"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Doctor Who: Series 14, Episodes 21-26 – “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” (1977)

*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.

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