Story 247 - Time Heist

 

In which the Doctor and Clara find themselves involved in a bank robbery. They are part of a four strong gang - the others being a young man named Psi, who has electronic implants in his skull, and a woman named Saibra, who has the ability to take on the appearance of anyone whom she comes into physical contact with.

They have no clear memory of how they came together, only that they have a mission to perform for an unknown agency. The last that the Doctor remembers was answering the TARDIS phone, but after that they all used memory worms to forget the immediate past.

The bank they have to break into is that of Karabraxos - the most secure in the galaxy. There are many measures in place to stop thieves, including DNA checks, and anyone trying to get round these is incinerated. The most fearsome security measure is a living one - a creature known as the Teller. This is kept locked up in an environmental chamber adjoining the office of Ms Delphox - the bank's manager. The Teller has the power to read people's minds and identify guilt of any kind. Should it use its powers on anyone harbouring criminal intent, it can melt their brains and reduce them to a vegetative state.

It is to get round this that the Doctor and his gang have used the memory worms.

They must still try to clear their minds of their intentions to rob this complex. Saibra uses her abilities to transform herself into a facsimile of a genuine customer, even down to the DNA traces. Psi will utilise his skills to get round the computerised defences as he can directly interface with them.

Each has something stored in the bank that they desperately want. For Psi it is the memories of his friends and families which he gave up to protect them, should he ever be arrested and interrogated. For Saibra it is a gene suppressant for her condition, as she has never been able to touch anyone without turning into a copy of them. 

Each of them has been given a device which they can operate in the event that they are captured - to prevent them from being turned into mindless zombies by the Teller. Known as a 'Shredder', it will disintegrate their bodies instantly.

As the gang works its way deeper and deeper into the bank, they are hunted by armed guards, and Ms Delphox lets loose the Teller to seek them out. Saibra is the first to be cornered and she uses the Shredder rather than face capture by the creature. When it homes in on Clara, Psi downloads information about hundreds of known criminals into his own mind, and so diverts it away from her towards himself. He too uses the Shredder to avoid capture.

The Doctor and Clara are aided at the last minute by a powerful solar flare which threatens the entire planet. Most staff and clients flee, and the flare also disrupts the security systems. The Doctor realises that the person who gave them their mission must be a time-traveller - to have known about this solar flare, which was impossible to forecast.

Ms Delphox finally captures them, but the Teller's guards turn out to be Psi and Saibra in disguise. The Shredders were actually teleport devices, which transported them to an orbiting spaceship.

They finally reach the main vault and find that it houses a residence, filled with treasure. This is home to Madame Karabraxos, the bank's founder and richest woman in the cosmos.

She is identical in appearance to Ms Delphox, and explains that she always employs clones of herself to manage the bank, being the only people she could ever trust. She has Delphox killed for failing to prevent them reaching her inner sanctum. The Doctor discovers that she has a second Teller creature incarcerated here - the mate of the one which is used by the bank, and the means by which she forces it to work for her. These are the last of their kind, and the Doctor realises that this is what he and Clara were sent to find. They must free them to save the species. The Doctor gives Karabraxos his contact details, should she ever change her greedy ways and need his help. Saibra and Psi have found what they were seeking, and the Doctor and Clara take the Tellers to an uninhabited planet where they can settle.

The Doctor realises that it was he himself who had sent them on this mission, after receiving a request from an elderly Karabraxos, who late in life had come to regret the actions of her younger self. He had hid his identity from himself so as not to leave anything for the Teller to latch on to.

Time Heist was written by Steve Thompson and Steven Moffat, and was first broadcast on Saturday 20th September, 2014.

Thompson had previously written two stories, neither of which were particularly well regarded - The Curse of the Black Spot and Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS.

The main inspiration was the whole subgenre of crime stories involving bank robberies or similar. This included movies such as The Italian Job, The Lavender Hill Gang, Oceans Eleven, The Thomas Crown Affair, The League of Gentlemen and The Killing.

Another crime subgenre being tapped was the Con Man story. The biggest influence on this story is probably the BBC TV series Hustle. This ran from 2004 to 2012, and revolved around a gang of confidence tricksters who, each week, would pull off an incredibly complicated theft against some unpleasant character who deserved to be robbed.

The team was led by Adrian Lester, and included the veteran grifter (Robert Vaughn) and the headstrong youngster (initially played by Marc Warren). The technical expert was Robert Glenister, and they hung out at a City of London wine bar run by Rob Jarvis (seemingly his only customers). The token female was Jaime Murray initially. The series moved to the USA for one season, and some of the cast came and went over the years. Viewers were left trying to puzzle out how the team had managed to play their con, though it was always explained by way of a flashback before the end of the episode.

The series shared a lot of cast and crew with Doctor Who.

The main guest cast are Jonathan Bailey as Psi, Pippa Bennett-Warner as Saibra and Keeley Hawes as Mme Karabraxos / Ms Delphox. 

Hawes came to fame in the series Tipping The Velvet. She later featured regularly in Spooks, Ashes to Ashes, Line of Duty and The Durrells.

Bailey is currently starring in the Regency-set drama Bridgerton and had previously appeared in Broadchurch as Olly, the journalist. 

Bennett-Warner has done a lot of Big Finish Doctor Who audios.

Saibra appears as a middle aged man for part of the story - Mr Porrima. He is played by Trevor Sellers.

Junior Laniyan plays the bank customer who falls foul of the Teller (which is played by Ross Mullan).

A number of Doctor Who characters make cameo appearances, in the scene where Psi downloads information about infamous criminals. One of these is a character who has only ever existed in the comic strips - Absalom Daak, "Dalek Killer" - who appears in drawn, comic form.

Other images are of a Sensorite, Kahler-Tek, a Terileptil, an Ice Warrior, the Slitheen, plus Captain John Hart and a Weevil from Torchwood, and Androvax and the Trickster from The Sarah Jane Adventures.

As far as the season's arc is concerned, the Doctor once again thinks about the woman in a shop who first gave Clara the TARDIS phone number, after he gets rung by the telephone in the door. This person was first mentioned back in The Bells of Saint John, but their identity won't be revealed until the end of the season. Clara is about to go on a date with Danny Pink when she and the Doctor become involved in the bank heist.

Overall, an enjoyable story - certainly the best of the Thompson trio. How much you enjoy it probably depends on how much you like the genres it borrows from. I always loved Hustle, so am happy with it. My only complaint- voiced in my review at the time - was the unnecessarily horrific attack on Junior Laniyan's character, which I felt was too much for younger viewers. This was the start of a period in which the series moved away from family viewing, to the detriment of the audience figures.

Things you might like to know:

• The idea of a weapon which disintegrates people, only to be revealed as being a teleporter, has been seen in the series before - in Bad Wolf.
• A bank staffed by clones of its owner was an idea already used in a spin-off audio, one of the Bernice Summerfield ones (Glory Days, 2009).
• Both the script and a rough cut of this episode were leaked on-line in advance of broadcast.
• Psi was inspired by the movie Johnny Mnemonic, which starred Keanu Reeves as a similarly technically augmented human.
• Saibra on the other hand is inspired by a couple of the X-Men characters - Mystique / Raven and Rogue - especially the latter who can take on someone's appearance by touching them.
• The part of Madame Karabraxos / Ms Delphox was originally offered to Michelle Gomez - but then Steven Moffat had something more interesting for her to play...