Scaroth, last of the Jagaroth, blew himself into twelve pieces at the dawn of time, and he's spent the 400 million years since nudging humanity toward the one invention that can put him back together. Funding it means selling the Mona Lisa. Seven times. City of Death is Douglas Adams rewriting a whole serial over one whiskey-fuelled weekend, Tom Baker and Lalla Ward falling in love on the streets of Paris, Julian Glover in a white suit being the most charming villain the show ever had, a detective who answers every question with a punch, and John Cleese admiring a police box. It's also the story Doctor Who fans hold up as the best thing the classic series ever made. So is it? Better than Blink? Better than everything? Or does a 46-year-old chase through the Louvre finally have some explaining to do?
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Plot Summary
The Doctor, Romana and a detective who punches everything stop a one-eyed alien from unmaking the human race over a very pretty painting.
Notable for:
The first Doctor Who story filmed on location outside the UK: four days in Paris at the end of April 1979, with the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Champs-Élysées and three Métro stations on screen
Credited to “David Agnew”, the BBC’s in-house pseudonym: David Fisher’s script A Gamble with Time (a Bulldog Drummond pastiche with a casino subplot in Monte Carlo) was rewritten over a weekend by script editor Douglas Adams and producer Graham Williams after Fisher, going through a divorce, could not do the rewrites himself; Williams had cut the gambling as unsuitable for a children’s show
The highest average audience of the Tom Baker era, 14.5 million, and part four’s 16.1 million is the biggest audience any Doctor Who episode has ever had; an ITV strike had taken the competition off the air
John Cleese and Eleanor Bron’s cameo as the gallery critics admiring the TARDIS; they agreed on condition of no advance publicity and asked to be credited as “Helen Swanetsky” and “Kim Bread”, which Radio Times declined
Julian Glover’s second guest role in the series (he was Richard the Lionheart in The Crusade); a double, Richard Sheekey, wears the Jagaroth mask in most of Scaroth’s scenes
Douglas Adams and director Michael Hayes both appear: Adams drinking in the bar, Hayes as the man in the cloth cap leaving the Métro behind the Doctor and Romana; Hayes also voices the guard who announces the Mona Lisa is gone
K9 stays home because bringing the prop and its operators to Paris cost too much, though the Doctor still greets him on the way into the TARDIS
Adams reused the idea of a crashed spaceship whose explosion sparks life on Earth, and a pilot who survives to undo it, in his novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency
Working titles included Curse of the Sephiroth, A Gamble with Time and The Time of the Sephiroth; the final title may be a pun on Paris as the Cité de l’amour, which sounds like Cité de la mort
Voted the most popular Fourth Doctor story, ahead of Genesis of the Daleks, in Doctor Who Magazine’s 2023 poll, and often named the best serial to show someone who has never seen the programme
Pete commentary:
City of Death is widely regarded as maybe the best Tom Baker story, and possibly the best story the classic series ever made. The reasons are clear.
The script is genius. This is Douglas Adams at his peak: he's doing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, script editing Doctor Who and writing for it, all at once. Working all the time, creative juices running at maximum, and somehow it all distilled into this.
The conceit: a creature from the dawn of time, splintered throughout history, pushing human technology forward so that the most advanced version of himself can build a time machine, go back and get a second throw of the dice. Super smart.
He funds it by "ransacking the art treasures of history," as the Doctor puts it, which turns into a whodunit caper: steal the Mona Lisa, then it turns out there are seven Mona Lisas. Surprise after surprise, each one building on the last.
The science actually hangs together. A lot of Doctor Who glosses over the sci-fi with technobabble, but here you can follow it: a time field that can age a chicken or kill Kerensky in seconds, a bubble separate from our time that you can't step in and out of. Scaroth wants to expand it to take in the whole world and rewind it 400 million years. The cracks in time set that up, because he really did jolt the whole world back a second or two. And with Time Lord know-how you can travel through that tiny field and rewind 400 million years, which is what they end up doing. Still technobabble, but I can wrap my head around it.
