The Talons Of Weng-Chiang
(Season 14, Dr 4 with Leela, 26/2/1977-2/4/1977, producer: Phillip Hinchcliffe, no credited script writer, writer: Robert Holmes, Director: David Maloney)
Rank: 137
'A funny thing happened last night on my way to the theatre...An anomalous anomaly, this blue box of balderdash, this deliverer of deliberation was received from on high and came to land on this collection of vile villainous vastitudes of Victoriana, defeated in their dastardly deeds by a Doctor of...Well, I never did find out what he was a Doctor of, but it was probably just about everything from what I saw. Corks! What a rum business that was and no mistake. I'll never view a rat or a pig or a magic cabinet the same way ever again. In other news: there will be no magic tricks hence with by order of the Palace Theatre management'.
Doctor Who Manchu! Robert Holmes meets Sherlock Holmes in a Victorian bodice ripper that they only did the once but which everyone thinks of as the de facto Dr Who template: The Doctor, in a deerstalker hat, solving crimes created by a villain from the far future. There’s something that seems so ‘right’ about it all somehow: this is the century that gave birth to science fiction, when astronomers began properly studying the stars and when all manner of modern inventions first came into being. It’s the last period of time before the modern age, a time that’s like our own in so many ways and yet which also seems as alien as any planet. There was a time too, not so very long ago, when this story was held up as evidence of everything great about Tom Baker era Dr Who, whether it be the setting (foggy Victorian London), the most memorable supporting cast bar none (Jago and Litefoot) or that hat (no one looks as good in a deerstalker as Tom Baker. It’s a wonder he doesn’t wear one every story after this. He does in fact wear one again in his first post-Who series when he’s in ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’). Had this been twenty or thirty years ago I’d no doubt get lots of rude messages asking me why I haven’t put this popular story top of my list; today I’m more likely to get tetchy messages asking why its only halfway down, as Weng-Chiang falls out of favour. Walking along these cobbled foggy streets felt special as when it went out this was the only story you could really see this sort of thing happen, which gave Talons a sort of magical aura amongst fans: the BBC always did historical costume dramas better than anything else and this is their best period, so of course it’s going to look amazing even on a Dr Who budget. Nowadays we seem to be in Victorian London every other flipping story, so Weng-Chiang feels as if it’s had its talons clipped slightly there too.
There is, though, a
rather bigger reason why fans don’t hold this story up to the same respect they
once did. You see, this is probably Dr Who’s most racist story, give or take ‘The Celestial Toymaker’. Now this is Dr
Who, a series all about tolerance and equality, so it’s not the travesty that
some other 1970s series are, even the ones that were designed to ‘help’ (like
‘Love Thy Neighbour’ which figured the best way of integration was laughing at
birth sides, or ‘Till Death Us Do part’ where you were meant to laugh at the
bigoted dad, a detail lost on a lot of people who take it at face value now).
It’s not that bad, but it does stick out like a sore thumb compared to every
other ‘classic’ story, one where all the foreigners are either evil or working
for the people who are, described by the (admittedly very tall) Doctor as
‘little men’ with ‘funny eyebrows’, ‘yellowfaces’, ‘chinks’ or with the ‘celestial’
phrase (and without being a un on ‘cosmic’ this time either). Even the title is
a bit rude: they namecheck the Human Chang rather than Magnus Greel and mention
him having ‘talons’, like some evil bird (it’s the sort of dehumanising insult
that used to be given to those from the East rather a lot. For the record Chang
has normal ‘Human’ feet. It’s not one of ‘those’ stories with a hybrid bird or
anything). Rather than giving work to an actual Chinese actor they simply dress
up a Caucasian in makeup, which isn’t that far removed from blackface (all
credit to actor John Bennett, who gives such a clever, nuanced performance you
wouldn’t know though – he’s General Finch in ‘Invasion
Of The Dinosaurs’ if you want to see what he ‘really’ looks like, but they
really shouldn’t have asked him). But at least ‘Toymaker’ had wordplay on the
word ‘celestial’ and was being made in the 1960s when you couldn’t move for TV
programmes that were casually racist; here it’s 1977 and getting a bit late for
that sort of thing. It made a lot of people uncomfortable at the time in fact,
banned by Australia and America in case people found it insulting (they did
show it in Canada, where it was roundly criticised). It makes people uncomfortable
now: it is the only ‘classic’ Who story on ‘Brit Box’ to have a ‘trigger
warning’ at the time of writing, for instance (and no, ‘Toymaker’ doesn’t have
one surprisingly).There never was an outcry at the time in Britain though (bar
a sort of half apologetic editorial in Dr Who Magazine from part-Chinese editor
Marcus Hearne, which seemed to cause more controversy than the story), perhaps
because most of the people watching at the time knew the very English music
hall kind of caricatures it comes from: the 19th century novels of
Chinese spies, the silent movies and the repartee of jokes from a nation that
laughs at everyone played to an audience who knew not to take it seriously.
