There's some lamesh*t plotting in this.
Like when (in part 1) the Doctor finds the giant rat hairs in Alf Buller's clothing and 'remembers' that Weng Chiang is the god of abundance. Where did that come from? A William Hartnell story?
And somehow this leads to the next bit where the Doc goes down the nearest sewer manhole?
Ok, I get it.The theatricality, the florid language and the old time music hall-ness blinds the sentimental audience to the plot development.
In other words it's a rollicking genre yarn with Tom as Herlock Sholmes and Leela as Deliza Oolittle set in a mix of the Good Old Days, Phantom of the Opera and the Ooze of Fu Manchu.
More specifically (from http://www.shannonsullivan.com/drwho/serials/4s.html)
- 1904 Holmes short story The Adventure Of The Abbey Grange. (the monogrammed glove...)
- Gaston
Leroux's 1910 novel Le fantôme de l'opéra (better known
to English-speaking audiences as The Phantom Of The Opera) for Greel's Lair beneath the theatre.
- Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu canon (published from 1912) for the Oriental ingredients of the adventure.
But
The biggest problem with this is the "yellowface".
I can take Alan "tough guy" Chuntz doubling for Tong member doing Kung Fu in the filmed fight scenes. I can take Michael "Pommie" Spice as an Australian War Criminal from the 51st century.
John Bennett was in DW twice (before this General Finch in Invasion of the Dinosaurs) and Blakes 7 (Coser, creator of Imipak in s2e3 Weapon) and lots of films (The Fifth Element, Minority Report) and great TV series (I Claudius, Jonathan Creek, The Avengers, The Professionals, The Saint).
John Bennett is a good actor who makes something of a good part as Li Hsen Chang.
But someone, somewhere actually made a decision that a Chinese magician would be better played by a white guy.
In 1977 that was old fashioned and thoughtless. In 2019 it is beyond the pale and nakedly racist. And times haven't changed that much.
But imagine what David Yip might have been like? (not Chinese but actually from Liverpool) (Veldan in Destiny of the Daleks, also The Chinese Detective (1981)) There are others. And surely he was not the only choice available.
And why couldn't Chang have been a "stage" identity? The character is a white guy pretending to be Chinese for effect.
On the positive side, the portrayal of Li Hsen is at least layered. He is a partly sympathetic character. His death scene in the Opium House is dramatic and tragic. He is shown to be the pawn of and dominated and misused by Magnus Greel. He is obviously a victim of the Zigma Beam Experiment as much as any Filipinos in the army that marched on Rekyavik (or something).
John Bennett's LiHsen is a major step up from things like Peter Ustinov (and others) as Charlie Chan, Christopher Lee (and others) as Fu Manchu , Peter Sellers as Sidney Wang in Murder by Death and of course Mickey Rooney as Mr Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's
The portrayal of other Chinese characters in a story like this at least acknowledges that they existed. They aren't entirely cyphers. But it's close to that. The number of lines for (let's say "dressed as"..) Chinese characters is:
- Li Hsen (lots)
- the others (some gutteral noises i.e.0))
A rewrite that features dialogue for one Chinese character perhaps mentioning that the (damn) shipping line that won't send them home (or something) or maybe ironically complaining that the theatre is "all that shouting in the evening" would humanise what is otherwise a troubling presentation of 'minions'.
An argument about this I read was that these are theatrical characters in a theatrically themed serial. That's a wily excuse but no more. (See below)
Apart from that...
The racism in other characters (Kyle, Teresa, Jago) is (arguably) in character but nonetheless ugly.
From Part 1 12m02s
KYLE: He's a Chinese, if you hadn't noticed. We get a lot of those in here, Limehouse being so close. Him jaw-jaw plenty by and by, eh, Johnny?
From Part 3 9m42s
CHANG: Fresh as dew and bright with promise.
TERESA: Yeah, well, that's how you might see it, Mister Ching-ching
From Part 4 21m39s
JAGO: You mean to say the celestial Chang was involved in all these Machiavellian machinations?
DOCTOR: Yes, up to his epicanthic eyebrows.
(The epicanthic fold is a bit in the top eyelid of typically asian eyes that make the eyes look Chinese... and celestial does not mean from the stars....it derives from 19th century American slang for China.)
Worse are these lines from The Doctor himself.
From p1 7m54s
DOCTOR: Oh yes, yes. We were attacked by this little man and four other little men.
From p3 3m19s
LITEFOOT: The sheer criminal effrontery. Things are coming to a pretty pass when ruffians will attack a man in his own home.)
