Tooth and Claw: Ranking - 240

  Tooth and Claw

(Series 2, Dr 10 with Rose, 22/4/2006, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: Euros Lyn) 

Rank: 240

'Here we are at the Queen's coronation. All the most dignified heads of state are here, some of them very much in a state it would seem...Oh no, the Queen's turned hairy and grown fangs and has started ripping their heads off! I say this isn't on. I mean, she did warn against having her coronation on the night of a full moon, but you know how British protocol is - we were loathe to move it. Well, the crown still seems to fit over those furry ears so err I hope you'll join me in my chant: Long Live The Werewolf!'

Or 'Crouching Monarch, Hidden Werewolf'.  And after fifteen episodes of improbably getting things right we end up with modern Who’s first clunker. Not that ‘Tooth and Claw’ is terrible – it is a perfectly watchable forty-five minutes of television – but it’s a story that leaves you going 'well that was all a bit silly wasn't it?' as soon as its over. There's an unwritten rule of scifi that you can't push your audience too far by giving them too large a pile of unlikely things so that they can't relate to what you're writing, but that you can get away with one or two if you ground everything else in reality. It's a rule I've found useful writing my own books. Normally rules written or unwritten are ripe for breaking, especially an institution that's been running as long as Dr Who, but whenever I break this rule is when my books fall apart and I have to start again. Maybe someone should have done that here. You see, this plot follows Queen Victoria In Balmoral in 1879 (OK so far), on the run from werewolves (starting to get a bit dodgy) and being protected by a gang of spiritual kung-fu kicking monks (going downhill rapidly) who know that the werewolf is really an alien who goes onto infect multiple members of the Royal Family with 'the curse' (I mean, I kind of buy that given the state of our present day Royals but...come again? Haven't alien werewolves got better things to do?) They are defeated by two things: the reflected light from the Koh I Noor crystal (which literally translates as ‘Mountain of Light’ in Persian and which Queen Vic did indeed possess but never carried around with her and even though werewolves tend to run around at night that’s because it’s when the full moon is out, not because it’s dark) and mistletoe (because it’s a plant which needs a lot of light to grow, which is why it was once treated as ‘sacred’ by Ancient Brits – because it tended to grow on individual trees open to the sunlight rather than forests). So let me get that right: this is a story where The Doctor just happens to bump into Queen Victoria at a time when she is on the run from Werewolves in a story solved by sunlight that’s set in…Scotland? Run that by me again? (I mean, there’s a half-hearted explanation that ‘mistletoe is so rare here that I should have guessed it meant something…’ but really it just sounds like a cover up for bad plotting after the fact). ‘All these separate things’ cried The Doctor at one point ‘They’re connected!’ Umm barely if I’m honest. It’s the sort of script that, had it not been written by the showrunner and had they not been so tight for time, would have ripped up and they’d have started again.