After all, every English character in this story is a buffoon, a hapless
eccentric out of their depth and still trying to uphold manners even in the
face of an alien threat (with the exception of the token comedy thick Irishman).
Even Chang himself is in on the joke and mocks some of the characters for
falling into stereotypes and prejudice. Watched at the time there would have
been a general unspoken consensus not to take these things too seriously. To
the modern eye though, with this story removed from other television programmes
on around it, this one jars, one of the few times that a Dr Who story is very
much of its time rather than timeless.
By his own admission
Robert Holmes wasn’t trying to give us an accurate portrait of Victorian London
(not in the way that ‘Evil Of The Daleks’
or even ‘The Crimson Horror’ sort of
is once you get past the Silurian detective and her Sontaron servant). He was
the sort of writer who preferred imagination over research and if he’d had his
own way wouldn’t have had the Tardis travel back in time at all. He wrote
‘Talons’ under duress, as a last minute substitute after yet another story fell
through. He’d hired Zygon creator and Who regular Robert Banks Stewart to write
the season finale ‘Foe From The Future’, a six parter that involved a time
traveller from the future trapped in our ‘near past’ and after getting an earty
script to show that the writer was on the right lines left him to it while the
script editor took a much needed holiday across Europe with his wife. Only it
all went wrong: during a trip to Italy Mrs Holmes fell very poorly with a
perforated ulcer and had to be moved to a specialist hospital in Germany where
she stayed for three weeks. Back in the days before mobile phones and email
Holmes was out of touch with the Dr Who office but wasn’t that fussed: the
other Robert had delivered two scripts previously that hadn’t needed many
changes and was regarded as a safe, experienced pair of hands. So experienced
in fact that he was in high demand, so when an off came along that Banks
Stewart couldn’t refuse (writing for The Sweeney with an offer for his own
series to follow) the writer sent off an apologetic letter that he wouldn’t be
able to write any more – which Holmes didn’t get for all that time. Once his
wife was better and back home it was so close to deadline that a director had
been hired and work had begun on sets and scenery. There was no time to give
the story to someone else or start from scratch so Holmes wrote around what was
already there. So what we have is, as with Holmes’ only other historical story
‘The Time Warrior’, a story set in
a romantic storybook view of the past. If you know the historical details – and
especially if you know the historic geographical details – then ‘Talons Of Weng
Chiang’ makes no sense. Victorian London only looked like that in ‘The Strand’
magazine, while having a theatre that posh (a little seedy but still
respectable, where pathologists hang out) in a part of the city inhabited by
prostitutes and drug dens is more science-fiction than anything that happens
with Zygma time cabinets and giant rats. This is a Victorian London that Holmes
remembers from his childhood library, full of dragons that shoot lasers and
giant rats in the cellar rather than one crafted with the meticulous detail of
a John Lucarotti or a David Whittaker. The last story in the Phillip
Hinchcliffe era, it copies from the hammer horror film department one last
time, but with the Peter Cushing Sherlock Holmes films in mind rather than
anything more gory.
‘Talons’ takes its ideas
from multiple Victorian and Edwardian sources, all poured into a melting pot
and while most stories in this era were recycled from something this one
borrows more than most. Basically there are all the period trappings that Steven
Moffat took out of his ‘Sherlock’ series, including lots that aren’t in the
text of the actual books but are in the illustrations or were added for radio, television or film
(though he kept a housekeeper called Mrs Hudson, who appears to wok here too).
There actually was a Sherlock reference to ‘The Giant Rat Of Sumatra’, this
story’s cliffhanger, in one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s lesser short story ‘The
Sussex Vampire’ (not as interesting as it sounds). The whole ‘beware of Chinese
agents plotting something’ aspect is straight out of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu
books. The whole ‘find the precious artefact that was appropriated by someone
who doesn’t know what it was’ sub-plot is straight out of Wilkie Collins’
‘Moonstone’. There’s the whole masked ‘phantom of the opera’ aspect by Gaston Leroux
years before it was an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (with music recycled from
multiple sources in a Hinchcliffe era tpe way; though Greel is marked through
his own carelessness he’s every bit as sympathetic a character, far from home).
