David Tennant is Creepier in Netflix’s ‘Criminal’ Than He Was in ‘Marvel’s Jessica Jones’

David Tennant is unbearably good at playing creeps. For years, comic book fans have been heralding his turn as the grotesquely sinister Kilgrave in Marvel’s Jessica Jones. There, he plays a sociopathic egomaniac who uses his powers of mind control to torture people and keep women, like the heroic Jessica Jones herself, as slaves. However, it is Tennant’s recent turn in the Netflix anthology Criminal that marks his creepiest role yet. As Dr. Edgar Fallon, Tennant is the picture perfect image of middle class respectability, until the cops piece together the twisted evil lurking within him.

When it’s all said and done, David Tennant is a million times scarier in Criminal than he ever was on Marvel’s Jessica Jones.

**SPOILERS FOR NETFLIX’S CRIMINAL (UNITED KINGDOM) AHEAD**

When Criminal (United Kingdom) begins, we’re picking up on the last hour of a tense 24 hour interrogation. Dr. Edgar Fallon (Tennant) is suspected of raping and murdering his 14-year-old stepdaughter Nicky. Armed with a lawyer and an insurmountable sense of resolved, Fallon’s retorted to every harrowing question with the same two words: “No comment.” It is only about 18 minutes into the episode, after a new DI has entered the room to shake him up, that Fallon opens up. “I’d rather people knew,” he tells his lawyer. He then proceeds to demolish the detectives’ case against him, arguing that his own wife pushed him to spend time with her daughter and accusing the girl of being in an illicit relationship with her adult netball coach. It’s the coach, Fallon argues, who raped and murdered his stepdaughter. He even goes so far as to say that the bruises on his daughter’s wrist exonerate him because it proves he hadn’t seen her after that accident.

Dr. Edgar Fallon is clever, polite, well-spoken, and in his checkered shirt and navy blue sweater, the portrait of upper middle class civility. He finds a way to cast himself as a victim in his interrogation, complaining about how awful it was to discover his daughter was carrying on a sexual relationship with a man his own age. He even has the detectives doubting their own investigation. It’s only when one lower level detective catches a small couple details in Fallon’s story does the harrowing truth come to light.

Fallon was indeed raping his stepdaughter, and he beat her within an inch of her life when she threatened to reveal his misdeed. Knowing that her battered body would doom him, he put her unconscious body in the trunk of his car, murdered her in the woods, and then cooly paid a gas station to clean his car. The plan was to pin the crime on his stepdaughter’s coach, and he almost got away with it — were it not for a receipt and a honeycomb imprint on his dead stepdaughter’s arm.

Dr. Edgar Fallon’s crimes are horrific: he sexually abused his own child, beat her, and then killed her to cover his own craven ass. He is a terrifying image of toxic male evil lurking under the surface in our society. Tennant is similarly awful as Kilgrave in Marvel’s Jessica Jones. Indeed, both characters seem bent on hurting, manipulating, sexually abusing, and even disposing of women as though they were toys. However, Kilgrave still isn’t as scary as Dr. Edgar Fallon.

Kilgrave is an effective enough comic book villain, but it’s his over-the-top nature that makes his evil obvious from the outset. He purrs his taunts, dresses in ostentatious suits, and treats everyone he meets with utter disdain. If Kilgrave had a mustache, David Tennant would have twirled it.

Dr. Edgar Fallon, on the other hand, is understated in his emotional appeals, and paints himself as a loser. As he describes it, his marriage is falling apart, his stepdaughter disrespected him, and now the police have the audacity to accuse him of a horrific crime. But Fallon is the menace here. He only speaks when he believes he has worked out a foolproof alibi for himself. It’s as if he believes himself clever enough to manipulate the entire situation, and were it not for the work of one singular detective, he would have gotten away with his crimes.

Fallon’s normalcy is what is so chilling. He’s not a colorful comic book villain, but a middle class doctor living a perfectly normal life. He doesn’t have superpowers, but he does have a cockiness, cleverness, and the mask of civility on his side. What Dr. Edgar Fallon represents is far more insidious than Kilgrave: he is the ordinary man capable of unspeakably evil things, and he can get away with it.

Watch Criminal on Netflix