‘Tooth and Claw’ makes oh much more sense if you ignore how it turned out on screen and see it more how it was meant to turn out. This story, pitched as Queen Victoria with werewolves, was in Russell T’s original submission for his new look series in 2004 but he was advised against having too many historicals, so he kept it in his back pocket in case he ever needed an idea in a hurry. It may even have been intended as a ‘red herring’ for fans who picked up on the ‘bad wolf’ idea (and recycled here to placate fans sad not to see a werewolf after hoping for one). That time was now, courtesy of the BBC’s decision to add an annual Christmas episode to their contract of thirteen episodes, which saw Russell moving his original idea for series two around, with the story that became ‘The Runaway Bride’ moved to the festive slot relatively late on. Russell gave the idea to another writer – identity unknown, all we know is that they never wrote for the series again – and asked for lots of werewolves in a romp with Queen Victoria. Only the script that came back had lots of Queen Victoria and no werewolves – instead the monarch was bitten in the eye by an alien insect that caused her to turn furry, while she low-key investigated a group of ‘Jack The Ripper’ murders she turned out to have committed herself under a full moon. Russell asked why and the writer came back, quite plausibly in my view, that there was no realistic way he could fit werewolves into a story with Queen Victoria. So the writer was paid off and Russell vowed to write this story himself to prove that it could be done, even though he had to write it at speed and for all his strengths as a writer Russell was not a natural for historicals and/or research (this is the only true historical he ever writes for Who – the closest otherwise is ‘The Next Doctor’ which might as well be set in the modern day for all the links it has to Victorian London). So Russell set about writing this story relatively blind, leaving big holes for other people to fill – one of them is producer Phil Collinson who comes up with the idea of the diamond (something not introduced until two-third of the way through the story, another big writerly no no) and one is the new script editor Simon Winstone who did meticulous research (into mistletoe, what knighting ceremonies looked like, even where the original plan for this week’s music reference (Lene Lovich’s ‘Lucky Number’) would have been performing in 1979 – all of which is ignored (the first for ‘artistic license’, the second because it didn’t look how fans would have imagined it and the third because of copyright issues – in the end it got replaced with Ian Dury and the Blockheads but the reference to concert dates was left intact, even though it was wrong. And while all the Dr Who stories where someone – usually the 4^th Doctor – start a revolution is indeed ‘very punk’ I would still argue the Doctor is a psychedelic folkie hippie at heart. We’ve never seen him pogo or wear safety pins). One bit of research that was missed by the way: originally The Queen, helped from the window by Sir Robert, calls him ‘My Francis Drake’ when she clearly means ‘My Walter Raleigh’ (actor Derek Riddell spotted this in rehearsals, having by coincidence just played Raleigh in his last job. No really. No Raleigh. No…you know what I mean). The thing is you can’t write a good story like that, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best that no one will notice. The result is almost the only Dr Who story so entirely implausible that it could never happen (I mean, invasions by the likes of The Daleks seem unlikely too but that’s unlikely, not impossible – few historicals get as much wrong as this one does). To be fair Russell learns his lesson and never does anything like it again. However ‘Tooth and Claw’ is an anomaly that stands out like a, well, werewolf.

Why a werewolf? That, alas, is another mistake. Russell was justifiably pleased with how the ghosts of ‘The Unquiet Dead’ turned out and went to computer effects specialists The Mill to discuss what else they could do. They mentioned that they still had the prototype model for a werewolf they’d created for the film ‘Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkaban’ and Russell leapt at the idea (not being that much of a fan he didn’t seem to know that it’s the singe stupidest effect of the entire franchise, much mocked by fans). On a Dr Who budget this one’s worse. For some reason Russell thought that Dr Who had never done a werewolf story though actually there are lots: take your pick from the Primords of ‘Inferno’, Meg from ‘Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ and multiple versions in the ‘wilderness years’ spin-off audios and books. However, having been burnt by how the Slitheen turned out in ‘Aliens Of London’ (when the money ran out partway through and they had to get a costume that didn’t quite match up) Russell got the costs drawn up from the beginning and worked out that he would only be able to have a limited number of shots of the werewolf, writing accordingly. This, too, is the only story Russell approached with his producer’s hat on being budget conscious rather than his writer’s hat and worrying about how to get round the costs later and it shows. This story lacks his usual free-flowing anything-goes style and, more than any of his other scripts, feels like a series of set pieces broken up by running away from them.  
The best parts of the story are the metaphorical parts which appear to be left over from that first draft, even though it took Russell to come up with the clever title that tied everything up into a neat bow – this is a story that, deep down, is all about death. The line ‘tooth and claw’ comes from the Lord Tennyson poem ‘In Memoriam’ which was a favourite of Queen Victoria in her days mourning Prince Albert (who’d died suddenly eighteen years before this story is set, in 1879). It’s a poem asking what comes next after death, seeing it as a very Victorian struggle between primal instincts and enlightenment, wondering which parts of humanity turn to dust and which go up to Heaven. As mentioned in the ‘Ghostlight’ review it’s somehow perfect that Darwin’s theory of evolution was born at a time when Victorian society felt they had successfully rid themselves of the sense of man as a primitive ‘animal’. But animal they remained and the werewolf, a timorous hairy beastie that loses all control, has long been used as a metaphor for all sorts of primal instincts of man. Especially puberty: nothing says ‘lust’ like suddenly turning hairy and losing all reserve and control, while for girls the full moon – twenty eight days apart in each cycle – would have rung a few bells about things Victorians felt uncomfortable talking about too. Putting a werewolf character into a Victorian society who would be the most scandalised by it is, therefore, perfect. Things are solved by ‘light’ – the sign of God in Tennyson’s poem, the part of man that strives to be better (‘your higher self’ if you will). That’s why the werewolf is destroyed by light at the end; he’s being ‘cured’ of his animal impulses, his soul taken to the afterlife after being struck by enlightenment (‘In Memoriam’s final line is ‘Farewell, we lose ourselves in light!’) Every animal principle is banished as we head to a better place. You can see why it would have brought Queen Victoria comfort after losing Albert and it’s a neat touch having him create the telescope and library that end up saving his wife, ‘still looking after you from beyond the grave’ as The Doctor puts it. As silly as the rest of this story is that part actually makes perfect sense and it’s a masterstroke of Collinson to put the diamond in there.

