Ulysses S. Grant once said, "Venice would be a fine city if it were only drained." If he were alive in 2294, he'd say, "I told you so."
The Eighth Doctor and Charley decide to take a well-deserved break from the monotony of being chased, shot at and generally suffering anti-social behaviour at the hands of others. The TARDIS disagrees and plants them right in the middle of the final day of Venice, several centuries into the future.
The local Duke has spent 100 years mourning his lost love, Estella, who cursed him to live a full century after he carelessly wagered her life in a card game. She also cursed the city to crumble and succumb to the water after 100 years.
While the Doctor befriends the curator of the Duke's museum, Charley befriends a gondolier named Pietro, and the two groups are separated without even noticing it. Pietro convinces Charley (with the help of some hypnotic drugs) to impersonate Estella. He turns out to be part of a group of gondoliers who have developed gills over the centuries. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Pietro find Estella's tomb, but it's a bit empty. There's also a mad high priest who has started an Estella doomsday cult. The Duke, confused by all of the above, decides to play along with Charley's ruse, but a perfectly ordinary bystander turns out to be Estella in the end. She's also a vengeful alien who used alien technology, not some magic curse. The Duke convinces her to reverse the curse, which restores Venice, but sadly also costs both the Duke and Estella their lives. They embrace one last time and make a Heroic Sacrifice.
The Doctor thinks the whole thing was a great example of how silly humans can be. Charley disagrees and calls it a touching love story.
Tropes
- Action Prologue: The Doctor and Charley escape from a revolution they caused in an opening that has nothing to do with the rest of the story, except that the Doctor gets the idea to visit Venice while being shot at.
- The Alcoholic: The Doctor keeps getting referred to as a drunk, by Elenore.
- Ancient Tomb: The prison cells are within the same complex as a Mausoleum.
- Aristocrats Are Evil: According to the Gondoliers.
- Back from the Dead: The Duke and the Cult both hope to invoke this regarding Estella.
- Belief Makes You Stupid: Belief in a divine Duchess. Both the Doctor and the Duchess herself call the cultists out on this.
- City of Canals: The Trope Codifier Venice, of course.
- Cloudcuckoolander: On the topic of Estella being worshiped, the Doctor goes into a rambling story about how hard it must be to be Liza Minnelli and have Judy Garland for a mom.
- Cold Open
- Continuity Nod: The Doctor still loves gondoliering, and tries a bit of it again after the day is saved.
- Cult: The Cult of the Lady Estella, which holds that on the hundredth anniversary of her tragic suicide, Estella will come Back from the Dead and save Venice from its curse.
- Curse: Supposedly the reason that Venice will sink into the water. The Doctor doesn't believe in curses, of course, and eventually proves that it's just Sufficiently Advanced Aliens again.
- Decadent Court: Duke Orsino presides over one of these, to the disgust of pretty much everyone who isn't a part of it.
- Deadpan Snarker: The Doctor
- Deathseeker: Charley sees the inhabitants of Venice this way, for not wanting to leave.
- Despair Event Horizon: The curse, for many Venetians.
- Drama Queen: Duke Orsino, Ms Lavish, and the cultists.
- Equivalent Exchange: Estella explains that her "magic" works on this principle, that to get something, something else must be sacrificed. The "curse" that has been keeping her and Orsino alive for over a hundred years is thus what is causing Venice to decay at an advanced rate, and the only way to stop Venice from crumbling is for her and Orsino to thus commit a Heroic Suicide.
- Failed a Spot Check: Seems to be building up as an 8th Doctor trait, where something obvious is happening and the Doctor is lost in thought.Charley: "They don't look happy with our help do they?"*a minute of conversation later*Doctor: "My, they don't look happy with our interference, do they?"
- Fantastic Racism: The Gondoliers get some colourful language thrown their way.
- Fisher King: Charley accuses the Duke that the curse placed upon him has this effect on the land.
