Tooth and Claw: A Werewolf, a Queen, and a Secret Weapon

Whovians, this is what I want from a Saturday night: a moonlit Scottish estate, kung-fu monks, a full-blooded werewolf, and Queen Victoria caught in the middle of it. “Tooth and Claw” is a gothic monster romp with its tongue only slightly in its cheek, and then it turns around in its final five minutes and drops a revelation that recontextualises the whole season so far. After the sunny sci-fi of New Earth, this is the show flexing a completely different muscle — horror-tinged historical — and it’s a cracking hour of television.

A Wolf, a Queen, and a House Full of Secrets

The Doctor is aiming the TARDIS at a 1979 punk concert and, being the Doctor, misses by a full century and a few hundred miles — 1879, the Scottish Highlands. Almost immediately they fall in with a very stern travelling party: Queen Victoria herself, diverted from Balmoral by a conveniently fallen tree and heading for the night to the Torchwood Estate. The Doctor, delighted, flashes the psychic paper and bluffs his way into the royal entourage as “Sir Doctor of TARDIS,” complete with a truly terrible Scottish accent. Rose, meanwhile, makes a private bet to get the famously severe monarch to say “we are not amused.” That giddy, larking-about energy — the same joy that made New Earth such a treat — is out in full force here, and it’s worth watching how the episode slowly turns it into a problem.

Because the house is a trap, and everyone in it is in danger. The local monks — the bald, black-robed, unexpectedly acrobatic Brethren of Saint Catherine’s Glen — have taken over the estate, imprisoned the household, and brought with them a caged prisoner: a wiry, feral man who is, in fact, the host of something far older and hungrier. When the full moon rises, he transforms, and the transformation is genuinely nasty for a family show — a towering, sinewy wolf-creature that stalks the candlelit corridors while the guests barricade the doors. Davies and director Euros Lyn lean hard into the haunted-house horror, and it works: this is the kind of monster you’d have watched from behind the sofa as a kid.

The lore behind the beast is a lovely bit of world-building, too. This isn’t folklore made real so much as an alien cell that fell to Earth centuries ago and has been passing host to host ever since, and the Brethren have a plan for it: infect the Queen, put the wolf on the throne, and found an “Empire of the Wolf” that would swallow the British Empire whole. It’s daft in the best Doctor Who way, and it gives the werewolf a purpose beyond simple slaughter.

Moonlight and the Koh-i-Noor

Here’s where “Tooth and Claw” quietly becomes clever. The house, it turns out, is itself the weapon. Sir Robert’s late father — an amateur astronomer — built an enormous observatory in the attic, and he built it in collaboration with none other than Prince Albert. The two of them had been preparing for exactly this night for years, and the key to the whole thing is the Koh-i-Noor: the legendary diamond that Albert kept having re-cut, over and over, never satisfied, always insisting it wasn’t quite right.

There’s a real poignancy underneath the sci-fi here, too. Victoria is a widow deep in mourning, still carrying Albert with her everywhere she goes — and this is the night she learns her late husband spent his final years secretly building a weapon to guard her against a threat he somehow knew was coming. Pauline Collins plays her with a marvellous flinty grief, all iron composure over a bottomless well of loss, and it lends the whole werewolf romp an unexpected emotional weight.

The Doctor puts it together in a rush of that trademark Tennant brilliance. The observatory isn’t a telescope, it’s a light chamber — and the endlessly re-cut diamond is the lens. Focus the moonlight through the Koh-i-Noor and you can turn the wolf’s own strength against it, trapping and burning it in a concentrated beam of the very thing that gives it power. It’s a properly satisfying “everything was set up centuries ago” resolution, the sort of long-fused trap that rewards you for paying attention, and the Doctor gets to be both the clever one and the awestruck one — thrilled that Victoria’s dead husband was three steps ahead of everybody.

The wolf dies in the light, almost peacefully, and there’s a flicker of sympathy for the creature that the episode is smart enough not to oversell. But the sting is in the tail: somewhere in the chaos, the Queen takes a small cut to the wrist. She waves it off. The episode does not, quite, let us wave it off with her — a neat little ambiguity left hanging in the Highland air.

“We Are Not Amused” — and the Birth of Torchwood

And then the reckoning. Victoria does, eventually, say it — a grim, joyless “we are not amused” — but by then the joke has curdled, and that’s the whole point. She has watched the Doctor and Rose treat mortal danger as a great fun day out, giggling their way through a night that got good men killed, and she is appalled by them. In a scene with real bite, she knights them both — Sir Doctor of TARDIS, Dame Rose of the Powell Estate, a long way indeed from the shop girl who first took the Doctor’s hand back in Rose — and then, in the same breath, banishes them from the British Empire forever. She wants nothing more to do with these strange, careless creatures from beyond the stars.

More than that: she resolves to be ready for them. She announces the founding of a new institute, based here at Torchwood House and named for it, dedicated to defending Britain against the supernatural, the alien — and against the Doctor himself, should he ever dare return.

If your ears pricked up at that name, they should have. Cast your mind back to The Christmas Invasion, and the shadowy, unheard-of organisation that reached up and blew a retreating Sycorax ship out of the sky over London. That Torchwood. This is its origin story — a Victorian queen, wounded and unnerved by an alien who wouldn’t take death seriously, quietly building a weapon against the very man who saved her life. It’s a superb piece of connective tissue, and it retroactively sharpens the Doctor’s own recklessness into something with consequences. He breezes in, has a whale of a time, saves the day — and leaves behind an empire that now considers him a threat to be neutralised. What that institute grows into is a question the episode is content to leave dangling, and I’m dying to find out.

What Tooth and Claw Leaves Us With

A gothic werewolf yarn that turns out to be an origin story in disguise. Here’s what it plants:

• The Doctor’s joy has a shadow. The same giddy delight that’s so infectious can look, to the wrong person, like callousness — and Victoria makes him pay for it.
• Torchwood, explained. The name that vaporised the Sycorax now has a founder, a date, and a mission: watch the skies, and watch the Doctor.
• A queen who won’t be dazzled. Victoria sees straight through the psychic paper and the charm, and stands as one of the few historical figures to send the Doctor packing on principle.
• A wound that won’t quite heal. That little cut on the royal wrist is left deliberately unresolved — a splinter of doubt the episode slips under your skin.

• The show can do horror. After cat-nuns and body-swaps, a straight-up haunted-house monster proves how much range this era has.

Rating: 4/5 — A tight, atmospheric, genuinely creepy adventure with one of the best final-act reveals of the run so far. Docked a point only because the wolf effects show their 2006 seams once or twice in full light.

A werewolf, a diamond, a not-amused monarch, and the birth of an institute with the Doctor’s name on its most-wanted list — this one earns its place. Now, where’s that big blue box off to next?