The Doctor endeavours to educate Leela by taking her to the greatest collection of Earth artefacts in the universe, The Morovanian Museum on Morovania Minor. But instead, they find themselves in a strange English village, inhabited by a variety of academics, and presided over by a curious collector called Harcourt.
The Renaissance Man contains examples of:
- Actor Allusion: Winston Churchill was namechecked in front of Harcourt. Harcourt was played by Ian MacNiece, who also played Churchill in Season 5's Victory of the Daleks.
- The name Harcourt itself is one as well, as MacNiece recounts that the writers named it in honor of a character he'd played in Edge of Darkness.
- Continuity Nod: Leela mentions firing a revolver at a dragon. Police are referred to as "blue guards" and Leela refers to Xoanon and the Tesh.
- Driven to Suicide: The trauma of losing their knowledge drives at least three experts to suicide, as they so define themselves by their work that they can't cope with life without that knowledge.
- Fake Memories: The Doctor does a low-key version of this; not only does he make up a famous historical figure to introduce false data into the system, but while testing Harcourt he asks him for the temperature in a specific village on a certain date and then pretends to let that information slip through his mental barriers, when in reality the village never existed.
- Holodeck Malfunction: Once the Doctor figures out that the museum is a virtual world, he defeats Jephson by introducing false information into the program and causing it to shut down entirely.
- Hypocritical Humor: The Doctor, who is too modest to talk about how learned he is, but who then goes on to talk about how great he is in other ways. He's still working on Leela's style though.
- Identity Amnesia: Doctor Henry Carnforth, formerly an expert on medieval castles.
- It's All About Me: Jephson wants to be the ultimate "renaissance man" and know everything, even if that means taking that knowledge from others.
- The Man Behind the Man: Jephson is the curator of the museum and the real enemy who is stealing everyone's knowledge, while Harcourt isn't even real.
- Shown Their Work: And HOW! The fact that the writer did his homework is incorporated as a critical plot point.note A little research work by the listener shows that all the other factoids given by the Doctor (such as the ever present Cow Parsley, probably better known as "Queen Anne's Lace") are correct except for Montmorency Peskerton, who was made up whole cloth by The Doctor to trick Jephson.
- Verbal Tic: Leela constantly pronounces "Renaissance" as "Runny-Science".
