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Man ... trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation's final law --
Tho' nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek'd against his creed
Tennyson, In Memoriam

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After last week's Carry on New Earth began the series with mixed reviews, we're back to a Who staple, the creepy historical, and a damn good one. The best scares last series came from Victorian ghouls and Blitz child plague, and now we can add werewolves to the sofa-diving honour roll.

Helped considerably by Pauline Collins on top form as Queen Victoria and some impressive SFX work by the Mill, it's a winner. Russell T Davis has a rep for letting plots run away from him faster than the Empress of India from a wannabe-King Wolf; but "Tooth and Claw" effortlessly juggles a story that has the cheek to throw everything from lycanthrope-worshiping kung-fu monks to the origins of spinoff Torchwood into the middle of staid Victorian Scotland and make it work. He even did away with another past failing with a clever, credible resolution.

Was particularly impressed by Collins' Victoria, replacing austere waxwork cliché for a cold, clever woman with a sharp sense of homour. Got to love anyone who dubs the Doctor Knight of the Tardis in one breath and slings his arse out the kingdom with the next. Her impassioned rant against the Doctor's godless world was superb, and I was very much amused.

Needless to say the wolf was a creepy little furball. Not quite upto last year's standout Victorian creep-out "The Unquiet Dead", but very close.

An impressive--



--for all involved. Just keep away from me on a full moon.

(Edited by Byron 25/04/2006 21:39)

Loved it

Wasn't too keen on last weeks really and it did leave me wondering whether this season was going to be on par with the last. This weeks was back to what I enjoyed most about last season - the severely creepy injected with the Doctor's thrill at being in the middle of such chaos. DT's glee at seeing the werewolf this week was good to see...as was Chris Ecclestone's at the end of the Empty Child after the nanogenes had saved everyone. Very cool .

I think the ep hit exactly the right tone in terms of being scary...much more, and it would have been too much.

All in all, really liked this one...gotta go in my top five ep of the newer series as a whole.

(Edited by head2head 22/04/2006 21:11)

Another thumbs up for me and the Royal Family are werewolves...who knew?

Good news ratings wise. Tooth and Claw pulled 8.9 million on the overnights, which is UP from the season premiere, which pretty much never happens. Might have had something to do with a particular footy match tho.

If you believe certain people, a decision on the 4th series will be made on the performance of the first 3 or 4 episodes, so fingers crossed for next week.

Super-awesome!

I am not amused

just finished watching this - was almost impressed.
couold this mark a return to the stories where the doctor was never entirely sure what he was doing with the tardis??
and looking forward to next weeks ep, not least because i always had a crush on sarah-jane smith back when i was a wee ikkle madsprog...

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by mad
couold this mark a return to the stories where the doctor was never entirely sure what he was doing with the tardis??

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Hope not, a guy who doesn't know how to work his own kit isn't the most inspiring hero. (Of course, another camp say tosh, he's a lovable eccentric. )

Got a William Hartnel DVD in an HMV sale the other week and was reminded his companions only stuck around for a few years cos the good doctor couldn't run his own time machine. And they accuse Russel T Davis of contrived plots!

Oh which one? The only really decent Hartnell story Ive seen is The Azteks which was purely historical.

I've not seen many Hartnell episodes, but I thought "The Ark" was a great story (and also the first "old-Who" story I watched apart from a couple I don't really remember from when I was in primary school). Although surely they could've come up with a more imaginitive name for the big one-eyed creatures than Monoids...

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by PictureOfFlowers
Although surely they could've come up with a more imaginitive name for the big one-eyed creatures than Monoids...

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could have been worse - im assuming you remember the ballchinians from men in black??
cant get more imaginative than that...

Oh you havent seen suggestively shaped one eyed creatures until youve seen the Alpha Centauri ambassador from Curse of Peladon

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by Wobag
Oh which one? The only really decent Hartnell story Ive seen is The Azteks which was purely historical.

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The Dalek Invasion of Earth. (Sod your forcefields and CGI, Daleks driving out the Thames, that's creepy. ) If I recall right, it took him another year or so afterwards to get the poor buggers back to the 1960s.

In an odd reversal, I've seen loads of Hartnel stories but hardly anything after Pertwee left the scene.

So... After being back with the former residents of Platform One, we get taken again to Victorian England immediately afterwards, and we're going back to the present again straight after that, too.

They're definitely playing up the moral ambiguity and things-with-which-man-was-not-meant-to-meddle angles, aren't they?

I just loved that moment when we got to see the Doctor with the almost childlike wonder of the typical, pioneering Victorian explorer: so busy gawping in fascination at whatever new discovery he's just made that he seems to be forgeting to run away - before having to kill it.

And I did like that werewolf. It was a novel explanation for lycanthropy, but since we've already had ghosts explained away as aliens, I suppose that anything goes.

Once you've taken one aspect of the legend and changed it, I suppose that it's easier to fiddle with everything else, including the way that the wolf was despatched in the end - which was novel if nothing else.

The wolf itself was fairly impressive - it seems that Pixar-esque fur effects're now available a bit cheaper.

Less Rose.

Granted, it's piling on the paradox by making the Doctor having inadvertantly made life difficult for himself by making the Establishment hate him - although it does put a new twist on The Christmas Invasion (for all we'd seen in the last five minutes of World War Three that Harriet Jones' willingness to sacrifice just about anything or anyone for her idea of the greater good were already there).

The cinematography worked well for me: lots of "less is more", lots of cuts in the right places, with plenty of Hitchcockian switches of POV, quick shots of gnashing teeth and suitably impressive screaming.

But this struck me as an episode that in some ways was more of a vehicle for moving the plot than a standalone adventure, and it showed.

My major concern after seeing that is that if RTD isn't careful, he's going to to overcook the Torchwood concept before the series has even gotten off the ground.

It was subtle in the last series - a couple of throwaway one word references that, once the spin-off was announced, people were having to go back to look for.

We knew in advance that there were going to be references to Torchwood throughout the series; but now we've had an entire cliffhanger based on it, barely before the series itself has got started.

And all of this build-up when the spin-off series itself isn't supposed to be hitting the airwaves until at least late summer - after Who itself's finished.

I'm getting seriously intrigued as to where all of this is going. It seems from the references in the 2005 series that RTD had the idea of a Torchwood spin-off in mind from the get-go; but between The Christmas Invasion and now this, Torchwood seems to be rapidly turning into the new Bad Wolf in the enigma stakes, and the Doctor's been treated like the biggest villain we've met so far.

Unless we're going to have a The Doctor vs. The People finale (and the red herrings seem to be flying thick and fast after even two episodes, but the online commentary says that things from that episode're going to be revisted for the finale), so much build-up just isn't making much sense. Again, the thought of what's being stored up with this level of foreboding fascinates me - I just hope that it won't be a let-down when RTD's willing to do something like that this early.

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by Samanfur
the Doctor's been treated like the biggest villain we've met so far.

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hmmm...
i have a vague recollection of one story that i never saw that had a later incarnation of the doctor as the bad guy - erm, might have been the 13thy doctor, taking on the name <i>the valarian</i>.
or i could just be talking out of my rear-end again (thats what you get for having a kebab for dinner!! )