City of Death Part Three

The one where Scaroth starts to go to pieces...

I love the knowing exchanges between Julian Glover and Tom Baker (and later, Lalla Ward), they're all so adept at delivering the dialogue with just the right tone it was written for. The characters metaphorically circle each other, weighing one another up, going along with the charade of false politeness. When the Doctor asks Tancredi what he's doing in 1505, the Captain replies: "I will tell you. The knowledge will be of little use to you, since you will shortly die." Wonderful stuff!

It seems that Captain Tancredi is not a distant relation of Count Scarlioni's; they are the same man, or at least aspects of the same man. They share their thoughts and can communicate mentally across the barriers of time and space. Tancredi affably explains that he is really Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth race (the spaghetti-headed aliens), and that when the spaceship we saw at the start of part 1 exploded, he, as the last survivor, was fractured into several splinters through time. So Tancredi and Scarlioni are both Scaroth, different shards of his splintered existence. All identical, none complete. What a fascinating idea. It's also rather tragic, as reflected in the solemn way the Doctor responds to the news (as opposed to a cheap wisecrack). I suppose the Doctor, as a Time Lord, can relate to the feeling of being one man being in several places at once.

Tancredi is determined to learn how the Doctor travelled back in time from 1979 to 1505, because naturally, if there's an easier way of skipping around in time, he wants to know about it. The Doctor is understandably very reluctant to give this information up, and even less keen on admitting that Romana is just as knowledgeable about time travel as he is (for reasons of her safety rather than pride). Tancredi suspects the blue box in the corner is something to do with it, and probably works out that if the Doctor is a Time Lord, then he must have a TARDIS. So I'm surprised Tancredi doesn't make more of trying to secure the TARDIS for himself.

But Tancredi has his own problems. The bits of Scaroth scattered through time seem to be losing their grip, and while Tancredi is swaying woozily under the strain of inter-dimensional communication, the Doctor makes his escape back to 1979. It's worth noting here that he willingly leaves behind a Polaroid camera and photograph, which I'm sure is an unwise oversight. OK, so Leonardo Da Vinci will probably find it and extrapolate something clever and forward-thinking from it, but if his designs for a helicopter are anything to go by, maybe his discovery of the instant camera centuries before its time will be conveniently overlooked!

The letter the Doctor leaves for Leo also suggests the two are quite friendly with one another, having met before. But in a wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey River Song kind of way, maybe the Doctor has met Da Vinci before, but Da Vinci hasn't met the Doctor yet (he signs the letter "see you earlier")? When it's announced that Da Vinci is on his way to the Duke of San Martino's masque in The Masque of Mandragora, it's implied the Fourth Doctor hasn't met Leo yet, but by City of Death it seems he has. Looking at the plethora of spin-off fiction which includes Da Vinci, it seems the earliest point at which Leo meets the Doctor is in the 2015 Titan comic strip The Swords of Kali, where the Twelfth Doctor critiques the Mona Lisa, for which Clara Oswald apparently modelled! So the Twelfth Doctor meets Leo before the Fourth Doctor. If Leo had been around in City of Death, he wouldn't have recognised him. Complicated isn't it? Even more so is the fact that, in a parallel universe where Geoffrey Bayldon plays the Doctor on audio, Leonardo Da Vinci was one of his companions!

Before escaping, the Doctor manages to scribble "This is a Fake" on the back of each of Leonardo's canvasses, which means that back (or forward) in 1979, the six extra Mona Lisas bricked up in Scarlioni's chateau will now have this message buried beneath the pigment. Clever, clever, Doctor!

While all this is going on in 1505, Romana and Duggan rendezvous back at the cafe, despite the fact it's the dead of night and it's shut. Romana stealthily breaks in using the Doctor's sonic screwdriver, and Duggan breaks in separately by smashing a window! The pair are straight onto the vino as they discuss what they think Scarlioni is up to. They're both still at the cafe next morning (it seems they may have slept there overnight), but no mention is made of what the cafe owner said when he arrived at work to find two strange English tourists drinking his wine and using the place as a doss house!

Scaroth is losing his grip on his sanity, and there's a great moment where we fleetingly see more of Scaroth's splinters. It's great fun to see Julian Glover dressed up in various outfits and make-ups, although we don't see nearly enough to fully identify most of them. Inevitably, spin-off fiction has expanded on these other splinters, with a Cardinal Scarlath featuring in the novel Christmas on a Rational Planet, and the Egyptian splinter, which appeared as a god to the people and not a mere man, being used by the Osirans as a foreman to arrange construction of the pyramids (The Sands of Time). These many splinters have not only caused the pyramids to be built, and the heavens to be mapped, but have also pushed early man into discovering fire, and the first wheel. Scaroth has "brought up a whole race from nothing to save his own".

There's a sequence of scenes in which the Doctor, and Romana and Duggan, run around Parisian locations looking for each other, but never the twain do meet. They're not quite as repetitive as those in part 1, but they're certainly unnecessary, and this time they don't look quite as impressive because it seems like it's been raining in Paris! Soggy wet cobbles look like soggy wet cobbles wherever they are in the world!

Romana and Duggan are captured trying to break into the Count's chateau in order to steal back the Mona Lisa (that's a brazen plan if ever there was one!), and the magical interplay between Glover and Ward is a delight to watch. Ward has a way of making almost everything she says sound slightly smug, and coupled with that beaming girlish grin, Romana proves she's just as recondite as the Doctor.

Down in the basement, Scarlioni proves he's able to wipe Paris off the face of the map using Kerensky's machinery, but the Hungarian scientist isn't happy that his work is being misused in this way. Sadly, Kerensky is no longer indispensable (Scarlioni has Romana now) and leads the professor into a deadly trap by cruelly accelerating his lifespan within his own machine. Kerensky is aged to death, but David Graham manages to completely spoil the horror of it by performing a bizarre "death boogie", flailing his arms around and contorting his face comically. He looks like Quasimodo at the disco!

The ageing effects are good though, with the make-up getting progressively more elderly until Kerensky finally crumbles into a skeleton. It's a cruel dispatch for a character who had such good intentions, and director Michael Hayes ends the episode perfectly. The last shot is not the fleshless corpse of Professor Kerensky, but the smarmy, self-satisfied look on Count Scarlioni's face as the true extent of his devilry becomes apparent. Glover's smug look of "I told you so" is the perfect way to end the episode. What a bastard.

First broadcast: October 13th, 1979

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The callous death of Kerensky shows us the measure of this cruel alien Count.
The Bad: David Graham's "death boogie" is embarrassing.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★☆☆

"Would you like a jelly baby?" tally: 20

NEXT TIME: Part Four...

My reviews of this story's other episodes: Part One; Part Two; Part Four

Find out birth/death dates, career information, and facts and trivia about this story's cast and crew at the Doctor Who Cast & Crew site: https://doctorwhocastandcrew.blogspot.com/2014/08/city-of-death.html

City of Death is available on BBC DVD. Find it on Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-City-Death-DVD/dp/B000AWKSU0