Behind the Sofa - The Collaborative Doctor Who Blog

"Elementary, my dear Litefoot..."

I don't like Tom Baker.

There. I said it. And since the world hasn't imploded, I guess I'm not alone in feeling that two of his adventures is just plain not fair. Damn you Neil, you accursed cad!

And yet, considering I'm no Tom Baker fan, this was actually pretty good. Huzzah. I won't bother going through the plot, since this wee page here does that job for me. Instead, I'm going to have a look at the characters, who were all quite excellent.

Totally ignoring the Doctor (for the reason given in my first sentance) and moving onto Leela, she's a more then suitable companion for the Doctor that questioned whether he needed a companion at all. I believe the only time she screamed was when a giant creature-which-Indiana-Jones'-father-hates was attacking her leg, so that's definate plus points there. She's fiesty, eager to kill and delights in being shown a different time. Everything you could want from a companion, really.

Litefoot and Jago... what an interesting team they make. We only really saw them team up in about 1.5 episodes, but it was still entertaining and I can fully understand why a spin-off was considered. Seperately they're a good pair, with Litefoot being the more scientific and daring, and Jago being the bold but bit of a softy really. In some ways they're almost like a Sherlock and Holmes - no points for guessing which is which. I could quite happily watch them a great deal.

Li H'sen Chang... an excellent performance by John Bennett. If I hadn't known better I would have sworn he really was Chinese (a testament to how good his make-up is). He clearly loves playing the role and puts an intriguing twist to his character. You almost feel sorry for him when his character SPOILERsnuffs itEND SPOILER. Almost. Let's not forget he's a bad, bad man. Not as bad as his master, but still pretty nasty. Deserved his fate with the short-brown-furry-things-with-whiskers-and-a-tail -that-women-are-frightened-of.

Mr Sin... kinda hard to take him totally seriously, what with him reminding me of Nick-Nack, but he still managed to convey some small terror, so I guess it's not a total loss. Interesting origin - basically a pig gone mad - and it's a lovely way to explain why he/she/it hates humans. And he was hilarious as a puppet! Which begs the question... how the hell did Li H'sen manage to hold him with one arm? He must have weighed a ton...

Weng-Chiang... pretty menacing. Nice to meet a villain who doesn't kill and main for the hell of it. A more scientificly-sound version of a vampire, if you will. One suspects that if he hadn't arrived disfigured, he may well have become a peaceful member of society, but I guess that wouldn't have made for a good Doctor Who story. And rightly so. So he's killing innocent women to stay alive. Boo, hiss, etc. I actually felt sorry for his servant Li H'sen when this guy cruelly dismissed him, which is pretty damn impressive, so good show all round there.

So overall I enjoyed the thing, but am not really looking forward to next week's episode because it's also got Tom Baker in it. And, on a side note, I went through the entire review without mentioning ra-things-that-people-keep-as-pets-and-make-run-around-in-wheels -which-aren't-mice-or-gerbils. Ha!

And regarding my activities during the week-long break - I've got a list of proposed stuff which I'm going to post as a comment since I don't want to make the review too long. Kindly let me know your thoughts about it, and feel free to make suggestions. I value your input, or something.

The Once and Future Foe

The Talons of Weng-Chiang Part 6

You know those moments during DVD commentaries when the participants stop saying anything remotely interesting as they involuntarily get caught up in the action unfolding on screen? Well, that's how I felt watching this episode. Instead of making notes for jokes (I got as far as trionic soap for dirty fingernails) I was so transfixed that my initial review went something like this:

"That was bloomin' fantastic, guv'nor!"

I realised that probably wouldn't cut the mustard so I cobbled this together instead:

The 4th Doctor is never better than when he's going toe-to-toe with the main villain, especially when said villain is a deranged, egotistical maniac who loves the sound of his own voice. If we're really, really lucky we usually get a couple of minutes of this in every story, but in Talons we are treated to approximately 20 minutes of the Doctor haranguing the hell out of this hideous, hateful, hell-beast (Henry Gordon Jago has a lot to answer for).