You see, the Kon I Noor is a real object, though it doesn’t look anything like the prop in the story. It’s long been considered the biggest and most beautiful diamond in the world discovered in India in 1628 and passing through several hands as tribes came and went, with multiple humans giving in to their baser animal instincts in the name of greed and power. It’s said that people finally knew the British Empire had ‘won’ when the diamond was handed over to Victoria as a sign of respect to their colonial ruler. However it never seemed to bring luck to those who held it for any length of time – it passed through hands so quickly that a story quickly went round that the diamond was ‘cursed’, even though it’s all really more of a sign of man’s animalistic greed if anything. A curse? That’s perfect for Dr Who and Queen Vic talks a lot about her fears that it might bounce back to hurt her too (especially given it’s close proximity to Prince Albert, who died young and suddenly). The diamond is so mysterious in origin (simply ‘found’ one day when a tribe needed money) that the idea its connected to a werewolf is actually one of the more sensible versions offered up by historians over the years. Only, once again, when they did the research they decided to change it anyway: the curse is said to specifically fall on the male carriers of the diamond and not the females. Which is why Queen Victoria lived an exceptionally long and relatively happy life. To this day the Royal Family only ever have the diamond on display when connected to females in the family (the last time it was seen anywhere was on The Queen Mother’s coffin – it had been in her crown for years too). Oh and the detail about Prince Albert forever cutting down the diamond is another bit of research that got tweaked to fit the story, though a bit more forgivably: in truth Albert had the diamond cut to give it more surfaces for the light to shine off (which fits) in order to wow the distinctly underwhelmed crowds who queued for hours to see it at The Great Exhibition (which doesn’t). As far as I know there never was a ‘real’ house named Torchwood with a library filled with mistletoe and a giant magnifying glass telescope light refractor either, but that at least is fair game for Dr Who (after all, they’d want to hush that sort of thing up and records can get lost).  

Personally I’m happy to buy that the Royal Family line are all werewolves too. It’s certainly true that Queen Victoria carried the haemophilia gene in mysterious circumstances as neither her mum nor her dad were carriers and her son Prince Leopold died after a fall (his illness meant his body was unable to stop him bleeding to death from his injuries). Usually historians see this as more of a conspiracy theory that her parents who we were told they were as part of a power claim to the throne (and that maybe Vic herself didn’t know) but if they want to make it a werewolf thing then fine. It seems unlikely that a mum as loving as Victoria would ever bite her own children though (especially all nine of them!) After all the Royals are fair game in Who: they messed the production team around badly during the making of ‘Silver Nemesis’, half-accepting then claiming they were all too ‘busy’ to appear in a children’s TV drama leading to a last minute re-write (all this despite appearing in the Royal ‘It’s A Knockout’ contest not long before, which is the very definition of silly). However Russell underestimated just how well the comeback series had gone down and it made for rather a difficult moment for the production team, who were working on this story in September-October 2005 before the news broke in early December that the ‘real’ Queen Elizabeth II had requested the series one box set to watch with her family at Balmoral over the Christmas period. Officially Queen Liz never asked for anymore but if she had seen series two she would have been hit by a story where her great-grandmother is a werewolf and so is she and all her blood relatives! There goes Russell’s knighthood.

