Doctor Who/Recap/S14/E06 The Talons of Weng Chiang
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"Doctor, you make me wear strange clothes, you tell me nothing: you are trying to annoy me."
—Leela
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Doctor Who goes all Sherlock Holmes-Meets-Hammer Horror in this tale set in Victorian London. Police pathologist Professor Litefoot is investigating a body found floating in the Thames, and, with help from the Doctor, determines that hairs found on the body come from a giant rat.
Moving into the sewers to investigate, the Doctor, Leela and Litefoot discover giant rats on the loose and follow the trail to the Palace Theatre. Stage magician Li H'sen Chang has been kidnapping young girls for his master, the ancient Chinese god Weng-Chiang - in reality the 51st century war criminal Magnus Greel, who feeds on the girls' lifeforce to stabilise his molecular structure, which was ravaged by the trip through time.
Greel's "Time Cabinet" was lost in London and has been found by Litefoot, so Greel sends Chang's ventriloquist's doll, "Mr Sin" - a computerised homonculus with a pig's brain - to infiltrate Litefoot's house and retrieve it. Mr Sin succeeds, but the Doctor and friends manage to intervene before Greel can escape. He falls into his own lifeforce-extracting machine and is disintegrated, before the Doctor manages to deactivate Mr Sin.
The characters of Jago and Litefoot, along with a few others from the serial, now have their own Big Finish spinoff.
Watch it here
Tropes
- Alliteration: As many of Jago's lines as he can possibly manage.
- Absurdly Spacious Sewer
- Affably Evil: Li H'sen Chang.
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Mister Sin.
- All Asians Are Alike: Chang sarcastically says, "I understand we all look alike," when the Doctor asks if they've met before.
- BFG: Lightfoot's elephant gun is the period equivalent.
- Black Comedy: On being introduced to Li H'sen Chang the Doctor asks to see a trick. Tong member promptly drops dead from the suicide pill. The Doctor applauds.
- The Butcher (of Brisbane): Magnus Greel.
- Call Back: A rather sneaky one: The Doctor mentions he hasn't been to China for about 400 years.
- Changed My Jumper: When the TARDIS first materializes, Leela steps out complaining about having to wear appropriate clothes. The Doctor's voice from inside the TARDIS tells her, "You can't go around Victorian London in skins, you'd frighten the horses." Then he himself emerges in the stereotypical Sherlock Holmes outfit -- only more colorful -- and says, "We don't want to be conspicuous, do we?"
- Chinese Launderer
- Concealment Equals Cover: A flimsy wooden table is enough to shield the protagonists from Fricking Laser Beams.
- Cyanide Pill: Li H'sen Chang slips a scorpion venom pill to a member of the Black Scorpion Tong who has been captured by the police, who then commits suicide to avoid revealing anything under interrogation.
- Demonic Dummy: Mister Sin is presumed to be one at the beginning of the serial.
- Disappearing Box: Li H'sen Chang uses this in his act.
- Disposable Sex Worker/Disposable Vagrant: Greel identifies his victims as "a few contemptible slatterns who will never be missed"; Chang protests that they are being missed and it's getting people's attention.
- Evil Laugh: Greel gets an amazing one in the episode 4 cliffhanger.
- Facing the Bullets One-Liner: Leela's response to an imminent and agonizing death at the hands of Magnus Greel shows a marked difference in attitude to that of previous female companions.
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"When we are both in the Great Hereafter, I will hunt you down, Bent-Face! And put you through my agonies a thousand times!" |
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- Filipinos With Firearms: Apparently the Philippines is a world power in the 51st century as the Doctor mentions marching with the Filipino Army as they advanced on a Supreme Alliance stronghold of Reykjavik. This is endlessly amusing to the few Filipinos who've heard about this episode (or this show, for that matter).
- Getting Crap Past the Radar—Leela has a Wet Sari Scene moment just after the giant rat sequence that apparently has not been edited out in over 30 years...
- God Guise: Magnus Greel posing as Weng-Chiang, though he doesn't try to hide his identify from Chang to whom it makes no difference anyway, as Greel has raised him up from his humble life as a peasant to a man who performs before royalty.
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Doctor: "You know he's not a god, don't you?" |
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- Hoist by His Own Petard: Greel ends up killed by his own life-extraction chamber.
- Instant Sedation: Possible subversion - the title villain uses an unspecified knockout drug on a cloth to capture Leela, and she goes down fast ... but she has enough time to tear the villain's mask off.
- Given the time period, it was probably either chloroform or ether.
- In the Past Everyone Will Be Famous: Not in the events of the story, but the Doctor mentions having shared a meal with the Venerable Bede.
- Jack the Ripoff: The disappearances and murder of several women in Whitechapel? You guessed it. The original draft had the Doctor chasing Jack the Ripper.
- Large Ham: MAGNUS GREEL!!!!!
- Magicians Are Wizards: Li H'sen Chang is a Stage Magician...and a bit more, with the technology given to him by his master.
- Mind Control
- Nice Hat: The Doctor, Leela, Chang's thugs, and Greel each have one; Chang has two.
- Opium Den
- Pig Man: the Peking Homunculus is a murderous midget robot made from the cerebral cortex of a pig.
- Raised by Natives: The Doctor's cover story for Leela.
- Rodents of Unusual Size: The rat.
- See You in Hell
- Shout-Out: To The Importance of Being Earnest ("A hatbox?").
- Slurpasaur: That giant rat is played, at least in part, by a perfectly normal rat in a model sewer.
- Spin-Off: Jago & Litefoot were so popular that a spinoff was briefly discussed; 30 years later, Big Finish gave them their own story and, in 2010, their own series.
- Title Drop
- Those Two Guys: Jago & Litefoot.
- The Triads and the Tongs: Greel's mooks are members of the Tong of the Black Scorpion.
- Victorian London
- What Could Have Been: Procuder Philip Hinchcliffe revealed that this serial was originally planned to be a Master story
- World War III: Greel is described as having almost caused World War Six
- The X of Y
- Yellowface
- Yellow Peril
- You Have Failed Me...
- You Look Familiar: John "General Finch" Bennett returns as Li H'sen Chang.
- You Rebel Scum: Magnus Greel repeatedly refers to his Tong hatchetmen mooks as "opium-addicted scum".