And I’m the sponsor for that badge so I get to decide the criteria, right? Right? 
/hj
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@TrocaNero It’s true you know!
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So, obviously this story is a sensitive issue, and one is right to say that the racism is intrinsic to the story. The yellowface is only the tip of the iceberg of this story’s problems. The Hinchcliffe era is of course known for doing a Doctor Who type of sci-fi take on old horror films, and in this case they’re doing Fu Manchu, which was a story made entirely out of the “yellow panic” of the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries rooted in imperialism, and in the time of the films, the Cold War era red scare after China turned communist. What has been said about the racism being inseparable from the story is absolutely correct.
Now, as a white dude from the United States who’s never experienced racism firsthand in his life, I also understand it’s a lot easier for me to acknowledge the numerous problems with the story and look past them to enjoy other aspects of it. It’s obviously not so easy for many other people to do similar, especially if they are more directly familiar with racism, and especially if they are of Chinese or other East Asian descent. However, I am one of those who still finds a lot to enjoy about this story.
All of the Victorian, Sherlock Holmesy, Jack the Ripper kinds of vibes are great. The sets, locations, the costume designs, the atmosphere, the direction, it’s just such a well put together story. Baker and Jameson are at the top of their game, the Doctor and Leela are excellent in this. Jago and Litefoot I think are some of the best side characters this show has ever had, even if they spend so little time together. They are so funny with that Holmes dialogue, my favorite is Litefoot trying to be a polite gentleman while Leela doesn’t know the customs and norms of the time and place, while humoring her and making her feel welcome. I like the mystery, it’s all very tense and exciting seeing how it all plays out. And despite the issues of his casting and of course the accent and make-up, I think John Bennett actually gives a very good, menacing, and then in the end sympathetic performance as Li H’sen Chang. Greel I think is another great absolutely batshit mad scientist villain.
I think if I were to try to “fix” this story, I would make it a more obvious criticism of Victorian attitudes towards race, and a criticism through parody of the whole Fu Manchu thing. Make it an obvious take on why those kinds of films are wrong. I’d have the Doctor more directly calling out these kinds of attitudes (the “Chinese ruffians” line reads as sarcastic to me, and probably the only jab at those attitudes in the whole story) more often. Like when Leela, going by perception of someone’s complexion, calling him a “yellow man,” maybe the Doctor should have told her not to say things like that. And the list could go on. And another big thing, Li H’sen Chang would have been a stage name for a racist white performer dressing up and doing the accent as a shtick, him making fun of Chinese people with stereotypes and all that, and working with Greel not out of worshipping him as a false god, but motivated by his own racism. And of course there would need to be tweaks to how that character’s story went. I think there also would need to be at least one, but ideally more than one Chinese character who is good and helping our heroes.
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Point taken. It’s not a true equivalency. There’s a correlation for me in having something I enjoyed tarnished by something I learned later, but yeah, it’s not entirely the same thing. I can watch Firefly and enjoy the heck out of it and try not to think of Whedon’s reputation, but I don’t think I could watch Talons without being aware of what’s right in front of my eyes.
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Re: the badge, I will see what I can do!
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I haven’t seen talons in a bit but isn’t that badge for stories set in China? Isn’t talons exclusively set in England? Like I don’t recall even a quick pop into China for 7 seconds than leaving, so genuinely why is it included in a set in China badge? Just because Chinese characters?
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It’s unquestionably problematic, and I definitely said “oh yikes!” out loud a couple times while watching it, but it’s also an engaging, propulsive story filled with cool characters and cool vibes. When “problematic” first started being a term, I took it to mean that some aspect is not great, something that you’d want to be aware of when watching, but different from “a problem” as in something that is irredeemably bad. I know that’s not really how it’s used now, but I still think it’s useful to distinguish between something that has parts that have issues, caused by ignorance or carelessness, and something like fascist propaganda that is intentionally created to spread hate and cause harm. Obviously, it’s a spectrum, and we usually can’t truly know the author’s intent, but I still think it’s important to recognize the difference.
