Categories
Classic Series Doctor Who Top 50

The 50 Best Doctor Who Stories – 38: City Of Death

City of Death

Doctor Who always makes mistakes, most of them from the late 70s onwards and most recently in the interminable Eleventh Doctor storylines. But whenever it does it creates these strange outposts along the way: excesses of violence, adult storylines, humour; dubious castings; unsuitable writers, directors, script editors. Producers even. Season 24. But I take the view that they all add up to the programme’s rich tapestry (apart from Season 24). Very few series can survive some of the nonsense and wrong turns Doctor Who has taken over the last 50 years; fewer still are enriched by their bad ideas.

catherine schell

Season 17 is such a bad idea: in my opinion it’s a low point in the series because it almost never comes off. Tom indulging himself, Douglas Adams’ slipshod approach to script editing and overreliance on humour, Williams’ apparent insistence on studio-bound pastiche (in fairness partially forced on him by effective budget cuts) and some of the worst directors to ever grace the programme. It feels like everyone is taking the piss, either actively or because they just can’t be bothered.

But somehow it all gels in City of Death – a half-written script from David Fisher, incorporating a series of unlikely stipulations from Williams and finished off by Adams over a weekend. Many writers will recognise how a deadline bearing down can stir them to creative heights. In 1979, powered by whiskey and coffee and under the sort of pressure that turns carbon to diamond, Douglas Adams turned out a perfectly-formed gem of his own.

It has glorious ideas: a rather louche alien scattered through history and secreting arts treasures for his later selves to sell – alongside copies that the originators have been strongarmed into creating – at inflated prices. The theft of the Mona Lisa; a scientist who thinks he’s feeding the world with time-travel chickens and a marriage that has failed to take into account that one half of it has one eye and green linguini for a face. Ridiculous!

scarlioni

It’s a high-wire act that relies on everyone being on the same page. In the majority of Season 17 something goes wrong: one or more elements are out of synch in the others, with sometimes disastrous results. I had always thought of Nightmare of Eden as a clever, rather nasty story with frightening moments and the odd splash of black comedy. That’s certainly how the book reads.

On screen it’s like a Crackerjack pantomime about space drugs. Destiny of the Daleks is a classic diminished-return Terry Nation runaround with added rubbish acting. Shada, something of a kissing cousin to City of Death is, as far as I can tell, as load of old tosh. It’s Douglas Adams coasting through it – it’s instructive that everything Adams wrote for Doctor Who ended up recycled in Hitchhikers or Dirk Gently novels at some point. Other stories in Season 17 have some very strong premises too but, somewhere long the line, they fail to come off – like a split sauce the elements just don’t rub along together.

jagaroth ship

Luckily the writer, director, composer and most of the cast are on the same page here. I say most, but not all. Kerensky, like Tryst in Nightmare of Eden, seems to have walked in from a Two Ronnies sketch and the Sam Spade private detectives are absurd, even for this. In another story Duggan, Herman, Kerensky, even Scaroth/Scarlioni and the regulars themselves would be beyond the pale – but City of Death casts them in a slightly different universe to the rest of the season.

The Doctor has ended up in a situation populated with people as daft as he is. The Doctor, Romana and Scaroth are determined not to allow the facade to drop and sweep everyone else along with them – their sense of attraction strong enough to reel in John Cleese and Eleanor Bron for a sublime cameo. It helps that everyone else in City of Death is similarly daft, but they’re primarily dancing to the tune the Doctor and Scaroth are playing. As such the whole story is conducted by characters as if they’re on stage: actors playing characters playing heightened versions of themselves. It results in some inspired moments.

Scaroth in his safari suit is a brilliant, irreverent image – he’s played as an urbane playboy by Julian Glover as if the Count simply is a gentleman thief. The idea that the Jagaroth has essentially created and guided the human race just so they can help him destroy themselves is another nice twist; a neat timey-wimey plot point that prefaces Moffatt by 30 years and pulls it off simply through some funny, throwaway lines. It’s the series doing time travel for one of only a handful of times in the classic run and it’s portrayed with a minimum of fuss and a lot of charm.