Scaroth can't quite pull it off alone; he doesn't have the knowledge of time travel. The Doctor and Romana are the X factor: they effectively complete his time machine, then stop him. A bit of creating the problem and making up for it, but it works.
Tom Baker is at the height of his powers. We keep saying that (The Masque of Mandragora, The Talons of Weng-Chiang), and he still has a couple of years to go, but he is incredible here. He knows exactly when to play it for comedy and when to take the material seriously. Textbook Doctor Who, beyond textbook. You can tell he is loving every minute, and he and Lalla Ward were together at this point.
Episode 2, the first meeting with Scarlioni at the chateau, is line after line:
"I say, what a wonderful butler. He's so violent."
"Duggan, what are you doing? For heaven's sake, that's a Louis Quinze."
"Well, you're a beautiful woman, probably." Laugh-out-loud funny and perfect for the Doctor. Was it ad-libbed or scripted? I couldn't find anything definitive.
The subtler moments too, like the repetition in episode 1, when Romana asks if the Countess is trying to steal it: "It is a very pretty painting." Then "That's never the product of Earth's civilisation." "Do you mean an alien's trying to steal the Mona Lisa?" "It is a very pretty painting."
Straight into: "You remember that man who was following us?" "Yes." "Well, he's standing behind me poking a gun in my back." Keeps surprising you, keeps your interest.
The Doctor confronting the Countess in episode 4: "A man with one eye and green skin, eh? Ransacking the art treasures of history to help him make a machine to reunite him with his people, the Jagaroth, and you didn't notice anything? How discreet, how charming." Listening to this dialogue is like drinking the finest champagne.
Lalla Ward is definitely second fiddle here, but she's great second fiddle. The Doctor and Romana are very much a couple throughout; hard to think they're not.
At the Mona Lisa in episode 1: "Not the universe in public, Doctor. It only calls attention." "I don't care. It's one of the great treasures of the universe!" "Shush!" "Let them gawp, let them gape." She plays off him so well, and he off her.
Romana has her own sonic screwdriver, and uses it to break into the café. The TARDIS Wiki dates it officially to The Horns of Nimon, where she says she built it herself, but this is where we see her use it.
The computer pictures bit is funny now, with generative AI: "At least on Gallifrey we can capture a good likeness. Computers can draw." Romana is very pro-AI here, at a time when it's very out of favour, particularly among Doctor Who fans, as we found out.
The one weak spot of the whole story: in episode 3 she's given nothing to do, so she wanders back into the chateau for basically no reason, because they need to be captured.
Julian Glover as Scarlioni/Scaroth/Tancredi: movie-star quality, real gravitas, and he understood the assignment. Charm and menace, combined.
The casualness when he tells Hermann to kill "those two fools" lets you know: okay, this is the bad guy.
Yet you can't help being charmed. You're half rooting for Scaroth. To use a poker analogy, he's been dealt a lousy hand, has bet perfectly at every stage, manipulated the game as well as he possibly could, and almost pulls it off.
A fantastic negotiator, too. Romana: "Count, you must have realised by now that I'm not from this planet. Why should it worry me if you destroy Paris?" Duggan: "What are you talking about?" Scarlioni: "You had your warning. Hermann, kill him." Romana: "No!" Scarlioni: "Ah, so you do care. I think you've answered your own question. Not a very clever bluff." Genius.
Glover says on the commentary he provided his own suit, and he looks great in it: white suit, ascot, suave. Duggan's trench coat is a little by the numbers but at least makes him distinctive.
The Countess (Catherine Schell) is great too.
Episode 1, on the "accident" that was really just the Doctor bumbling into her: "It was well organised, I'm sure."
Love the bit in episode 4 where she confronts him with the pistol: "Now, what are you?" ... "What have I been living with all these years?"