Then again she probably wouldn’t have been amused at how her ancestor is written anyway. ‘Tooth and Claw’ also shows the downside of the celebrity historical, treated at its absolute worst here. You see, trying to limit a famous person to a forty-five minute drama involving other characters and a monster is harder than it sounds. Mark Gatiss cleverly got away with it in ‘The Unquiet Dead’ because he knew enough about the ‘real’ Charles Dickens behind the stereotype, but at least he was just a more complex, rounded, flawed version of the justice-fighting showman the public felt they knew. Gatiss basically put that version on screen, with just enough scenes of self-doubt and worry to make Dickens likeable. In reality Queen Victoria was very different to her standard image – her diaries and letters reveal a far funnier, sillier more human person that she didn’t like the public to see. The truth of the matter is she was often amused even if she didn’t always make that clear in her speeches, believing  that she needed to work extra hard as a woman to seem as if she was taking her job seriously. So what version do you put on screen? The way people think of her or the way she really was? It doesn’t help that the only footage we have of her today come from official portraits (where she had to sit still for hours), photographs (where she again had to sit still for hours and always at the end of her life when she was most crotchety and in pain) and moving footage (where she’s a grainy speck at some official function trying to look dignified amongst dignitaries).  Russell writes the script for the ‘official’ version with a hint of twinkle and the script seems to be more or less what the 1^st Doctor was: an authority figure you learned not to mess with who was capable of great kindness and the occasional giggle. But no one seems to have told Pauline Collins this. There are fans who will tell you that her turn as Queen Vic is the revelation of the season and one of the best performances in the show, but to these eyes at least that’s because she looks the part, not because she acts it. The ‘real’ Queen Victoria would never be, by turns, this rude, this angry, this bitter and above all this serious, at least not in private. Of all the monarchs stretching back to Charles II she’s the one most likely to believe The Doctor talking about alien worlds upfront and to stand up to fight the baddies with him – though her first thought would have been for her family, her second for her people, her third for her friends and servants – and only her fourth for herself. This Victoria isn’t likeable or sympathetic at all, which wastes half the goodwill of the viewer for what might happen in the story. We had a near miss when her character Samantha nearly became a companion in 'The Faceless Ones' in 1967 - where, ironically, she was replaced by a Victorian called, umm, Victoria - but not a Royal one. If you want to see what Victoria was really like then check out the superlative ITV series simply titled ‘Victoria’ which is what Jenna Coleman did after plating Clara, which gets closer to the ‘real’ soul than any other series or film to date (and Jenna’s brilliant. It helps that her fiancé of the time Tom Hughes is Playing Albert – their romantic scenes sizzle. The series was cancelled before the end partly because the credit crunch made lavish dramas untenable but mostly because they split in real life. Though admittedly they had three series and a particularly Who-ish Christmas special to get her character right, space Dr Who just doesn’t have).

I can guarantee that if Queen Vic had set up ‘Torchwood’ it would have been out of a curiosity into aliens, not out of fear or annoyance at The Doctor. You get the feeling that the entire closing scene, where The monarch first knights then banishes The Doctor and Rose, was made because of a sudden late night thought by Russell that this would be a clever way to link his burgeoning spin-off Torchwood (then it’s early phase of being worked out) with the main series. Only that really doesn’t fit either. Dr Who has been around since 1963. In that time we’ve had dozens of stories set in the present day (for now I’m throwing all the ‘near future’ UNIT stories in there too because they certainly happened before the end of the 20^th century) covering a vast array of alien invasions. What happened to Torchwood in all that time? What are they waiting for? Why do they never fight back a bit harder? Had Queen Victoria founded UNIT with Royal taxes it would have made more sense but founding an institute that at most mopped up a few invasions and housed a few bits of alien tech is an utter waste of money. Frankly they’re not very good: Torchwood is established on the grounds that the Doctor is the Earth’s number one threat but he’s never so much as questioned by them in all that time – including the years he was in the public eye working for UNIT. Someone somewhere would have asked questions. Besides, it’s not as if Vic had that sort of power: her reign was a continual game of chess and negotiations with varying prime ministers who were in a forced stalemate relationship together: neither could do anything without the other’s agreement. No way could Victoria simply have ‘borrowed’ money from the government without explaining to the public where their taxes were going. Frankly Torchwood don’t do a very good job either given their close ties to The Doctor (Captain Jack is, admittedly, not one for paperwork but you think his ears would at least perk up at mention of The Doctor in ‘The Empty Child’ given that his entire job was founded because of this one alien – and he’s a bounty hunter looking for alien goods). Then again, ‘Torchwood’ itself only exists because Russell considered the name too good not to use – it was the ‘anagram’ of ‘Doctor Who’ used to ‘mask’ where the series was being filmed to prevent fans finding out, but once the first series had aired they’d gone back through the paperwork and ‘rumbled’ it. Whether that and giving John Barrowman some lines was enough reason for an entire spin-off show is up to you (see the ‘sequels’ column below for why the closest answer is that it’s both, often within the same episode).  