(The Doctor puts a bunch of icecubes tied in a napkin on Litefoot's head.)
DOCTOR: Well, they were Chinese ruffians.
Read these for a taste of modern views on Talons' racist bits
https://cultbox.co.uk/features/doctor-who-fandom-the-talons-of-weng-chiang-and-racism
And as usual Sandifer is definitive. Briefly Phil/Liz says the racism is casual and forms the backdrop for witty dialogue.... which she reminds us is not a suitable excuse.
http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/the-lion-catches-up-the-talons-of-weng-chiang/
Also worth a read is Kate Orman's essay on this topic at http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/one-of-us-is-yellow-doctor-fu-manchu-and-the-talons-of-weng-chiang-guest-post-by-kate-orman/
This argument is long and many regard it as largely unresolved. Other DW episodes with racist components compared to this are no different. (Tomb, Abominable Snowmen, Crusade, Ark in S)
What's key here is how explicit it is.
I will not argue for "it is a product of it's time". 1977 was NOT a time when racism did not exist or people were unaware of it's wrongness.
Mainly it was a time when some people chose to ignore the issue.
As Kate O argues to condemn Talons... for racism is not to lose it. But recognising it for racism is the same as to recognise (and forgive) the silly giant rat.
This is silly racism. No one will be persuaded to treat people racistly because of this story. Compared to actual neo-nazism this is fine.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Shout out for Deep Roy. Kenyan born and not yet 20 yo when he appeared as Mr Sin, Deep is just 132cm tall and holds a unique quadrella.
He's been in:
- DW (Talons...)
- Star Wars (Return of the Jedi),
- Star Trek (2009, 2013, 2016) and
- Blakes 7 (4 times).
This story has a string of lasts.
- David Maloney (went on to produce Blake's 7),
- Roger Murray Leach (moved into other TV and films like Local Hero, Clockwork, A Fish Called Wanda),
- Philip Hinchcliffe (produced other TV: Target, Nancy Astor, The Gravy Train, McCallum, Rebus, Taggart),
- Chris Doy'ly John (PA and similar jobs back to The Ark),
- Michaeljohn Harris (Visual Effects back to The Tenth Planet).
In production terms this is a turning point for DW. From the next story Production Unit Manager is a guy called John Nathan-Turner.....
ABM Rating 3.20/4.00
LJM Rating 4.33/5.00
SPJ Rating 9.90/10
No. 15 (out of 91)
Link to Cumulative Rankings
Rankings Scoreboard
from http://www.pagefillers.com/dwrg/talo.htm
Elementary Holmes by Mike Morris 7/2/04
It's back, and this time it's got cliffhangers and numchucks. If there's one thing I could never get my head around it was this story's lack of availability in unedited format, and finally that's been rectified. Talons has arrived in a HMV near you.
There's been a fair bit of discussion about this story on this site lately, which - as someone has already said - seems to centre around whether or not it's a classic. I don't really know what the word "classic" denotes in Doctor Who, in fact (for reasons that Terrence Keenan articulated lately) I actually despise the word itself. And yet I think if there's one word that describes The Talons of Weng-Chiang it's "classic". It's practically an archetype. It's Hinchcliffe in microcosm, but more so it's Robert Holmes in microcosm. And many of the successful elements have recurred in Doctor Who over and over again - the setting, the villain, the stylised characters. Talons is a certain type of Doctor Who, and that type is probably Who's most popular format. Just like The Daemons summarises the Pertwee era, Talons summarises the Hinchcliffe era. It also summarises Robert Holmes' style of storytelling, which is maybe why it's so damn impressive.
What's interesting, though, is that I've agreed with most of the criticisms I've read, and yet it hasn't made me like Talons any less. In fact, I think much of what people list of negatives are actually what makes this story works so well. And so, I wouldn't mind a bit of a comeback here. I think that there are three main criticisms of the story, which I'll tackle in sequence.
Before that, I'll state my theory on why this is the story for many people. There have been many better scripts - in fact, in terms of newness, imagination, plotting and even dialogue, the script for Talons is probably the season's third or fourth best (this is a reflection on the quality of the season, but still). Bluntly, I think the thing that really hits the viewer is the production values.
