Day 230 — August 18th 2021
The Talons of Weng-Chiang Parts Five and Six
The Talons of Weng-Chiang — Part Five
D’you know, I cannot make my mind up with this story, and after today’s entry I’m going to sound positively schizophrenic to you lot. So far I’ve found lots to enjoy in The Talons of Weng-Chiang but felt that the overall product was less than the sum of its parts, and generally a bit of an underwhelming experience. This episode is the one I’ve enjoyed the most so far — I’m going to give it an 8/10 — but everything I’m going to say about it will be in contradiction to things I’ve been saying in the last few days…!
We’ll start with Jago and Litefoot. In the first two episodes I praised them as being one of the best aspects of the story, and went on at length about how much I love them in their own spin-off series. And then yesterday I decided that actually the story worked better when they were sidelined a little. In this episode they’re bright right to the forefront of the action — I think they probably have more screen time than Doctor Who and Leela on the whole — and I think they’re the major reason that I’ve given my highest score of the story so far to this one.
It probably helps that this is the adventure in which the pair are finally brought together, tying up the halves of the story and setting them up for a lifetime of adventures ahead. The characters as they appear here are absolutely in keeping with the ones we hear on audio, and their first encounter is an especially enjoyable moment which made me really laugh out loud, and which I think was made all the stronger knowing how close they will become;
Jago: ‘Kindly tell your employer that Mister Jago wishes to see him urgently.’
Litefoot: ‘What?’
Jago: ‘Your employer, Professor Litefoot. Come along, man. Hurry. Chop-chop.’
Litefoot: ‘May I ask, sir, who you are?’
Jago: ‘Confound your insolence, sir. Just announce me.’
Litefoot: ‘Consider yourself announced, sir. I’m Litefoot.’
Jago: ‘Why, dash me optics. I should have realised. That brow, those hands. England’s peerless premier professor of pathology.’
The pair of them continue to shine across the rest of the episode, and you don’t really mid the absence of our regular leads. The rumour for years was that the BBC wanted to make a spin-off starring the pair for television in the 1970s, but I’m not sure there’s any actual evidence of that and it’s probably more of a myth than anything. Watching this episode, though, and knowing the audio series, I suspect you could have made it work incredibly well.
Jago and Litefoot aren’t the only brilliant performances in this one; the entire guest cast is especially strong across the story. Chang makes a brief reappearance here, having been thought dead in the last episode, and John Bennett gives us his best performance for his dying scene. It’s very underplayed, and coupled with some nice dialogue it’s a bit of a winner. We don’t often see the villains come to realise the error of their ways like this, so it feels especially mature for the programme.
And then there’s Michael Spice as Weng-Chiang, who is incredibly over the top but balances it on the right side of being hammy. Spice was also in the series last season as Morbius, and this feels like a better opportunity for him to be physical, rather than providing the voice to a shuffling corpse…! I said yesterday that I’d have liked to see the Master as the ultimate villain behind this story, and I think Spice would have been a brilliant incarnation — as theatrical as some of the later incarnations will become, but paired with that brilliant voice!
Chiang is quite a scary character in his own right, though, and I think the moment where he forces one of his henchmen to commit suicide in front of him might be the scariest death the programme has ever given us. There’s something about it which makes Chiang all the more powerful; he doesn’t need to attack the man, he can simply pressure him to do it all himself. That’s dark. We’ll start to see a shift in tone for Doctor Who next series, and as powerful as moments like these are, you can’t help but think they really weren’t suitable for children watching with their tea!
The next place I’m going to sound like I’m contradicting myself is in the presence of location filming. I spend ages on this blog saying how much I wish they’d shot the whole series on location, and how usually those are my favourite parts of any serial. I even praised the other day that the opening episode of this one was almost entirely filmed on location. This episode switches direction and we’ve gone the other way — we’re almost entirely in the studio here… and I think I actually prefer that in this case.
Somehow it makes this feel more like Doctor Who, and I realise for the first time that I’ve been thrown slightly by the glossy sheen of the earlier episodes. As much as I love being out in real streets, and as good as the theatre looks for being a real place, there’s something oddly comforting about being back inside Television Centre. And the sets on display here are fantastic — the Dragon Room is an impressive size, so you lose none of the scale that the locations afforded the story.
It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster, this, but I’m hoping the final episode can stick the landing.
