Should Doctor Who and Sherlock do a crossover? There’s no need— the Doctor has been Sherlock, right here in The Talons of Weng-Chiang.
This is a terrific episode, absolutely one of (my picks for) the ten best in the history of the Classic series. It is the perfect capstone for the Hinchcliffe/Holmes “Gothic Horror” era of the series, and the perfect finale for it as well (see below for more on the end of an era). Although most viewers will walk away with “the Doctor as Sherlock Holmes,” the story really draws on many more sources than that: Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories are an even stronger influence, with the main villain impersonating an ancient Chinese god and leading the dangerous “Tong of the Black Scorpion,” (“one of the most dangerous crimino-political organizations in the world,” the Doctor pronounces in a very Conan-Doyle-esque line). Jack the Ripper, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the Phantom of the Opera, and even Dracula all contribute moods or images to this story, which is actually not so much a Sherlock Holmes pastiche as it is an homage to the entire Victorian Gothic Horror genre— fittingly so, as that was the genre that contributed so much of Dr Who’s mood and style over the last three seasons.
This story moves in the foggy, gas-lit, cobbled streets of Victorian London’s East End— or rather, in the mythical version of it. As an aside, the DVD release of this story includes a fascinating documentary on the rise of this literary myth, called by one book “Darkest England,” where monsters lurk after dark (whether supernatural or merely criminal— if there’s even a difference). The real East End, even in the Victorian era, though a poor district, wasn’t nearly the place of menacing squalor depicted in stories from Charles Dickens right through the 20th century pulp magazines. But Dr Who hasn’t been interested in history lessons since the end of the Hartnell era, so the TARDIS flies straight past reality and lands firmly in the spooky, Gothic East End of literary myth.
The incomparable Robert Holmes, Dr Who’s best writer ever (period) draws a beautiful supporting cast of characters, two of whom steal the show: the boastful, grandiose theater owner Henry Gordon Jago, and the reserved, dignified pathologist Professor Litefoot. When these two finally link up, they form such a perfect buddy-movie pairing that it’s surprising to realize in hindsight that their meeting doesn’t happen until episode 5 (of 6). Holmes carefully takes the time to build each character separately before putting them together. To a great extent, the Jago & Litefoot show is what you’ll remember from this episode. Many fans have long wished they’d joined the Doctor and Leela in the TARDIS as the end of the story, but it’s probably just as well they didn’t— they’d have left no narrative space for the Doctor. They’ve remained so popular that Big Finish audio, which produces original Dr Who dramas on CD, brought together the original actors recently for an entire series of original Jago & Litefoot adventures.
The villains are equally well-drawn, from Weng-Chiang’s chief henchman, the stage magician Li Hsen Chang, who is a master of sinister, quiet menace, to Weng-Chiang himself, escaped war criminal from World War 6 in the 51st century. They make a shadow pair to Jago and Litefoot, the stage performer Chang as quiet as theater owner Jago is loud, the mad scientist Weng-Chiang as maniacal as Litefoot is reserved. The sinister Mr Sin, an android originally programmed to assassinate the royal children to which it was given as a toy in the 51st century, is the obligatory creepy monster of the story.
Perhaps the only let-down in the story is the giant rat haunting the sewers (actually giant rats, there’s more than one). Played sometimes by a normal rat on a miniature set, and other times by a man in a costume, it’s an unconvincing special effect either way. Such problems are par for the course in Dr Who, but it is perhaps more disappointing in this story because everything else about it looks so good.
Details
- The set design is gorgeous, and the director skillfully used location work as well. The production found an actual Victorian music hall (maintained but not modernized) to shoot the theater scenes, and Hinchcliffe managed to find the budget to have the director shoot there on video rather than film. This cleverly plays on viewer expectations, which in this era on the BBC assumed that video meant a set and film a location. The viewer is tricked into thinking Dr Who managed to build a huge and amazing theater set. It’s a subliminal effect but one that works.
- Costume design also deserves a mention, especially the Doctor’s costume which displays another subtle but brilliant touch. Abandoning his usual outfit (even the trademark scarf), the Doctor instead dons clothes he’s chosen to be “inconspicuous” in Victorian London. When you first see the costume you think, “Ah, Sherlock Holmes!” but there’s more to it than that. Put the Doctor side-by-side with the genuine Victorians around him, and you realize his outfit is just as outlandish as his usual get-up. The brilliant move of the costume designer is that he doesn’t give the Doctor as Sherlock Holmes costume, he gives him the Doctor cosplaying Sherlock Holmes. It’s an attempt at being inconspicuous, made by the same personality that picked up that scarf in the first place, and that’s a brilliant idea.
- Leela meanwhile is required by the Doctor to dress up as a proper Victorian lady but costuming doesn’t really help her fit in. When she and the Doctor are attacked by a gang from the Tong of the Black Scorpion, she fights them off so vigorously she gets herself arrested by a police officer who takes her for the aggressor. Later she saves the Doctor from an assassination attempt by shooting the assailant with a poison dart out of a blowgun, and the Doctor has a close call stopping her from just admitting it to another police sergeant, unaware that it would get her into trouble. In one delightful scene, she horrifies Litefoot by debating his use of a stabbing victim’s wound to calculate the height of the attacker— because she was always taught to shove the knife right up under the breastbone. The Doctor helpfully explains to Litefoot that Leela is a “savage found floating down the Amazon river in a hatbox”— playing to legends of “feral children” popular in the Victorian era and leading to a scene where Litefoot takes Leela home and offers her dinner. Looking at the buffet his housekeeper has laid out, she just picks up a whole roast in both hands and starts chewing on it. Litefoot is about to pick up a plate, when you can see right in his eyes the thought that he must not embarrass his guest, and so picks up a whole chicken and starts chewing on that right next to her.