Examining Phillip Hinchcliffe's impact on Doctor Who is actually quite difficult. The most obvious thing to say is that the production standards became extremely impressive - and one of the interesting things about DVD commentaries is that you can hear him stressing this often. Talons is maybe his greatest achievement as far as that's concerned. It looks gorgeous. Only the oft-derided Giant Rat lets the side down (and it's nowhere near as bad as it's made out to be), but everything else looks completely convincing, and this is a rare quality for Doctor Who. The numerous shots of the fog-bound streets and hansom cabs are the kind of thing one sees in a flagship BBC drama, and to see them in Doctor Who is astounding. This extends to little scenes, such as the tracking shot to the Missing Girls poster - direction is tight and the camerawork is flawless. These touches, such as the sequence where Leela sees Li-Hsen Chang abducting a girl in the morning, all add up. Were that sequence to be shot in studio everything would be closer, Leela would probably have to hide two feet away and it wouldn't be anywhere near as effective. Although we fans don't need good effects, it's thrilling to have them and makes the story more accessible for a wider audience. Even my mum liked The Talons of Weng Chiang, and that's saying something.
Okay, and now for those criticisms.
1. It's unoriginal.
Yes, it is; most of the ideas have been used in previous Robert Holmes stories. Holmes was, of course, a delightfully quirky writer, and there are many signature "Holmesian" ideas in Talons. We have a double-act, the most obvious Bob Holmes trait, but there's more. Robert Holmes characters tend to be larger-than-life and theatrical, verging on stereotypes in fact, and there's plenty of them. Holmes' dialogue is often stylised, and his love of words is obvious, so who else would you expect to write a line like "have you got the oopizootics coming on?" Holmes also loves "guard-dog" monsters (Giant Rats, the Shrivenzale, the Magma Beast, Kroll, and many more) and manipulated human agents of the main evil power. And Magnus Greel bears all the traits of the classic Holmes villain. He is deformed, he is desperate, he is close to death, he is imprisoned in a sense and his motivation is more about survival than conquest. Of course, he's also mad as a balloon. A quick glance through the great Holmes villains shows how common this thread is - Morbius, Sharaz Jek, Noah and The Master of The Deadly Assassin are all similar in many ways. By bringing all his fascinations into one story, Holmes produces an exemplar of his work.
So Talons is unoriginal, but not in a negative way. One shouldn't forget that most Hinchcliffe-era stories are unoriginal pastiches of B-movie sources, so to condemn Talons for this is to condemn the entire era.
This story is effectively Robert Holmes' masterwork, insofar as it encompasses all the most outstanding elements of his writing. Rather than Holmes running out of ideas and using up old, spent ones, it's more the case that he takes all the key elements of his storytelling and addresses them better than ever before. Rob Matthews makes this point above, in his usual perceptive way, and discusses the story largely in the general context of Holmes' writing. I think he's more or less right to say that Holmes' work is dark, meaty and very much centred on human desires. For many stories these elements are pulled in by other constraints, but in this story they are highly apparent. That he's done them before is irrelevant; what matters is that here they are done better than ever before.
The hunger-lust-desire subtext is particularly prevalent. I don't find this as uncomfortable as Rob does; I think abandoning oneself to instinct can be a liberating and healthy thing, and it's not like any characters are savage or irrational - apart from, of course, the main villain. However, that's really a question of taste. What's indisputable is how clear this strand is, another example of the supreme skill with which it's told.
2. Talons is padded.
No, no, no. The story's pace, in my opinion, is lovely. It isn't padded, it's slow, and they're two very different things. Excuse me as I climb onto a very familiar soapbox; I'll say again that, contrary to what a lot of Doctor Who fans assume, "slow" isn't automatically a bad quality. There's nothing wrong with a slow-paced narrative, and one thing that makes the story so enjoyable is the way it's not afraid to take a bit of time to examine its setting. It evokes Victorian London so well because it takes the time to do so; to show us Litefoot and Leela sitting down to dinner, to show Jago's introductory speech and the crowd's reaction, to give us the wonderfully corny Daisy sing-song, to showcase the beautifully rickety flytower interior, to basically meander around the setting that makes the story so successful.
This isn't padding. The very word "padding" annoys me. It should mean scenes that don't add anything to the story (i.e. pointless corridor chases), but is often taken to mean "scenes that aren't directly connected to the plot". Just because Doctor Who stories are generally based on economy and quickness doesn't mean slowness doesn't have value - in fact, given that it's so scarce in Doctor Who it's something to be treasured. There's far more to storytelling than just resolving the plot as quickly as possible, there's the creation of atmosphere, the exploration of themes, the development of characters. Rob Matthews points out above that "fans really enjoy the padding", but I don't think he goes far enough; that the time-out scenes aren't padding.
