Also, I think he's completely sincere when he says “moral worth” - it's one thing to solve a murder. She's really closed off, she's quite mechanistic, and I think he takes an interest in that. Again, we were discussing that with both Dolly and Stanley: is this almost a flirtation? You know, they finally meet and there's a smile from. But he's a highly intelligent man.Īnd why does he take such interest in Janice's disappearance? I've only talked a tiny bit of it with Stanley. I've got a version of what's going on there. He's begun treating the people in that prison more or less as his staff. He says he's a criminologist, but that feels like a fraction of the story. Grieff: he has remarkable resources for a guy on death row, for one. There's a real shroud of mystery around Mr. Vladimir Putin doesn't seem that fucking interesting, does he? You just think, You're not even bloody handsome, how're you getting away with it? You're not charismatic. Dennis Nilsen, also played by the wonderful David Tennant, was famously a boring man. That's why I'd always say, back in my Doctor Who days, “Look, if you're just writing a villain, you're not turning up for work.” I mean, ‘I do bad things because I’m a villain' isn't a story, right? ‘I’m a villain who does good things,' that's a story. The idea of "the banality of evil" comes to mind. But why do we cooperate with dreadful people?
Surely the biggest question in the world at any given moment is, “Why do good people do bad things?” It's not a very big question, because most people are fairly decent. He has all the moral insight you'd expect from a fallen angel: “I understand what evil is, but I did it anyway.” Jefferson Grieff is no such thing.ĭid he come to this view before or after he killed his wife?Īfter. He's kind, he's compassionate, he's brave, and he wants to believe in good. And even Sherlock, who at least presents as cold, isn't at all. The advantage of hell is you don't have all that disorientating optimism about the human spirit.
Doyle really nailed it, didn't he? Every detective is like Sherlock Holmes, and every super villain is like Moriarty. I'm curious as to why you're so attracted to that psychology.Įvery detective since Sherlock Holmes has been like that, I can't think of one who wasn't. Grieff is similar to characters you've written before, especially in Sherlock, in that he has this great gift of inference. It's quite the swing to make those stories connect - not least for the geographical distance. If you lapse from perfect decency, and kill someone, what would you do? What do you then do with the rest of your days? Because you're a perfectly decent person apart from this one time you did something unacceptable. But I couldn't guarantee I wouldn't kill another innocent person to save my child.Īnd the third one is, suppose you'd done the worst imaginable thing. And I'd think, Well, I would want to be like Doctor Who, and lay my life down for others. Would I kill another innocent person, just to save my own life? You know, shove them out of a lifeboat, because there's only room for one or something.
Would I kill someone for money? Well, no. The other - are there any circumstances in which a perfectly decent person would kill another perfectly decent person? What would push me to do that? I would ask myself all sorts of questions. This didn't come to me as a script idea, but three things I'd always worry about just idly, at four in the morning: if I were trapped by someone, because they don't want a secret revealed, how could I negotiate my freedom? There's the story of Janice and the cellar, there's the story of the vicar's life upstairs, and the story of Jefferson Grieff on death row. And they're just two or three preoccupations of mine. Steven Moffat: Well, there's kind of three stories, actually.
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