Mr. Sin, the Peking homunculus with the modified brain of a pig, sits enthroned in the clever Victorian pulp pastiche “The Talons of Weng-Chiang.”
positive light, being either criminals, superstitious lackeys or both. On top of this, due to the lack of Chinese performers available to the BBC at the time, the pivotal role of Li H’sen Chang is played by a Caucasian in full-blown Fu Manchu mode. Bennett is a fine actor, but his performance, while effectively sinister (helped by the fact that the par- tial mask he wears does not allow him to blink), is likely to grate on viewers of Chinese descent, es- pecially when he delivers an intentionally ironic line like “One of us is yellow.” There are also instances of spoken words and writing that are passed off as Chinese, but are not. Complaints from the Chi- nese-Canadian community did cause this serial to be barred from rebroadcast after its initial appear- ance on public television in Ontario. This kind of backlash goes unmentioned, but the fact that the show ran into trouble with the British censor in regards to an earlier VHS release, due to the use of nunchakus in one fight scene, is mentioned. There are a few other surprises to be found in the special features. It’s alarming to see the pro- duction notes matter-of-factly referring to male crew members who “took a ‘hands-on’ approach
to the actresses” and often groped Ms. Jameson on set (how did the BBC’s lawyers let that get through?), and even moreso to hear writer Terrance Dicks refer to TEN LITTLE INDIANS by its original title (TEN LITTLE NIGGERS) without apol- ogy in the audio commentary that accompanies “Horror of Fang Rock.”
Moving on to that serial, this comparison be- tween Agatha Christie’s famous story and DOC- TOR WHO Story 92 is not entirely apt. In the case of the DOCTOR WHO serial, there is no mystery as to what is happening, except from the point of view of the characters who are being killed off one by one. There are, however, marked similarities to John Carpenter’s THE THING, made five years later. In both, a small group of bickering people stranded in an isolated outpost are stalked and killed by a crash-landed alien that can change shape to look like its victims. In this case, the iso- lated outpost is a lighthouse on Fang Rock just prior to 1910; the Doctor and Leela arrive shortly after the alien does.
“Talons” is the swan song of a successful pro- ducer, carefully crafted with a higher budget than
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