City of Death

Dear Gary—

“What’s Scarlioni’s angle?”

To steal the Mona Lisa. To ransack and sell priceless treasures through the ages. To finance dangerous time experiments. To reunite his twelve fractured selves scattered throughout history. To roll back the Earth’s clock four hundred million years. To undo all of human progress.

“Scarlioni’s angle? Never heard of it. Have you ever heard of Scarlioni’s angle?”

“No, I was never any good at geometry.”

The City of Death, like The Romans so many years before it, is Doctor Who as unabashed comedy.

Also like the Romans, City of Death is Doctor Who on vacation: “It’s the only place in the universe where one can relax entirely.” The Doctor and Romana are in Paris and there is a wonderfully leisurely feel to the story as they take in the sights, from the Eiffel Tower to the Louvre to sidewalk cafes; riding the metro and running across busy streets; the two are totally at ease with one another; and the accompanying musical score to this holiday is inspired.

But when the world takes “a funny turn” and the Doctor and Romana run afoul of Scarlioni things really take off. City of Death is Doctor Who in top form: an excellent script full of excellent supporting characters played by excellent actors.

I’ll start with the least minor character. In the midst of all the big name talents of Julian Glover (“the centuries that divide me shall be undone”), Catherine Schell (“you’re a beautiful woman, probably”), and John Cleese (“to me, one of the most curious things about this piece is its wonderful afunctionalism”), the likes of Peter Halliday makes his usual Doctor Who memorable impression. Tom Baker as the Doctor and Julian Glover as Captain Tancredi are clearly the major players in their scene together, but Peter Halliday in his quiet way as an unnamed soldier steals it.

“I say, what a wonderful butler. He’s so violent.” And then there is Hermann. There isn’t anything exceptional about the character of Hermann, except he is the perfect foil; always deadpan, always on hand to set up a laugh: “Sell a Gutenberg Bible discreetly?” “Well, as discreetly as possible. Just do it, will you?”; “Count, I would really like to get some sleep.” “Hermann, cancel the wine; bring the vitamin pill.”

The scientist Kerensky is yet another notable in our cast. Duped into believing he is working for the betterment of mankind (“It’s the Jagaroth who need all the chickens?”), he is befuddlement and genius combined (“You never cease to amaze me, that such a giant intellect could live in such a tiny mind.”).

Even the tour guide at the Louvre gets in the act.

But it is our main players, the Doctor, Romana, Duggan, the Count, and the Countess, who make City of Death the classic that it is.

Let me start with the Count (Julian Glover) and Countess (Catherine Schell), our two stars among the guest stars. Without their restraining presence the Doctor’s antics would not work as well as they do.

For instance, the Doctor introducing himself and his companions to the Countess while on his knees (after having been tripped up by the violent butler Hermann) and then directing everyone to their places and helping himself to a drink all would have been completely over the top if the Countess didn’t remain perfectly calm, firm, and aristocratic throughout. Even a touch of Margaret Dumont would have sent this scene into the realm of the zany. This is not Marx Brothers but Doctor Who after all.

The Count is equally calm, although not quite as humorless as the Countess. But his is the dry, above-it-all humor one would expect from an alien being who has been splintered into twelve separate parts living twelve separate but connected lives amongst a peoples so far primitive to his own for a seeming eternity. The Count, Scaroth, Last of the Jagaroth; “An infinitely old race and an infinitely superior one.” That he can find humor at all in his plight is remarkable.

I especially love the scene in the cellar as the Doctor peppers the Count with questions that beg for exposition only to have the Count answer in staid, monosyllabic “No” and “Yes” replies (“I like concise answers”), and then the Doctor echoes this back to him when the Count begins his own interrogation. Punctuating it all, of course, is Duggan’s punch (“Duggan! Duggan, why is it that every time I start to talk to someone, you knock him unconscious?”).

But I don’t want to get into Duggan just yet, Gary, because I have more to say about the Count and Countess.

What a fascinating pair, these two. “A few fur coats, a few trinkets, a little nefarious excitement.” This apparently is all it takes to keep the Countess happy. One has to wonder about that nefarious excitement, given the fact that her husband is an undercover alien with one eye and green tentacled face and hands and who knows what else. “What have I been living with all these years?” she finally thinks to ask, and we have to ask why she never thought to ask before.

The Countess is a woman full of her own self-importance, reveling in the power and wealth her husband provides, and thrilling in the criminal escapades he masterminds. (Countess: “Think of the wealth that will be ours.” Count: “The wealth is not everything.” Countess: “Of course. The achievement. Yes, the achievement.”) The Count plays up to her vanities and secretly scorns them.

Puffed up as she is, she knows her place:

Countess: “Of course. Just tell Hermann.”

 Count: “No, my dear. You tell Hermann.”

She has sold herself for fur coats, trinkets, and nefarious excitement, and she never thinks to ask, “What have I been living with all these years?”

Now let’s get to Duggan, ”I’m about ready to thump somebody” Duggan. This Bull Dog Drummond meet Inspector Clouseau character contributes more than his punctuating punch (“I think that was possibly the most important punch in history”).  And he does more than merely introduce us to the art theft sub plot that sucks us and the Doctor into this story.