- But all this doesn’t mean Leela is stupid: Holmes draws her character as well as any other, getting both humor (and action) from her primitive ways, but showing that although she translates everything she sees into terms she understands, she does so intelligently and always knows what matters about what’s going on.
- Even without her usual Tarzan costume, Leela never entirely escapes the cheescake factor. At one point she escapes from Weng-Chiang wearing only Victorian underwar (admittedly that still covers more than her usual outfit), fleeing down the sewers where she’s attacked by one of the giant rats. Unless I’m misremembering (we’ll see going on) this is the only time during her run on the series where Leela actually screams (normally a stock response for all monster-confronted companions), but she’s got ample excuse: giant rat actually gnawing on her leg while trapped in a sewer is about as harsh as it gets. However, both scream and disappointing man-in-a-costume giant rat are instantly overshadowed when Leela stands back up, soaking wet. Millions of British boys must have entered puberty simultaneously as it was revealed that she was wearing nothing under the Victorian underwear. Seriously, it is so clear (and by that I mean the costume) that I’m amazed the scene was allowed to air.
- Trivia fact about the Doctor: he was with the Filipino army during the final advance on Reykjavik at the end of World War 6. World powers in the 51st century were apparently different from those of our time.
- Continuity nod? Weng-Chiang thinks that the Doctor might be a “time agent” pursuing him from the 51st century. When the new series introduced Captain Jack Harkness, he is a time-traveling former Time Agent from the 51st century. Later, River Song is also from the 51st century (sort of: she’s complicated). Clearly the new series wanted to play on this story’s mention of time-travel technology in Earth’s 51st century, but did they get the continuity right? Weng-Chiang explicitly states at one point that he believes he’s the first person ever to travel in time, and he assumes the Doctor followed him using the technology he (Weng-Chiang) invented. So his reference to a “time agent” was clearly just a description he gave to a hypothetical pursuer, not a reference to an actual agency he knew about. The Doctor is equally explicit that Weng-Chiang’s time technology came to nothing but disaster, warning the villain that it worked for him once but if he tries to use the machine again it will cause an explosion powerful enough to destroy London. “Your so-called technology is the twisted lunacy of a scientific dark age,” he declares. Clearly this is not the same technology as the wrist-mounted “vortex manipulators” used by both Captain Jack and River Song.
End of an Era
This story is the season 14 finale, and it’s also the finale for Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes as producer and script editor. Hinchcliffe didn’t know he was leaving: he and Holmes had plans for where to do next. Seeing how well this story was working, along with the recent “Pyramids of Mars,” Hinchcliffe and Holmes had decided they had discovered a rich vein of story material to mine in the Victorian/Edwardian era of adventure fiction, stories like “King Solomon’s Mines” and countless “Lost Civilization” tales. They wanted to do more stories putting the Doctor into this period, in stories drawing on the genre of Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. “I think we were onto something,” he says in interviews, “since only a few years later Raiders of the Lost Ark came out using the same genre.” Hinchcliffe was also keen to do another Dalek story, trying to reintroduce some of the Machiavellian machinations of the great sixties Dalek stories.
Instead, while Weng-Chiang was in production, a man walked into his office one day and introduced himself as Dr Who’s new producer, telling Hinchcliffe he’d been reassigned to produce a new series that was coming out. Hinchcliffe had no idea this was coming. Why did it happen? Fan Conventional Wisdom, repeated in issues of Doctor Who Magazine for the last thirty years* has been that the political pressure from Mary Whitehouse and her “clean up TV” campaign was to blame.
Interestingly, however, in an interview recorded for the special features of this story’s DVD, Hinchcliffe at first says nothing about that. He speculates instead that Graham Williams, who was a friend of the then-BBC Controller, wanted the job and just pulled a string with his buddy to get it. The interviewer at that point asks Hinchcliffe if he thinks Mary Whitehouse and her campaign prompted the BBC to make the change, and Hinchcliffe is obviously surprised, as if the thought had never occurred to him before that moment. Then he nods and says “That might very well have had something to do with it.”
So if that was the reason, the BBC of the time never informed Hinchcliffe of it (though he was certainly aware how much Whitehouse detested Dr Who in general and his seasons in particular). Whatever the real story, the fact remains: Hinchcliffe and Holmes were out after this story, and the next season would begin under a new pair of showrunners (though not, as we’ll see, without a lot of influence from the old guard, who already had stories in the works).
Hinchcliffe wasn’t done with Dr Who forever, though. He wrote a few novelizations of episodes from his era for Target books (a children’s imprint of W.H. Auden that eventually novelized almost every episode of classic Dr Who). And just recently, Big Finish audio have launched a series of “Philip Hinchcliffe Presents” fourth Doctor audio adventures, with Hinchcliffe supervising the writing and production of stories matching the style of his era.
While unanimity is impossible with such a long history and large fanbase, as far as I’m concerned there’s doubt that the 3 seasons of Dr Who produced by the Hinchcliffe/Holmes team were the best era of Dr Who, Classic or New, there ever was. I’m sorry to have reached the end of it.
Next week:
“The Horror of Fang Rock,” 4 episodes, the season 15 premiere.
*Good lord, have I really been a subscriber to Doctor Who Magazine for 30 years? Yes.