Under the cut for HP/JKR stuff
An example distinction would be JK Rowlings twitter. The writing there is intentionally created to cause harm. There is no value in reading that outside of explicit study of hate speech, for academia or journalism.
Harry Potter though, has a lot of problematic aspects, but there’s still value in reading it casually for fun. I think it’s good to be aware and make others aware of like, the antisemetic tropes that are the bedrock of her goblins. But that more than likely just came from her playing around with existing tropes without investigating the deeper origins. While perpetuating harmful stereotypes like that isn’t great, I also don’t think it’s great to have people drawn and quartered for not asking questions they didn’t know were questions to be asked.
(And in HP, the attitudes towards women who are too feminine or too masculine originally also fell under this as something very mildly problematic, that readers should maybe think about before replicating in their own works/lives. But now with the added context of her current activities, become a much bigger red flag, and is now probably one of the most problematic things to keep in mind when reading)
I don’t think that trying to engage in only morally pure art is a good goal, or even achievable. That quest leads to attacks on indie artists who include queer/neurodivergent/minority characters, but aren’t perfect or all-encompassing of the queer/ND/minority experience, and forcing authors to out themselves to defend the existence of their imperfect queer art. To me, that causes more harm than just pleasantly enjoying a work that has something unapologetically problematic going on.
It’s rare to find another person who’s morals line up exactly 100% with yours, so why should art? Finding a way to enjoy art with problematic elements is a good way to practice getting along with other people that don’t share your morality (and by that, I’m not advocating for becoming besties with your racist uncle at Thanksgiving, but moreso being a Green voter working with a Liberal voter against Conservative policies[1]. Can you get along with someone who’s essentially on the same side as you, but who still has a lot of big things you disagree with?)
But as I said, it’s a sliding scale, and what’s fine for some people to work through is too much for others, or some people can handle a lot more homophobia but not even a sliver of racism. I think Talons falls in the middle of the scale. It’s totally fair for the racism to be too much for people, but it’s also not a red flag about someone if they enjoy it. It needs a warning, and it’s good for there to be discussion about it, but I think it’s still watchable. In a way, the racism being so overt probably makes it better than something more subtle. It’s easy to see and then you can use that to recognise more subtle racism in other things, that may not have the same level of discussion surrounding it. If nothing else, it’s valuable as a teaching tool.
idk this is a ramble, basically watching and enjoying things with morally bad bits sometimes is good, either teaching you about bad things so you can recognise it in the wild or helping you exist in a world with people who also have some morally bad bits but are still overall fine. Talons itself is really pushing the limit for that whole bad:good ratio, so if you like it or don’t we can still hang out or whatever[2]
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Well said. I think intention is crucial in these conversations, and I don’t believe any hate was intended by anyone involved in the production. That doesn’t excuse any of the things that are wrong, but it does make it different to things where the racism is an attack or a mockery rather than severely misguided ignorance - still very much a problem and if someone decides they’re not comfortable with it and they dislike the whole story because of it, that’s entirely valid. But not objectively enough to make all aspects of the story a morally bad thing to enjoy.
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Yeah, I was going to ask the same thing. As far as I can remember, none of the story is actually set in China, is it @AlfieSigma - in which case we can remove it from the badge requirements.
(Is the badge based on the Location @shauny?)
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Yes, and ignorance is also something I have more grace for in the past. Like, listening to the interviews after Sins of the Flesh, they said they had like 3 sensitivity readers. That wasn’t a job in the 70s! Today you can yell into the Twitter void to ask for help from someone from a demographic, or check Wikipedia for the film/genre you’re being influenced by and check if there’s a “Controversies” section, or easily find academic articles to read. In the 70’s you could what, check an encyclopedia at the library that if you’re lucky was updated in the last decade? Send physical mail to a university professor and see if you hear back in time? And for Doctor Who specifically, being in constant ongoing production, even if at the time, someone was hesitant about the script/casting/etc was there even any spare time to do additional research and bring that information to the table?
