Season 8, Episode 3 | 4 parts | First broadcast: 13 March – 3 April 1971 | Writer: Bob Baker and Dave Martin | Director: Michael Ferguson
Cast
- Jon Pertwee as the Doctor
- Katy Manning as Jo Grant
- Nicholas Courtney as Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart
- Roger Delgado as the Master
Summary
A golden, shape-shifting alien ship called Axos lands on the English coast, offering humanity a miraculous energy-multiplying substance called Axonite in exchange for hospitality. The Doctor quickly recognises Axos as a living, predatory organism intent on draining the Earth entirely, and with the captive Master forced into an uneasy alliance, must find a way to trap the creature before it consumes the planet.
Interesting Facts
- This marks Bob Baker and Dave Martin’s first Doctor Who script, beginning a prolific writing partnership that would shape much of the 1970s series.
- It was the first time the Master appeared as a prisoner of UNIT rather than a free-roaming villain, forcing an uneasy alliance with the Doctor.
- The ending, in which the Doctor’s TARDIS is deliberately trapped on Earth by the Time Lords using the Axonite crisis, sets up ongoing plot threads for the remainder of the season.
- The story’s psychedelic organic visual design for Axos was ambitious for the era’s effects budget and remains one of the more distinctive alien designs of the Pertwee years.
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