The Doctor employs all of his usual tricks against the enemy, which makes him the unique hero he really is: jelly babies, name-calling, feigning ignorance, psychological baiting, grim warnings, and even a spot of chess. It's only when push literally comes to shove that he even considers putting it about a bit.

We also learn that Weng-Chiang is actually a war criminal from the 51st century called Magnus Greel (and with a surname like that he didn't have much of a choice, really). The Doctor kindly fills us in on Greel's fantastical backstory which takes place during World War 5, a conflict which saw the Philippines, Iceland and Australia kicking the shit out of each other. To be perfectly honest, the rest of the planet hardly noticed. Mr. Sin almost started World War 6 between The Shetland Islands and Venezuela a few years later, but, thankfully, his batteries ran out.

Greel is, in actual fact, the Butcher of Brisbane. A man so twisted and evil he actually tried to fuel his time travel experiments with Australians. There's a colonial metaphor in there somewhere, I'm sure. Or maybe Robert Holmes wrote this episode by sticking pins randomly into a map?

The problem is that Greel is too 'one-note'. He's constantly in a state of panic or distress, even when he's supposed to be gloating, and you just want to slip him a Valium. OK, so his face is melting off and that's enough to put anyone in a bad mood, but there simply isn't any shading to him. He's the quintessential pantomime villain who is upstaged by his own, far more interesting, henchmen.

A good example is when Greel really lets rip with the classic line 'Let the Talons of Weng-Chiang shred your fle-ESHHHHH!' He's got the spring onions and sliced cucumber all set and ready to go. The fiend.

And speaking of ham, Mr. Sin goes suddenly piggy on Greel's ass. That's what you get when you employ a malfunctioning toy as a henchman, I suppose. I wonder if he's still under warranty? And if I were Greel I'd work on my micro-management skills.

When the Doctor finally throws the madman into his own distillation chamber (who saw that one coming?) you can also see him thinking 'sod this for a game of soldiers!', and who can blame him?

The episode ends with a charming debate on the nature of tea, and then Leela and the Doctor head off for more adventures, leaving Jago and Litefoot to their spin-off negotiations. Meanwhile, off-screen, someone is eaten by a giant rat that everyone has conveniently forgotten about. Oh well, leave it to Sherlock to sort out.

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about episode six: the House of the Dragon was a production in-joke - it was actually the name of the Chinese restaurant where Hinchcliffe commissioned Holmes to write this story.

"I say, I say, I say..."

Part the Sixth.

This episode flashes by – it only seemed to have been on for about ten minutes before the final credits were rolling, and for once it wasn’t my DVD player going south again. No, it’s an enjoyable slice of Who – not perhaps quite as masterfully crafted as some of the previous episodes of this serial, but it brings everything to a pleasing conclusion and has some more great dialogue and just an all-round feeling of warmth and enthusiasm.

Admittedly the laser beams are a bit dodgy, and there’s a boom mic in shot for some of the final street scene, but again these are quibbles with the dressing of the thing, rather than with the substance of Holmes’s script and the performances. Although yet again I’m wondering just what exactly is a Jackanapes, anyway?

It’s intriguing that Mr Sin is the one who saves the day, in the end – the close-up of his eyes shows that he’s taking in what the Doctor’s saying about them all dying if Greel activates the Zigma Beam, and as soon as the Time Lord has explained this then the little pig brain has turned on his erstwhile master and gunned down him and his cabinet. You wonder how the Doctor would have coped if Sin hadn’t so suddenly and conveniently turned.

Anyone who utters a line like “The talons of Green will shred your fleeessshhh!” deserves to be lasered to death by his own little pygmy pig toy, mind you. Greel does speak a hell of a lot of crap throughout this episode, even for a Robert Holmes script, with all his nonsense pseudo-scientific gobbledegook about the Zigma beam and his time travel experiments.

There remains little else to tell. Jago and Litefoot survive to fight another day and have a fantastic story to tell their friends, and they all trot out for early morning muffins before the final trick of all, the magical disappearance of the TARDIS which everyone else is pretty much used to by now.

