master. But why would he want to rule over a devastated planet, where most of the inhabitants have probably been destroyed? What fun is there in sitting on a throne and overseeing a globe of post-apocalyptic devastation? The Master really is a total psychopath.

The Mind of Evil Episode Five

The one where UNIT storms HMP Stangmoor...

Dudley Simpson's score for The Mind of Evil gets on my nerves a bit. It manages to swing from quite pleasantly melodic passages, to outright cacophonous assault. There were moments in earlier episodes where the music sounded like a demented trimphone, it's often so shrill and "parpy". I remember particularly disliking his score for a couple of the Troughtons (The Underwater Menace), but while his work isn't quite as nails-down-a-blackboard as Tristram Cary's score for Doctor Who and the Silurians, Simpson's best work is definitely ahead of him, I feel. I realise it's quite experimental, but it's also pretty mental.

My personal star of this episode is Major Cosworth, played by Patrick Godfrey with a splash of wit which gives the Major and the Brigadier quite an amusing double act routine. It's lovely when Cosworth appears to get quite excited about Stangmoor's dungeons ("Rather like making a film, isn't it, sir?") and the Brigadier shoots him an astonished glare! Cosworth also congratulates his superior on his plan to attack the prison, which puts the Brig's back up a bit too. Lovely little repartee. Cosworth should have stayed on!

The Mind of Evil Episode Four

The one where UNIT loses an illegal nuclear-powered missile...

The Keller machine has grown so powerful now that even the Master is struggling to control it, which already gives a fair indication of how this is all going to play out. If it's anything like Terror of the Autons, then the Master is very soon going to find he's out of his depth, and require help from the Doctor to defeat the creature (I think this is the first we learn that there is a sentience inside the machine, what the Doctor describes as "a creature that feeds on the evil of the mind"). It's fascinating to see the Master joust with the Keller machine though, trying to reassert his mental control, something he's very used to having over lesser beings (and when Roger Delgado says: "You can't harm me, I'm stronger than you are", he sounds remarkably like Anthony Ainley in Survival).

It's also interesting that we get to see what it is the Master fears most, which is humiliation by the Doctor. The way this is depicted on screen is wonderful, with the Master diminutive in the foreground and a projected giant Doctor guffawing mercilessly, grasping at the Master's contorted form. Quite how the Master might die from this abject humiliation is another question...

The Mind of Evil Episode Three

The one where Jo overcomes a prison riot, but the Master just goes ahead and starts another one...

The Chinese dragon costume really isn't all that bad. Its saviour is director Timothy Combe, who quite rightly decides to shoot it as ambiguously as possible, using extreme close-ups, quick cuts, fades and blurring. You don't get to see the whole thing very clearly at all, just a second or so in long shot when the Brigadier fires his pistol. But the close up of its head before it merges back into Chin Lee shows what a lovely sculpt it was. At the time, the production team laughed at it, labelling it Puff the Magic Dragon, and if it hadn't have been shot as judiciously as Combe did, it would have been the laughing stock of the Pertwee era. As it stands, it remains pretty effective.

But the dragon's manifestation continues to smudge my understanding of exactly what the Keller machine is doing. I struggle to follow whether Chin Lee actually turns into a dragon, or just appears to do so in Alcott's imagination. The fact the Doctor, Brigadier and Fu Peng physically see the dragon too is explained away as a "collective hallucination", which means the machine's power is affecting them too, and isn't targeted solely on Alcott (by the way, full marks to Tommy Duggan for acting his socks off during the dragon's assault!).

The Mind of Evil Episode Two

The one where we discover the Master is trying to disrupt the world peace conference...

The fluctuating quality of the colour in episode 2 demonstrates just how good the pain-staking hand colourisation of episode 1 by Stuart "Babelcolour" Humphryes was. At times the colour recovery process used here is almost as pointless as The Ambassadors of Death's, in which colour sometimes became an option between two shades of beige. As with Ambassadors, I tend to think they should have just left it in black and white rather than wishy-washy semi-colour.

Anyway, so the reprise of the cliffhanger sees Jo burst in and break the Keller machine's grip on the Doctor's mind, proving that he is imagining the flames, rather than them actually being there and burning him. The Doctor asserts that "we believe what our minds tell us to", so it seems everything the Keller machine's victims are "seeing" is imaginary, which means the physical effects of their deaths (scratches and bites, lungs full of water) are nonsensical. Colour me confused.

The Mind of Evil Episode One

The one where a man drowns in a completely dry room...

For the first time in what seems too long, the Doctor actually seems quite happy in the opening scene of this story, although his good mood doesn't last very long at all. It's odd, because this Doctor seemed pretty jovial and pleasant in Spearhead from Space, and only really got grumpy when he saw things going wrong. But in the past few adventures (the latter half of Season 7 and Terror of the Autons), he comes across as a right moody devil, and not someone I'd particularly want to spend time with. This is very possibly why the Third Doctor has traditionally been one of my least favourite incarnations; the version we had in his debut story is much more appealing.

The early scenes inside Stangmoor prison are cacophonous and unsettling, with the raucous prisoners shouting and clanging away on the verge of a riot. The soundtrack is really noisy, making it hard to make out dialogue at times, and the grittiness of the scene where the wardens collect an irate Barnham makes it feel more like Get Carter than a family teatime adventure show. Ray London's prison set is impressively convincing though.