Duggan lets us get to know Romana Mark II. Now the previous story, Destiny of the Daleks, and the opening scenes of this have shown us a relaxed and easy side to our new Romana. But her interactions with Duggan let us glimpse a side to her beyond her role as companion. Romana is a Time Lord (or Time Lady if you will) and it is nice to see City of Death give her an opportunity to shine as such. (Interesting that now she is a Time Lady and not Time Lord Romana has become vain about her age and is shaving years off, telling Duggan she is 125 when we know from The Ribos Operation that she is 139.)

“If you wanted an omelet,” she tells Duggan displaying a biting wit worthy of the Doctor, “I’d expect to find a pile of broken crockery, a cooker in flames, and an unconscious chef.”  And then she gets to do some Doctor Who technobable explanations to an incredulous Duggan regarding time continuums before giving up and concluding, “Come on, let’s get back to the chateau where at least you can thump somebody.”

“Can anyone join in this conversation, or do you need a certificate?” Duggan’s confused dim-wittedness in many ways voices the same need of the audience for explanations. While Romana assumes a more authoritative, informative role usually consigned to the Doctor alone, Duggan takes on the more traditional companion role needing the intricacies of the plot spelled out for him.

 “Stealing the Mona Lisa to pay for chickens?” That would be Duggan summing up the plot. And that’s not a bad summation, except the Doctor would substitute tinkering with time for chickens, and “that’s always a bad idea unless you know what you’re doing.”

“Oh, some can,” the Doctor says, clearly placing himself in that category, “and if you can’t you shouldn’t tinker with time,” he concludes, clearly placing Kerensky in the latter.

The Count agrees, and he demonstrates exactly how he deals with fools by placing Kerensky in the field generator (“No! Not that switch!”) and ages him to dust. Not to worry, Romana has built him a field interface stabilizer so he can utilize the equipment Kerensky has built as an effective time machine and succeed in his goal of returning to his past self in order to stop himself from causing the explosion that resulted in his fractured existence (and incidentally producing the massive dose of radiation needed to create life on Earth).

And now, Gary, I want to turn my attention to the Doctor. He might have displayed a relaxed and easy charm on holiday followed by some comic turns complete with pratfalls, but when it comes down to it there is a dead serious core masked by the buffoonery that has always been a part of the Doctor’s, and most especially Tom Baker’s Doctor’s, persona.

Doctor: “Ah Count, hello. I wonder if you could spare me a moment of your time. Romana, hello, how are you? I see the Count’s roped you in as a lab assistant. What are you making for him? A model railway? A Gallifreyan egg timer? I hope you’re not making him a time machine. I shall be very angry.”

All that quick, rapid-fire wit we come to expect from the Doctor. Light and humorous but masking concern and gauging the situation.

Scarlioni: “Doctor, how very nice to see you again. It seems like only 474 years since we last met.”

(The Doctor has just returned from his sojourn back to Leonardo da Vinci’s time and his meeting with one of Scarlioni’s alter egos Captain Tancredi.)

Doctor: “Indeed. Indeed yes. I so much prefer the weather in the early part of the sixteenth century, don’t you?”

And then, added to the end of this droll string rolling swiftly off his tongue: “Where’s Duggan?” With all of human history hanging in the balance, with off-the-cuff banter flying about, the Doctor takes the time to enquire after a man he barely knows, a man who is “in it for the thumping,” a man who has blundered his way into the Doctor’s life.

It is that dead calm eye of the storm existing within the chaos that is the fourth Doctor that first impressed me back in Robot and that is impressing me still as we near the end of his long run.

Duggan: “Doctor, get me out of here.”

Doctor: “Ah, there you are Duggan. Are you behaving yourself? Good, good. Now, Count, this is what I’ve come to say . . .”

Assured of Duggan’s safety, the Doctor can get down to the serious business of saving the world.

A quick hop in the TARDIS back four hundred million years (apparently the Doctor can take the TARDIS off the randomizer when necessary) and Duggan can make his world saving punch. In the end I feel sorry for Scaroth, the Last of the Jagaroth. But the Doctor is right: “You’ve thrown the dice once. You don’t get a second throw.”

 I do wonder, though, why Scaroth (as Scarlioni) didn’t hook up with the gang from Invasion of the Dinosaurs working towards the same goal of moving the Earth back through time, but then we’d have a different story. I also don’t know why he didn’t cooperate with the Fendahl and the Daemon Azal to advance Mankind through the ages, but again, different story. It is rather maddening, all these aliens claiming credit for our advancement (including the Doctor’s off-hand claims regarding Shakespeare). And since I’m on the subject of re-writing history (rather ironic since the Doctor is admonishing Scaroth from doing just that when the show is rather liberal with its own revisions), really Gary, are we to believe that da Vinci could make seven identical pictures, so much so that no one can tell the difference from the original even if painted by the same hand?

I have long cited City of Death as my favorite Doctor Who. I don’t know, Gary, that I would state this unequivocally if asked today; I don’t know that I could single out any one story for such an honor, although it remains in my top ten if not top five. Rivaling City of Death for top spot would be that long ago Hartnell story The Romans as well as fellow Tom Baker serials The Brain of Morbius, Pyramids of Mars, The Talons of Weng-Chiang, The RibosOperation, and The Pirate Planet (but don’t count out Sylvester McCoy’s Paradise Towers).

I wonder, Gary, where you would rank City of Death, but I can only wonder and send this off with these words of wisdom from the Doctor:

“Well, I suppose the best way to find out where you’ve come from is to find out where you’re going and then work backwards.”

If and when I ever find out where I’m going, Gary . . .