The Dr Who ‘mystery’ explained by ;scifi’ means this story is Jack The Ripper:
though they don’t make a big thing of it (and a lot of extra-curricular Who
stories use the gap to come up with other variations) the reason why so many
young girls, especially prostitutes, went missing in this period was part of
Greel’s time experiments and they stop suddenly because he dies at the end of
this story. Jago’s character, too, is clearly based on Leonard ‘Borusa’ Sachs’
TV series ‘The Good Old Days’, a 1970s production featuring mock-up Victorian
music hall acts, with a character very much like Henry Jago’s here who talks in
alliteration (not how most music hall impresarios actually behaved). This is a
story that knows the audiences have a particular view of the Victorian world
and rather than puncture it this story plays up to it, with all the clichés
present and correct. ‘Talons’ is a big melting pot then: rather than offer
anything ridiculously original in and of itself it’s an original patchwork quilt
that sticks lots of disparate sources together and uses time travel and scifi
trappings to cover the joins.
Somehow that doesn’t
matter because, despite the deadline and despite the reliance on caricatures,
everyone in this story ‘feels’ real and Holmes’ capacity for writing about the
human condition was never sharper. We all know a Litefoot, a polite and posh,
slightly awkward man who doesn’t quite understand how the world works. The fact
that he’s so highly regarded in society because he’s a pathologist that cuts
people up for a living only makes the joke funnier: he’s out of his depth in
the darker side of Victorian London. We all know a Henry Jago too, a showman
who would have been called ‘new money’, who has all the financial acumen but
none of the class or breeding and who is secretly a big ol’ coward behind all
the big talk. Chang is a worthy threat, an unblinking unruffled foe pretending
to be stupid when it suits hi, but impossibly clever (the makeup lady asked
John Bennett if he could stare straight ahead while she applied his makeup and
the actor was so good at it they asked him to do it in front of the cameras
too). Time traveller Magnus Greel, played by Michael ‘Morbius’ Spice, starts
off like your typical Robert Banks Stewart baddy (emotional in a low key
whispering sort of a way) and ends up a typical Holmesian one, larger than life
and trying to control fate by shouting at it. Greel’s a great character
(perhaps because, for a half a draft, he was the decayed Master from ‘The Deadly Assassin’ before Holmes
figured it would be better to make him new rather than trying to shoehorn The
Master’s backstory to make it fit). Though he’s an evil psychopathic killer,
with the Cromwellian nickname ‘The Butcher of Brisbane’ you actually feel sorry
for him, stranded out of time and trying to get home. He’s the
first of many exiled criminals in Who, with The Cessair of Diplos and Professor
Chronotis to come (see ‘The Stones of Blood’
and ‘Shada’ respectively) but by far the
most scary, although he’s not trying to rule the world or destroy humanity,
just get his time travel machine working again. The irony is that if he’d
stayed quietly and asked The Doctor for a lift he’d have been home in no time.
Chang is a worthy underling too, more interesting than the usual possessed
Human/comedy henchman and in many ways more of a threat, being naturally more
level-headed and harder to manipulate by The Doctor. Then there’s the ‘peking
homunculus’ Mr Sin, a character the script doesn’t need in terms of plot but
which has all the scenes everyone remembers, the ventriloquist dummy who comes
to life who is part robot, part pig, turned mad and violent by being sent back
through time, accidentally kickstarting World War Six (what is it with Dr Who
and space pigs?) Up against it as he was Timewise, Holmes may well have got the
idea from the film that saw Tom Baker cast as Dr Who, ‘The Golden Voyage Of
Sinbad’, where as the baddy Kouras he creates something similar. All three baddies
are very different threats: one an intelligent yet emotional baddy, one an
unstoppable but very Human force and one an unhinged but easily fooled psychopath,
the script juggling which one is a bigger threat at any one time. Which, when
you come to this story straight from a one note ‘Davros’ or a ‘Cyberleader’ one
is a refreshing change, giving this story added ‘layers’. Even the supporting characters in ‘Talons’ with
one or two lines ring ‘true’ though. While ‘The
Unquiet Dead’ maybe did this aspect even better, you get to see all sides
of Victorian London for once: the posh people in funny hats and crazy sideburns,
the working men struggling to get by, the working girls who have no other
choice to get by (amazing to think they got away with putting prostitutes in a
series mostly made for children on at a Saturday teatime!)