Of course, this doesn’t fully exonerate them, a lot could’ve been avoided if they had literally one Chinese friend to bounce ideas off of, but I don’t want to forget that the wealth of information at our fingertips and ways to communicate with people we might not bump into in our day to day is a really recent thing, and really has affected in a positive way how much easier it is to not ignorantly be a jerk, or at least be corrected on your jerkiness sooner.
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This says everything I think my head would have said if I was eloquent enough to put it into words.
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The Talons of Weng-Chiang is a very complicated watch for me. I really love it as I have a particular love for Victorian fiction in general, particularly the gothic variety. I read a lot of it and so I’m quite used seeing very racist stereotypes and characters. As a story I think it works really well but I have to admit that I don’t think that it can be separated from the racism.
So how can fans of the story justify their fondness for this? There’s the obvious nostalgia factor, whilst I’m not of an age to have watched this during broadcast I did watch it as a child through the Revisitations 1 boxset so I feel that to a certain degree, and the racism certainly isn’t obvious to a child who doesn’t know any better. Then there’s Jago & Litefoot, although as others have mentioned above I feel this is more impacted by the audio plays than the television story itself (although I do think that they both shine really well in Talons, particularly Litefoot and his dealings with Leela). The plot I think works really well as a classic Victorian gothic story which is really fun, although I admit not to everyone’s taste. Then the question becomes with these positives why should we still have to “put up” with the racism?
I do think that ignorance covers Hinchcliffe and Holmes some of the way as they were clearly playing into the classic Victorian gothic style and where unaware of how problematic or truly racist some of the tropes were. In this regard I found The Ghosts of Gralsted a really interesting story, the first of the Philip Hinchcliffe Presents series from Big Finish it feels almost like an apology from Hinchcliffe as it is a similar Victorian setting with a strong ethnic minority presence as essential to the story, in this case with Congolese rather than Chinese. In this sense I think the stories are really interesting to compare.
Ultimately I think that one’s enjoyment of the story comes down to one’s ability to enjoy the Victorian gothic and being able to accept the style “warts and all” so to speak. Something which I think has now been proven not to be necessary but for many years was considered an essential part of the tone of that type of fiction which Hinchcliffe and Holmes were trying to produce.
All that being said I completely understand why people can’t get over the racism and I hope that I have been clear in my condemnation of the racism in the story which was shocking even for the 1970s, at least for mainstream television. Yet I still enjoy the story very much, and I think that on the whole there have been some excellent answers put forward above on why so many Dr. Who fans still find enjoyment from this story.
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I will just say that when I was younger, I often didn’t notice or register problematic material that I do now, or noticed some but not most of it. This does lead to me sometimes finding I really don’t like things as much as I did originally now that I’m older. (I read a lot of stuff by Piers Anthony when I was younger, for example…)
Talons tends to be one I’m avoiding rewatching, because I’m sure everything will be glaringly obvious these days.
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@PuddingBrainMummy @deltaandthebannermen You are right. I confused it with the VMA novel The Shadow of Weng-Chiang. That one is set in China
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The thing I found the most unbearably racist about Talons is the scene where Tom talks to the magician, and no one bothered to translate so they are just speaking gibberish. I always found that more racist than the fact that British actors are playing Chinese people. I don’t accept or ignore the racism, instead I acknowledge it as a massive black mark on an otherwise brilliant story.
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At least The Mind of Evil made an attempt for the language, even if the choice of Hokkien was an odd choice for the characters in question, and Pertwee’s was very simplified.
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We finally reached the start of Talons, did the first two parts last night. It is certainly an unusually good start to a story in terms of how it gets us hooked into the narrative and the deliciousness of specific lines and also the location footage is some of the best they ever did on this show, the foggy streets and handsome cabs etc, the chase inside the theater in Part 2, this is directed SO well.
