Tooth and Claw

Chapter The 222nd, where things get a bit hairy for the Doctor and Rose.

Plot:

The Doctor and Rose are aiming for Sheffield in 1979, but instead arrive in Scotland in 1879. Immediately, they run into Queen Victoria and her military escort who have been forced to cross country by coach because of a tree on the railway line. The TARDIS team accompanies them to the nearby Torchwood house, where the Queen will stay the night. The house, though, has been taken over by a local brethren of monks, who worship a werewolf alien that crash-landed on Earth hundreds of years ago, and has passed from host to host since. The monks want the Queen to be the next host, the Empire thereby to fall under Wolf control, and have contrived that she should be there on the night of a full moon. They take everyone else hostage to pressurise lord of the manor Sir Robert MacLeish to keep up the pretence; he shows the Queen, Doctor and Rose around the house. His father was a good friend of the now dead Prince Albert, and they often talked about the local legends of the wolf. Meanwhile, the monks have drugged all the soldiers, and release the creature. It stalks its prey for a bit, picking off members of the household and finally Sir Robert, who buys the Doctor time. Sir Robert's father and Albert had believed the legends to be true, and had contrived the means to destroy the wolf in the house. The observatory's telescope plus the Koh-I-Noor jewel that the Queen carries with her can be used together to focus moonlight on the creature and destroy it. Once the Doctor has done this, the Queen knights him and Rose, and then banishes them. She vows to set up an institute named Torchwood, after the house, to protect her empire against aliens.

Context:

A Friday night after a week of work, a glass of wine in hand and the new series 2 volume 2 DVD in the player, I watched Tooth and Claw on my own (though each one of the children wandered into the living room at points during my watch, none stuck around). I can't remember now why I only bought the individual 'vanilla' DVD releases of this particular series (brought out with three or four stories to a disc periodically through the summer of 2006, with the big series box-set with extras coming out in November, ready for Christmas). The previous year, swept up in the excitement of the return of Doctor Who, I had got both the vanilla volumes and the big box-set (though the latter was a Christmas present, I had heavily hinted to the Better Half that it was my yuletide desire); from 2007 onwards I waited and just got the box-set each year. Was I expecting to get series 2 as a Christmas present again, but was disappointed? Or was I just conscious of saving pennies as we had a baby to look after by late 2006? Alas, I just know one day I'm going to crack and buy it, just to complete the collection. 

First Time Round:

Watched live on its debut BBC1 broadcast in the UK on 22nd April 2006, with the Better Half (that was the whole family back then, our now gangly 15-year-old eldest was but a bun in the oven). We were in our old house in Hove (we'd move out the following year once the family got larger), watching a bloody enormous cathode-ray tube widescreen SD TV, while taping the story onto a VHS tape in an honest to goodness video recorder. Smartphones, the cloud, on demand streaming services, even owning an HD TV: all these things were almost science fiction concepts to us back then. It is nearly 16 years ago, I suppose, almost as long as the previous gap between Tooth and Claw and the final Sylvester McCoy episodes of the classic era. The only thing I remember of the first watch from all that time ago is thinking, like everyone else at the time no doubt, that the opening scene of the red-robed monks doing formation high kicks and jumps looked like the latest in the BBC's 'Rhythm and Movement' idents that accompanied the continuity announcements before programmes in 2006. These would always include multiple people in some balletic display and would always feature red elements, usually in the costuming. If it wasn't a deliberate nod by the programme makers, then it was a very silly choice!

Reaction:

There's a moment three quarters of the way through this story where the on screen image is as a split screen effect; the Doctor is in close up on the left-hand side of the screen, and the werewolf the other side of a wall appearing on the right. Maybe this was to compare these two aliens, to show that the Doctor - just like the beast - has a divided nature, with as much darkness as light, and with those two forces in a constant fight against one another. Or it could just have been put in because it looks cool. This is the difficulty for this particular story; it's one of the first few stories at the beginning of the series, which - the template set even at this early stage after the show had returned - tended to be the lighter and fluffier stories; but, it's also putting in place wider overarching narrative elements of the show by looking at some quite dark and mature themes. The main objective is the setting up of Torchwood, which will be the running theme for the series, but also then for a spin off show in the making, with a rationale of imperial xenophobia. This puts the Doctor in a difficult position in any future conflicts, as he - in a very true-to-life fashion that would become more politically relevant in the UK a decade later - is mistrusted by authority due to his 'foreigner' status, even when acting as an ally. Not much is ever made of this, though. In the finale of the series, there's a bit of conflict between Torchwood and the Doctor, but it's soon forgotten when Cybermen and Daleks start appearing, and it's never resolved in a satisfactory manner.

This leaves little Tooth and Claw essentially to be a standalone exploration of the Doctor not taking danger seriously enough and conflicting with establishment forces. This it does quite efficiently. The reversal of Queen Victoria knighting and then banishing the Doctor and Rose is effective, and even somewhat shocking. Pauline Collins as the Queen plays it well, as she does throughout. The relationship between the TARDIS travellers and the Queen has been played mainly for laughs up to this point; the scene cuts through the complacency in the regular cast set-up; they do seem awfully smug in this story, but this is clearly intentional. Mind you, they seem smug in other stories too, where it might not be so intentional; I'm not sure that this story effectively creates a free pass for that. The Doctor and Rose clearly haven't learned any lesson, as at the end they're still laughing and joking away about the royal family being werewolves. Perhaps this is the pride that will lead to the fall of their separation at the end of the series in Doomsday; it works just about as part of the a foreshadowing of that. It's quite a bit of heavy lifting for a story that is essentially just reusing the template set by the previous year's The Unquiet Dead. Instead of Dickens in Wales at Christmas with ghosts, it's Queen Victoria in Scotland at full moon with a werewolf. If they'd rested on their laurels rather than tweaking things, the next year could have had Gladstone in Northern Ireland on Halloween night with vampires. Probably best we didn't see that.

