City of Death Part Two

The one where the Doctor finds six genuine Mona Lisas...

Why does Scarlioni take his face off? It doesn't lead to anything other than providing a good cliffhanger, but the sense of it is lost. What is clever though, is that the carving on the great wooden doors of his chateau appropriately reflect his true spaghetti-faced countenance. In reality, they are the doors of the Hotel des Ambassadeurs des Hollande on Rue Vieille du Temple, and the carvings depict the heads of Medusa, with her hair of snakes. I googled the doors and it looks like they've since been painted red. I wonder what the Count would say about that?

Inside, it's back to a BBC studio, but Richard McManan-Smith's stunning design and decor for the chateau's interior is richly detailed. You barely get to see the corridor properly (fleetingly at the end of part 1, and only in part in this episode) but it's so well dressed, and the amount of research, not to mention time and effort, that went into designing and dressing the living room is astonishing. McManan-Smith was more accustomed to designing sets for variety and comedy shows at the time, such as Mike Yarwood or Lennie Bennett, although he had dabbled with period drama in the past, notably The Pallisers and Colditz. But here, he simply excels himself, as he does with the Renaissance scenes later on.

As soon as the Doctor enters the room (collapsing into it after being pushed by Hermann the violent butler), he takes charge. As the Countess looks on with bemusement, the Doctor offers himself a drink, invites Romana and Duggan to take a seat, and manages to gain the upper hand before the much wilier Count Scarlioni makes his entrance. The interplay between Tom Baker and Julian Glover is delicious, delivered with well-rehearsed and enjoyable satisfaction by two actors riffing on genuinely organic badinage. Glover has that perfect Bond villain presence, that ability to smile knowingly, saying one thing but meaning another. Both Scarlioni and the Doctor are fully aware of one another's intelligence, and both know that each are saying less than they mean, but that more does need to be said. They are circling each other diegetically, weighing each other up, two heavyweights of repartee.

This script is not merely funny, that's too simplistic a description for it. The dialogue here is breathtakingly witty, delivered by two men who recognise the quality and mechanics of wit. It's funny as in humorous, but also witty because of its style, panache, intelligence and judgement. There's a definite narrative voice at work in this banter, and it can only be script editor Douglas Adams, who's clearly having a field day trying to make the 16-year-old Doctor Who as Adams-esque as he can. It makes a refreshing change to have such a clear new voice behind Doctor Who's scripts, an intelligent wit with bags of imagination too.

The Count invites the Doctor, Romana and Duggan to stay longer at the chateau, incarcerating them in a cell in the basement so that he may return to questioning them later. The Doctor is happy to accept as he wants to find out more about what's going on before he inevitably escapes. In the basement he sees Kerensky's laboratory, and it's not long before he gets out of the cell using his sonic screwdriver (which is amusingly fixed by Duggan by bashing it on the wall - "Would you like to stay on as my scientific advisor?" the Doctor asks).

I laughed when the Doctor and Duggan started squabbling over whether to stay or go, while Romana just gets on with the job at hand and starts getting together scientific equipment so that she can break down some of the rock wall in the cell to see what's behind it. It's great that she casually identified the fact the room should be bigger than it is, meaning there's a secret room.

The Doctor witnesses Kerensky's contained time experiments, in which he manages to accelerate the life cycle of a hen's egg so that it hatches a new chicken within seconds, rather than weeks. Kerensky is conducting these tests with well-meaning intentions, hoping that by being able to accelerate the growth cycle of animals such as chickens or cows, he can end world famine. The Doctor puts the kibosh on his humanitarian hopes by pointing out that Kerensky can only control what goes on within his own specially-created time continuums, and that these time bubbles and our own continuum can never meet or match. So Kerensky can accelerate as many eggs and calves as he likes, but those starving people can't get into the time bubbles to slaughter and cook them! Damn!

Why does the Doctor see the face of Scaroth in the time bubble when it's left on reverse for too long? I don't know. It suggests that if you reverse a hen's egg far enough back in evolutionary terms, you end up with a squiggly-faced alien. But only his head, not his entire body. Not sure what point there is to that.

Meanwhile upstairs, Scarlioni (aka Mr Spaghetti Head in disguise) is showing off a fantastic new gadget which is genuinely breathtaking in its creativity (signs of Adams at work again). The bracelet the Countess was wearing when she visited the Louvre was actually a device that not only captured the physical image of the Mona Lisa and its surroundings, but is also able to project a solid reproduction of it that can be interacted with. Scarlioni and his men practice their theft of the Mona Lisa using the bracelet projection, overcoming both the glass screen and laser bars in front of the painting. I love this bit of technology, and it's a shame it's so often overlooked in the Doctor Who canon because it actually predates Star Trek's holodeck by nine years (although a holographic "rec room" had debuted in Star Trek: The Animated Series in 1974).

Back downstairs, our heroes are trying to get through to the secret room, which leads to a slightly embarrassing scene in which Duggan volunteers to barge his way through a supposedly solid stone wall which, inevitably because this is the BBC and not Hollywood, wobbles furiously as he does so. Having an actor shoulder his way through anything solid on Doctor Who is just asking for trouble, to be honest.

Within, the Doctor discovers not one, not two, but six identical Mona Lisas, which all appear to be genuine and not fake, judging by the unique brushwork and pigment used by Leonardo Da Vinci. At last, Scarlioni's grand plan begins to slot into place. Why does he need to steal the real Mona Lisa when he seems to have six other real Mona Lisas bricked up in his cellar? Well, the one thing Scarlioni needs is money to fund Kerensky's time experiments, so what better way to raise lots of money than sell the actual Mona Lisa on the black market? He wouldn't be able to sell any of his six copies if the world didn't think the real deal had been stolen, so that is what he has to do, and then he can sell all six simultaneously and make a fortune. Genius!

But where have the other Mona Lisas come from? The only thing for it is to go back in time to see Leonardo Da Vinci himself to ask what he's up to. The Doctor returns to the TARDIS, which is amusingly parked as if it's an exhibit in an art gallery. That gallery can be identified as the Galerie Denise Rene, which, although a BBC studio set here, is a real place in Paris. Interestingly, at the time Doctor Who was filming in Paris (April 30th to May 3rd 1979) the real Denise Rene gallery was hosting an exhibition of constructed abstract art, which some might say would be the perfect place to exhibit a police box which isn't really a police box, but is actually an alien time and space machine that's bigger on the inside than the outside.

The Doctor zips back in time to Renaissance Florence in 1505 (how does he override the randomiser?) to ask Leo what he's up to, but instead falls foul of a sword-wielding guard, and then - da da daaaah! - a door swings open to reveal the eerie silhouette of Da Vinci's current employer, Captain Tancredi. As he steps forward into the light it becomes apparent that Tancredi is actually none other than Count Scarlioni - and he knows exactly who the Doctor is!

Another cracking cliffhanger, the second in a row where Scarlioni reveals a new identity. From spaghetti monster to French art thief to Italian swordsman, whatever next? One thing's sure: City of Death keeps you on your toes!

First broadcast: October 6th, 1979

Steve's Scoreboard
The Good: The bracelet projector is a fascinating piece of speculative future-tech.
The Bad: Tom Chadbon bashing his way through a stone wall, almost taking the entire set with him.
Overall score for episode: ★★★★★★★★★☆

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

NEXT TIME: Part Three...

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