I thought of two specific fixes for everything else that’s wrong and misguided about the story. Obviously, firstly, yes, Li H’sen Chang should not be played an Englishman. I will say I do feel like the performance and the writing are clear that this a clever, cunning, and powerful adversary, but the trouble is that ALL Chinese characters in this story are part of the Black Scorpion gang. My other fix addresses that by simply asking: what would Tintin do? And the answer is that a Tintin story along these lines would ALWAYS have had a Chinese policeman or authority figure who is on our leads’ side against the baddies (as well as multiple everyday bystander characters who just provide cultural texture), there’s nothing wrong with a cool, powerful Chinese villain, but Talons goes out of wack because it doesn’t provide any balance at all to the Londoners’ prejudiced view of all Chinese people, seems to reinforce it if anything. That ally role is sort of filled by Jago and Litefoot, which is great, some of the best side characters of all time, but Litefoot himself dishes out several unthinkingly racist remarks right off the bat, so he’s no respite from it either. A character who had pursued Chang and Greel from China and was working with the police to catch them, or even working undercover in the Black Scorpion gang, would ease off quite a lot of my issues! Needs any balance at all lol. I am so curious what everybody’s gonna say about all this on Behind The Sofa!
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We did the next two parts last night. And actually, it’s Part 4 that leaves the worst taste in the mouth about Chang’s character, specifically because they never allow him to be clever enough to realize that Greel is NOT Weng-Chiang, and that he’s been used. He remains a true believer all the way to the end, which feels like it handwaves him away from the plot because it’s changing focus. He starts as clever and cunning and powerful, but in the end they only want to write him as sinister and superstitious and subservient. Much cooler would have been a) my proposal from yesterday about some Chinese agent who has pursued them to London because of Chang’s crimes, he could be captured and taken back and we could leave that part of the plot that way, or b) he could realize that Greel is an imposter, try to turn on him and be destroyed, which at least leaves him with a bit more intelligence and agency.
Having said that, these are two very good parts otherwise, especially for Leela. Her deciding to stowaway on the baddies’ cab and then putting herself in danger by swapping for the other lady, this is not something that Sarah or Jo would have done necessarily (Ace would, Adric would, Romana does literally whatever she wants haha), but it speeds up the plot by like a full episode to have a companion this proactive and utterly brave. All the lines The Doctor has about Litefoot’s rifle are just so great “Made in Birmingham, yes that’s the main requirement” haha. This sort of remains a 4 or higher story and nearly a 5/5 production, with a gigantic glaring problem at its center that’s definitely going to pull my rating down when it’s all over.
Last thought from these two parts: in absolute sincere honesty, these giant rat effects from the original production feel more convincing to me, take me out of the story way less, than the CGI animals in Spielberg’s Disclosure Day lolol.
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Last two parts! Well, it’s been long enough since I saw this that I had completely forgotten they DO give Li H’sen a very very small slice of redemption, there is that one scene where he has merely lost his leg to the giant rat, is blasted to the dome on opium, and does realize he has been following a false god. They do end with some pretty cliched dialogue about his ancestors waiting with fruit on the other side of a golden bridge, but yes, they do give him a modicum of a turnaround. It’s not quite enough to make the character more than two-dimensional, but it is something.
But of course the best thing that happens in the final two parts is the advent of Jago and Litefoot as a team. It’s something of a stroke of genius to spend four episodes establishing the chalk and the cheese of that duo separately, then have them collide in a way where initially you think they’ll never get along, and then by the time Jago is confessing his cowardice and Litefoot is tenderly reassuring him, you go “oh, these two guys just made a best friend!” Everything they have to do is pretty spot on, and the script is so confident they’ll be entertaining that we let them lead the story for about ten minutes! Jago’s “I say, I say, I say!!” distraction is one of the funniest things in the story.