Then there’s the 4th
Doctor at his most alien and Sherlockian, at a distance from the people he
mingles with and studying them with ice cold detachment. Although that makes
Leela Watson, which is quite the image. Actually she’s much more like Eliza
Doolittle from ‘My Fair Lady’, with Holmes going back to his original idea
which was that The Doctor would ‘mentor’ the savage and teach her about the
universe. As the barbarian savage who’s the antithesis of Victorian values and
puncturing the pomposity of Victorian society at every turn without meaning to.
This leads to a lot of this story’s greatest moments as she accidentally shows
everyone up while showing how stupid a lot of the Victorian ideals were (the
best part of the story is when Holmes teams her up with her polar opposite
Litefoot. He’s so polite that when she picks up some meat and eats it with her
bare hands he does the same so as not to offend her, a lovely and very
Holmesian touch!) You wouldn’t know from the characters or dialogue that this
story was written at speed (so much so that they did the location filming
before episodes five and six were ready, Holmes keeping them to the studio
sets) from the dialogue, which is full of some of Holmes’ sharpest pithiest
writing. The reason so many have always loved this story is because of how
quotable so much of it is, from Jago owning up to his cowardice and relieved to
find out other people feel the same to Leela’s confusion over how her
ancestors’ society worked.
Holmes gets plenty of
room to make comments too, about societies in the past present and future,
showing that society exists in a cycle not in separate passages of time. As
with ‘Tine Warrior’ he plonks an alien down in the past, but rather than have
them automatically rule the Humans as lesser writers would have it, Holmes
makes comments about how they’re really the same people just in different
clothing. Greel is in many ways just a Victorian gentlemen writ large, so
concerned with his own life and welfare and need to get back home that he
doesn’t stop to think about the harm he does to his victims. That’s a very
Dickensian view of the world: why is what he does putting people suffering out
of their misery any worse than letting them starve? Things don’t appear to have
moved on much in the 51st century: Greel was testing the first ever
time machine when it goes wrong and leaves him stranded, but having him end up
in an era of the first stages of modern society, with the invention of the
telephone and light bulbs, brings him full circle: had it not been for those ‘backwards’
inventions in the past he dismisses so readily he wouldn’t have been such a
pioneer in the future. The irony, though, is that this is a time period that
judge intelligence by looks and the horrific effects of time travel have
damaged his face to the point where he has to keep it hidden behind a mask.
Greel thinks himself superior to everyone around him, but everyone else looks
down on him and he has to hide away in a smelly sewer tweaking his invention,
with the giant rats.
Ah yes, the rat. After so
much fog-lit intrigue and hammer horror it’s rather a shame to find the curse
of the typical Dr Who monster as stuntman Stuart Fell thrashes around the
cleanest sewer set you ever did see, while Leela – the hardest companion of
them all – squeals at being nibbled by the sort of ‘King Rat’ costume that you
last saw in pantomime (this is also the point where, if you are using this
story to introduce new fans to Dr Who, you want to be eaten by a giant rat
yourself). I’ve seen it described, by general TV viewers, as a low point in
television history not just Dr Who, which is maybe going a bit too far. I mean,
didn’t they see the giant prawn virus in ‘The
Invisible Enemy’?!) Everyone hates this part of the story, including the
writer, the actor, the costume designers and every fan (Holmes has been working
on the show long enough by now to know how it was probably going to turn out,
while they should have lit the thing in the dark rather than choosing this
moment of a gloomy story to stick all the lights on so you can see it in all
its glory, even its fuzzy felt teeth). The worst part is that the rats don’t
need to be there at all, except for a cliffhanger: there’s no reason why
experiments on time travel should kill pubescent young girls and suck their
life force while making rats large, whilst Greel already has a perfectly good
barrier in place already.
There are people who will
tell you the rat is the only fault in this story, but that’s not strictly true.
For all the brilliance at the characters and dialogue this is easily the
weakest of Holmes’ stories from a pure plotting point of view and shows just
how much of a hurry this story was written in, without his usual care. There’s
no real link between plot elements: something happens over here, then something
happens over there, only coming together for the cliffhangers. There are whole
ideas sold as if they’re going to be important that are then ignored, such as
the music hall stage clues or the rats themselves. There’s a whole subplot about The Doctor
asking a dying Chang where his master Magnus will be and he points to…his shoe.
