Before we look at the story itself, we must address the issue of "yellow face" in these episodes. This has been an issue in the series before - e.g. the Hartnell historical adventures Marco Polo and The Crusade.
Actors of an ethnic minority background were employed in these stories, but only as background characters. All of the principal roles went to Caucasian actors - and the same thing happens here. The argument is always that the UK did not have enough leading actors from the minorities at the time. True, institutional racism had contributed towards them failing to break out on stage and on screen, but by 1977 this should not have been the case. We only have to look at The Mind of Evil in 1971 to see two Chinese actors in significant speaking roles, helping to carry the earlier instalments. The actor who we see in the background of the image above - Vincent Wong - could easily have portrayed Li H'sen Chang. He was a good enough actor to be given a significant role in one of the Bond movies (Die Another Day).
The other controversial issue, of course, is the representation of the Chinese people in the story. This goes back to one of the main source materials which Robert Holmes was using for inspiration - the Fu Manchu novels of Sax Rohmer. The first of these - The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu (aka The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu) - was published in 1913, and reflected attitudes of the time. Despite comprising only a couple of streets, Limehouse's 'Chinatown' district was regarded as a den of sin. The locals were employed almost exclusively in the laundry business - and the drug trade. White women ran the risk of being abducted and sold into slavery abroad. The newspapers were full of the "Yellow Peril". The Chinese were pretty much, as an entire nation, criminals who could not be trusted. Rohmer's books are full of stereotypes - including other ethnic minorities who are generally described as intrinsically monstrous.
Talons features no sympathetic member of the Chinese community - someone from within it who is opposed to the Tong.
On to the story itself.
The geography is all wrong. The River Fleet ran down through the area between the Cities of Westminster and London. Walk along Fleet Street today and you'll notice a prominent dip / rise between the Strand and St Pauls - the old course of the vanished river. The Holborn Viaduct crosses it. What is left of the river, now part of the sewer system, comes out on the Thames close to Blackfriars Bridge.
The Palace Theatre is located firmly in Limehouse, which is much too far east for the Fleet to pass underneath it.
The Doctor's mention of the Venerable Bede sounds as if he was local, whereas the Tyneside monk never left the North East of England.
It's a very big coincidence that the pathologist examining the Tong's victims just happens to be the very person whom the Tong's leader is searching for.
From what Litefoot says, the Time Cabinet has been in his London home for a long time. The fact that young women have only just started to disappear suggests that Greel has only been in the city for a short time. If the British were the main foreign presence in China at the time of Litefoot's parents' stay there, then surely Greel should have looked at searching London first. Why hunt all over Europe for it?
Couldn't Li H'sen Chang's hypnotic powers have been used to find out from palace staff exactly who the cabinet had been gifted to?
Another big coincidence is that the Peking Homunculus just happens to be taken back in time to... China. If Greel had some previous connection with that country it certainly isn't mentioned.
Mr Sin is a homicidal maniac, yet it doesn't kill Litefoot - despite two attacks on his home.
The dummy Mr Sin at the end of the final episode is particularly obvious.
The giant rat is another obvious misfire. As the producer himself noticed too late, it needed to be dirtied down, with wet, slicked back hair, instead of looking fluffy.
You can clearly see a 1976 newspaper in the laundry hamper at one point.
Greel has a giant laser weapon in his secondary base. Why? His plan is to get the Cabinet and leave immediately, so why would he plan for a battle within the confines of his base? If he was worried about Time Agents or other undesirables coming for him, wouldn't some more subtle booby-traps do the job more efficiently?
Why have as his main base a chamber right next to a stinking sewer, when he has that other place?
The theatre is one of the few buildings in London which has people moving around it for much of the day and night. Wouldn't somewhere only used for a few hours a day, or an abandoned place, have been more practicable for sneaking in and out of?
How does Chang get to the opium den so quickly, considering he's lost a lot of blood - and one of his legs?
The Time Cabinet is clearly not dimensionally transcendental - so how did Greel fit all that equipment into it? Even if he built a lot of it himself locally in China, it would still have taken a fair bit of 5000 AD equipment which could hardly have fitted into a space which had to accommodate himself and Mr Sin as well.
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