The second best thing that happens is when Mr Sin starts snorting and giggling and goes nuts and starts shooting his own dudes just because he’s frustrated and has to shoot somebody haha, my girlfriend goes “he’s so great, he’s like an evil Grogu when he’s driving the mech” haha. She was obsessed with the fact that he has a pig brain haha.
Fascinating to learn from the BTS how this was made: The Foe From The Future script fell through, Bob Holmes had to write it himself but worried he wouldn’t have the time, Hinchcliffe came up with a slightly brilliant solution: let’s decide the time period, setting, premise, you give me a list of the sets and locations you want in Parts 1-4 before you write the script, we’ll get going on those, then we’ll have no location footage in 5 & 6 so those can just be sets we build during shooting of Parts 1-4, you now have what feel like bonus weeks to write this but you have to be fast and it all has to take place on the agreed sets/locations. This is a way of working that would only be possible if you were an unbelievably talented and unbelievably disciplined writer. Absolutely wild that it came out this good given that it was sort of written backwards.
So my girlfriend’s final assessment was that she had worried the problematic element was going to be way worse, she was braced for I think much more hideous, cartoonish portrayals; yes, all Chinese characters in the story are villains, which sucks, but this is just Robert Holmes parroting that aspect of this era’s literature in a really unthinking way, if he had been able to overcome it instead, this really would be worthy of a 4.5/5 or higher. The problem really, for me, is that The Doctor himself doesn’t push back on any of it anywhere near enough, and is the one who says “this little man and four other little men,” which sucks. I have no problem with media depicting racists, those viewpoints absolutely should be shown, interrogated, & dismissed in entertainment, but The Doctor should always be the one with the perspective to go “hey, take it easy” when Jago says racist slurs, which sucks, or deliver a Thin Ice-style uppercut if necessary. I can’t overly fault them in 1976 for not being quite progressive enough to get over slavishly imitating the Fu Manchu stories rather than ripping them up and using the pieces to make something a little more evolved, but I am certainly allowed to be disappointed in them.
Production of this show is superb: best location footage possibly in all DW, the lightweight OB cameras at the music hall allow for so many dynamic angles and zooms and dollies, the sets and costumes are some of their very best, the cast is excellent (even John Bennett is playing the reality of his character, it’s not an inherently offensive performance, he just shouldn’t be doing it at all). Very sad that this was David Maloney’s final story, he was a fabulous director of this show. Script is brilliant in terms of its dialogue and its tweaking of Victorian literature with a steampunk killer from the future, but is unfortunately too much a product of those Victorian novels to see them objectively and fix their built-in issues.
That element is only mentioned very briefly on the Behind The Sofa and newer documentary, not nearly enough self-awareness or a mea culpa from Hinchcliffe in those for sure, but I was quite pleased that it was Sophie and Peter Purves who did call it out, Sophie straight up calling a line of dialogue “casual racism, there” which it is, then them both agreeing that while John Bennett was a very good actor, this yellowface makeup is absolutely not okay!
So I can still find lots to enjoy, it is a fabulous send off to the Hinchcliffe era and they really went all out on the production, but it absolutely lets itself down, and I completely understand if somebody else would just rather not deal with it. Totally fair! I’ll settle on a 4/5, the good things about it are much too good to go much lower than that.
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I tend to see stories as several themes and currents which overlap and interact, and some of these can be handled badly whilst others are handled well. Talons IMO, has several strands that I love. I think that its dialogue is really fun and snappy, and it’s one of my favourite teams at top form (4 and Leela). The plot is a really fun, campy adventure that really hits on some of my favourite elements in dr who, especially its vibrant portrayal of a past era, mystery elements and creepy, surreal monster (mr sin).
But at the same time, parts of the story are handled badly, which is the case in many stories. In this one, those issues are primarily just flat out ignorant racism, with some parts questionable even when taking the age into account. This turns a story that I would find one of the best of the classic series into one that I enjoy, but seriously can’t call a favourite.
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