By the end of City of Death the Doctor has learned that the Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre is a fake, with the words THIS IS A FAKE written underneath the paint, existing because he created it and put it there. No only that, it is part of plan by an alien to destroy, albeit coincidentally, the human race. Rather wonderfully the whole plot is explained through a little jaunt back to Renaissance Italy to catch up with Leonardo.

scaroth

The Fourth Doctor is so completely the star of City of Death. Tom directs the whole tone and carries it off with utter conviction; in an Aristotelian sense this is the perfect Doctor – the one everyone thinks of. The eyes, the hair, scarf and silliness.City of Death Who wouldn’t want him as their best friend? There are so many funny, lovely moment it’s impossible to count them: Tom and Lalla, running around the French capital – the fact that it’s grey and overcast not mattering one whit – in love; a lovely score by Dudley Simpson – also nearing the end of his association with the series. “You, Duggan”. The artist’s sketch of Romana. “CAPTAIN TANCREDI?!”

you duggan

At the end of the story, having bade farewell to Duggan, the duo have reached the bottom of the Eiffel Tower in what seems like seconds. Did they fly after all, powered by love and imagination and wit? It’s a even little bit poignant, if you want to go down that route – whatever the truth of the Doctor and Romana’s descent here, he can’t escape Logopolis’ fearful gravity. How remote, how different, do those two moments seem?

In City of Death Tom and The Fourth Doctor – seemingly interchangeable – shine one last time, spending the rest of the incarnation overacting wildly or in a massive huff. By next season it’s all cod technobabble, bleeps and synth, and unwanted companions; the smile gone from his face and the curl from his hair. With it, seemingly, his powers. The burgundy coat, E-Space and Adric loom large on the horizon, but we’ll always have Paris.

Categories
Classic Series Doctor Who Top 50

The 50 Best Doctor Who Stories – 39: Genesis of The Daleks

Fourth doctor and thals

I’m a bit bemused as to how Genesis of the Daleks has ever topped any best-of lists. But that doesn’t stop it being very good, nor does it stop it being very important.

Terry Nation (apparently at the prompting of Robert Holmes) finally does something interesting with the Daleks after a run of Pertwee stories that are very much diminishing returns. Once again in Genesis, the Daleks are a threat: cunning, merciless, genuinely evil with some unsubtle fascistic overtones – it’s akin to the reboot (since squandered) the new series gave the pepperpots.

doctor and harry look

There’s always a thrill to see how each new Doctor will tackle them and Tom’s newness rubs off the Daleks – so tired and shagged out and a bit ridiculous by Death to the Daleks. And Sarah and Harry make the perfect foil – lending a human perspective. They are appalled at what they see; frightened, horrified. But they respond with bravery and succour for the Doctor, wrestling with his conscience.

For his part, the Fourth Doctor still feels alien, dangerous – yet he’s funny too. Tom is still taking this deadly seriously, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t show humour, fondness for his companions, empathy with the people he meets on Skaro, horror and anger at cruelty and injustice. It’s the combination that makes Tom feel so vital at this point in the series. Yes, he’s mad, boggling, weird, occasionally frightening. But he’s like a bonkers uncle – the Doctor is always on our side; always good, kind, ready with a smile.

fourth doctor and davros

But at the centre of it all, Davros and the Daleks. Michael Wisher’s performance is iconic, mould-breaking. Even Julian Bleach, more than 40 years later, doffs his cap to the original. It bears repeating just how hideous Davros is. Like a peach that’s been left out in the sun he’s wizened, dessicated. There’s a whiff of decay and putrefaction about him. The crippled scientist isn’t a monster – he’s a human who’s suffered something truly terrible. Somehow that makes him so much more disturbing and the faint element of tragedy makes him all the more rounded.

