Tooth and Claw (Doctor Who)

169 – "Tooth and Claw"
Doctor Who episode
The werewolf attacks Queen Victoria.
Cast
Doctor David Tennant (Tenth Doctor)
Companion Billie Piper (Rose Tyler)
Others Pauline Collins – Queen Victoria Ian Hanmore – Father Angelo Michelle Duncan – Lady Isobel Derek Riddell – Sir Robert Jamie Sives – Captain Reynolds Ron Donachie – Steward Tom Smith – The Host Ruth Milne – Flora
Production
Writer	Russell T Davies
Director	Euros Lyn
Script editor	Simon Winstone
Producer	Phil Collinson
Executive producer(s)	Russell T Davies Julie Gardner
Production code	2.2
Series	Series 2
Length	45 minutes
Originally broadcast	22 April 2006
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by → "New Earth" "School Reunion"

"Tooth and Claw" is the second episode in the second series of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and was first broadcast on 22 April 2006. In 1879 Scotland, the Doctor and Rose meet Queen Victoria. However, a group of warrior monks have sinister plans for the monarch, and the full moon is about to summon a creature out of legend.

Plot

The Doctor attempts to take Rose to Sheffield in 1979 to see Ian Dury in concert, but ends up in the Scottish moors in 1879. They encounter a carriage carrying Queen Victoria, who has been forced to travel by roads to Balmoral Castle as a fallen tree has blocked the train line to Aberdeen, feared to be a potential assassination attempt. The Doctor poses as Dr. James McCrimmon using his psychic paper, and the Queen invites him and Rose to join her as she travels to the Torchwood Estate, a favourite of her late consort Prince Albert, to spend the night. The royal party is unaware that the Torchwood Estate has been captured by a group of monks from a monastery in St. Catherine's Glen led by Father Angelo, forcing its owner, Sir Robert MacLeish, to play into their ruse as they take the place of the house's servants and guards. The monks, having arranged for the fallen tree to force the Queen to the estate, have brought a man infected with a form of lycanthropy, hoping to pass its nature to the Queen and create a new "Empire of the Wolf".

The Doctor soon realizes the trap they have fallen into, and helps to save Rose, the Queen, and Sir Robert from Father Angelo's men and the werewolf by taking shelter in the estate's library, its wood coated with oil of mistletoe wood to stave off the beast. They study the library and discover evidence collected by Sir Robert's father, a polymath, and Prince Albert which indicates the werewolf is really the current form of an alien species that fell to earth in 1540 near the monastery, surviving by passing its lycanthropic form from human to human. The Doctor also realizes that the estate was designed as a trap for the werewolf, as by use of its strange telescope along with the Queen's Koh-i-Noor diamond, its cut fashioned by Prince Albert, they can force the werewolf to revert to human form and destroy the alien lifeform.

Sir Robert sacrifices himself to allow the Doctor, Rose, and the Queen to prepare the telescope in the Observatory. They are able to trap the werewolf in the concentrated light of the full moon collected by the diamond. The transformed human being begs for the Doctor to kill him by increasing the power of the light concentration, which he obliges. As they recover, the Queen finds a small cut she insists came from a wood splinter, but the Doctor remarks to Rose that all her children will carry a form of haemophilia, and that perhaps this was simply a Victorian euphemism for lycanthropy. The next day, the Queen dubs the Doctor and Rose with royal titles before banishing them from the British Empire. The Queen is appalled and outraged by the unholy sort of lifestyle the Doctor and Rose share. In honour of Sir Robert's sacrifice and his father's ingenuity, she orders the creation of the Torchwood Institute to help defend Britain from further alien attacks.