The mistakes don’t end there either. What’s with the kung-fu kicking monks? They make a big thing of them in the pre-publicity and stick them at the start of the episode to keep people watching, but their entire plot function is to keep the werewolf inside the house (and accidentally trapping the Queen there too so she can’t run away), which is so like the early days of artificially separating The Doctor from his Tardis. It seems maybe less obvious now all these years on but in 2006 they were the worst kind of cliché, so common to popular culture in the wake of the ‘Crouching Tiger film that they were even parodied on the BBC ident broadcast right before this story (as Russell must have known was likely, given they’d run for a couple of years already by this point – at the very least he could have put them in a different colour rather than red). Then there’s the plot itself. Apparently the Lord who built Torchwood house erected a giant telescope/light refractor in the vain hope that someone would stumble onto the clues he was leaving, but he never spoke about any of this to anyone, not even a cryptic clue above the fireplace or a big arrow pointing to the relevant passage from the relevant book (which The Doctor and Rose find straight away, in a packed library). Honestly it’s a wonder The Doctor even worked it out and he’s meant to have some of the best brains in the universe. It’s contrived and silly, a world away from all the stories in series one that ran to their own internal logic and avoided coincidences, instead growing the threat organically out of the plot. Even the fact that The Doctor and Rose bump into Queen Victoria the minute they step out The Tardis feels a coincidence too far (at least Dr 9 drags Rose in to see  Dickens performing rather than walk into him on the street).

To be fair, I suspect the finished script would have got round a lot of these issues but there was another major obstacle: this story ran nearly ten minutes over its allotted time in the original edit (a rare, near enough unique lapse for the RTD1 era and possibly a side effect of how few actors were available at the readthrough when the show is first timed. David Tennant’s parents happened to be visiting and, being former actors themselves, were roped into playing Lady Isobel and Captain Reynolds). Apparently no dialogue got cut at all and it was only scenes of panning countryside and the beginning and ends of scenes that got trimmed, but that still makes a difference. This story would have been all the better had The Doctor and Rose seen a bit of Scotland before walking into danger, or had the monks had another dance-off against the actual werewolf, or had they even bothered to take the time to search for that sodding book. Mercifully, perhaps, we didn’t get the original planned ending: the sudden shock death of Queen Victoria and the revelation that we’re in a parallel universe (the one later seen in ‘Rise Of The Cybermen’ in fact), dropped only when everyone around Russell – who didn’t know about the future storylines – went ‘eh?’ as one. That would at least explain the rather odd line from Vic that ‘this is not my world’ (it’s meant to be an ironic joke as it is her world – but it’s not ‘our’ world).

So, let’s recap: that’s a story with rubbish looking werewolves after a Queen Victoria who’s acting all wrong in a wonkily plotted story that throws in too many ideas that don’t hang together. Is this story a total disaster? Well, no, it’s all far from a total loss. Russell’s keen eye for dialogue and his ability to make even the tiniest of characters seem real hasn’t deserted him and he’s picked up on the best bits of ‘The Unquiet Dead’ as well as the worst, getting Rose to befriend the servants and learn the truth from them while The Doctor is hobnobbing with the gentry. You feel for The Host (who, by coincidence, happens to be played by one of Tennant’s best friends from drama school Tom Smith who was actually cast before The Doctor back when it was still hoped this would  be an Eccleston episode) even though he’s still a nasty piece of work – there’s still enough humanity lurking there. It’s totally by chance they cast a Scottish actor after setting up a story fimed with Scotland and it’s a nice chance to hear David Tennant talking in his ‘natural’ voice (complete with a clever and very in character bit at the end that he reverts back to ‘English’ when running from werewolves, because he has bigger things on his mind).

