The Shadow of Weng Chiang

The TARDIS is drawn to another part of Earth by the tracer. The Doctor and Romana are suspicious about two segments being on the same planet and plan to investigate carefully, and then are swept up in the flood of events in Shanghai of 1937. The opium trade is still alive and well and Japan is threatening to invade, and the Tong of the Black Scorpion, lead by a young woman who recognizes the Doctor, are acting with their own agenda and using the mystical Dragon Paths to move across space at their whims.

Yep, you read it right, the Tong of the Black Scorpion. If the title wasn't enough of a giveaway, this is David A McIntee's own sequel to the gothic horror Tom Baker tale The Talons of Weng Chiang, complete with a plot of pluck Magnus Greel out of time before his zygma beam takes him back to Victorian times, and the vicious Mr Sin hacking and slicing his way through everyone around him. Shadow has a lot more violence in it than Talons, most of it being executed by Sin in the last quarter of the tale. I found all the hinting about Sin's presence to be a bit unnecessary; he's on the cover of the book, we know he's in it, why shroud him in secrecy for so long before he actually emerges? I often complain about Dalek stories with the word "Dalek" in the title for waiting until the end of episode one to show one of them; if you're going to blantantly show off your baddies, then waiting for a cliffhanger moment to reveal them isn't so much of a cliffhanger anymore, just an "It's about time," moment. If you follow? Do you?

A lot of fans have said that they want more adventures with the fourth Doctor, Romana and K9, and most figured they would be tacked onto the end of their regular run as the Key To Time series seemed like a pretty sealed set of adventures. Clever of McIntee to "interrupt" the series right in the middle with this tale, then, and for him to make it still fit in with the continuity. He does a bit of his own speculation into the nature of the Key itself and why the tracer would pick up a stream of chronon radiation and mistake it for an actual segment, which makes sense (as far as the series and its continuity goes). What does not make sense, though, is Romana singing in a nightclub as a cover. Being a fan of Star Wars like McIntee I am sure this idea came from one of the old Star Wars comics (#77 I think) where Princess Leia finds herself on stage doing a torch number quite by accident, and even in that instance I thought it was a bad idea. Or maybe McIntee heard Mary Tamm sing at a cabaret at a convention once. Maybe. Anyways, not my favourite part. Nor was my favourite part the inevitible showdown between Mr Sin and K9, but maybe McIntee figured a long confrontation between these two would be predictible.

McIntee loves his history, that much can be seen when reading the full body of his work as he takes the Doctor to China in not just this novel but the previously blogged Eleventh Tiger, to Haiti in White Darkness and to modern day Los Angeles in The King of Terror. It's obvious the man has travelled and wants to inject all of his own observations into his work, and for me sometimes it works, other times it sounds so different that my mind still goes back to the BBC studio versions of the world... which is where this blog is going now...

NEXT EPISODE : THE ANDROIDS OF TARA