The Daleks are at their best – apparently basic, silent, neutered they inevitably, suddenly turn on their creator in a way that seems to make them all the more terrible, all over again. They think Davros is hideous too. Another shot of Sarah and Harry watching on a screen as the Daleks massacre the Kaled scientists is a perfect evocation of what makes the Daleks tick, cannily referenced 30 years later by Rob Shearman when van Statten asks why the Dalek will kill everyone: “Because it honestly believes they should die,” explains the Doctor.

Genesis seems to have a reputation as being beloved of po-faced fans due to its supposed ‘darkness’ or ‘grittiness’. In fact, it’s not dark or gritty – it’s bloody horrible. Soldiers are gunned down in Peckinpah-style slow-motion; Sarah is psychologically tortured (“they say people who fall from great heights are dead before they hit the ground. I don’t believe that, do you?”); the Doctor nearly strangled by a mutant; Harry nearly eaten by a genetic mutation; Thals and Kaleds alike are pretty awful people and we virtually have two de facto genocides. Not to mention a scene where our heroes rip gas masks from corpses to survive gas attack.

sarah and thal

But I think what fans like so much about Genesis is that it’s epic in a way that Doctor Who rarely was – it’s like one of RTD’s end-of-season finales, only the universe doesn’t get rebooted because the Doctor wants to hump Sarah. Doctor Who only really pulled out the stops like this for regeneration episodes (after The Dalek’s Masterplan anyway), as a result this is the series basically telling you that you’re seeing something important. And, despite some rather pedestrian ‘running-up-corridors’ episodes, the story is up to it.

David Maloney’s direction is among the best of the era; a cast packed with dependable character actors (Dennis Chinnery, James Garbutt, Peter Miles, Stephen Yardley, Guy Siner and Tom Georgeson – amongst others – in ‘what-was-he-in?’ appearances); “Have I the right?” is a punch-packing iconic moment delivered by an actor who represents what is probably one of the best bits of casting in television history – an actor who has found something he’s been searching for all his life.

nyder ravon sarah sevrin kavell garmin

Genesis of the Daleks is a thorough rethink about what the Daleks are – and how best to use them. It brings down a curtain on Terry Nation’s cut-and-paste quest-style narratives, marking a clear break from the past, despite the odd clam. It’s also a break from the past that highlights just how much Doctor Who has changed over the previous few years. Oh, Ark In Space and Sontaran Experiment have their moments but Genesis isn’t just about the Daleks’ rebirth.

No cosy UNIT family here; no mother hen. The Brig isn’t around, nor are Yates or Benton. Not even the vaguely avuncular Master, nor a TARDIS to fall back on. Jo has departed for the Amazon in what is surely one of the most allegorical departures in the series – growing up and growing out of the series – and the Third Doctor gone is a blaze of radiation and what seems most like a death of any of the regenerations.

davros and daleks

In their place mustard gas, minefields, holocaust, barbed wire, machine guns, fascism and genocidal violence. There’s still humour and companionship, but it’s set against a backdrop of genuine horrors that resonate with a time barely 30 years past. Just imagine Jo being dangled hundreds of feet above the ground by a sadistic Thal; Benton decked out in the might-as-well-be-Nazi outfit of a Kaled soldier, wielding a machine gun. Or the Third Doctor, stock still, his foot balanced precariously on a landmine. Pertwee and Delgado – two men who served in WWII – in a story about fascism and racism is, conversely, unthinkable. It just doesn’t work.

have i the right

That Terry Nation got it up one last time is impressive; that he was able to tear the series away from its rut of the previous few seasons so violently and so confidently is astonishing. 12 years on from defining Doctor Who he redefined it for Tom Baker, Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe.

Given how shagged-out the pepperpots are by the time the City of the Exxilons is crumbling in Death to the Daleks – and how depressingly familiar the narrative in Destiny of the Daleks is in a series again changed beyond all recognition just five years later – Genesis is perhaps the most important Dalek story of all.