Beyond the wider plotting, the episode itself is a nice runaround. The CGI on the werewolf is particularly good (full disclosure: this was worked on by someone who's a friend, Chris Petts, but I think the work speaks for itself anyway). The (practical?) effect of the werewolf host's eyes is very creepy too. All the performances are good, though nobody apart from Pauline Collins gets that much to do; Derek Riddell has a couple of nice moments, though the climax of his narrative arc where he sacrifices himself for the greater good would be more impactful if every other minor guest character didn't seem to be doing a noble sacrifice also. The score is one of the best examples of Murray Gold's early Who period. Sets, locations and costumes are all effective at creating period. The ending is satisfying too, utilising the different elements hidden in plain view around the house. There's some funny lines, and some nice quieter moments like the Doctor and the Queen talking about grief.

Connectivity: 

Both stories see the Doctor plan a trip to witness a specific moment (in Time Flight it's the opening of the Great Exhibition, in Tooth and Claw it's Ian Dury at the Top Rank Sheffield on the 21st November 1979), and both contain references to knights of the realm (Sir Robert MacLeish is one of the characters fighting the werewolf; Sir John Sudbury, a UNIT big wig who contacts Heathrow).

Deeper Thoughts:

Tea and scones with Liz Two. One might think that a UK television programme that started in the 1960s and that regularly visited past periods would have a lot to do with that typical school room history topic of the kings and queens of Britain and England. It's interesting to note, though, that this is only very rarely an area of focus for the show. In the first season in 1963 / 64, there were stories set in prehistory, post-revolutionary France, 15th century Mexico and one accompanying a European traveller in 13th century China. It was hardly a parochial approach, positively globe-trotting in fact, and though none of the periods were exactly obscure, it still went beyond the scope of the O-level curriculum. Into the second year of the show, the approach was similar, with stories set in ancient Rome and 12th century Palestine during the crusades, plus a brief stopover on the Mary Celeste in the 1800s. It was only in the final story of that second season that the TARDIS landed in the past of the British Isles. Though that story (The Time Meddler) was set in 1066 before the Normans conquered, and made a brief mention of King Harold, it was set far away from any royal court or encampment. The only King of England with a significant speaking role in the entire classic series is Richard The Lionheart (played by Julian Glover) in The Crusade, and the only queen was Elizabeth the First who appeared for a brief gag (watched by The Doctor on a time-space TV) in The Chase.

After this, the third season continued on as the first two had, with historical adventures in ancient Troy, ancient Egypt, the old West of America, and a visit to a more obscure period of French history (in The Massacre). From the fourth season, the historical settings fell out of rotation, and thereafter tended to just be used occasionally as window dressing for an adventure or sci-fi plot. This is how it remained in the 20th century. If a historical period was visited, it was almost certainly an out of the way place, far from anyone famous let alone anyone with power. I wonder why this should be? The new series has been a bit more willing to include monarchs in its historical 'celebrity' guest appearances, but even then it's been sparing: over the years, as well as Queen Victoria, there's been two appearances of Elizabeth the First, and one of King James the First. That's it. In all those new series appearances, the monarch is away from court, usually travelling with a smaller retinue so that too many protocols can't interfere with the adventure. Is it just that courtly intrigue isn't that interesting or compatible with Doctor Who? It's done quite well in The Crusade, but even then that was just for an episode; for the story as a whole it wasn't the main focus (which was sword fighting, really). The other attempt at showing the Doctor dealing with a monarch's whims and courting favour was The King's Demons, which wasn't 100% successful to my mind, and the King John depicted therein was a fake one anyway, so it doesn't fully count.

It's not just the historical stories that could feature a UK sovereign, of course. The current queen Elizabeth the Second has had a definite presence in Doctor Who over the years; despite being (rarely) featured, there's been lots of teases in scripts. Early on, though, a key factor of the show was that it couldn't reach the contemporary time zone, and when Jon Pertwee was brought down to Earth with a bump it was in a near future. So, it is only from Tom Baker onwards that Liz Two is included. At the end of Baker's first story Robot, the victorious Doctor is invited to dine with Her Maj at Buckingham Palace, but decides to scarper off into time and space instead. It's interesting that there was no attempt to suggest a King Charles in that story, to better indicate the near future setting; they had, after all, done this with Prime Ministers (forecasting a PM called Jeremy in Pertwee's time, and a female one in Baker's). Perhaps this felt disrespectful as it's not a job you get voted out of, or perhaps it's too risky to guess when an enduring monarch will no longer be on the throne (Battlefield predicted a king by the time of its 1990s-ish setting, and that obviously turned out to be wrong). There were visits to her coronation in The Idiot's Lantern, and her silver jubilee in Mawdryn Undead, there was a near miss where Sylvester McCoy's Doctor and Ace almost meet her (or someone who looks like her) at Windsor Castle in Silver Nemesis. She and the rest of the royal family were impacted by the blood control of the Sycorax in The Christmas Invasion, but the queen would nonetheless not leave Buckingham Palace two years later (although in the real world she doesn't spend Christmas there). This was in Voyage of the Damned, when she finally appeared and even got a line, thanking the Doctor and wishing him a Merry Christmas after he prevented the Starship Titanic from crashing into her.

In Summary:

Tooth and claw is pretty sharp and biting for one in the slot that's usually for the fluffier stories.