Fantastic stuff, great fun, and a classic example of the original series doing brilliantly.

You're Twisting my Muffin Man

The Talons of Weng-Chiang - Episode 6

I'd not picked up on this  before: Leela tells the Doctor that in a house of this size there must be protection. If she's looking for a prophylactic she might not be in luck, Litefoot doesn't seem like that short of chap. It's not long before Weng-Chiang appears and, well, it the same old story. He's like a badly melted, broken record. He's still after the soap-like Trionic Lattice key that'll get him into the Time Cabinet. But really it is a posh soap and he just needs to clean his dirty fingernails.

Jago and Litefoot, doing their best Beirut hostage impressions start talking about what might happen at dawn. Jago's absolutely caking it that the Chinese are about to do unspeakable things to their limp and still twitching corpses. Perhaps they could fight over his sideburns as wear them as trophies. Perhaps they're seen as a Chinese delicacy?

Weng-Chiang finally reveals himself as Magnus Greel, the infamous Minister of Justice, the Butcher of Brisbane. Now, having just witnessed the 20th anniversary of Neighbours I say that Magnus should be celebrated. Why? Cos whenever people left the cast they always seemed to go to Brissy and by the 51st century, if Neighbours is still running, and I've not seen an evidence to disabuse me of that hypothesis, Brissy must be choc full of ex-Neighbours characters. Bit of bad-soap character clensing might actually go down well but would have decimated the Panto business for years after. Actually, now here's a thing. Greel started rattling on about Time Agents earlier and he's from the same time period as Capt'n Jack. Coincidence? Probably. But like Bastic Bullets there's probably lots of milage in some fan-wank-fic about how Greel and Jack used to hang out before Greel turned bad and started to melt.

The Doctor starts wittering on about there being a one-eyed little idol, to the north of Milton Keynes. Or some such idiocy. That might be the next vehicle for the loathsome Cowell, "One-Eyed Idol", in which optically challenged people compete for an expensive medical procedure to restore 20-20 vision. You could have a vision-impaired Dalek fronting the whole shebang with a partially mutated Kate Thornton fronting the companion show over on ITV37. Hell! I think I might as well pitch that to the next alcohol-sodden entertainment exec next time I'm in Soho. Last time I was outside the Tiger Aspect studios it smelt as if the drains had gone, but it was probably just a direct result of The Catherine Tate Show.

Note to self: Stop listening to Charlotte Church, it's not helping. I think I need some therapy.

Where were we? Ah yes, the Doctor's turned into MacGuyver as he plots his escape using only the things around him. Wonder if Patty and Selma would covert locks of Tom Baker's hair with the same starry eyed insanity? Actually, there's the distinct possibility that there probably already exists a thin vein of fandom that does exactly that and goes around collecting the bodily clippings of our heros. It's certainly a rich and infinitely strange bunch of people. The Doctor's master plan is almost stumped by dodgy Lucifers and an obviously large number of retakes.

Greel start talking in riddles now, about preparing his two partridges. A-ha.

Leela's basically doing the Doctor Who equivalent of being tied to the train tracks ahead of an oncoming steam train. Our plucky heros are now pinned down behind a very flimsy table. Just why is Greel hiding too? Surely he has the upper hand here? He needn't continue hiding. Sin goes a little trigger happy and roasts Greel's chinese cohort. It's just like an episode of campy Batman where the story always climaxes in the villain's hideout and the enemy of the week sends in his lackeys first, usually with comedy names written on their tunics. Tang, Wang, Jang, Bang and Pang. Apologies, the opener for the latest series of Curb Your Enthusiasm is still fresh in my mind.

This is mutiny, Mr Sin! And it all ends in bread-based produce. Still a cracking story, marred only slightly by the printing error on the DVD. Doctor Who reaching the heights it always was capable of reaching (but more often than not, didn't).

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about part six: the dragon's head laser gun, that Mr Sin is seen operating towards the climax of the story, is now to be found in the club house of the Stoke Newington Municipal Golf Course.

