Doctor Who (2005) 2-02: Tooth and Claw (Quick Review)

Episode:

712

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Serial:

169

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Writer:

Russell T Davies

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Director:

Euros Lyn

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Air Date:

22-Apr-2006

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Today on Sci-Fi Adventures, it's the 22nd April 2026, making this the anniversary of Tooth and Claw, the second episode of Doctor Who's second series. The second second series, from 2006, not the one with William Hartnell from 1964 or the one with Ncuti Gatwa from 2025.

Though it's the third episode so far to be directed by Euros Lyn, one of the most prolific directors of the first Russell T Davies era. His episodes are all over the place in quality, but when he was paired up with writer Steven Moffat he produced some gold. Unfortunately this isn't a Moffat story, it's actually the sixth episode in a row to be written by RTD himself. It wasn't really meant to be, but he had to step in and get the job done when the original writer went rogue and wrote something they couldn't use.

I usually go through a whole episode scene by scene, but we're both busy people so I'm going with a shorter review format this time. With SPOILERS. Though I won't be spoiling anything that happens later in the series, so if you're watching the show for the first time you've got nothing to worry about from me.

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RECAP

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Scotland, 1879. A bunch of monks led by Father Angelo arrive at Sir Robert MacLeish's Torchwood Estate to claim the house, with violence. Meanwhile the Doctor and Rose materialise in the wilderness right next to Queen Victoria's carriage, and talk their way into coming along.

They all arrive at Torchwood, where everything seems fine, more or less, until the Queen's soldiers are drugged and Rose is dragged to the basement. There she finds Sir Robert's wife Lady Isobel and her staff have been chained up by the monks, in front of a caged man who's about to turn into a werewolf. She has a chat with the wolf host to learn his evil plot, then helps the others escape. Upstairs the Queen just shoots Father Angelo dead and recovers her treasure: the priceless Koh-i-Noor diamond.

There's a lot of running around and the Doctor, Rose, Sir Robert and the Queen end up in a library protected by mistletoe oil on the walls. They search through the books for clues and the Doctor realises that Sir Robert's late dad and the Queen's late husband Prince Albert had been coming up with a plan to deal with the werewolf. They rush to building's giant telescope and focus the moon's light into the Koh-i-Noor, killing the creature. Afterwards the Doctor and Rose are knighted and then immediately exiled!

Later, the Queen reveals that she's establishing an organisation to fight these kind of bizarre threats and naming it after the house: the Torchwood Institute.


REVIEW

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The episode beings with a striking shot of the Welsh landscape, standing in for Scotland, so it's a great looking story from the very first frame. Great for SD footage shot on an outdated digital camera at least, they could only work with what they had.

They've gone with a bit of a high-contrast desaturated bleach-bypass look for this one, where even the daytime sky can somehow disappear into blackness. I think it works for it, adds to the spooky vibes.

Also look at this shot! I've got nothing to say about it really, I just like it when a director's skilled enough to show familiar scenes in a different way without being so much of a show off that it pulls me out of the episode. 

This is one of the episodes I hadn't seen before, so it was nice to go into a story with no idea where it was going or how it was getting resolved. Well okay I knew about the werewolf, and the ninja monks, and the Doctor putting on a Scottish accent, and Rose trying to get Queen Victoria to say "we are not amused", and Torchwood. But other than that (and a handful of other things), I went into this completely blind.

Basically I knew about a lot of the different pieces, but I hadn't seen how it all fit together in context.

And now I know that there's pretty much no context that explains the scene of the Scottish monks removing their monk robes to reveal they're wearing different monk robes, before leaping 12 feet into the air in slow motion to kick ass. It's never explained where the werewolf cultists got their Shaolin skills from, they're never relevant again, this is just a gag for the intro.

You'd think there'd be at least one other fight in the story, but nope. They remain outside the house with guns to prevent the heroes from escaping, and then the episode just forgets that they were there. Also this one fight we do get is kind of terrible.

This is one of very few modern Doctor Who episodes to shoot scenes on film, as they put in the extra time and money to give us a slow motion flip right out of a wuxia movie. But just as you think it's about to go full Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, we instead get a quick-cut shaky-cam fight like you'd see in The Bourne Identity! It's hard to even know or care what the combatants are doing here.

On the plus side, it really shows off how far camera and editing technology had come by 2006. '70s Doctor Who looked like two different series depending on whether they were using video cameras on a soundstage or shooting on film out on location, but this scene switches between video and film seamlessly.

After the kung fu teaser, the episode settles down to be surprisingly grounded. New Earth had a bit of a goofy tone to it, but everyone's playing it very straight in this story, even the Doctor and Rose a lot of the time. I can appreciate that, as the time travelling means nothing if they don't commit to making it feel like they've arrived in 1878. Plus British television is top tier when it comes to serious costume dramas, so they were wise to play to their strengths.

I had the impression that the two of them were going to be at their most obnoxious and jokey in this story, acting like they're detached from the danger everyone else is facing, but they actually take the crisis pretty seriously. Aside from Rose's attempts to get Queen Victoria to say "we are not amused", which got kind of annoying. Plus her extreme nakedness was very inappropriate... even though it took me a minute to figure out what people were actually bothered by (I guess it's the short skirt). I also had to look up what 'timorous' meant, and it turns out he was calling her 'timid'.

This time it was David Tennant's turn to drop the fake accent, or maybe adopt one from closer to home. The guy's so Scottish in this story that he got to call himself Jamie McCrimmon. That was a nice reference for the old school fans, especially as it confirms that Jamie still exists in this revival continuity! The old companions haven't been lost in the reboot.
 