It’s a mystery that’s never explained and The Doctor bumps into Greel more by
accident than anything (did Holmes, working at speed, forget about this part?) The
plot itself is a bit of a confusing convoluted one as it is, embracing music
hall magicians using alien technology, an alien from the 51st century
pretending to be a Chinese God who has two different names and a time cabinet
powered by crystals. The Doctor unravels the clues in the ‘wrong’ order in many
ways, so that we get led down the garden path a few times before we see the
bigger picture, making it hard to follow episode to episode, while the Doctor
and Leela don’t investigate something odd occurring so much as walk right into
it off the street as soon as the Tardis lands – even given my favourite theory
that the Doctor has all these adventures because the Tardis knows instinctively
where his help is most needed, this seems...well, its just a whacking great
plot coincidence isn’t it? I mean, Magnus Greel has been searching for his time
cabinet for twenty long months and the Doctor just stumbles on it twenty
minutes into the story. Like many a six parter there’s so much endless escaping
and kidnapping you quickly get bored and the story plays its hand early on,
using most of its sets by the middle of episode two so there’s nothing that new
to keep your interest in the story to the end. Though often held up as an
example of why Robert Holmes was the single best writer to ever work on Dr Who,
in many ways it’s his worst script in terms purely of plot function, stealing
its best ideas from other sources and with no ambition to make a further
‘point’ beyond an adventurous yarn.
All that said, it’s not
the plot or the metaphor you watch this one for – there are other stories for
that after all. It’s the impressions that this story leaves that live long in
the mind, Victorian London brought to eerie fog-lit life with theatres and
handsom cabs. This is a super dark story and not just because so much of it is
filmed merely by gaslight. The shadowy edges of the plot include such topics as
prostitutes and opium dens and poisoning, with more references to death and sex
and violence than Dr Who had ever done before or will pretty much ever do again
(another reason so many fans show it to newbies who hear all the stories about
Dr Who being a mere children’s series. Remember that we’re only thirteen years
away from ‘Search Out Space’ here kids and only four from ‘K9 and Company’). Even though Holmes’ worst
excesses were curbed (there were lots of extra mentions in the original script
about why Greel needed to take life forces from girls at the point of puberty)
it’s still a shock just how many scenes in this story seem to be there purely
for shock value. It’s as if Phillip Hinchcliffe, in his last story as producer,
has teamed up with Holmes to make a protest: Hinchcliffe hadn’t wanted to go,
but the BBC moved him on out of fear that Who had become too scary and fed up
with Mary Whitehouse writing in all the time and protesting about it. the
series is under strict orders from now on to be much more child-friendly and
lighter in tone – so, knowing that he can’t be sacked, it feels as if
Hinchcliffe really went for it in this story, with more numchucks and axes in
the back and poisonings and drownings and mutilated faces per minute than any
other story. Oh and Leela wandering around in rather revealing Victorian
underwear (for all her worries about her usual savage leotard it’s this costume
that reveals a bit more than she bargains for when she’s down in the wet
tunnels. Poor Louise Jameson would normally have asked for a retake under normal
circumstances rather than show her nipples off but was suffering from glandular
fever at the time so probably just wanted to get it over with. The next time
you see one in the series it’s Christopher Eccleston’s in ‘Dalek’ in 2005 to put that in context). Even
today they wouldn’t do half the things this story does and there would be a far
bigger outcry if they did.
One other side effect of
Hinchcliffe leaving is that he’s got money to burn, baby. He told the
production team to go ‘all out’ for his last story and make it as lavish and
lush as they could. He also hired all the best most respected film makers he
could get his hands on: the best cameramen, lighting teams, set designers,
costumers: it was as if, after three years of having to look over his shoulder
at the budget, Hinchcliffe could let rip without any repercussions. If you were
being kind then you could say that the producer wanted to go out with a bang
and with money spent on an episode that really does look as if it was made by a
Hollywood blockbuster rather than in a tiny TV studio. Everything looks ornate,
lavish and far far better than it usually does (two more reasons why so many
fans show this story to newbies: it’s the morality that wobbles, not the sets!)
