City of Death

Episode of the Doctor Who series
Original title	City of Death
Country of production	United Kingdom
original language	English
length	4 × 25 minutes
classification	Season 17, episodes 5–8 ; 510th - 513rd episode overall ( list )
First broadcast	September 29, 1979 to ; October 20, 1979 on BBC One
Rod
Director	Michael Hayes
script	David Agnew
production	Graham Williams
music	Dudley Simpson
camera	John Walker
cut	John Gregory
occupation
	Tom Baker : The fourth doctor ; Lalla Ward : Romana;
chronology
← Predecessor ; Destiny of the Daleks	Successor → ; The Creature from the Pit

City of Death is the 105th plotline of the British science fiction - television series Doctor Who . It consists of 4 episodes that aired between September 29, 1979 and October 20, 1979.

action

In Paris in 1979, the doctor and his companion Romana experience the effects of a time distortion which seems to have its origin in the Louvre . Once there, the two of them watch a woman using an alien machine to scan the Mona Lisa's security system . From Inspector Duggan the two learn that the lady is Count Carlos Scarlioni's wife and that he has been following her for a long time, as he suspects that the Scarlioni couple are involved in art theft. Together with Inspector Duggan, the doctor and Romana go to the Scarlionis' estate and find various devices in the vaulted cellar that seem to have been used for experiments over time, as well as 6 other Mona Lisas, all of which are similar to one another down to the smallest detail. The doctor decides to visit his good friend Leonardo in the past to find out if he has anything to do with the copies of the Mona Lisa; Romana and Duggan stay at the mansion to further investigate what the Scarlionis are up to. After the Doctor disappears in the TARDIS , Count Scarlioni returns to the estate with another Mona Lisa and takes Romana and Duggan prisoner. When Scarlioni learns that Romana seems to be familiar with time travel, he kills his previous scientist and forces her to continue his work.

Arriving in the past, the doctor is arrested in Leonardo's workshop by Tancredi, who looks like Carlos Scarlioni, and learns that this is really Scaroth, the last of the Jagaroth. He landed on earth with the other Jagaroth over 400 million years ago; but while his fellows were killed in the explosion of their transporter, Scaroth was cut into innumerable fragments and scattered around the earth in different ages. Now he has hired Leonardo da Vinci to paint 7 identical pictures so that these can be sold in the future by his other fragment, Carlos Scarlioni, and he can continue his research on time. After learning this, the doctor manages to escape from Tancredi back to the TARDIS and rushes to Romana and Duggan in 1979.
Once there, the doctor learns that Count Scarlioni plans to destroy all of Paris if Romana does not complete his time machine ; because the count wants to travel back to the point before his transporter explodes and all his people are wiped out. Before the doctor can get involved, Romana finishes the machine and Scarlioni travels back in time. After the Count disappears, reality slowly begins to dissolve, as Scaroth's Fragments were involved in the development of Earth's civilization - without them, humanity never existed. The Doctor, Romana and Duggan just make it back to the TARDIS and also go back in time. 400 million years in the past, the Three Scarlioni can overwhelm before he can avert the destruction of the transporter and travel back to the restored present. Once there, Scarlioni is attacked by his bodyguard and thrown against the various scientific devices, causing a chain reaction that sets the entire property on fire. The doctor, Romana and Duggan manage to save one of the seven Mona Lisas before the entire building goes up in flames.
It turns out that the rescued Mona Lisa isn't the one originally stolen from the Louvre, but the Doctor assures Duggan that no one would notice the difference.

production

Author David Fisher , who already wrote the script for two stories of the 16th season, was asked by Doctor Who producer Graham Williams to provide two scripts for the 17th season. Fisher wrote two script drafts: the first was ultimately to Serial The Creature from the Pit and the second was entitled The Gamble with Time (to German Playing with time ) and dealt with the fact that someone's gambling in Las Vegas abused to to fund a time travel experiment. Williams asked Fisher to revise this design to include a parody of the Bulldog Drummond character. After Fisher delivered a new draft, it turned out that the filming should take place in Paris and not Las Vegas, whereupon the draft had to be rewritten again. This meant, among other things, that K-9, the doctor's robot dog, also had to be removed from the script, as it would have been too expensive for the production to fly the technical team behind K-9 to Paris.
At this point Fisher was prevented by a divorce and could not work on a script, whereupon the then script editor Douglas Adams , with the help of producer Graham Williams, had to rewrite and finish the script himself. After the script had been completed, a certain David Agnew was listed as the author - a pseudonym that had previously been used in the Doctor Who Serial Invasion of Time .

Audience ratings

City of Death - Part One - 12.4 million viewers
City of Death - Part Two - 14.1 million viewers
City of Death - Part Three - 15.4 million viewers
City of Death - Part Four - 16.1 million viewers

actor

Tom Baker - The Doctor
Lalla Ward - Romana
Julian Glover - Count Scarlioni / Tancredi
Catherine Schell - Countess Scarlioni
David Graham - Dr. Kerensky
Kevin Flood - Hermann
Tom Chadbon - Inspector Duggan
Peter Halliday - soldier
Eleanor Bron and John Cleese - art gallery visitors
Pamela Stirling - Louvre tourist guide

publication

The serial is one of the few that has never been published by Target Books, as Douglas Adams declined any offer to transfer the rights to his scripts to Target Books. Only after his death did his heirs Gareth Roberts and James Goss allow his scripts to be adapted from novels. The novel version with new and extended scenes for this serial was published on May 21, 2015.
In April 1991 the serial was first released on video in England and a DVD release followed in 2005. In Germany, the serial is only available in the form of a German translation of the novel adaptation by James Goss under the title Die Stadt des Todes on November 9, 2015 by Cross Cult, which was published a short time later as an audio book by Audible , read by Michael Schwarzmaier .

Trivia

City of Death was the first serial in the series that was recorded for outdoor recordings abroad, in this case in Paris.
Another working title for the story was Curse of the Sephiroth (in German Fluch der Sephiroth )
Parts of the plot, as well as excerpts from Shada , were later reused in Douglas Adam's novel The Electric Monk .
Douglas Adams and director Michael Hayes both have cameo appearances on the serial. Adams plays a visitor to a Parisian café and Hayes a tourist with a metal suitcase that is just leaving a train in the Boissière Metro Station.

Web links

City of Death on the official website of the BBC with a photonovel with Telesnaps to illustrate the episode
City of Death - Detailed recap in the Doctor Who Reference Guide .