After seeing the repetition in Russell T Davies' second era as showrunner, I've been looking out for ways that series 2 echoes series 1, and there are some similarities here. Tooth and Claw and The Unquiet Dead are both historical horror stories with pseudo-supernatural elements and a famous real life figure playing a major role. They both look pretty good too, which makes sense as they were both directed by the same person.

This even has a scene of someone with unnatural abilities sensing the wolf in Rose, which is a weirdly specific thing to happen every episode 2! Though now that we're on the other side of the Bad Wolf reveal there's no ominous foreshadowing about it, it's just connecting two dots in a way that brains find satisfying. But even though she burned like the sun, he only needs the moooooooooooon.

I like that Rose is the one to communicate with the creature, getting useful information from it. She doesn't know that it's a Lupine Wavelength Haemovariform or whatever, but she's experienced enough by this point to figure out it's an alien and get it talking. Plus she frees herself and the others before the Doctor arrives to help!

To be fair she had plenty of time, as you have to wait until halfway through the episode before the werewolf gets out. Then the episode turns into New Earth again, with the characters running away, finding safety for a few minutes, then running away to another room. (Rose seriously needs to learn to run away from the monster when someone's sacrificing themselves to delay it. She was like this in Dalek as well.)

New Earth had cat nuns wearing physical makeup. This time though the furry alien was created with CGI and I think they did a pretty good job, especially for mid-budget British TV in 2006. It'd been a few years since the movie Monsters Inc. but CGI fur was still a challenge. It's not photorealistic, but I don't think the episode looks embarrassingly bad. Then again, I don't think She-Hulk looks bad either! I grew up watching Babylon 5 and Sliders, my hopes are high and my expectations low.

Like Daleks, bullets do not stop it. Well, maybe silver ones would, but they don't have any. Fortunately bullets did stop Father Angelo, who gets gunned down by Queen Victoria almost immediately after being revealed! Sucks if you were hoping he'd be an interesting villain. It was probably worth it just for the surprise though.

But Lady Isobel and the staff figuring out the wolf's weakness and creating some mistletoe water to throw at it felt very strange, as aside from this moment of agency they're not really characters in this episode.

Rose does interact with them for a moment, helping Flora and encouraging Lady Isobel to help break the chains, so it could've been satisfying to see them help her later on when she's in trouble. But with the script as it is, it's almost like the background extras suddenly come up with a plan on their own, and it's weird.

It was interesting that the weapon to defeat the werewolf was there in the building the whole time, so the Doctor wasn't coming up with his own solution, he was using the clues to work out someone else's solution. Books are the most powerful weapon you can have, especially if they lead you to the death ray.

The trouble is that the plan was kind of crazy. Sir Robert's dad and Prince Albert had a whole adventure where they discovered the existence of space werewolves and came up with a method to destroy them which relied on cutting chunks off the world's most valuable diamond so it could precisely reflect the beam of moonlight coming from a specially engineered telescope. Of course the werewolf would have to be lured into Sir Robert's own house for this to work... You have to suspend your disbelief a bit for this one.

In reality the Koh-i-Noor was cut down so dramatically because it had visible flaws and looked a bit rubbish. They turned it from a chunk of disappointing diamond to an incredible sparkling gem. Also I'm not sure where the line "It is said that whoever owns it must surely die" comes from. There is apparently a superstition that it brings bad luck, but only if it's worn by a man.

Anyway, I can buy that space werewolves are a thing in the Doctor Who universe, but this scheme to defeat them really strains my suspension of disbelief. Also I'm not sure this observatory even fits into the tower it's supposed to be in. The telescope is cartoonishly huge from the outside view.

In fact the observatory room is so damn massive I'm not sure the entire house has the space for it!

It does make sense though, that the Torchwood Estate would already have an anti-alien ray built into it, considering that Torchwood's introduction in The Christmas Invasion had them using a Death Star laser to blow up an Sycorax ship.

The funny thing is, series 1 trained viewers that there's going to be an arc word in every episode and it's not going to mean anything until the end of the season, so it's actually a surprise when the episode ends with the Torchwood Institute being created at the Torchwood Estate.

(In real life, the word 'Torchwood' was actually the codename for Doctor Who during series 1, as it's a sneaky anagram. Other anagrams of 'Doctor Who' include Crowd Hoot and Hotrod Cow.)

Anyway, the Queen knights the Doctor, makes Rose a dame, and then banishes them. All because they carried out a plan to save her life that her own husband came up with. Is she really that mad about the Doctor deceiving her with his accent? She seemed to get over it quite fast at the time, seeing as she let him hold the most valuable diamond in the world, which she would die to protect... for some reason.

She's very quick to decide that the two of them are far too irreverent and eager to dive into danger, especially considering she's only known them for one day. It's like she watched a Blu-ray box set between scenes.

Funnily enough the best evidence for her case comes after she's made her judgement, as the two of them laugh about the royal family maybe being werewolves all the way back to the TARDIS. That's something they should probably be more worried about! They should also be worried about the Queen saying they should reflect on how much longer they may survive this terrible life, as that's an ominous thing to say in a TV show.


RATING

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Tooth and Claw isn't the most fast-paced, fascinating or wittiest episode of Doctor Who, in fact I'm struggling to decide if I like it more or less than the mediocre New Earth.

Both stories are watchable enough, they're fine, but New Earth made me care more about its villain than Tooth and Claw did for its main characters. On the other hand, Tooth and Claw is more atmospheric and did a better job of justifying its absurdity. I think I'm going to be nice and give this:

  6/10

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NEXT EPISODE

Next week it's the third episode of Doctor Who series 2, School Reunion!

But this week it was Tooth and Claw and I'm curious about what you folks thought of the episode. Do you love it? Hate it? Had you forgotten it existed?