'Beware the Eye of the Dragon'

Bless her; Leela certainly puts up a brave fight, both against the chloroform that Weng-Chiang is trying to impart on her and with the sight of that half-melted face. Sarah-Jane would have been away with the fairies by now…

Tom’s on fine form at the start of this episode - his deadpan reaction to the villain sitting in Leela’s place and resultant frivolity in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds being the very quintessence of the Doctor’s character. It’s this mix of the manic and the menacing that really sells his Doctor as the definitive article - and as I’ve said before, it’s the very tone that Baker brings to proceedings that makes this era so unforgettable. Things really never would be quite the same again following this episode.

Jago and Litefoot - charming and poignant though their banter is - have become pretty superfluous by this point. And ‘Talons’ 6 is largely concerned with acting out the traditional ‘Mexican stand-off’ so representative of a Hinchcliffe/Holmes production. There’s some real steel to the Doctor and ‘Weng-Chiang’s confrontations - because the villain with the dirty fingernails is in reality a time-travelling war criminal called Magnus Greel, whom the Doctor is familiar with having ‘walked with the Philippino army’ in the 51^st Century. As the first man to travel in time - and proponent of the dangerously unstable Zigma experiments - Greel is very much a Saddam Hussein of his day; ranting about how history is always written by the winning side and standing by his convictions to the bitter end. Apparently Holmes originally had the Master earmarked to be the real villain beneath the mask; and it’s to no detriment of the story that such a shocking - though, even then, clichéd - denouement is shelved in favour of something more original.

Unfortunately for the Doctor, he fails to heed Chang’s warning about ‘the eye of the Dragon’ and is soon sharing Jago and Litefoot’s cell with a couple of nubile lovelies, ready for Chang’s latest life-force top-up. Following some DIY bomb-making lessons (who needed the Internet to become a would-be terrorist in those days?) the Doctor is back in the nick of time to save Leela from Greel’s life-sucking machine (Leela having, not for the first time, decided to take on the villain mano-a-mano) Is it just me, or would she and Greel have made an ideal married couple - constantly bickering in a can’t-live-with, can’t-live-without kinda way? And why doesn’t Greel insist on first stripping Leela to her flowery undergarments this time before inflicting the machine on her (but then you’ve already heard enough from me about that particular obsession, haven’t you?)

But just as Greel sees the time cabinet-aided end to his suffering in sight, that pesky homunculus Mr Sin goes all trigger-happy, resulting in the former Weng-Chiang literally falling to pieces at the hands of his own devilish machine. And following some rather frenetic midget-hurling from the Doctor, everything’s resolved and it’s muffins all round. If only a typical episode of Eastenders ended so happily-ever-after…

And you can’t help agreeing with the Doctor’s parting words to Litefoot - ‘It’s been such fun’ - as the time-travellers head off to their 1977 summer break. Because these last six episodes really have been Doctor Who at its very height: atmospheric, scary and with a leading man who was never better, whether it be before or after this watershed story. And a perfect end to three faultless years of halcyon Who.

China Crisis

The Talons of Weng-Chiang Part 5

Mr. Sin is revealed to be nothing less than the fabled Peking Homunculus™: an augmented toy pig from the future (bacon not included)! We're firmly in Chucky territory now, and it's nice to be treated to a plot device that another writer will steal later on. Let's see how Hinchcliffe and Holmes like them apples!

Weng-Chiang has the mother of all dickie-fits as he suddenly realises (you won't believe this next bit) that he's successfully stolen the time cabinet BUT the key that was already in his possession has been left behind in the confusion of their recent move! Chiang is livid and he decides to punish one of his minions:

Chiang: You know the penalty for failing me?
Lee: A P45 and no back-pay?
Chiang: Muwhahahaha! Oh.

But Chiang's really, really pissed and a poor reference just isn't going to cut it this time - it's time to employ the gobstoppers of doom!