What exactly is her relationship with Scarlioni? Apparently they wondered about it while filming. Getting a little nerdy and adult: have they slept together? The easy answer is no. She married him for the riches and the partnership, he's probably gay, the marriage is for show, and she likes being the consort. Wouldn't be the first time. But if his disguise is good enough, maybe they have, and that changes her reaction when he pulls off the mask and she drops the pistol: less "that's disturbing" and more "I can't believe I let that thing touch me." I kind of like that one; it works on a more adult level. The story works either way.
Headcanon on the disguise: his Jagaroth head is much bigger than a human head, so something is at work. Maybe he can compress the spaghetti face at will, like the compression field in the Slitheen skin suits in Aliens of London and World War Three, or it's partly biological, a species of partial shapeshifters, plus a very good mask made from whatever each era has. The 1979 Scarlioni probably has better technology for it. In other eras he passed as a one-eyed god: the Egyptian wall painting the Countess pulls out of the hollow book shows one. He boasts he "caused the pyramids to be built... invented the first wheel, shown the true use of fire." That might conflict with An Unearthly Child (100,000 BC), but maybe he was the one-eyed god who showed them how.
Hermann and Kerensky: stock characters, both with good guest performances.
Hermann is more than a thug: "Discreetly, sir? Sell a Gutenberg Bible discreetly?" Fully on board with the Count, and he saves the day at the end by throwing a bottle into the time bubble. Whatever happened to Hermann? He probably ran out of the chateau, maybe with a few of those Bibles. There's a Big Finish in that.
Kerensky is "the foremost authority on temporal theory in the whole world," and he gets killed off. A bit wasteful, but Romana is 100 times better at temporal physics, so no big loss. Great line: "It's the Jagaroth who need all the chickens, is it?"
The chicken: aged to death, the Doctor reverses the polarity and it goes back to an egg, and left running it ends on Scaroth's face. It skips 400 million years in a minute and pauses on his face, which doesn't quite make sense. Headcanon: it's showing time, not the chicken, and all life on Earth carries some imprint of Scaroth, residue from his cells mixed into the life his explosion created. I'd pick at that more than the cracked-clock painting, but I'd still leave it in.
Duggan is a hilarious battering ram. Eventually the Doctor and Romana just look at him like, well, how do we get out of here, Duggan? And he slams through the wall. "If it moves, hit it."
The John Cleese and Eleanor Bron cameo: so, so great. Jack and Grace loved it. A perfect use of them and the back-and-forth, written perfectly. And now for something completely different. Keeps everything light, not that it wasn't already; it's uncorking the champagne.
The crack in time with the artist sketching Romana, her face a cracked clock: why is he there, why does he draw her that way? Who knows, who cares. Coincidence, to emphasise the cracks in time, and it doesn't stretch beyond where you'd go "oh, come on." Headcanon: Scaroth's experiments are affecting people across Paris, and this artist is more in tune with it than most. A huge stretch, but it's beautiful.
Paris:
The location shots seem a little extraneous now, lots of "hey, we're in Paris!" I love it. It feels so genuine: in 1979 they seem to have just shot people on the street, on the Métro, and they ended up in a Doctor Who episode.
Most Doctor Who stories run up and down corridors for episodes 2 and 3. This one runs up and down the streets of Paris, which is quite an upgrade. In episode 4 they run down the Champs-Élysées, dicing with the traffic.
A neat coincidence: the poster they walk past, "3 millions d'années d'aventure humaine," was a real exhibition at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle while they were filming.
Dudley Simpson's music, especially the riffs on the streets of Paris, is unique to the story and used really well.
The randomiser comes up almost right away, at the top of the Eiffel Tower: "The randomiser's a useful device but it lacks true discrimination." Then "Shall we take the lift or fly?" A lot of that dialogue was added on top of the shooting script; the making-of documentary on the Blu-ray (The Collection) shows marked-up pages. Was it Tom Baker and Lalla Ward? Everyone stepped up with their best ideas and their best performances.
Episode 4:
"This is a fake": the Doctor writes it on the blank boards so Scarlioni can't sell them, and the only surviving Mona Lisa is the one with "This is a fake" under the paint. Genius. "But it's a fake!" "How can it be a fake if Leonardo painted it?" "It doesn't matter what it looks like." "Doesn't it? Well, some people would say that's the whole point of painting."
