August 13: The Talons of Weng-Chiang Parts One & Two

Standard and special edition DVDs

For a start, these two episodes look gorgeous.  Through a combination of great locations, impressive sets, and marvelous costuming, the first two parts of The Talons of Weng-Chiang boast some of the finest visuals ever seen on Doctor Who.  This, in many ways, is the most immersive story yet, making us almost believe the production crew simply went back to the end of the 19th century and filmed the story there.  (It probably didn't hurt that Philip Hinchcliffe, in his last story for the show, decided not to worry too much about going over budget.)

And into this environment Robert Holmes has inserted the Doctor and Leela, in a story about Chinese gangs in Victorian London and a strange masked figure lurking underneath the Palace Theatre.  It's a clear pastiché of the late 19th-/early 20th-century literature, with the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Sax Rohmer, and Gaston Leroux all getting the treatment.  This is a world of fogs and alleys, and a world into which the Doctor has been inserted to distort everything around him.  Thus we get giant rats in the sewers, holograms masquerading as ghosts, and masked figures worrying about "time agents".  This last one is apparently the Chinese god Weng-Chiang (not a genuine god), who the magician Li H'Sen Chang is working for by kidnapping young women to serve as sustenance for his god.

And into this mix we also get the delightful characters of Henry Gordon Jago, the Palace Theatre owner, and Professor George Litefoot, the local coroner.   Each one has time interacting with the Doctor and Leela that is quite wonderful to behold.  Jago threatens to be a pompous, overbearing character (given to extravagant language use and turns of phrase that would make Pip & Jane Baker blush), but in the hands of Christopher Benjamin, the character is instead a likeable fellow with, it would seem, a heart of gold.  Meanwhile, Trevor Baxter's Litefoot is the soul of a gentleman, despite his profession -- watch how he mimics Leela's style of eating so as not to make her feel self-conscious (although, charmingly, he draws the line at letting her use the tablecloth as a napkin).  They're both wonderful characters, and their interactions with the Doctor snap both pairs of characters into sharp relief.

It's not perfect, of course; there is some racism on display which I don't feel qualified to comment on⁹⁸, other than to note that Chang (as played by non-Asian actor John Bennett) turns his r's into stereotypical l's only on stage, which is a nice touch.  And there's the frankly odd moment where the Doctor quells his own irritation at Leela's use of a janis thorn (as seen in The Face of Evil) after Leela informs him that "He was trying to kill you," which does feel rather off.  But small quibbles aside, these first two episodes, which seem primarily designed to build and populate the world of the story (Weng-Chiang isn't even introduced until part two), do an excellent job of building things up and making you want to see more.







⁹⁸ Interested parties might want to start by looking at Andrew Cartmel's "Weng-Chiang and the Yellow Peril (and Rats)" in Outside In.  Not that he's necessarily any more qualified to discuss it, but I think it works as a reasonable (albeit slightly facetious) starting point.