Meanwhile, Jago is planning for the inevitable tours of the theatre's basement; there's nothing like some mutilated prostitutes for drumming up some trade. He also seems to have forgotten that poor Casey is dead as he yaks to himself about his grand schemes, but he does stumble across the key to the time cabinet and this leads to the moment that we've all been waiting for.

Forget Torchwood, the Jago and Litefoot spin-off would have been fantastic! Tachyon TV even managed to its hands on the original pitch (with apologies to MST3K):

Robert Holmes: So, Jago and Litefoot: The Series -
Head of Drama: The name goes. Never liked the name. It's banal.
RH: But if you're hoping to connect the new series with the original -
HoD: We need something like Sparky and the Lieutenant or Night Mistress. Something that will really seduce people. We can work on it.
RH: OK. So you've got Professor Litefoot and he roams through Victorian London with his little cowardly helper, Jago, and they get into all kind of scrapes against the chinks and the paddies and the blacks -
HoD: Birmingham
RH: What?
HoD: Birmingham, Coventry, Weston Super Mare! No, I like Birmingham. You like Birmingham? It's your show.
RH: Well, to me London is the essence -
HoD: Liverpool. We'll do it in Liverpool.
RH: Well, I suppose if you actually film it in Liverpool -
HoD: No, no, no. We'll film it in Cardiff. Have to.

It's a shame that nothing came of The Amazing Adventures of Jago and Litefoot. Oh, I can see the flaw now - they're rubbish. Each episode would start with them being caught by the villain of the week and... well, where can you possibly go from there? Unless, like Hong-Kong Phooey, Mrs Hudson was the brains of the operation.

Meanwhile, in one of the scabbier parts of London, the Doctor and Leela infiltrate the Victorian equivalent of a crack house. First prostitutes and now this! Mary Whitehouse must have been chewing her own legs off a this point.

And speaking of lacerated limbs, Chang isn't dead! Hurrah! But he's really pissed off (and as stoned as a herring). Having decided that suicide isn't painless after all, he quickly turns on his old boss and spills the beans to the Doctor. Unfortunately, he doesn't get very far and he succumbs to the hoary old cliche of croaking just as he's about to spill the most important bean of all. If he'd kept the poetic eulogising in check this mystery could have been wrapped up in no time at all.

The Doctor and Leela head back to the Professor's house just in time to bump into Chiang, who has finally realised that if something evil is really worth doing then you'd best do it yourself. However, instead of keeping his eye on the prize, he can't help but indulge in a quick fondle with Leela and before you can say 'velcro' -

Bloomin' heck! It's Sharaz Jek!

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about part five: if you listen really carefully during the scene in the opium den you can hear Melyvn Bragg blowing his nose.

"I'm a tiger when my gander's up!"

Part the Fifth.

Litefoot is, of course, still alive and well and coming back to fight another day, although you have to wonder whether his explanation that “dozens” of Chinese attacked him isn’t a bit of an exaggeration. After all, Weng-Chiang only seems to have about six followers back at headquarters. Perhaps, in the best Doctor Who tradition, the rest of them are all staying in the next room.

One wonders why Mr Sin, or to give him his full title as revealed here “The Peking Homunculus”, couldn’t have taken Litefoot all on his own without needing others to burst in and give the Professor a good kicking too. Then again, I suppose he would hardly have been able to carry that cabinet out to the carriage all by himself. Speaking of Sin, does anybody else find the Doctor’s explanations of his origins a bit odd? Advanced technology being tied in with the cerebral cortex of a pig is a pleasingly grotesque image – and one echoed twenty-eight years later in Aliens of London – but the Doctor claims that the pig part became dominant, creating a creature that “revels in carnage.” Excuse me? Pigs notorious serial killers now, are they? Perhaps they undergo some drastic change in their nature by the 51^st century. Must be all that molesting they suffer at the hands of randy Time Agents by then.

