YMMV / Doctor Who S14 E6 "The Talons of Weng-Chiang"

• Broken Base: Nowadays, practically any mention of this story in public will lead to a lengthy and vicious argument about whether it is racist or not (or whether the elements of it that are sometimes claimed to be anti-racist satire are successful or just racist in a different way).
• Condemned by History: The serial was quickly lauded by fans as a classic thanks to Tom Baker's outstanding performance, a memorable villain, Leela's development under the Doctor's tutelage, a well-layered plotline, and engaging supporting characters. These days, though it's still recognized for those qualities, a significant proportion of fans now shy away from it, either cringing over the Yellow Peril-tainted plot, racist dialogue, and yellowface casting or to avoid arguments over how racist the story was. (Outside fandom, the story's objectionable qualities daunted the story from the beginning; some international broadcasters refused to air the story even back then, at the height of the Fourth Doctor's extreme popularity.)
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Jago and Lightfoot worked so well that The BBC considered giving them a Spin-Off. While they never got one on television, Big Finish obliged.
• Foe Romance Subtext: Li H'sen Chan seems to get obsessed with the Doctor, based on the fact that Chang's mind-reading powers don't work on him. He describes him in awe as "tall, with wide pale eyes, and hair that curls like the ram", and singles him out for magic tricks. Mark Gatiss is a fan, and relished his part in Dr. Terrible's House of Horrible in which he played one half of a homoerotic rivalry between Chang and Fourth Doctor Expies.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Ever since The '80s, the story title has been hard to say without thinking of the band Wang Chung.
  • The Doctor dresses and acts like Sherlock Holmes, with various other characters filling in for Doctor Watson, Inspector Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson and Professor Moriarty. The revival's second showrunner, Steven Moffat, is the co-creator of Sherlock with fellow modern series writer Mark Gatiss.
  • Tom Baker would later play the Great Detective in a four-part BBC adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles that was produced by Barry Letts (who produced the show during Jon Pertwee's tenure and cast Baker as the Doctor) and featured Caroline John (the Third Doctor's companion Liz Shaw) as Laura Lyons.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The story was considered by received fandom opinion for decades to be one of the greatest ever, but in recent years it has become far more notorious for its Yellow Peril content, some of which is subverted or possibly-ironic, but some of which is played very straight. (Li H'sen Chang being played by a white actor in Yellowface doesn't help.) As a result, practically any public mention of it nowadays will start a Flame War about whether it is racist or not, and whether the racist content outweighs the good things about the story to the point that it shouldn't be praised or recommended any more. More than one commentator has lamented that while many unfortunate racist bits litter the past of Doctor Who, this story is the only one that has the misfortune to be both very racist and a genuine classic.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • Tom Baker once said, "The BBC is very good at period drama but not very good at giant rats". The rat is 'played' by three different effects — some acceptable-looking Slurpasaur Miniature Effects of a real rat, a motionless stuffed giant rat dummy, and a rat costume so that Leela can fight the rat. The intention was to use mostly footage of the real rat, with the stuffed rat being shown only from behind and the rat suit being shown only in brief glimpses in a very dark environment in a scene with lots of movement, and since "Talons" was the last story of the season and already its most expensive story, the costume was simplified to save time and money. It would probably have worked really well had this actually happened — instead, most of what we see of the rat is the rat suit or the dummy, and we even get an extreme closeup of its mangy plush face at one point. The effects department was absolutely livid when they found out. It also would have helped if any of the three rat "actors" actually looked anything like each other. The Blu-ray release has a CGI rat and it is TERRIFYING!
  • Chang's Hypnotic Eyes are just a two-frame animation of a white oval flashing, vaguely where the actor's eyes are. Especially bad considering that legitimately good hypnotism effects had been used (or not used) in over half of that season's previous stories.
  • And speaking of Chang, the fact that he's supposed to be Chinese but is played by a white actor in yellowface is not only awful but also extremely obvious when you see him in any scene with the actually-Chinese extras. The makeup even starts to come loose during his death scene, with visible air bubbles at his brow.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The Doctor's comment about how Lightfoot's elephant gun is bound to be reliable because it's "made in Birmingham" — at the time of the episode's broadcast, Birmingham was the main base of the British car manufacturing industry, with British-made consumer cars having (fairly or otherwise) a heavily negative reputation. Nowadays, with the industry a fraction of the size it was when the episode first aired and what remains of it being largely based elsewhere in the country, the joke can come across a little confusing.
• Values Dissonance: Even allowing for some Deliberate Values Dissonance of the 'Victorian horror-adventure pulp' feel it's evoking, the story itself reflects some questionable (1970s) attitudes towards race; in particular Li H'sen Chang is played by a white actor in yellowface. Granted, the character is otherwise depicted in a well-rounded and even sympathetic fashion, but even so. While this was still acceptable practice in the UK in 1977, television stations in America, Canada, and elsewhere which imported the programme found this problematic enough to refrain from transmitting the serial. Although the moral of the story is anti-racist, it's easier to see why they thought it was acceptable when one considers it was made at a time when The Black and White Minstrel Show was also being aired as "harmless" family entertainment. Worse is that the story even goes so far as to have the Doctor join in with the racist jokes. Tom Baker performs the lines with as much Refuge in Audacity swagger as he can, as they were intended as a knowing part of the Yellow Peril Exploitation Film genre Pastiche (British audiences in the 1970s were exposed to this sort of fiction through constant Hammer Horror reruns). Modern audiences tend not to find it coming off as ironic thanks to all the other racist things going on in the story, and many people (like Paul Cornell) find it upsettingly out of character.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Even by the standards of the Philip Hinchcliffe Era, this is Darker and Edgier than everything around it, and so adult in tone that it's hard to believe it was ever seen as kid's TV. There is a lot of onscreen drinking (with the Doctor participating frequently), onscreen smoking which has attention drawn to it, onscreen use of opiates, sympathetic characters using racial slurs (with even the Doctor joining in), a Serial Killer who specifically targets women he considers his 'beauties', an astonishingly inappropriate scene where Leela's nipples are clearly visible through her transparent shirt, and the Doctor gushing about how good his Birmingham-built fowling rifle is and using it to shoot an animal.

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