31st Aug 2008
City of Death
I’m kicking off my series of reviews of “Classic Nerd Television” with my thoughts on the Doctor Who story City of Death. (If you don’t want to hear any spoilers, maybe you should read no further. I consider this fair warning for all my future reviews as well. Caveat lector.)
This particular Doctor Who story has two main plot threads, one of which is a group of criminals trying to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. Coincidentally, we were watching it on August 21, 2008, the ninety-seventh anniversary of the actual theft of the Mona Lisa.
As a child, I saw almost all the Doctor Who serials that had survived the BBC tape wipings of the 1970s. However, a great many of them I only got to watch once. If my father decided that a given story wasn’t a “classic,” he would record over it the next week. We watched City of Death once as a family, then taped over it with Nightmare of Eden. So I had a very rough idea what the story was about — an alien broken into twelve pieces and scattered across time by the explosion that first created life on Earth, trying to steal the Mona Lisa to raise money for time travel research, so he could travel back and prevent the explosion — but I had forgotten everything else in the intervening twenty years.
What I found most striking about the story was the closeness of the relationship between the Doctor and Romana. Perhaps it was the Parisian atmosphere, but it was difficult not to see a current of romance between the two time lords. Of course, the fact that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward were falling in love at the time may have had something to do with it. Doctor Who being what it is, there was never anything explicit; they just sort of acted like a couple, whether they were bickering or out having fun. I don’t remember the pair’s intimacy being so apparent at any other point in the series, except perhaps in Logopolis, when the Doctor looks in on Romana’s now-empty room — which is remarkable, since the Doctor usually seemed to forget about his former companions almost instantaneously.
The alien, Scaroth, looked silly — played by Julian Glover, shortly after his appearance as the frighteningly cold General Veers, in a one-eyed green rubber mask. To disguise himself as a human, the villain wore a second rubber mask with human features. I couldn’t quite get over the oddness of the fact that when Scaroth was wearing his disguise, his head was smaller than with it off, since Scaroth with a mask was really Glover without one and vice versa. Also inexplicable was the fact that some (or all) of the versions of Scaroth, which were scattered over millions of years of Earth history, had masks with identical features! On the other hand, I really enjoyed a scene where one character, guided by the Doctor’s hints, locates an Egyptian papyrus where a one-eyed green monster is depicted alongside the pharaohs and gods.
Scaroth’s spaceship, unlike the “man” himself, was totally awesome. A huge olive green sphere with three articulated legs, various ports, and a spinning ring around its equator. It just looked more natural — the product of a coherent alien technology — and seemed to operate more fluidly than most of the products of the BBC model shop.
Later in the story, there’s a cameo by John Cleese, which I recall my father found quite hilarious. Nothing Cleese says is really that amazingly funny. It’s more just the incongruity of suddenly seeing Basil Fawlty propounding pompously on the TARDIS as a new piece of installation art at the Louvre that makes the scene. (And at least it’s definitely him; no wondering whether that guy in The Face of Evil is actually Eric Idle in a secret cameo.)
Apart from Clese, the acting is good but not outstanding. Ward turns in the best performance, with a particularly nuanced presentation of her relationship with the Doctor. K-9, on the other hand, is completely absent. Glover is more effective when his character seems to be just a sinister human gangster, rather than a megalomaniacal alien warlord. And Tom Chadbon provides some additional humor as Duggan, a thuggish P.I. who tags along with the protagonists, sometimes being an asset and sometimes a liability. A decision not to show Leonardo da Vinci on screen was probably wise. Douglas Adams or one of the other ghost writers for the episode must have been an admirer of Leonardo. There’s a nice touch when the Doctor drops in on the great painter, but the latter is out, so the Doctor leaves a note for him in mirror writing.
Unlike, say, The Pirate Planet, I’m unlikely to watch this story again before I my kids are old enough to enjoy it. However, it was a nice piece of light entertainment with which to occupy an evening.
[...] for building civilization on the banks of the Nile could be conveniently forgotten in “City of Death.”) Apparently, Sutekh is the greatest threat that will ever face the Earth, even with all [...]