Episode #91 : The Talons of Weng-Chiang

Leela: What's the tribe here?

The Doctor: Cockneys!

Episode 91:   The Talons of Weng-Chiang.
Companions: 4th Doctor and Leela.
Air Date:       Six episodes. 26th February to 2nd April 1977.

The Fourth Doctor brings Leela to Victorian London to see how her ancestors lived, but is rapidly drawn into a fiendish plot involving Chinese Tongs, disappearing women, an Oriental stage magician, a murderous ventriloquist's dummy and giant rats in the sewers.

The adventures of the 4th Doctor come back to their horror roots with another classic adventure in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. The setting for this tale of mystery and terror is the fog wrapped streets of London of the 1890's. The atmosphere for this story has been piled on thick and it serves to present a really top notch tale.

The story has it's science fiction elements as always. In this case the villain posing as the Chinese god Weng-Chiang (A made up deity I believe) is a renegade and war criminal from the future, the 51st century to be exact. We get a little bit of details about that time in this story, specifically the Doctor mentions that the Earth is in a grip of an ice age and the villainous Greel speaks about Time Agents (of which future companion Jack Harkness was once a member as we know) looking for him. We know about the ice age in the future from The Ice Warriors. It's nice to see some continuity linking from the past and the future of the show.

While the story itself is excellent the episode has some issues. My main grumble is the length of it. At six parts it is close to a three hour story and that is just too long even at the time when production and scripts were much better than the dawn of the series. The second is some truly poor effects. A couple of times we see an experiment of Greel's, a giant rat which hunts the sewers under London. The giant rat is simply a man in an oversized and painfully obvious rat costume. It is so bad as to be laughable.

This story has garnered controversy for some of its Asian roles being played by white actors in "yellowface", especially John Bennett as Chang. Most of this controversy is in the US and Canada, where the use of yellowface fell out of practice earlier than it did in the UK. Indeed, TV Ontario refused to air it after consulting with local Chinese-Canadian groups, and multiple stations in the US and Canada also declined to air it.