- Five-Finger Discount: The Doctor swipes the Duchess's jewels from her supposed sarcophagus. This comes into play later, when the Duchess's true fate is revealed.
- For Doom the Bell Tolls: On the Dawn of the New Day
- Foreshadowing: In the first conversation the first gondelier, Pietro says: "This city will belong to us again, when it sinks."
- Going Down with the Ship: Or rather, going down with the floating city as it finally sinks.
- Ham-to-Ham Combat: Most of the third episode and a good chunk of the fourth see Duke Orsino and High Priest Vincenzo competing to see who can chew more scenery. In the final act, Estella turns it into three-way combat as she gives them both The Reason You Suck Speeches.
- Heroic Suicide: Orsino and Estella, at the very end, burn Together in Death to stop Venice from crumbling into the sea.
- Hollywood Drowning
- Identical Stranger: Averted with Charley and Estella, as Charley is notably one of the very few companions who don't look like models. She wears a Venetian mask to play the part.
- Ignored Epiphany: After everything is resolved and the city is saved, Vincenzo swipes the remains of the Duke and Duchess and runs off back to his catacombs to continue cultishly worshiping them. Churchwell and Pietro are stunned at this, but the Doctor muses that something as simple as undeniable evidence that everything he knew is wrong won't shake someone from a Cult mentality, and at least Vincenzo is a relatively harmless cultist, at this point.
- Immune to Fate: Or as the Doctor says it "There's things that happen and things that don't."
- Innocent Innuendo"C'mon Charley, I want to have a good poke around!"
- Large Ham: Both the Duke and the High Priest.
- Lizard Folk: The Gondoliers are humans who have evolved amphibious traits, notably webbed hands and feet and the ability to breathe underwater.
- The Magic Goes Away
- Masquerade Ball: In true Venetian tradition. It proves useful for disguising the fact that Charley and Estella are not Identical Strangers.
- No Ontological Inertia: Subverted. Orsino and Estella dying breaks the curse and stops Venice from sinking, but the parts that have already crumbled and sunk remain crumbled and sunk. Churchwell's first thought is to go back to check and see how much of the Duke's art collection has survived, as the Doctor points out that some of it will have certainly been destroyed, but ultimately he decides to stay, since the paintings aren't going anywhere now.
- No Sense of Direction: The Doctor.
- No Social Skills: The Doctor gets called out on his.
- Nostalgia Filter: Elenore is planning to look at all of Venice before it ends.
- Purple Prose: The Duke is extremely fond of it. Estella isn't. Writer Paul Margs never fails to include plenty of purple prose for the actors to deliver.
- Really 700 Years Old: Or Really Over 100 Years Old And Unchanging So He Can Suffer The Curse.
- Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The Gondoliers have somehow mutated into amphibious creatures who are still mostly human, but who can live underwater. They're looking forward to Venice sinking so it will belong solely to them.
- The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: Somewhat subverted. Some of the Gondeliers are content with just waiting for Venice to sink. Others... aren't.
- Right on the Tick
- Royally Screwed Up
- Sherlock Scan: The Doctor performs one on Mr Churchwell. Or so he would have him think.
- Shiny-Looking Spaceships: Charlie asks why all of the 8th Doctor's controls look so wooden.
- Slipping a Mickey: How the Gondoliers conditioned Charley to impersonate Estella.
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: When her true identity is finally revealed, Estella takes time to chew out both Orsino and Vincenzo, the former for the betrayal that ended their relationship, and the latter for being dumb enough to lead a cult that worships her.
- Together in Death: Orsino and Estella, reunited at last, performing a Heroic Suicide to restore Venice from its curse. The Doctor thinks it's a great example of how silly people can be, but Charley finds it very romantic.
- Trrrilling Rrrs: The Duke inserrrts these every now and then.
- Underwater Base: The Cult of the Lady Estella has their hideout in a section of tunnel that has been below sea level for years.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: The Duke is already sick of being alive after over a 100 years.