The Mona Lisas burning is tragic, and it hits you. Anyone with a basic understanding of art knows how horrible that would be.
"I think that was possibly the most important punch in history." They've been building to it: Duggan thumps people, hits Kerensky, punches Scaroth in the present day.
The goodbye at the top of the Eiffel Tower: Duggan buys the Mona Lisa postcard, then "Bye, bye, Duggan!" So gorgeous and cute.
Plot holes, the only two I can think of:
Romana wandering back into the chateau in episode 3 (above).
When they bust out of the cellar and Scaroth is there with the gun, why doesn't he just shoot them all? The arrogance of the bad guy: you won't have existed in a minute anyway.
To debate with Chris: is it the best Doctor Who ever?
The Discontinuity Guide makes the point that it's almost a shame the rest of Doctor Who exists, because this deserves to stand on its own. (Douglas Adams did reuse some of these ideas, in Dirk Gently.) Worth thinking about.
Blink is often called the high-water mark of the new series. City of Death and Blink both transcend the show on story and script.
Which is more emblematic of Doctor Who? I'd argue City of Death, simply because Blink is Doctor-lite. Having the Doctor there, being the Doctor, matters for the thing that best represents Doctor Who.
Here the Doctor makes decisions, drives the story and has a great foil in Scarlioni/Scaroth. It might not be quite as flawless as Blink (and you can find flaws in Blink), but I'd hold it up as the best-ever Doctor Who: not just a sci-fi story, a sci-fi story where the Doctor matters.
What did Pete's family think?
I watched this one with both Grace and Jack. Jack (16) doesn't watch with us much anymore; he still likes Doctor Who but has other interests. I convinced him because it's regarded as a great story, and he agreed it was great. That was really nice.
After about episode 2, Jack said, "Tom Baker is such a great actor." He's right.
Grace really liked it too. Both were impressed with the story and the dialogue, and liked how smart it was. The John Cleese scene was a big hit.
They've grown up with streaming, YouTube and big effects, in an era where geeky stuff (the Avengers, Star Wars) is the centre of pop culture, so they're not used to classic Doctor Who pacing. There's an upper limit to their appreciation at their ages, but it held their attention throughout.
Jack thought about the ethics of changing history and what they're doing. I forget where he landed, but it was interesting that he saw it in that light.
Jack also said Scarlioni seemed like a Bond villain, and he was right: two years later Julian Glover played the villain, Kristatos, in For Your Eyes Only (1981).
Four Questions to Doomsday - Pete
Why did the Randomizer take us here? Survival is where the classic series ended; City of Death is often called its peak. Big-budget Doctor Who, following Masque: they obviously spent money to bring at least some of the cast to Paris, and they had the resources to make a great story work. Not a huge budget, but as well resourced as the show got. Survival, by contrast, is a boring London suburb with no money; the set pieces don't make sense and the script isn't all that clever. A clear slide down the hill by the end, and you could blame the BBC for cutting the budget again and again. Regardless of who's to blame, you can't argue with the damage: once a show hits a height like City of Death, it's always judged by that bar. Also: when exactly is Tom Baker at the height of his powers? This, Masque, somewhere in between, or throughout? He's amazing whenever he has the best material.
What if the evil plot had succeeded? Scaroth stops his ship exploding and life on Earth never starts. The Doctor and Romana are affected, and Earth stays a barren wasteland. But the other Jagaroth on the ship survive. They never take off, so they make Earth their base, and over many millions of years they terraform it and rebuild their population from that one ship. In place of humanity's Earth Empire you get the Jagaroth, "a vicious, callous, war-like race," something like the Mirror Universe empire in Star Trek: one-eyed, spaghetti-faced bipeds fighting wars with the Daleks, the Cybermen and the Sontarans. A much more violent galaxy, maybe the most violent. Maybe the Time Lords feel they have to step in, or the Jagaroth conquer them, and it becomes a Game of Thrones over who has time travel. A sad day for anyone who likes things good and ordered.