The story also looks gorgeous: I mean the monks are stupid and the werewolf terrible but every scene they aren’t in simply glows: Dr Who’s first ever location filming in Scotland (with bits of Wales still, naturally) is some of the most beautiful in the series. You can totally see why Victoria loved it so. The inside filming too is stunning: by chance location manager came across  the breathtakingly beautiful 17^th century Treowen House in Dingestow after a friend of his got married there and he asked the owners if they’d be introduced on filming on some future special: Who was the first to fit the bill. Although the library and kitchens weren’t considered quite ‘right’ so they were filmed back at Tredegar House, which ends up being seen in four stories back to back (it’s also the rocket group base in ‘The Christmas Invasion’, Cassandra’s house in ‘New Earth’ and will be seen most spectacularly as Versailles in ‘Girl In the Fireplace’). There are great gags throughout too, from the sweet injoke that The Doctor’s pseudonym is ‘James McCrimmon’ (a late change from ‘Jock Tamsin’, which was David Tennant’s suggestion for a Scottish equivalent to ‘John Smith’ when Russell rang up in a panic, before deciding to go with the companion who’d given The Doctor that pseudonym in the first place) to The Doctor claiming to have studied his doctorate in Scotland under Dr Bell (a rejoined to the far more unlikely comment in ‘The Moonbase’ that he studied in Scotland under Dr Lister!) to The Doctor and Rose giggling that her mum would try and pinch the diamond – and fend off the werewolf while she was at it!’ to the fact The Doctor finally gets knighted (after near misses in ‘The Crusade’ – when Ian was knighted in The Doctor’s absence and ‘The King’s Demons’ – when The King turned out to be an android replica, presumably making the ceremony null and void. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?) to the injoke that The Doctor likes the year 1979 (where the Tardis was originally meant to land – he calls it a ‘table wine’ in ‘City Of Death’ when it was the ‘present day’) to the Doctor’s pithy comment on deadly curses (that anything kills you if you wait long enough) to the kneejerk reaction to Russell’s so-called ‘gay agenda’ (this being one of the first stories he’s written since the papers went mad about it): ‘Your monks are all shaven-headed, athletic and kind of…happy’ (the 19^th century meaning of the word ‘gay’). Listen out for the Latin incantation at the beginning too, the only bit of Dr Who ever written by Russell’s dad (who was a Latin teacher before retirement: it translates as ‘The wolf is great, the wolf is strong, the wolf…is God!’) There are lots of little individual bits that work nicely, especially the near-finale in the library and the giant telescope, that almost make up for the bigger picture. ‘Tooth and Claw’ isn’t one of those stories that’s so wretched and misguided from first scene to last that it’s unwatchable (like ‘Orphan 55’ ‘Voyage Of the Damned’ ‘The Dominators’…you know the list by now) – it’s actually very entertaining. You just have to leave the logical brain behind the sofa while you’re watching it. Oh and forget that you’ve ever seen any, better werewolf film or anything with kung-fu fighting monks. The problem with this story is we are amused – just not enough to ignore or forgive the very many fundamental things wrong at the heart of this story.

In other words this is an episode that's big and wild and hairy, but just as you think you've got something to sink your teeth into plot-wise it goes back to being a playful puppy again and you just can't take it seriously. This story could have worked if they’d thrown a bit less at it – like, say, the werewolf or Queen Victoria (yep, the original author was right, although I’m not sure an alien insect would have worked too well either) and it’s a saving grace is Collinson’s suggestion of the diamond (though by rights it should have been in the story from the start). The answer in retrospect seems obvious: as a historical horror story this one surely had Mark Gatiss’ claw marks all over it. Russell can do many many things and is one of the most gifted writers to have worked on the series, but even he can’t get this disparate jumble of ideas to come together, while historicals, stories based around real people (that he doesn’t know firsthand anyway) and horror are all his weaknesses. His Dr Who stories are better thoughtful than visual, exciting rather than creepy, lit in bright sunlight to remind us of the good in humanity not skulking around in the dark with the bad. His strengths as a writer fight this tooth and claw to the end, but it’s a battle he was never going to win. The result is a story that even the people who like it think is a bit silly and those who don’t like it consider totally stupid. This is, in short, the sort of story us old-timers dreaded when the series came back, cashing in on lots of current trends without any justification or sense of why they work. However even then I suspect most of us in 2004 would have enjoyed the dialogue, been impressed by the two leads and been relieved it wasn’t worse, never mind thrilled that – until ‘Fear Her’ at the end of the year – this is as bad as it gets for a while.  

POSITIVES + (spoilers) The resolution is easily the best part of the episode and very Dr Who. Think of every other werewolf story you’ve ever seen: each one is defeated by a big battle sequence or something equally supernatural, in a maelstrom of range fur and fangs. This one isn't  defeated by guns or weapons or gun-toting space armies. It's defeated by a library full of books and learning, built with mistletoe in the walls to keep werewolves out. I wish more 'super-heroes' would use their brain in plots like these except relying on brawn – it’s been said before but one of the best things about the Doctor’s character is that rather than being an almighty warrior he's a geek whose used his spare time to read most every book in the universe. 

