| abstract | - The Fourth Doctor brings Leela to Victorian London to see how her ancestors lived, but is rapidly drawn into a fiendish plot involving Chinese Tongs, disappearing women, an Oriental stage magician with uncanny powers, a murderous ventriloquist's dummy, and giant rats in the sewers. A dozen women are missing, believed dead. The murder of a cab driver married to one of the missing women causes the Doctor and Leela to encounter a police pathologist, Professor Litefoot, and a member of the Chinese tong which carried out the murder. The latter leads the Doctor to become suspicious of Li H'sen Chang, a police interpreter, who is also a stage magician appearing twice-nightly at the Palace Theatre. Chang is secretly the henchman of Magnus Greel, a 51st century war criminal masquerading as the Chinese god Weng Chiang. Greel fled through time to escape his enemies and is searching for his lost Time Cabinet, which by chance has fallen into the possession of Litefoot. Theatre owner Henry Gordon Jago assists the Doctor in his investigation of Chang's vanishing lady illusion, by which the women are being kidnapped - and ultimately murdered to feed Weng Chiang. The plot casts Weng Chiang in the role of the phantom of the opera, haunting the cellers of the Palace Theatre, his bodily decay fended off by extracting the life energy of the victims Chang brings him. The Doctor must track him down, and find the Time Cabinet first, because any further use of it will cause a catastrophe. It uses zygma energy, and the zygma experiments lead only to disaster.
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