Continuity

• This episode starts a running joke of the Tenth Doctor saying "No, no, don't do that" whenever a companion attempts (usually badly) to put on an accent appropriate to their time/location. He would say it again to Martha Jones in "The Shakespeare Code" and "The Infinite Quest" and to Donna Noble in "The Unicorn and the Wasp" and "Midnight".
• In the Third Doctor story The Curse of Peladon (1972), the Doctor mentioned having been in attendance at Queen Victoria's coronation. The Fifth Doctor meets Victoria (and is appointed her Scientific Advisor) in 1863 in the Past Doctor Adventures novel Empire of Death and she is also involved in the events of the novel Imperial Moon, taking place in 1878, where the Doctor's companion Kamelion poses as Prince Albert to convince her to keep the events of the novel secret. The canonicity of the novels, like all non-televised stories, is unclear.
• This episode bears some similarities to the Fourth Doctor serial Horror of Fang Rock (1977). In the earlier story, the Doctor also uses a diamond to refract light, creating an "amplified carbon beam oscillator" that brings down the Rutan mothership. Both stories are also set in remote, enclosed locations, in or around the Victorian era, involve shape-changing aliens and a feral girl.
• A werewolf also appeared in the Seventh Doctor serial The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (1988), while silver bullets were mentioned in Battlefield (1989). Werewolves feature in the Past Doctor Adventures novel Wolfsbane, the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel Kursaal and the Big Finish Productions audio play Loups-Garoux. A race of werewolves, the Wereloks, turn the Fourth Doctor into a werewolf in the Doctor Who Weekly comic strip story Doctor Who and the Dogs of Doom (DWW #27-#34), although he manages to devise a cure for his condition in the TARDIS.
• Rose is wearing a T-shirt with a crown on it, a reference by the costume designer to Queen Victoria's presence in the episode, but also in keeping with Rose's expected visit to a 1979 Ian Dury concert. In the episode "Attack of the Graske", he took Rose to an ABBA concert in 1979 Wembley, and quoted the Status Quo song "Down Down" at one point in the same episode.
• The Doctor mentions assisting the early re-entry of Skylab in 1979, although the circumstances are not elaborated on. He does, however, state that it nearly cost him a thumb.
• The Doctor introduces himself as "James McCrimmon". Jamie McCrimmon was a young Scottish piper from the 18th Century (1746 to be precise), and a companion of the Second Doctor. The Doctor's use of Jamie's name as an alias has a certain symmetry, as Jamie was the one who gave the Doctor his most often-used alias, "John Smith", in The Wheel in Space.
• When Rose first encounters the wolf in its human form it says it can see "something of the wolf" in her and that she has "burnt like the Sun", a reference to the 2005 series episode "The Parting of the Ways".
• The Doctor gives an explanation of lycanthropy in this episode. He says, "Well, you'd call it a werewolf, but it's actually a lupine wavelength haemovariform."
• Although Victoria shoots at him, we do not see Father Angelo's body, nor do we see what happened to the monks after the werewolf was dispelled.
• At the very end of this episode, Queen Victoria founded the Torchwood Institute, taking the name from the estate, with a remit to investigate paranormal events such as the werewolf in this episode.
• "Tooth and Claw" was also the name of an unrelated Eighth Doctor comic strip story involving vampires on an island in the Indian Ocean. It was published in Doctor Who Magazine #257-#260, written by Alan Barnes and drawn by Martin Geraghty and Robin Smith.
• This is the second time the Doctor has been knighted, but the first time he was officially knighted; the Fifth Doctor was knighted by his future companion Kamelion – then posing as King John I while under the control of the Master – in The King's Demons.
• In the 21st century, Torchwood House becomes a museum and wedding venue.

Production

• David Tennant is actually from Scotland. Thus, the accent the Doctor puts on at points in this episode is actually Tennant's real Scottish accent, and it slips to his in-character accent.
• Michelle Duncan and Jamie Sives were unable to attend the readthrough for this story, and their parts were read by David Tennant's parents, who happened to be visiting the Doctor Who set. Tennant told reporters at the series' press launch, "Because it's set in Scotland they were delighted to be asked to read in. My Mum played Lady Isobel and my Dad played Captain Reynolds and they were in seventh heaven. And they were genuinely cheesed off when they didn't get asked to play the parts for real! I was like 'chill-out Mum and Dad, back in your box!'"
• At one point during filming, Billie Piper's hair caught fire.
• Interviewed in Doctor Who Confidential, director Euros Lyn said that various martial arts films were viewed in researching the opening fight sequence, including Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.
• Treowen House in Dingestow, Wales was one of the sites for filming this episode, representing Torchwood House in the Scottish Highlands.
• Exterior shots were filmed at Craig-y-Nos Castle, Swansea Valley.
• The monk fight scene was filmed at a courtyard in Dyffryn Gardens, St Nicholas.
• The werewolf in this story is computer-generated. Pauline Collins stated in a BBC press release that there were two performance artists who demonstrated the movements that the werewolf would do and talked about the problems of overacting in a situation where one was simply reacting to a green screen.
• A deleted scene was included on the boxset DVD, where the Doctor and Rose, after being knighted, run off towards the TARDIS.

Cast notes

• Pauline Collins appeared previously in the series as Samantha Briggs in the Second Doctor serial The Faceless Ones (1967). This makes her the third actor from the classic series to appear in the new series, following William Thomas (Remembrance of the Daleks and "Boom Town") and Nisha Nayar (Paradise Towers and "Bad Wolf"/"The Parting of the Ways"). Collins had been offered a role as a companion in 1967, but had turned this down.
• When Sir Robert offers to precede the Queen out of the window, she calls him "my Sir Walter Raleigh". Actor Derek Riddell had played Raleigh in the BBC drama The Virgin Queen, screened earlier in the year. The script originally had Victoria refer to Sir Francis Drake, until Riddell pointed out that this would have been incorrect for the reference the Queen was making.
• According to the accompanying episode commentary, actor Tom Smith, who played the Host, studied at drama school with David Tennant.
• Derek Riddell and Billie Piper also appeared together in the adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing for the BBC's ShakespeaRe-Told series.
• Ron Donachie and Jamie Sives would go on to star together as Roderick and Jory Cassel in Game of Thrones.