NEGATIVES - As werewolf effects in general and The Mill's work on the Dr Who revival in general both go the special effects in this story really aren't very special at all and a little obviously computer-generated. Admittedly it had four extra years to get the effects right, but the ones in Toby Whithouse’s superlative 'Being Human' are so much more convincing than the ones here on a similar BBC budget. This isn't the worst effect in Dr Who by any means (there's a very long list from the 1970s) but when you have a script that's already stretching credulity to the limit and a Queen Victoria who only looks like Queen Victoria if you squint really hard and throw in a load of monks dancing about in slow-motion for no reason then you need every bit of ‘realism’ you can get. It’s particularly bad running, something Russell should have realised was difficult after similar trials making the Slitheen work: the only scene where the werewolf looks good is the inventive one where it’s listening on the other side of the library to The Doctor, the wall in the middle, where it’s standing still and you can roperly admire all its many hairs.

BEST QUOTE: Victoria on the diamond: ‘Given to me as the spoils of war. Perhaps its legend is now coming true. It is said that whoever owns it must surely die’. Dr: ‘Well, that's true of anything if you wait long enough’.

PREQUELS/SEQUELS: It’s a fond farewell (if you’re reading this book in alphabetical order anyway) to those minute-long downloadable ‘Tardisode’ prequels, this one officially sensibly yet boringly named ‘Tardisode #2’.  Weirdly it has a lot more atmosphere and far better special effects than the main episode itself, even though it’s a bit lacking in script, with a man chased across moorlands by a big hairy beastie that really looks quite impressive in close up, running across a Scottish highland rather than a library (where it just looks daft and artificial). The only line of dialogue the entire minute: ‘Yaaaaaaaaargh!’ Like the other Taridsodes it’s still yet to be re-released on anything beyond the Dr Who website (and you can’t find it there either these days).

‘Tooth and Claw’ (1997) is also the official title of a very different story, one of the first comic strips featuring the 8^th Doctor and published in Dr Who Magazine issues #257 to #260. The two stories are like fire and ice – well fiery headed monks and ice warriors anyway – with this one set on the eve of WWII as the Doctor and companion Izzy land in a dastardly (and unlikely) Nazi plot to train monkeys to be soldiers. What ought to be one of the silliest strips around is actually quite harrowing, looking at the question of guilt and the need in war to kill people who would kill you first even when they’re not aware of what they’re doing. The Doctor is quite different to his TV Movie self already, all sense of romance and optimism gone (he’s much more like the 9^th in fact, haunted and despairing of humanity). A surprisingly harrowing but decent read.

There are plenty of werewolf stories in Dr Who: see ‘The Greatest Show In The Galaxy’ for the best one, several extras listed under that story’s ‘sequels’ section and Harry Sullivan turning into a Werewolf in ‘Wolfsbane’ listed under ‘Revenge Of the Cybermen’ (a story it leads directly into). There are two more that feel like they make more sense to list here: ‘Kursaal’ (1998) is an 8^th Doctor Adventures novel by Peter Anghelides in which a theme park is forcibly closed by eco-terrorists who mean well but accidentally unleash the very animal they are trying to save, one far more deadly than they realise. The Doctor is on their trail in this mixed ‘Jurassic Park’ rip off, at its best when The Doctor takes up the side of the government trying to track the ‘Jax’ alien wolves down and blaming the eco-warriors, while companion Sam takes up their side, with many a moral clash between the two that makes for good believable drama. Alas when your best drama in a werewolf book is coming from people talking you know something has gone wrong somewhere and ‘Kursaal’ is pretty ordinary really, the ‘Tooth and Claw’ of the spin-off novels. Not all the 8^th Doctor novels are bad (despite what reputation says) but they really struggle to work out what the 8^th Doctor is supposed to be like and there’s a gaping hole that even his feisty companion can’t fill. 

‘Loups-Garoux’ (2001) is Big Finish’s werewolf story, number #20 in their main range, which gives a lot of room for Turlough, the only companion with the 5^th Doctor  back in the days when Mark Strickson was the only actor from the era taking part alongside Peter Davison (thus placing this story in the gap between ‘Resurrection Of The Daleks’ and ‘Planet Of Fire’). The title being is an urban legend appearing in Germany Russia and Brazil for three interlinked stories – this last one is the best, with Turlough struggling make sense of the Rio De Janiero carnival and commenting how daft Human customs are. Marc Platt has a great feel for the characters who come to life more than they did for most of their time on TV and while the plot’s a standard one concerning a millionairess with a secret that’s given away as soon as you hear the first wolf howl, this is a better than average story that knocks spots off ‘Tooth and Claw’.