Where's the Clara splinter? It's a bit nuts that these mobsters in silly outfits keep walking into the café with guns, nobody reacts and the cops are never involved. Clara is the café manager. Well before this week, she told all the regulars the café does performance-art skits, especially old mobster and film-noir stuff, so if anyone ever comes in and pulls out a gun, don't worry about it. She prepped the whole café, which is why everybody is so chill.
Dalek, Ogron, Professor Hayter, Viscount Banger, Fixed Point in Time, Lady Cassandra, or Zarbi? Viscount Banger. How could you not? It's a banger of a banger, nearly flawless, and that is high praise for any Doctor Who story. (The best-ever debate is at the end of my commentary.)
Chris commentary:
I was spoiled by City of Death. It was only the second Doctor Who story I can definitely remember watching all the way through, after Destiny of the Daleks – indeed, I remember watching it TWICE, in September 1979 and when the BBC repeated it in summer 1980 in the run-up to the Leisure Hive (no wonder, I realize now, I was aghast at the new Season 18 intro!). So it's etched on my formative brain – indeed I now see, that when for the first time I contemplated death as a kid, around that time when I heard my Nana say a local GP had died, I saw in my head something very much like Kerensky doing his weird dying dance.
Mostly I will always associate City of Death with at least one balmy long summer evening when 6 year old me was being looked after by my ancient neighbor Mrs. Morton, two doors up the cul-de-sac, and the strongest memory from that was being freaked out by the Scarlioni reveal at the end of episode one – but the second strongest memory is that, unusually, Mrs. Morton was watching it too. Everyone watched City of Death! Up to 20 million people, depending on the audience counting protocol, even after the ITV strikes had ended! It was just ridiculously watchable on its own merit! I'm proud to say that for most of the episodes, my region of England and Mrs. Morton's, the North East, contained the highest percentage of its viewers.
Anyway, yes, spoiled, as I say. I realize now I always knew Doctor Who could be like this, right from the very start of my Doctor Who fandom. I always knew how good it could get, and I expected it, and with one possible exception, I never got it this good as a kid again. Even now I'm a little worried that I give much of classic Who short shrift because City of Death exists to show it all up …
About Time put it best: "the most surprising thing about City of Death is how ordinary it seems" – that is, without any of the hassles and strikes and miscommunications that seemed to plague the rest of classic Who.
I'm not surprised to learn that it is the story RTD showed to Julie Gardner to convince her that a rebooted show could significantly up the quality level on the old – that its combo of quick-witted comedy and cartoon characters and high-minded concepts taken extremely seriously was a winner. You could argue it's the template for Moffat's entire run, essentially – right down to the timey-wimey TARDIS hop and the crack in time (and doesn't Capaldi say something like "you're a beautiful woman, probably?")
Which was a Baker amendment, according to the Springtime in Paris doc.
The Cleese and Bron cameo – exquisite! –was often repeated on the BBC in the 1980s. Usually in quiz shows where you have to guess what happens next. And I always felt the stab of a reminder that as far as the public seemed to be concerned, Doctor Who peaked in 1979.
That's as may be, but how has it aged? The thing about City of Death is, it's the one place in classic Who where you can relax completely. It has aged really, really well, like … what's the thing that has a bouquet?
Episode 2, especially, where everyone is firing on all cylinders, has a claim to be the best single episode of classic Who ever. I could watch the Chateau scenes over and over. And it contains two of the series' best cliffhangers, at the beginning and at the end. My god, I remember the week of trying to figure out how Julian Glover can be in two times at once.