If you were being cycnical, though, you could argue that this is Hinchcliffe’s
lowkey act of revenge on being moved on from a programme against his will,
overspending so that his successor Graham Williams will be forced to cut
corners the following year. Many people do indeed see the Williams years as
cheap ‘n’ cheerful compared to the dark gothic horror of the better remembered
Hinchcliffe stories. Though the producer denies that was ever a consideration,
he just wanted to show what he could do one last time. He was friends with his
successor too, inviting him to the set to meet the gang, just in time to see Tom
Baker throwing one of his cross-patchy tantrums, for which he immediately
apologised when he realised who Williams was (something that rather sets the
tone for the rest of their time together). For once in a Who story the money
was spent on the ‘right’ things too as it all looks fantastic, with lots of
location filming in Northampton (the real home of The Royal Palace Theatre) and
London’s wapping wharf district (where the locals either didn’t get or ignored
the notices about filming: see if you can spot the giant haystack covering up
where a Porsche was parked!) It really does feel as we’ve time-travelled back
to a Victorian past, with even the studio sets matching the location filming
better than usual (though I still say the sewers are too clean).
There are lots of little bits
in this story, then, that are fabulous. When the script is worthy of its lush surroundings
there are few Who stories better than Talons for pure atmosphere and
entertainment and there’s lots you remember long after you’ve forgotten the
main story. There’s the shock of the dummy coming to life and wandering around
the set (and it’s not a puppet either but an actor, Deep Roy). There’s the
magic hall act from the man with the unblinking eyes who knows more than he’s
letting on. There’s Magnus Greel aka Weng Chiang, master ranting Who villain
with the deformed features, trapped in a time he doesn’t understand and causing
deaths not for power or money but as experiments to escape the time he finds
himself stranded in. There’s poor Stuart Fell out the rat costume and inside
Leela’s bloomers hurling himself out a window in a scene that’s one of Dr Who’s
most celebrated and respected stunts, even though it was one of the simplest
(rather than being a fall from a first floor window it was shot from the ground
floor using camera trickery. Even so full credit to Fell who performed it with
a skeleton crew on the final day when everyone else had gone home and with full
pressure on his shoulders to get it right first time. He even stacked the
cardboard boxes that broke his fall himself as the propmen had all left). There’s
the cliffhanger reveal of his face, distorted and shocking, as if he’s been
dipped in acid (something Holmes recycles for his later story ‘Caves Of Androzani’).
There’s the 4th Doctor at his moodiest and most alien as he’s pushed harder than usual by a worthy foe, with very little time for jokes for once. It’s Leela, getting all the good lines as she alternates between action hero and comedy relief, simultaneously intellectually misunderstanding the basics of what’s going on all around her and instinctively understanding the real and vivid threat before her better than anybody. There’s two of Dr Who’s greatest sidekicks in Jago and Litefoot, who brighten every scene they’re in with the former’s very Victorian extroverted pioneering spirit and the latter’s dry English reserve (they’re basically Gilbert and Sullivan, complete with witty alliteration and impressive sideburns). You’re desperate for them to somehow join the Tardis so you can see more of them. played with gusto by Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter, who were so popular among the fandom that they nearly got their own spin-off series ta the time and finally got it for good on Big Finish thirty years later. All this despite the fact that they don’t ‘team up’ until episode five). Even the music is fabulous, with Dudley Simpson really enjoying himself with his Gilbert and Sullivan pastiches and music hall songs (that’s him cameo-ing as the conductor at the theatre. No wonder he’s so happy: it was the most money he ever got paid in one go for doing Who).
There’s so much going for
this story that it’s easy to overlook its faults, though ‘Talons’ is far from
faultless sadly. I can see why ‘Talons’ is used to ‘lure’ so many fans in as it’s
the opposite to normal and it flies against Dr Who’s reputation: it’s the parts
that Who usually gets right that don’t quite work and the parts it usually gets
wrong that works: the sets don’t wobble, the incidental characters we meet are
all three dimensional and there are Oscar-worthy performances from the entire
cast. It’s just a shame that, underneath all that fine window dressing, the
plot itself is such a perfunctory one compared to the very best this series can
do. Certainly it’s a very different series when Dr Who comes back after the
summer break, even with the false dawn of ‘Horror
Of Fang Rock’ (an Edwardian story almost as deadly as this one) and leftover
script ‘State Of Decay’ (vampires,
the only hammer horror cliché we hadn’t had under Hinchcliffe) to come. I’m not
sure I agree with either group in fandom, the ones that rate ‘Talons’ at the
very top or the very bottom: it’s another Hinchcliffe mixed bag with some parts
that don’t work and others that work brilliantly. Personally I prefer my
stories deeper and less violent and my history more accurate, but equally I can
see why so many fans hold this story to close to their affections. Few stories
look or sound as good as this one does and once it gets its claws into you ‘Talons’
is a story easy to get caught up in, a Victoriana scifi story that is many people’s
de facto idea of what Dr Who always looked like, even though actually very few actually
do.
