Come to Ricosta! Tropical climate, untouched beaches, fabulous cuisine… and no extradition treaties. The perfect retirement planet for a certain type of ‘business person’ – such as Ms Melanie Bush, formerly the co-owner of the Iceworld emporium, now on the run from her former criminal associate’s criminal associates…
Some other former associates of Ms Bush are abroad in this space Costa del Crime, however. Not long ago, the time and space traveller known as the Doctor arrived here, alongside his sometimes-criminal associate, the reformed juvenile offender Ace. But now the Doctor’s gone missing – and Melanie Bush is about to learn that on the planet Ricosta, the wages of sin… are death.
A LIFE OF CRIME
Matt Fitton’s “A Life of Crime” kicks off a new trilogy for the seventh Doctor and Ace, and features the reintroduction of Mel to the crew. We’ve seen Big Finish reintroduce regular characters before, but any expectations from those stories should be curbed as, sadly, this story isn’t very good at all.
Much of what Fitton is going for in this story is a comparison of how both the Doctor and Mel have changed since last they met. It’s unclear when in the seventh Doctor’s timeline this takes place, but the characterization of Ace seems to put it squarely in season 25. (If it’s supposed to be later than that, then Ace is both written and performed terribly. Sadly, this strikes me as a reasonable possibility.) So we’ve got a Doctor who recently made the decision to blow up Skaro and Mel, who has spent quite some time as Sabalom Glitz’s traveling companion. You’d expect this to factor into the story, and indeed the Doctor spends much of the story suspicious of and disappointed in Mel for apparently falling under Glitz’s profit-driven sway. But the grand revelation is that the Doctor is wrong, and Mel is exactly the same character she’s always been. As a plot twist, that’s not bad, but it’s self-evidently awful character development. Perhaps we’ll find out more as this trilogy progresses, but for right now it sits badly. And for the Doctor’s part, Mel says that maybe he’s the one who changed for the worse – because he’s disappointed in her. This would work if, say, the Doctor’s inability to trust his companions led him into a tight spot, or if his relationship with Ace was notably different than his relationship with Mel, but as it stands it comes almost entirely out of nowhere.
Sabalom Glitz hangs over every minute of this script. It seems as though every character is a former associate of his, every plan originated in his mind, and every piece of currency has passed through his hands at least once. But he’s not in the story! I’ve seen this device many times before – the absent character that impacts the story – but in “A Life of Crime” it just feels awkward because we all know Sabalom Glitz and we’re all waiting for him to show up, and he never does.
Apart from that, there isn’t much going on here. The setting is fairly interesting – a retirement planet for career criminals – but the story doesn’t do anything more with it than generic heist tropes. Gloria (Ginny Holder) tries to fool first Ace, then Mel, by pretending to be a newly regenerated Doctor. I’m not sure why, because the audience obviously knows it’s a trick and the characters see right through it, but that is a thing that happens. Holder isn’t very good in general, actually – she gives a one-note performance, and the story setting her up as a potential recurring character feels more like a threat than a promise. The story of Lefty Lonnigan (Des McAleer) is clever enough, I suppose, but even that twist is visible from a mile off. And the Sperovores are the sort of monsters that sound interesting but fail in practice: they feed on potential futures, meaning that the more interesting you are, the better you taste, but this really just amounts to a lot of slobbering and chewing noises.
The more I think about this, the more I dislike it. The dialogue is excruciatingly descriptive at times. The Sperovore voices are incomprehensible. The characterization is either flat or off. The production, at least, is fine, even though director Ken Bentley doesn’t bring a lot of forward momentum to a heist story that could use it. Overall, “A Life of Crime” is a weak story. Every time it seems as though the monthly range is starting to improve, along comes another one of these damp squibs. But still we plod along, grinding out story after story. I suppose expecting consistent quality is too much to ask after 214 of these.
Not good.
4/10
Jim Thompson wrote a fantastic criminal retirement community in his 1958 crime novel The Getaway. It was called El Rey's, a sanctuary in Mexico designed as a Hell for criminals to suffer for eternity. You'd think a franchise that parodied Bulldog Drummond in City of Death would've done a much better job…especially on audio.
http://arcana.wikidot.com/el-rey