Finally, this is the story where Queen Victoria forms Torchwood, to keep an eye on The Doctor and keep planet Earth safe…from him! In case you didn’t know there’s a whole spin-off on TV which ran for four series between 2006 and 2011 and a plethora of spin-off novels and Big Finish audios, featuring the already established character Captain Jack Harkness, with John Barrowman starring as the impossibly old/impossibly young/impossibly horny/all round impossible dashing lead with the shady past who’s a lot more dangerous and untrustworthy than The Doctor but usually comes right in the end (mostly). Alongside him are Gwen Cooper, policewoman turned alien hunter, who is recruited in the first episode (and got the job after winning Russell T Davies over for her role as the maid in ‘The Unquiet Dead’), butler-come-henchman Ianto Jones, grouchy medical officer Owen Harper who’s bedside manner is poor even for a Doctor and Tosh, a Japanese whizzkid who understands everything there is to know about technology and almost nothing about people (and is easily the most interesting of the five despite getting shunted to the background). Martha turns up for a few episodes too when Owen dies and he can’t officially work at the base anymore even though his ghost hangs around for ten whole episodes (don’t ask). Along the way Torchwood hunt down the monsters The Doctor hasn’t found yet, repel alien invaders, keep prisoners in a locked impenetrable vault (those poor weevils!) and have lots and lots of sex with their spouses, with each other and - more often than not - with the visiting aliens. The series was billed, much like the ‘New Adventures’ novels, as a darker edgier version of Dr Who that, depending who you ask, is either a lot more adult or a lot more juvenile than the parent series (often it’s both at once). Though it was Russell T Davies’ invention, he was too busy writing Who to give it his full attention so most of it was run by future Who showrunner Chris Chibnall but with lots of stories by outsider writers including Who regulars Toby Whithouse,  Phil Ford and Joseph Lidster (who ran the Dr Who website) plus some outside scifi writers including, amazingly, Sapphire and Steel creator P J Hammond - sadly still the closest one of the UK’s best writers has come to penning a Who story - and even actor Noel Clarke (Mickey). It is, depending on how you look at it and who you are, extremely sexy and hip dragging Dr Who into the 21^st century, downright daft and keeping it firmly back in the 20^th or incredibly Welsh taking us kicking and screaming back to the Middle Ages.

It’s a rollercoaster ride in quality: it starts and ends badly, with some of the episodes at the start of series one and the whole of the extended series four woefully poor, full of tacky clichés and one-dimensional stereotypes (‘Cyberwoman’ with sexy part-converted woman who turns out to be Ianto’s girlfriend before his entire character is written round fancying Jack is very much a low for this entire book; ‘End Of Days’ a woeful season ender that’s a re-tread of ‘Robot’ only with The Devil instead of an android and the entire ten part series ‘Miracle Day’ is like watching paint dry, only in America rather than Wales. In between, though, when it all clicks together – for a lot of series two and all of series three – and becomes more about emotions and people rather than blood, sex and gore ‘Torchwood’ is everything we were promised it would be, bold, dangerous, raw and exciting. Highlights include ‘Sleeper’ (an alien that hides inside people’s bodies before activating and converting them that’s really a thoughtful story about loss and grief), ‘To The Last Man’ (Tosh falls in love with a world war one soldier who’s cryogenically frozen and can only live a day a year – very like the plot of ‘A Christmas Carol’ but this story got there first), ‘A Day In The Death’ (Owen, who wants to die, helps an old man who wants to live, with Richard Briers giving the nuanced performance we expected from him in ‘Paradise Towers’  – and in the end tragically neither get what they want), ‘Something Borrowed’ (Gwen’s wedding to lovable twit Rhys goes wrong when she’s impregnated by an alien that very morning!) and especially the five parter ‘Children Of Earth’ (the one Russell T wrote himself that was broadcast Monday to Friday, with aliens coming to take 10% of the Earth’s children and politicians are revealed to be as cowardly as we all thought they were. Peter Capaldi gives the performance of his life – and yes that includes the 12^th Doctor – as put upon politician Frobisher. No, not the shape-shifting Penguin from the comic strips. It’s the one Torchwood story that’s the equal of the parent series, full of great cliffhangers, twists and turns, tension, horror, emotion and comedy with an ending as dark as any in scifi, never mind Dr Who). 

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