It is no secret that in fictional terms, Victorian London has always been a favoured location of many a book, television series or serial, audio play or other various forms of media. With the exception of the Doctor Who series nowadays, it is surprising how little the show had visited the era before The Talons of Weng-Chiang came along. The Victorian Era had appeared in 1966's, The Evil of the Daleks, But Talons would be when it was allowed to appear in all its horse-drawn coaches' glory. This delay turned out to be a good thing though as there had never been a better suited story than this one for the Victorian setting. Talons appears to gleefully pillage the extraordinarily vast storeroom of Victorian tropes to create one of the darkest and moodiest stories the show had ever created. It is so stuffed with little atmospheric details, it instantly becomes a timeless classic. Unfortunately, nowadays the story is let down by a few slightly racist moments, otherwise it would truly excel.
And at six episodes, this story is quite a long one. The Doctor and Leela arrive in Victorian London dressed as tourists, wanting to see a show taking place at The Palace Theatre. Instead, they end up tracking down a serial killer who is somehow connected with the powerful Chinese magician, Li H'sen Chang and his disturbing ventriloquist doll, Mr. Sin. Joining the Doctor and Leela through this adventure are the theatre's owner, Henry Gordon Jago and the coroner, Professor George Litefoot. The killer is masquerading as the ancient Chinese god, Weng-Chiang, the god of abundance. His powers include the ability to create giant rats in the London sewers, granting Chang the ability to hypnotise people and Sin the ability to move and think on his own. But the killer isn't Weng-Chiang, but an Icelandic fugitive war criminal from the far future named Magnus Greel, who escaped his own time in a primitive time machine which resulted in him horribly disfigured and in constant need of fresh victims who can replenish his DNA. The only reason that Greel is pretending to be a god is because he crashed in China. His continual masquerade as Weng-Chiang is more of a way to keep Chang on his side than anything else who worships him as a god. But Greel's time-machine went missing and ended up in London, as a family heirloom to Litefoot, whose family had previously lived in China for decades befriending a number of local dignitaries. But the time-machine has become dangerously unstable over the years and now threatens to blow up London.

Doctor Who had used a few 'pseudo-historical' stories in the past, continuing on from the purely historical adventures used in the Hartnell era. These historical adventures had never been particularly popular so the 'pseudo-historical' stories had been utilised in the Troughton era, and it wasn't until The Time Warrior, the opening story to Jon Pertwee's final series that these kind of stories came back. Hinchcliffe and Holmes used these types of stories a lot more than they had been previously and Talons is the perfect example of what a truly brilliant pseudo-historical story should be. Talons weave's science fiction with Victorian-era pulp adventures and crime fiction. So really it isn't the Victorian London of history, but the Victorian London of story instead.

But Greel also bears a resemblance to the monster from The Brain of Morbius, a story from the series before 14. Morbius was another war criminal who turned into a horrific biological monster who is forced to trust his life in the hands of an underling he has grown to loathe. The resemblance between Greel and Morbius probably isn't by coincidence given that both stories were written by Robert Holmes, who had a tendency to play around with the same basic character design throughout his time on the show. Greel fulfils the Hinchcliffe characterisation of a 'broken boss'. The 'broken boss', is basically the foe with unlimited, almost god-like powers who only really wants to fix themselves from injuries they had sustained in an unseen story.

But because both the Doctor and Greel are both moody and powerful, it was necessary to keep them apart for as long as possible. This then means that the story relies more on its secondary characters - Leela, Litefoot and Jago, for the main bulk of the action. And I think that this is a good place to talk about the two other bumbling sidekicks the Doctor picks up in this story. Jago and Litefoot are a perfect, text book example of one of Holme's motifs, the comedy duo, who show up in virtually all of his stories. What is different about this pair however, is that they don't meet until half-way through the fifth episode as the pair are kept apart during the opening and middle acts playing the role of Dr. Watson to the Doctor's, Sherlock Holmes. It is a very clever way of bringing out Watson's bipolar persona that has accompanied him through popular culture. The main side of Watson is a competent physician and a friendly gentleman. But during the 1940s, there was a Watson who was a pompous, blithering fool. And with both Jago and Litefoot playing Watson, Talons gets to have both incarnations of Watson too. When the pair meet, they click instantly and make a great team, Jago has plenty of bluster but is fuelled by cowardice and is nicely balanced by Litefoot's more soft-spoken, level headed bravery which make the pair endearing. And they are heroes. Well, more like two overgrown boys playing at heroes. It is really enjoyable watching them get in over their heads when they spy on Greel. I would almost would have liked to see them being the main characters of this story, no matter what the Doctor was up to! And it would appear that the chemistry between the characters didn't go unnoticed by the production office as there was talk of a spin-off series thrown about for a little while. Of course, this didn't happen at the time, but we now have the popular Jago and Litefoot audio book series from Big Finish Productions for us to enjoy! And one could argue that they are the format for the Doctor's new Victorian allies, Madam Vastra and Jenny.

But the last homage is what doesn't show this story off in a good light but before I go into that, lets talk about that giant rat. It just looks bad. Everyone at the time, knew it looked bad but that was the problem with the behind the scenes of television at the time, show's like Doctor Who got virtually no budget and there moments in every serial of the time when this showed. It is so clearly a couple of guys in a giant rat costume and is a dismal failure of a special effect. And then, to make things worse, we get a perspective shot of a normal rat in a small set, totally ruining the cliff-hanger to episode 1.

But all that can be looked past given that Li H'sen Chang is the most important character in this story. He is the only character granted a really interesting character arc that changes him over the course of six episodes. And despite the actual actor being British, John Bennett plays Chang with intelligence and has an air of understated dignity, playing brilliantly off of Michael Spice's unhinged Greel. One moment that really stands out as a could-have-gone-one-way-or-the-other, is Chang's double entendre, he say's, 'one of us is yellow'. Had it been mishandled, it would have harmed the overall story but Bennett handles it perfectly. As Chang, he knows this how the people of the time saw him and he knows how to deal with the people of London everyday because of it. But the character of Li H'sen Chang is held back by the fact that he isn't played by an Asian actor and unfortunately, it is impossible to ignore.
But this review isn't going to conclude on that matter. It is really worth noting that Talons does more than just blending Victorian gothic, mystery and horror elements together. The horror elements are that which are most prevalent, given that during the Hinchcliffe time on the show, it was horror that was used to drive the narratives forward. All the outlandish elements of this story aren't just seemingly supernatural but the result of the technology that Chang brought through time with him. It is really evident that amongst the horror stories of the show that featured heavily in the seventies, that the production team still wanted to route the main plot in something resembling logical plausibility and to tell stories about things that could really be real. As much as an Icelandic war criminal traveling back to Victorian London to cause potentially untold havoc, could be real, I suppose...
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