Mr Sin’s owner, Weng-Chiang himself, seems to be indulging in a bit of a lunatic puppet act with the creature when he asks him at a later point “Did you hear that Mr Sin?” Bizarre. He’s also still absolutely shocking in the field of employee relations, as Slartibartfast might say, as no sooner has he managed to replace former right-hand man Chang with one-episode-wonder Lee (hmmm, did Philip Segal ever see this story, do you think?), then he’s gone and killed him off with more of that scorpion venom. He really needs to go on some sort of management training course, perhaps one of those with the amusing John Cleese videos.

Chang himself is rather surprisingly still alive, albeit with a leg gnawed off by the giant rats. The scenes of him dying and happily puffing on an opium pipe to dull the pain, and the explicit outlining of all this, is really rather shocking in its way, and you wonder why more of a fuss doesn’t seem to have been made about it at the time. Certainly you can’t really imagine the current series getting away with this – although then again you could probably say that of several elements in Talons, not least all the colourful stereotypes on display! Chang’s reflections as he dies are touching, particularly his now lost dreams of performing for the Queen at Buckingham Palace, which he was due to do next month. He really did care about that magic act after all.

Jago and Litefoot finally get to team up in this episode, and you can see why Robert Holmes was keen on the idea of the spin-off. Did he ever get around to writing a script for them? I’m sure I heard that he did pen one when trying to pitch the idea, but that might be hearsay. Answers on a postcard please. In any case, you do have to wonder how long such a venture could have lasted before it ran out of steam, although it is a shame we never got a return visit from the Doctor to this time and place so he could bump into them again. (And no, I’m not counting The Bodysnatchers). Leela has less to do in this episode, although she does get a great – and very self-aware, for the series – line: “You ask me so that you can tell me,” she points out to the Doctor, neatly summing up one of the main roles of any Doctor Who companion.

As we come to an end, again as with the unconvincing monster costume, Robert Holmes seems to be doing scenes from The Caves of Androzani seven years early, as the mask is ripped from the disfigured villain’s face. The cliffhanger works extremely well this time around, with the brief glimpse we’re given of Weng-Chiang’s face being enough to make you think you’ve seen something horrific, but not lingered on long enough to be able to pick out any detail, and more importantly any faults, before the end credits come crashing in. It also, of course, leaves you wanting to see more, and I’m sure the vast majority of those watching back in 1977 were very eager indeed to tune in next week and see the full detail of what lay behind the mask…

Look Who's Oinking

The Talons of Weng-Chiang - Episode 5

There's plum sauce everywhere as the Doctor and Leela arrive at Litefoot's house well outside the nick of time. Litefoot's been knocked up and the cabinet is nowhere to be seen. The Doctor smells a rat. And given the unconvincing nature of the damn thing it's probably quite some stench. But then he starts putting the pieces of this Chinese puzzle together and deduces that the midget who attacked Litefoot is actually from the year 5000 and is called the Peking Homunculus. Where on earth did Holmes (Robert) pull that one from?

The Peking Homunculus - part toy - part Chinese takeaway menu number 37. A play thing. This Christmas' must have toy. A series of magnetic fields, on a printed circuit operating on a small computer with one organic component - the cerebral cortex of a pig. Batteries not included, obviously. Why did they feel the need to ram the cerebral cortex of a pig in there? It comes from the year 5000, so surely they've got something more sophisticated by way of artificial intelligence that would mean they didn't have to loiter outside abattoirs to get their hands on some pig innards? Or perhaps they were just that kind of scientist. Still, at least it explains why he keeps oinking. The swinish instinct has taken over. Just where would the Peking Homunculus come in a pack of Who Top Trumps? Somewhere between The Kandyman and a Nimon? We might never know. How many people lay awake at night trying to workout an ordering for Who monsters? Could Mr Sin have an Orgron? Could a Drashig pulp a Kroton? The possibilities are infinite.

