A Life Of Crime

A Life of Crime by Matt Fitton

A Life of Crime is pretty boring, not going to lie - it’s Buying Time/The Wrong Woman with all the substance sucked out of it, shoved into a mediocre Heist story that occasionally stops and does some nice character work if you actively pay attention to it. It is, to it’s credit, not fucking awful to listen to, and is exceedingly inoffensive on the whole - there aren’t an enormous number of holes in it other than it isn’t very attention grabbing and has quite an awkward storyline that almost seems to wrap up by the end of part two before it buggers off to do something pretty much different. And it's really dull. Did I mention it's dull? The ready comparison is to Time Heist, but Time Heist has a good deal of ideas to it and seems to almost be aware that Heist movies are kind of bland and never really have interesting characters or concepts. A Life of Crime doesn’t have that, which I think weighs it down tremendously. Nonetheless, A Life of Crime is not without it’s positives - it’s brimming with potential for the characters, Seven/Ace/Mel seem like an incredible TARDIS team already. The story does try to be a series opener in that it mostly focuses on Mel’s re-entry into the Doctor’s life for the first two parts, and Mel is the character that gets the most dignity. (Next to Ace.) The character stuff is quite fascinating, and there is a really good through line for Mel, but it’s picked itself a really boring plot to go with it. For those who like heist media, I am not one of you, but you may get a little more of a kick out of this. The story would have been much improved with a recast for Glitz - as it is, Glitz is just around the corner messing with shit for most of the story and we never see him - his presence may have helped tie things together. Letting Gloria be a better fake-Doctor would have been another good move. I understand her being shit at it from an in-universe standpoint and Mel does need to figure it out, but from a dramatic standpoint, it’s no fun being in on the fact she’s totally fake from the start. How Gloria tricks Ace is beyond me (although it does lead to a rather humorous attack upon Sixie’s TV regeneration.) The villains are nothing we haven’t seen before, but I love the sly references their prior appearances to Diary of River Song - it helps out the fact that they’re lame villains that at least they’re prior established lame villains who have other better stories to their names. This is a strange story - how did it make talking Racoons so completely unmemorable? As it is, A Life of Crime is really really fine, but it had the ingredients to be a lot more, to be actually good. I long for the timeline where one of my friends didn’t fall asleep listening to it: 4/10