Instead of "say something nice," I'm going for a "say something nasty," because everything else I say will be nice. So to say something nasty: there's a hell of a lot in City of Death that doesn't make sense if you think too long or look too closely. How did Scaroth manage to manipulate all of human history with 12 splinters, only 6 of which we see? How did his mask work? How did it reassemble itself on his head so quickly? How did all the Scaroth splinters get the same caucasian mask? How could he force Leonardo to replicate a painting that took 15 years to paint? Who does Duggan work for and why hire an idiot in the art world? How come nobody notices all the Mafia guys with guns walking into cafes? What was the deal with Bourget, the clock sketching angry artist who never shows up again? How do Time Lords fly (throw themselves at the ground and miss, to quote DNA)? How did any of them breathe when they went back 400 million years, and why did Douglas Adams not understand the difference between 400 million and 4 billion (the more accurate number)?
Now here's the nice: City of Death don't care. The novelization expands on and explains a lot of these things, mostly amusingly, and yet isn't a better story for it. City of Death doesn't care about being believed, and that's why it is. It is cheerfully impossible all over the place, then plonks itself in your Louis Quinze, and pours itself a drink. City of Death believes six impossible things before breakfast at Maxims, and it's so impossibly charming that you go along for the ride, and then you realize it's also been locked up in your cellar all along and is punching through the walls of your heart.
Part of why it's so charming – the supporting cast are cartoons, in a good way. Clearly, confidently, briskly drawn. Duggan never stops being a caricature and it pays off like crazy (the apex of Duggan: smashing the wine bottle open).
'Would you like to stay on as my scientific advisor?" Genius line and an example of why the Doctor can't stop bringing home strays.
Has there ever been this much lightning in a bottle in a single story, not just in Doctor Who but all of TV? Douglas Adams on the cusp of glory, still young and hungry enough that you could squeeze a script out of him in one whiskey and coffee-fueled weekend, especially given it involved improving someone else's template and adding his most sparkling dialogue! Julian Glover on the cusp of Empire Strikes Back! John Cleese in the middle of Fawlty Towers! Tom Baker and Lala Ward in love, in Paris, infecting the world with their grins! Tom so happy he didn't even wander over to Soho and get drunk after lunch, probably! JNT when he'd just started to get the idea of foreign location shoots!
The novelization has an interesting take on Scarlioni that explains the mask thing – he doesn't know he's Scaroth until the end of episode 1. That explains why the countess doesn't know either.
I quite like the way Scaroth becomes a tragic figure in ep 3 – it could be an easy way to get the Doctor out of his thumbscrew situation, but you also start to feel a bit sorry for Scaroth's splintered condition once he starts raving in Leo's workshop. His madcap Mona Lisa scheme starts to seem in that moment like it can't work with the Doctor around.
Surely there are easier ways to make a quick billion? Shame there's no splinter beyond 1979 to tell his earlier self "invest everything in Microsoft then hang around for a decade." (Or maybe "go act in a George Lucas movie or two …")
Not that you'd expect the count to be good at people management, but he'd get a lot more out of Kerensky if he let the poor guy sleep every now and then. The novelization has a nice touch – Kerensky was a fat man when the count started wooing him.
Mona Lisa history corner! Since 1979, we've more evidence that Leonardo was working on it continually through 1517, two years before its death. The wife of a silk merchant never had it so good. L would have liked the "La Gioconda" == the "jocular" pun.
SHE DID HAVE EYEBROWS. Revealed by a hi-res scan in 2007 – faded over time.
Four Questions to Doomsday - Chris
Why did the Randomizer take us here? The "dog in/ Duggan" joke is even better given that he was based on Bulldog Drummond, and in the early David Fisher draft, was called Pug.
What if the evil plot had succeeded? No life on Earth, no beautiful human woman to be the Doctor's mother, probably …
Where's the Clara splinter? "So, you got divided into 12 versions of yourself throughout human history? That's cute," said the neverending helix of Clara splinters as it zeroed in on the Scaroth splinters. And thus began the series I'm going to offer Big Finish as a spinoff: Clara vs. The Count.
Dalek, Ogron, Professor Hayter, Viscount Banger, Fixed Point in Time, Lady Cassandra, or Zarbi? A portrait of the Viscount by Leonardo. But what's this? It's six identical Viscount Bangers that I bricked up in 1979! They're worth millions!