The Talons of Weng-Chiang — Part Six
I’ve complained a lot in this story about the relationship between Doctor Who and Leela feeling off-kilter, and I still think that’s the result of the pair no longer being written by Chris Boucher. Whether or not his version of the characters are the ‘right’ ones, it was the only approach we’d had for their first two stories, so this was always going to feel slightly different.
It was especially prevalent in Part Five, where on two occasions Doctor Who called his companion ‘my girl’, and it just sounded wrong coming out of Baker’s mouth. Pertwee could sort of get away with that slightly patronising tone, but I don’t buy it on this occasion. See also the moment later on in the episode where he praises Leela working something out by offering the compliment ‘you’re learning to think’. I’ve said before that I don’t like the ‘Olympic Detachment’ angle they occasionally play with the Fourth Doctor Who, but I like the ‘complete arsehole’ persona even less.
Thankfully this final episode takes a completely different approach, and gives me the kind of Doctor Who that we had in Boucher’s two stories, or in those by Robert Banks Stewart last season. He’s flippant and silly, and has a whale of a time winding up the bad guy by being deliberately obstructive. Greel claims to hate ‘frivolity’ and so that’s initially all he gets in return, with Doctor Who offering Jelly Babies, fiddling with Yo-Yos and exclaiming ‘heavens to Betsy!’ when he realises what’s going on. It’s all an act for Greel’s benefit, of course, but it’s great fun. And we also get a brilliant insult from it, which continues to be the area in which Robert Holmes shines the brightest;
Doctor Who: ‘Never trust a man with dirty fingernails!’
All this heightened silliness is great fun to watch, and still absolutely my favourite way of seeing this incarnation, but it also serves as great counter-balance to the steely anger we get from Baker only moments later. He’s never yet given us a bad performance in the show, but every now and then you get a moment where you remember just how brilliant he is. It’s especially brilliant in exchanges like this where you realise just how dangerous he can be;
Doctor Who: ‘Life’s full of little surprises. What have you done to her?’
Greel: ‘Nothing, yet.’
Doctor Who: ‘Take my advice. Don’t.’
I think the entire scene between the pair in Litefoot’s house is incredible, and it’s probably the highlight of the story for me. It showcases everything that this incarnation — and this era — can do so well.
Leela gets her strongest episode of the story here, too, including a fantastic showdown with Greel and a great few parting words when she thinks she’s going to die;
Greel: ‘At my camps, the extraction process was considered the most painful of all. They pleaded for anything but this.’
Leela: ‘I shall not plead, but I promise you this. When we are both in the great hereafter, I shall hunt you down, Bent Face, and put you through my agony a thousand times!’
Greel: ‘Silence the spitfire!’
It’s in episodes like this that you realise how much of an asset Baker and Louise Jameson are to the programme. I’ve got reservations about Season Fifteen (which I’ll come to in a moment), but with these two in the lead roles I’m hoping I’ve nothing to worry about.
Elsewhere I’m not going to go on about how great Jago and Litefoot are, but I am going to contradict myself again and say that I wish their final farewell and the TARDIS’ departure could have been done out on location. The ship’s arrival in Part One was such a highlight that I’d have loved to see another moment like that, rather than a slightly flat departure in the studio to round out the season.
The Tom Baker era is broadly dived into three ‘phases’. There’s the ‘gothic’ Hinchcliffe years (Seasons Twelve to Fourteen), the ‘comical’ Williams years (Seasons Fifteen to Seventeen) and the ‘serious’ JNT-led Season Eighteen to round things off. While the first of those phases is usually considered a high water mark for the programme, the same cannot always be said for the latter pair. I always thought that Hinchcliffe run was somewhat over-rated, but watching through on this occasion I’ve found an awful lot to love, and several of the stories have ended up right at the top of my list when it comes to rankings.
When I think of Season Fifteen, though, the first word that comes to mind is ‘cheap’. I think of dodgy effects in The Invisible Enemy, the lack of sets almost entirely in Underworld and the valiant — or plain foolish — attempt to record the TARDIS interior in an abandoned hospital from The Invasion of Time. The last few years of the show have looked pretty lavish (probably more so than ever before), and I’m genuinely worried about how I’ll feel moving into the next era. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to find lots to enjoy, and I can’t wait to find out.
