Four Episodes
Aired between 29th September 1979 and 20th October 1979
Written by David Agnew
Produced by Graham Williams
Directed by Michael Hayes
Synopsis
The Doctor and Romana are on holiday in present day France. As they take in the sites,
they are oblivious to clandestine experiments going on in the basement of Count Carlos Scarlioni.
The count is working with a scientist on a futuristic machine, but the scientist, Professor Kerensky, is unhappy because of the sheer amount of money it will take to develop the work that the Count has laid out for him. Scarlioni says it won't be a problem at all and hands him three million franks.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Romana visit the louvre and experience strange time distortions that cause the Doctor to faint. As he comes to, he notices an alien bracelet on a woman that was suspiciously hanging around the Mona Lisa and with some slight of hand, he takes the bracelet.
He and Romana leave and go to a cafe to examine the bracelet, but are followed, first by a detective called Duggan, then by thugs who take all three of them at gunpoint to Scarlioni's mansion. The woman with the bracelet was Scarlioni's wife.
Through investigation, the Doctor, Romana and Duggan find out that Scarlioni somehow has six Mona Lisa's in his Chateau and is about to steal a seventh.
The Doctor goes back in time to 1505 to visit Leonardo Da Vinci, but he's not home.
He does get captured by a guard however and the guard's captain turns out to be Carlos Scarlioni!
The Doctor figures out that Scarlioni is an alien and convinced Leonardo to paint multiple Mona Lisa's. In the future, he will then steal the Mona Lisa and use its absence as a way to sell the copies and make a fortune.
The Doctor manages to escape and writes on the blank canvas' "this is a fake".
Meanwhile, back in 1979, Romana and Duggan try to stop the Countess from stealing the Mona Lisa but fail and get captured. Scarlioni forces Romana to complete his experiment to transport himself back through time. He explains that he is really an alien called Scaroth of a race called the Jaggeroth, and says that there are many copies of him scattered throughout time.
He's actually one alien, that split when his ship (that landed on pre-historic earth) exploded as he entered the time vortex. He's been forced to guide humanity in its development throughout history until it was advanced enough to get to the level of tech capable of building the machine.
He goes back in time to warn himself not to start the ships engine, but the Doctor, Romana and Duggan travel back to pre-historic earth and stop him long enough for the ship to detonate.
Scaroth returns to the chateau in 1979 but his own henchman butler sees his true form and panics, destroying the equipment and therefore killing him. The chateau sets afire and the threat is ended, leaving the Doctor, Romana and Duggan to enjoy the rest of the sights of Paris like the Eiffel Tower.
Trivia
- This was the first Doctor Who story to be filmed outside of the UK
- David Fisher, the man who was supposed to write a story for this slot, was going through a divorce at the time, and couldn't find the time to get the work done. Time was very tight and the popular story goes that Graham Williams locked Douglas Adams in a hotel room for a weekend with a typewriter and a bottle of gin and wouldn't let him leave until came up with the scripts. Because of this, the story is credited to David Agnew (a pseudonym because it wasn't allowed for the script editor to commission his own work)
- The original script called for the Countess to use the bracelet to rig the roulette wheels at casinos to pay for Scarlioni's experiments, but Williams thought it gave a bad impression to kids
- Douglas Adams pilfered his own story and used parts of it in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
- Due to opposing TV channel - ITV going on strike, this story received huge ratings and was the highest of Doctor Who's run at 16.1 million people tuning in for episode 4.
- During this story's run, Doctor Who weekly was first published by Marvel Comics. It continues to this day as Doctor Who magazine and has been a stalwart of the show, even in the dark times during the series' cancellation
- Douglas Adams' novel of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was also published during this story's run
- John Cleese agreed to appear in the show as returning a favour to Tom Baker
The Review
Despite the rave fan reviews that this story gets, and despite the clever and witty things it does, I was preparing to sit down and give City of Death a pretty scathing review.
Those of you who have been reading the reviews in order so far will see that from the start of the previous season (see The Ribos Operation), the show had been developing more and more of its comedy routines. As fantastic a writer as he was, with the appointment of Douglas Adams as Script Editor, this started to grate on me, as more and more cheap gags found their way into the stories. Now, I'm not a killjoy or a dementor, I love the jokes, but they're either A) in stories that have a serious tone and therefore stand out like a sore thumb, or B) the funny story is placed within a serious dramatic plot line and therefore detracts from the bigger plot and makes the characters look like morons. It was getting to the point where it just didn't feel like the same show (then again, perhaps that was what they were going for).
In that context, City of Death is one to absolutely dread because it's something Douglas Adams has been fully unleashed upon, and so you just know that there's going to be laugh a minute gags and farces galore. And that's what it is...except...
Douglas Adams is a genius when it comes to comedy writing. Unlike the rest of the stories where he shoehorned his humour into someone else's story, I found that City of Death's complex plot is very complimentary to the humour it displays. It feels right. It feels like a Douglas Adams story, where the humor is a payoff because the characters are shown to be capable of handling the complexities of it all. Well, except Duggan, but it's an hilarious twist to see his thuggish ways being the thing that saves the universe.
It sound hypocritical, but when you lift City of Death out of the Doctor Who continuum and watch it without a regard to what is coming before or after, then it is an absolutely fantastic story, worthy of all the praise. It's mind boggling to think that it was put together and scripted within a weekend, because it's stood the test of time. It could be remade today with modern effects and still be one of the best stories produced. It is a high ranking story, without doubt, and a must for anyone new to Doctor Who, but be warned that when you put it beside the other non-Douglas Adams stories, you're in for quite a shock.
Rating
10 out of 10!
Rewatchability Factor
8 out of 10
- Vincent and the Doctor (Doctor Who, Series 5)
