LS2.04 – Crime of the Century


CRIME OF THE CENTURY

Crime of the Century by Andrew Cartmel is one of the “lost stories” that was planned for the TV series but didn’t make it to the screen due to the series’ cancellation.  Here we have Big Finish‘s audio version.  This is a difficult story to describe, as it doesn’t seem to do anything.  It feels like a series of ideas that the writer’s put into scenes and then linked them together in the hope that they’ll lead somewhere.  It feels a bit like you’re wandering around aimlessly with a couple of your mates with no real clue of where you’re going.

The writer, Andrew Cartmel, explains in the interviews that his initial memory of creating the 7th Doctor’s new companion, Raine, is of her being a safe-cracker and finding the 7th Doctor in the safe of which she’s cracking open.  This scene is, in a nutshell, the best explanation of the whole story.  A great idea, but nothing that builds up to it and nothing that builds up from it.  Even after the full duration of the story, I’m not sure we ever got an explanation of what the Doctor was doing in that safe, why he was there, or whether he was trapped in there, or just sitting around waiting for this person who has no idea who he is.

This piecemeal method of story-telling doesn’t really fit in with any sense of a “masterplan” that we thought was to come from the Cartmel era of the 7th Doctor on the TV series.

Does this make it a bad story?  Not really, you just don’t get the sense that it’s going anywhere.

The previous story, Thin Ice, was spun around Ace being tasked with her own mission regarding the Ice Warriors in order to be accepted into the Academy on Gallifrey.  At the end of that story, the whole thing was effectively discarded away as Ace’s application was ultimately refused — kind of making the entire story a bit pointless.  So we have Crime of the Century in which Ace is still the Doctor’s companion whilst the new companion is being introduced.  It all feels somewhat a little awkward, especially as Ace and Raine don’t even meet until right at the very end of the adventure.

Crime of the Century is set some 22 years after Thin Ice when the baby of Markus Creevy and Lt Raina Kerenskaya has grown into a young woman.  Although the Doctor has apparently been keeping an eye on her, he seemingly has done nothing to save her from a troublesome father or from going down the path of criminality.  So he’s been keeping an eye on her just because it sounds good to say the 7th Doctor has been keeping an eye on her, not because he’s been keeping an eye on her in any narrative sense.

Not that this should surprise us as we also discovered in UNIT: Dominion that the 7th Doctor had been keeping an eye on Klein, even though his “keeping an eye on her” didn’t actually have him doing anything.  Again, it’s something that sounds good to have the Doctor say it but, in narrative terms, it’s just a waste of words.

The only real level on which Crime of the Century works is as a sequel to Thin Ice, in which we meet again some of the characters from that story.  It’s 22 years on, but pretty much none of them seems to have aged – not in character or in voice.  The story moves forwards 22 years solely to have Raine ready to join the Doctor & Ace at the end of the adventure, not because the narrative demands it.

The synopsis of this audio in the Big Finish website is typically brief and nondescript and this is because there’s no way to actually summarise the story.  Listen to it if you enjoyed Thin Ice and you want to hear the first adventure of a new companion that never made it to the TV screen but, as a standalone isolated story, it’s not going to win you over.  It’s fun and lively enough, and it never bores or tires, but it’s difficult to believe that this was part of some “masterplan” season.

The next adventure in this series with the same characters is Animal.