*Disclaimer: Okay, so I did talk about the Orientalism and the yellowface in this review… at the very end. And I wrote some equivocating bullshit about how lots of shows still include Orientalist crap today. That wasn’t cool. No matter how much I love Leela in this serial, no matter how delightful Jago and Litefoot are, and no matter how much of a kick I get out of Four playing Sherlock Holmes, that doesn’t give me the right to make anything even close to a handwavy remark about the Orientalism. The crappy handling of the Asian storyline and the yellowface are bad, indisputably, and I should’ve been more forceful about that in my review.*
Oh my
goodness gracious. Leela tooling around
Victorian London! Four playing Sherlock
Holmes! Engaging supporting
characters! Giant rats! Cool time travel plot! What’s not to like? (Not much, but this serial isn’t perfect – we’ll get to that
later.) This is one of my
favorites: of the Leela seasons, of the
Four era, of classic Who, take your
pick.
The
Fourth Doctor takes Leela out for a night on old London town. Trading her in leather bikini for a
Victorian-era-acceptable dress, it’s only a matter of time before Leela finds a
murder to thwart, and she and the Doctor get themselves entangled in a tale of
intrigue involving mysterious disappearances from a local theatre. With some assists by an eccentric theatre
manager and a pragmatic undertaker, the game is afoot for our heroes.
First
things first: I love Leela unabashedly,
and everything about Leela in Victorian London is made of win. I love her complaining about being forced to
wear frippery, inventing battle stratagems involving 19th-century
golf clubs, pulling faces at the Doctor when he explains away her unfamiliarity
by claiming she’s a “savage” he’s “civilizing” (not entirely inaccurate, but
not polite, either,) and, of course, gnawing at an entire joint of ribs when
she’s having supper with Litefoot. Top notch
all around.
The
Doctor is no slouch either, naturally.
This is an old-fashioned Victorian mystery romp, and the Doctor takes to
it with relish. The deerstalker makes me
smile, and I love how quickly he starts making deductions and claiming all
sorts of acquaintance with Scotland Yard that he doesn’t actually have. His delight at the theatre, particularly his
impromptu magician-act audition, is great fun, too. Plus, I always like it when the show weaves
in a little future history that we’ve
never heard of but is common knowledge to the Doctor, and we get some of that
with the big mystery.
Like I
said, this story has great supporting characters in Jago and Litefoot. Kind but stuffy Litefoot pairs up spectacularly
with Leela (when he picks up that joint of ribs in solidarity with Leela, I bet
he considers that the most outrageous thing he’s ever done in his life,) and
dramatic Jago, with his strong Micawber vibes, is a lot of fun in his
scenes with the Doctor. Both characters
also provide great foils to each other; a lot of Who episodes tend to list in the rare scenes when the Doctor and
the companion(s) are both offscreen, but these two keep up the entertainment
value.
The one
monkey wrench in these otherwise-excellent works is the portrayal of the
Chinese gang working with the baddie. As
with most classic Who stories dealing
with non-European cultures, it’s not handled especially well. The mostly nameless, faceless extras are at
least cast with Asian actors, while the sinister Li H’sen Chang goes for the
full yellow face, complete with “slanted eyes” and a hokey accent. He also has this whole Orientalism thing
going on, enigmatic and vaguely mystical.
To be fair, though, Sherlock
wasn’t much more progressive when they made an episode featuring a Chinese gang
in 2010, and even more recently, the Japanese gang The Hand on Daredevil are less villains and more interchangeable
ninjas with no characterization. So,
yes, “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” is definitely racist, but we’ve had 39 years
to get better about that, and we’ve not come nearly as far as we should’ve.
No comments:
Post a Comment