Whilst we're all salivating over a pack of Who Top Trumps, Weng-Chiang's getting antsy, and just a little Lady Bracknell, and is looking for a lost handbag. He rewards the stupidity of his oriental minions by offering them the sweet of a thousand toothaches. One bite and it instantly gives you cavities so large that they swallow you up. He could keep dental practices in filling work for decades

Litefoot then indulges the Doctor in his detailed knowledge of the dodgier places of Victorian London. He's a sly one, I bet he's been around the houses a few times himself. The one thing that amazed me is that it's not until half way through this episode that Jago and Litefoot meet. I could have sworn it was much, much earlier that they teamed up. But they waste no time getting down to business and jamming themselves into a Dumb Waiter for a little fumble in the dark.

Chang's re-appearance from the sewers is a little of a surprise. And boy he could do with taking more care of his skin. But he soon ends up doped out of his tiny mind in an opium den, sucking on what appears to be a school recorder. You know the type, the one you faked playing in music classes by holding it low enough so that the holes over which your fingers were supposed to dance, musically, were hidden beneath the lip of the desk. He's also lost a leg. A bit careless, but I guess the drugs are working.

And then the traditional Bobby Holmes "rip the mask from the grotesquely deformed mad man" scene. Weng-Chiang looks like a man slowly returning to a gelatinous state. Pretty effective make up job too.

The Bumper Book of Made-Up Doctor Who Facts has this to say about part five: The part of Mr Sin was recast at the very last minute as the original actor contracted, Little Jimmy Krankie, was unable to take the role after becoming stuck in her husband.

'I may have had a bang on the head, but this is a dashed queer story'

…and you didn’t even get to see the giant rat, Professor.

That has to be one of Who’s shortest ever cliff-hanger reprises, hasn’t it? As ‘Weng-Chiang’ and Mr Sin make their laughing way from Litefoot’s house (time cabinet well and truly in hand) the Doctor and Leela find the Professor in his usual position: lying on the floor, sporting a Chinese-inflicted bruise. Even Sarah-Jane didn’t get overcome by the villains of the week that often, surely.

But as the saying goes, it’s all ‘elementary, my dear Litefoot’ (or should that be alimentary, following episode two’s discourse on table manners between the Professor and Leela?). And it’s fair to say that Tom’s on the exposition ball, as he quickly deduces the inside man was Mr Sin (or rather the ‘Peking Homunculus’, some cross between a robot and a pig’s spine that almost caused the sixth World War around the year 5000...apparently.) It’s another example of how this story peels the layers off its respective villains one at a time; with each of their supernatural facades revealing a scientific underbelly.

Meanwhile, the yet-to-be fully-peeled ‘Weng-Chiang‘ is busy settling into his new, rather more esoteric hideout; already planning more than a few decorative changes starting with the time cabinet. Sadly, however, the quality of staff following Li H’sen’s sudden departure have not improved; with the lugubrious Lee becoming the latest to feel the wrath of Weng-Chiang’s Alan Sugar-style management methods. Played by the rather implausibly named ‘Tony Then’, Lee takes his punishment like any good down-trodden peasant, cracking down on ‘the sting of the scorpion’ as though he’s just broken a filling (but then if you’re a peasant the expense of replacing such things must make you crave suicide, given the lack of decent NHS care these days). And so Tony Then ends up just like his name: an embarrassing example of the past-tense.

Back at the theatre Jago (whilst not busy thinking of the ‘Alton Towers’ style theme-park he’s going to make out of the Palace’s grisly goings-on) has found a rather handily discarded carpet bag, containing no end of items from the BBC special effects workshop (think Matt Irvine’s life in microcosm). And like the budding detective that he’ll never be, he’s quickly hot-footing it to Litefoot’s residence, first mistaking the Professor for his own servant, and then extolling him with a cavalcade of Leonard Sachs dialogue. As a result, the ‘peerless premier professor of pathology’ suggests they help out the absent Doctor with a quick visit to the theatre, where no doubt the ‘blaggard’ in question will be too tempted not to return. But so clueless are the pair that it’s not long before Chinese ruffians are once again beating them up, leaving the viewer wondering how such a duo ever attracted thoughts of their own spin-off show (and besides, who’d ever commission a Doctor Who spin-off, anyway?)