POSITIVES + Leela is
surely a strong candidate for best series companion. Where others would be
screaming or running away she trades insults with the baddie Magnus Greel
(‘Bent face!’) then promises to spend the afterlife tracking him down and ‘put
you through my agony a thousand times’. Basically Magnus Greel and her both have
a strop at the other and its marvellous, especially in the oh so prim and
proper Victorian settings. But then neither are Victorian and each have a lot
in common, resenting everything that this place stands for. Would that all
confrontations with the villain were like that in Dr Who.
‘The Time Machination’ (2009) is a standalone 10th
Doctor comic strip (a rare one not to be published in Dr Who Magazine first or
be part of a long running series) that manages the rare feat of being both a
prequel and sequel to ‘Talons’. You see, Magnus Greel has a friend named
Jonathan who’s seeking revenge for what happened to his mate in the TV story. Only
he’s arrived too early: a visiting Doctor points out that it’s 1889 and he
can’t take revenge those events haven’t technically happened yet (we never did
get a date on screen, but most guidebooks reckon ‘Talons’ must have taken place
around 1892 given various references and fashions). This continuity-heavy story
also ties in with two others: The Doctor is again travelling with H G Wells as
per ‘Timelash’
(where he’s marginally less annoying this time around and The Doctor keener to
drop hints, all but giving him the idea for his novel ‘The Time Machine’ in the
strip’s coda) and meets two of the earliest operative of Queen Victoria’s
original ‘Torchwood’ (as seen in ‘Tooth
and Claw’). The Doctor
saves the day by making the Torchwood guys think that he’s Jonathan and the
weirdly dressed time traveller must surely be The Doctor! Of all the modern 21st
century comic strips this is perhaps the one closest in feel to the old days of
TV Comic and Countdown, a light and fluffy absolutely bonkers read not to be
taken seriously that has great fun sending up half of the series and then contradicting
the other half!
Weng Chiang, or at any rate Magnus Greel, appears in
prequel ‘The Butcher Of Brisbane’ (2012) by Marc Platt, number #161 in Big
Finish’s main range. It’s a 5th Doctor story, with Nyssa Tegan and
Turlough the companions, in which the Tardis travels to the 51st
century when Magnus Greel was emperor, setting up ‘Talons’ where he’s been sent
back in time. A zygma beam strikes the Tardis and sends it off course, which
causes it to unfold in space, with Nyssa and Turlough trapped in the time
vortex and apparently dead (only –spoilers – don’t worry because they’re really
in the second ice age of the 5000s). Given how little time the pair spent
together on TV it’s interesting to hear the two bounce off each other, Nyssa’s
people pleasing practicalness hitting Turlough’s panicked selfishness head on
without Tegan or The Doctor to intervene and they have the more interesting
half of the story, meeting what appears to be an old man drawing his last
breaths (but who is really in his twenties and an early guinea pig used in the
time experiments). They’re surprised, to say the least, to meet his younger
self of a few days earlier at a camp base. Pretending that they’re meant to be
there in order to get food and shelter, they take on new aliases (Turlough as
the secretary to Nyssa’s boss!) Nyssa ends up engaged to Greel as part of her
cover story, but her fiancé gets suspicious and sends an android to keep an eye
on her (true love!) before Nyssa re-programmes it to obey her. Meanwhile three
years later the government official in charge of the experiments has discovered
that The Doctor is an alien and is merrily interrogating him. It turns out that
the time cabinet abandoned at the end of ‘Talons’, ended up in the possession
of Litefoot’s family and has been revived after all this time. The Tardis team
are reunited (it takes three years, yet there’s not much sense of time passing:
Turlough, surely, would be beside himself after a day of this even if Nyssa
kept her cool), The Doctor foils an attempt to interrupt yet another world
peace conference and order is restored, with the villain and his companion Mr
Sin sent back in time to the start of ‘Talons’ (no wonder he has it in for The
Doctor so!) A very epic yet very bitty story that will appeal to fans who enjoy
the more timey wimey Moffat type stories, arguably more than fans of ‘Talons’
itself, with whom it only really shares one character (and he’s not in it that
much). A really strong story for the under-rated Nyssa, but not much else.