The Litefoot/Leela dinner scene is very important, for example. One reason that Magnus Greel is a genuinely frightening creation is that he's a total contrast to the mannered society around him, and even to Li-Hsen Chang's courteously menacing villain. This contrast is played out in a more benign fashion in Litefoot and Leela's dinner together, enlarging a theme which crops up elsewhere; the contrast between Mr Sin the on-stage comedy puppet (by definition a collection of mannerisms) and Mr Sin the savage killer, between the Doctor and the routine-bound policemen, and all sorts of references to politeness in the script. Related themes are theatricality and, particularly, concealment. Henry Gordon Jago is a combination of the two, with his extravagant character concealing his rather timid nature. The setting of the theatre itself expresses this as well, with the contrast between the (theatrical) public area and the dark, almost mysterious world backstage (which is why the flytower chase scene isn't at all gratuitous). Then there's Magnus Greel, concealing himself behind a mask; Li-Hsen Chang's inscrutable exterior; the rats and Greel's base, hiding beneath the city in the sewers. Sigmund Freud would get a book out of it. There isn't one scene in The Talons of Weng-Chiang that I'd want to remove. And more than any other it's this element that, to my mind, elevates this story from good to great.
3. The characters are cliched, and the story is a little racist.
Yes. The characters are all stereotypes, of course. One might including the setting here, which is basically a character in itself and fits in every Victorian cliche imaginable. But then, part of Holmes' genius is that he's not afraid of cliched, slightly unbelievable characters who talk and act like no-one in the world would. His characters are usually one-noters cranked up as far as they can go, and although that can backfire, in the hands of a good actor it's dynamite. Also, Holmes underscores them with such humour that it's hard not to be sucked in. The bottom line is that Doctor Who is melodrama, and the best characters will therefore be melodramatic. So yes, Litefoot is very much a jolly-good-chap Victorian gentleman, and Jago a sort PT Barnum-esque bag of theatrics, but they are what the story needs and they are played superbly.
This is where the story might be accused of racism, as the Chinese characters are all evil and about as cod-Chinese as cod-Chinese can be. Maybe this is questionable; but we shouldn't lose sight of that fact that the story is obviously a slice of escapist hokum and no-one in it is believable enough to be taken seriously (just as I find it funny, rather than offensive, that the story features a leprechaun-like Irishman replete with green jacket and woeful accent). Ultimately, The Talons of Weng-Chiang is like most Doctor Who of the era; it's brash, colourful, not too deep and there to entertain. That the characters can all be categorised in the same way isn't a weakness, it's a strength. It's especially fortunate that Leela was a companion (although the desire to do a "Pygmalion" story was apparently an idea Holmes and Hinchcliffe had knocked around for a while), as an everyday Sarah Jane Smith wouldn't have worked. She would have been too ordinary, too real, and would either have been drowned out by the surroundings or shown up their inherent silliness.
There are other reasons that these sterotypes work. First of all, they are all incredibly theatrical - and the setting's a theatre, so that's all right. Secondly, they are gradually undercut as the story goes on - as it gets more fantastic the characters become more real, anchoring the story in the same way. The "I'm not so bally brave" is just lovely, revealing Jago's exterior as the veneer we always knew it was. And so many scenes are simultaneously brashly comic and very touching, such as the scene where Greel chokes Jago - Litefoot's defence of a man he's barely met shows his integrity brilliantly, but there's still room for the little "I say, steady on," joke. And then there's Li-Hsen Chang's wonderful death scene. Again, it's the removal of the "sinister oriental" veneer that makes it so gorgeous, with Chang exposed a rather innocent man whose ambition stretches no further than a performance for Queen Victoria. And his final breath is marvellous - he genuinely seems on the edge of throwing up.
The only limiting factor amid all this genius is that Michael Spice, as Weng-Chiang, doesn't really have the acting chops to make him as frightening as he should be. Greel lacks the soft-spoken rationality of Sutekh that would make him believably god-like. Nor does he pull off the malevolence that Peter Pratt invested in the Master, and he doesn't quite manage the cold-blooded scientist either. Rather he's a bit of a ranting maniac who does far too much evil cackling. But the character's conception is brilliant, and he does so many nasty things that he remains frightening. The "sting of the scorpion" death of one of his stooges is really very nasty. Besides, Mr Sin is so new-shorts-please-matron scary that it really doesn't matter.
Overall; what a thing of beauty this is. It is a magnificent slice of Doctor Who that thoroughly deserves its place among the greats. It's a piece of storytelling that revels in escapism, which sucks the viewer in utterly and gets better every time it's watched. Something special.
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