Back with the Doctor and Leela once more, and their search for the source of the laundry thieves has brought them to a positive hive of scum and villainy; also know as the local launderette (Pauline Fowler’s presence, unknown). There the somehow rat-immune Chang is on his death-bunk, having apparently survived death-by-Giant-Rat with only a missing leg to show for it. Drunk on the opium pipe he’s smoking (prostitution, drugs…will the level of debauchery in this story ever end?) Chang gives arguably one of the series’ most lyrical death scenes, hallucinating of his forefathers coming to greet him and lamenting the fact that - next month - his show would have attracted the attention of no less than Queen Victoria herself. Your really do feel for Chang in this scene, with the late John Bennett’s ability to elicit great pity in the otherwise ruthlessly sinister master magician showcasing great skill behind those (somewhat misguided) prosthetic eyes.

And as we head to the climax, Jago and Litefoot have managed to escape their prison with the aid of a dumb waiter (no, not Fawlty Towers’ Manuel) only to be inevitably captured again; and the Doctor and Leela have returned to Litefoot’s to gather weapons for the final battle ahead. But while Leela is mistaking a golf club for some kind of Victorian spear, look at just who’s poking his cowled head through the curtains - yes, it’s Weng-Chiang, back for his trionic lattice. As he and Leela struggle, she finally manages to pull the mask away to see the face of the enemy, only to find that it’s a dry-run for later Holmes villain Sharaz Jek.

But I’m sure that it’s a face that still gave me the willies back in 1977!

Footsteps in the Fog

Part the Fourth.

Why does the rat sound like a mad parrot? I’m sure rats don’t actually sound like that. Mind you, if you did amplify a rat’s squeak in an attempt to replicate what it may sound like were it to be enlarged to fifty times its regular size, it would probably sound faintly pathetic, so it’s probably for the best they just made up a completely random noise for it. Not that anything much about the rest of the idea and execution of the rat can be said to be for the best, however.

Just how does Leela managed to get changes so quickly? Mrs Hudson seems to have managed to get her out of that wet underwear and into her new togs in about thirty seconds flat. Most impressive. Perhaps more notable, however, is the Doctor’s intervening line in response to Litefoot’s assertion that “clothes matter to women.” “They do?” the Doctor replies, in apparent or humorously feigned ignorance of the fact. The “you’re a very beautiful woman… probably,” line in City of Death is often remarked upon, and they come out of a very similar viewpoint and performance, which shows a nice piece of consistency across the Fourth Doctor’s character.

Just why is Leela so excited about the prospect of going to the theatre, however? At the beginning of the serial she didn’t even know what the theatre was, so she must have been brought up to speed very quickly somewhere along the line. Everything seems to be happening to her terribly quickly in this story. It must be such a disappointment.

Holmes keeps giving Chang very good dialogue, none more so than during his performance scenes here as his characters spars with the Doctor. “Chang shoot fifteen peasants learning this trick,” is a nice little gem, but particularly noteworthy perhaps is the well-taken “One of us is yellow,” line. Admittedly it might seem rather more authentic were it actually played by a Chinese actor, but you can’t have everything in life.

Chang is increasingly beginning to come across as a sympathetic, and perhaps rather pathetic figure here, rather than the apparently obvious villain of the earlier episodes. His desperate attempts to get back into Weng-Chiang’s good books by killing the Doctor, and his story of how he was a “simple peasant” who took in the ravaged time traveller thinking he was a God is affecting. He might actually be the most well-rounded henchman in the show’s history, and he does actually seem to care about his magic tricks as well, being shocked and perhaps a little hurt when the dead Casey turns up in his box of knives rather than his assistant.

It’s an odd sort of a cliffhanger to this episode, in Doctor Who terms. Usually episodes end – unless they’re the final one, of course – with a specific character under threat of injury or death, but the climax here is a far more general threat, Weng-Chiang riding off in his carriage with the recaptured Time Cabinet, his funny little pig friend in tow. And again we’re not left with any indication as to whether Litefoot is alive or dead, although you’d have to suspect he’s probably still alive. Even if in reality being knocked out twice in such a short space of time can’t be all that good for you.