Crime Lord: Doing Time (and Space)

Nick May is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

Doctor Who’s relationship with crime and criminals is a long and interesting one. The series’ central trope of good versus evil takes on an added dimension when that evil has a more base motivation than ruling the world. The genres of crime fiction and sci-fi have come up through the ranks together, both rising to prominence in the nineteenth century through the works of Wilkie Collins and HG Wells respectively, so it was inevitable they would converge at some point.

A recent re-watching of Series 8’s Time Heist revealed the story to be more interesting than on first viewing, not so much for the adventure itself which, though superficial, rattled along nicely, but in spotting the influences and deconstructing the episode. Madame Karabraxos is usurious, vain and ultimately trapped by her situation, having created, almost literally, a gilded cage for herself in the heart of the bank. Her motivations are somewhat contrived: why not just contact the Doctor to get her out of the bank? In fact, why not just leave?

The episode owes more than a little to recent crime films and TV. The device of amnesiac protagonists has cropped up in Danny Boyle’s Trance (itself a remake of a 2001 film with Neil Pearson) and Christopher Nolan’s Memento. Visually, Time Heist takes its style from series like Hustle, all slow-mo sashaying through glossy buildings, which in turn ripped off the aesthetics of films like Lock, Stock and Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Ocean’s Eleven.

Indeed, it was ever thus. The series’ portrayals of nefarious activity move with the times in which they were produced. When Robert Holmes created chancers like The Ribos Operation’s Garron and Trial of a Time Lord’s Glitz, the viewing public was sitting down to the exploits of loveable rogues like Arthur Daley in Minder and Porridge’s Norman Stanley Fletcher. We are asked to find them endearing for all their avaricious intent, to like them despite their motivations.

Rewind a few years more, back to The Seeds of Doom, and the treatment is a lot less rosy, akin to the violent goings-on in series like The Sweeney. It’s no coincidence: director Douglas Camfield had only recently directed one of The Sweeney’s more infamous episodes, Thou Shalt Not Kill, which wears its politics on its sleeve regarding the arming of the police. Back further still, we come to The Ambassadors of Death and Regan (no relation), a sharp-suited ne’er-do-well in the mould of gangsters in films like Get Carter or (pun intended) the criminally overlooked Villain and Robbery.

The series’ most obvious brush with the criminal classes is The Mind of Evil, set as it is in a prison. It’s the Pertwee era’s last hurrah for gritty storytelling, with the Mind Parasite playing second fiddle to the machinations of Mailer, menacingly played by crime drama regular William Marlowe, and his gang, a group so volatile that even the Master has trouble keeping them in check. Like Douglas Camfield on Seeds, director Timothy Coombe makes The Mind of Evil a hard-hitting crime drama with a sci-fi edge. The battle for Stangmoor Prison and the cliffhanger to Episode Five (“I only need one of you…”) is atypically realistic for the time, with not a ‘hai!’ in sight.

The caper is another staple of the crime genre. Differentiated from the heist story by its lighter tone (Reservoir Dogs and The Town are heist movies, The Jokers and The Italian Job are capers), capers feature elaborate crimes committed by stylish people swapping witty one-liners in glamorous locations. City of Death, with its Parisian setting and art thefts, is the series’ caper movie. Film stars Julian Glover and Catherine Schell provide the style and glamour, the Mona Lisa provides the ultimate prize and Douglas Adams provides all the memorable lines. Shada would see him attempt the same thing with the theft of alien books in Cambridge, though Skagra, with his disco Windy Miller costume, definitely lacks the panache of the Scarlionis.

Organised crime has reared its ugly head in the series on occasion, and seldom have those heads been uglier than those of the Slitheen in Aliens of London or the Foamasi in The Leisure Hive. Both are crime families in the vein of the Mafia-‘Foamasi’ is even an anagram of ‘Mafiosa’. Toward the end of The Leisure Hive, the West Lodge crime family are caught by the Foamasi ambassador, just in time for the Doctor to help smooth things over with the Argolin. Sadly, neither really cut the mustard as crime families, with the Slitheen’s continuous fart gags in particular undermining their gangster credentials.

City of Death, with its Parisian setting and art thefts, is Doctor Who’s caper movie.

It would be interesting if we could see more of The Smugglers and its portrayal of 17th century law breaking. What’s left is a collection of the robbing and the stabbing and the looting and the shooting (to quote The Paragons) that was the lot of the average booze-peddling malcontent on the Lizard Peninsula. Some of the violence on show seems to be in excess of the story’s Robert Louis Stevenson-lite reputation, almost akin to the infamous acid-throwing scene that got ITV’s Big Breadwinner Hog taken off air around the same time. There was a lot of ruffle-wearing in that, too.

The perpetrator in Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue was an orang utan. The Avengers started with heroin smuggling and ended with Steed and Tara being launched into space. The criminal and the fantastic have long gone hand in hand, just as greed and avarice have driven individuals and groups to break the law to achieve their aims. As abhorrent as that behaviour is, it makes for a good story. The fantastic elements of sci-fi allow writers to take the trusted staples of the crime genre and to ramp them up (selling a planet, robbing banks with alien ambassadors) to amazing proportions.

Not to do so would be, well…

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