Outside references

• The title is an allusion to a merciless "Nature, red in tooth and claw" from Lord Tennyson's 1850 poem In Memoriam A.H.H. The poem was a favourite of Queen Victoria's, who found it a comfort after Prince Albert's death in 1861.
• The Doctor alludes to the Scottish ballad Walter Lesly ("I've been chasin' this- this wee naked child over hill and over dale,") and Robert Burns's poem To a Mouse ("Isn't that right, ye tim'rous beastie?") while trying to explain his and Rose's sudden appearance and their unusual dress to the soldiers at the beginning of the episode.
• The Doctor notes that the Queen, by 1879, has had six attempts on her life. Of the known assassination attempts, one took place in 1840, three in 1842, one in 1849 and one in 1850. Subsequent to 1879, two more attempts were made in 1882 and 1887. In the Seventh Doctor serial Ghost Light, the Doctor thwarts an attempt in 1883 by an alien force to kill the Queen and thereby take over the British Empire.
• The Doctor claims he is from the township of Balamory. Balamory was a popular live-action children's television programme broadcast between 2002 and 2005 and set on the Isle of Mull.
• The Doctor also claims to have trained at the University of Edinburgh under "Dr Bell", a reference to Joseph Bell, the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. In The Moonbase (1967), the Second Doctor claimed to have studied under another Scottish doctor, Joseph Lister, in 1888.
• One of the traditional uses of mistletoe is indeed as a ward against werewolves, although the plant is "almost unknown" in Scotland. In the commentary for the episode, script editor Simon Winstone notes that mistletoe was also used as an anticonvulsant, which tracks with the fits the Host suffers as he transforms.
• Also noted in the commentary was Prince Albert's overseeing of the cutting of the Koh-i-Noor and his dissatisfaction with the results, although Winstone suggests it was more due to the fact that the stone was cut down so much. Although Queen Victoria mentions that the Koh-i-Noor brings death to those who own it, the curse is supposed to only affect men; the stone is reputed to bring good luck to female owners. The Koh-i-Noor is currently set into the crown of Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother.
• Rose, in a running gag tries time and again to trick the queen to utter the famous phrase "We are not amused", and makes a triumphant gesture when she finally succeeds (History tells Queen Victoria actually never said this, but urban legend does).

Broadcast and releases

• Overnight ratings for the episode peaked at 10.03 million (during one five minute segment). The audience Appreciation Index was 83. The episode received an average of 9.24 million viewers, taking the timeshift into account.
• The Defending the Earth! site update for this episode features another "live" message from Mickey Smith to the viewer. Mickey mentions how he was tracking satellites on the Torchwood website but was kicked out. He then re-directs the viewer to the Torchwood House site, telling them to access the telescope feed by using the password "Victoria" and help him search for the satellites.
• This episode was released on 5 June 2006 as a basic DVD with no special features, together with "School Reunion" and "The Girl in the Fireplace", and as part of a second series boxset on 20 November 2006. This release included an audio commentary by writer Russell T Davies, visual effects supervisor David Houghton and supervising art director Stephen Nicholas.

References

Footnotes

• Matthew Norman (April 2, 2006). "The Doctor will see you now". Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/04/02/svDrWho02.xml.  A father's account of bringing his young son to the set of "Tooth and Claw".
• Paul English (April 19, 2006). "Where wolf?". Daily Record. http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16962759&method=full&siteid=66633&headline=where-wolf---name_page.html.  Actor Derek Riddell discusses the filming of "Tooth and Claw".

External links

• Tooth and Claw on TARDIS Index File, an external wiki
• TARDISODE 2
• "Bullets can't stop it"." — episode Trailer
• Episode commentary by David Tennant, Simon Winstone and Derek Riddell (MP3)
• "Tooth and Claw" episode homepage
• "Tooth and Claw" at the BBC Doctor Who homepage
• "Tooth and Claw" at Doctor Who: A Brief History Of Time (Travel)
• "Tooth and Claw" at the Doctor Who Reference Guide
• "Tooth and Claw" at Outpost Gallifrey
• "Tooth and Claw" at TV.com
• Visit the Torchwood Estate
• "Tooth and Claw" at the Internet Movie Database

Reviews

• "Tooth and Claw" reviews at Outpost Gallifrey
• "Tooth and Claw" reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide