The Claws of Axos is another of those serials that when not watching it you kind of forget just how good the entire thing is.  It’s the third time this current production team is doing an alien invasion story, bringing in a new writing team of Bob Baker and Dave Martin who had the fantastic idea to do aliens that seem benign and just want our help as stealth for a proper invasion.  Making them gold parodies of humanity gives this otherworldly quality before devolving into spaghetti monsters which is just fantastic.  It also provides a near perfect switch up to have the Master become an unlikely ally of UNIT and later the Doctor, all a trick to defeat him and the Axons.  Plus this one gives a direct middle finger to the Conservative bureaucracy of government from the very beginning with Jon Pertwee getting some great rants about a duty to the world.

Michael Ferguson directs what would be his final serial and while it’s not as technically complex as his other three, he still has that flair for the surreal.  It doesn’t help that Katy Manning while giving a great performance has little to do in the script, Baker and Martin went through several rewrites and I have a feeling they didn’t have a companion in mind during much of the drafting.  Jo gets a pseudo romance with American Bill Filer who is there for the international aspect of UNIT.  That and the third epsiode has always been a bit oddly paced, somehow slightly stretched and compressed to fit into four in this weirdness.  Still this is just a great and creative time.