Given Weng Chiang’s experiments in time it seemed
inevitable he would bump into River Song at one point or another – Big Finish’s
‘The Talents Of Greel’ (2019) is that story, part of ‘The Diary Of River Song
Volume Six’. Like most of the ‘Diary’ sets the fun is in having River Song
become part of the action just before the TV story occurs – given that this
story also features Jago and Litefoot that means triple the fun! River goes
undercover at the Moulin Rouge theatre, puzzled by the way Mr Sin is behaving
and discovers the time machine in the cellar. There’s lots of fun little
in-jokes in this story, such as River doing her act in the sort of fez the 11th
Doctor would appreciate and running rings round the worst misogynists of
Victorian London. All in all one of the better stories in the range, although
like so many of them it rather asks the question why River doesn’t leave a note
out for the Doctor somewhere – while she manages to foil Greel’s plan
temporarily she doesn’t stop him, she just wanders off and leaves The Doctor to
finish him off (if anything he’s even madder after that and more determined to
go along with his experiments than ever!)
There are, in addition, a full sixty-eight stories,
across a whopping twenty-eight separate releases, starring everyone’s favourite
Holmesian double act Jago and Litefoot. Both Trevor and Christopher Benjamin
loved their time making ‘Talons’ and often talked about wanting to come back to
play the characters, so if anything it’s a surprise Big Finish took so long
before recalling them. Each of their appearances is set after ‘Talons’, the
first being in ‘The Mahogany Murders’ (2009), part of the ‘Companion
Chronicles’ series, a ‘Spearhead From Space’ Auton-style story about a wooden
mannequin that comes to life in Litefoot’s autopsy yard, leading him to call on
his old friend. The story was so popular they then got their own series which
ran for fourteen box sets from 2010 until 2018, a year after Trevor Baxter’s
death. The good points: the two actors are having such fun and work so well
together that I could sit through anything with them in it. The bad point: there’s
only so much a cowardly theatre owner and a calmer pathologist can do together
and too many of the stories follow a ‘Midsummer Murders’ type formula, while it
stretches credulity that so many aliens decide to visit this part of London at
this particular time (no wonder Queen Victoria started Torchwood - she should have hired these two as they’re
always getting in trouble). There are some great little stories in there
though: ‘Litefoot and Sanders’ (series two) sees Jago replaced by…a vampire!,
‘Encore Of The Scorchies’ (series eight) is an honest to goodness musical in
which everyone sings and far better than you’d expect and creepy near-last
hurrah ‘The Laughing Police’ (series fourteen) is a memorable story that stays
with you much darker than the rest. They’re a pretty consistent lot though,
with only a couple of turkeys out the collection (series six is the weakest box set I’d say).
The pair also guested in a lot more appearances on
Big Finish which are quite an uneven collection: the 4th Doctor (and
Romana) range story ‘The Justice Of Jalxar’ (2013) a so-so story that’s still a
delight for hearing Tom Baker play opposite two old pals again, the rather
ordinary ‘Mind Games’ part of the 5th Doctor box set (2014), the fun
but frivolous ‘Jago Litefoot and Strax’ spinoff (2015) that pairs them with one
third of the Paternoster Gang to comical
effect, the rather better ‘Beast Of Kravenos’ (2017) another 4th
Doctor range story with Romana II this time, the pair have a cameo in the
utterly brilliant Colin Baker regeneration story ‘The Brink Of Death’ (part of
the box set ‘The Last Adventure’, 2015), there’s the slightly disappointing
‘Jago and Litefoot Revival’ (a two part Companion Chronicle story from 2017), the
really strong ‘Voyage To The New World’ and ‘Voyage To Venus’ in which Jago and
Litefoot finally leave Victorian London behind for a trip into outer space with
the 6th Doctor (Corks!) and ‘The Jago and Litefoot Revival’ (2018)
which features appearances by Drs 10 and 11 at a Litefoot lecture on some of
the mysterious things that have happened to him down the years. The best
release of all might well be ‘Jago and Litefoot Forever’ (2018), a posthumous
story written to wrap up the series where Litefoot goes missing and Jago
remembers his old friend and times gone past, with a truly heart-wrenching
ending and a magnificent speech from Christopher Benjamin on mourning and grief
and how the world will never be the same without his friend that does both Baxter
and his character proud. There’s also ‘Benjamin and Baxter: Jago and Litefoot’,
not a fictional story but a two disc set from 2013 in which the two actors
discuss their characters and their work both inside and outside the series,
with theatrical anecdotes galore. It’s very fun, like listening to two old
mates nattering, though you don’t actually learn all that much from it!
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Robots Of Death’ next ‘Horror
Of Fang Rock’
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