The Unicorn and The Wasp: Ranking - 118

         The Unicorn and The Wasp

(Series 4, Dr 10 with Donna, 17/5/2008, showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Gareth Roberts, director: Graeme Harper)

Rank: 118

  'I have gathered you all here today to reveal the murderer, as worked out by me Hercule Poirot using my leetle grey cells. It is you Doctor, you are the one who always did it in my cases: the eccentric loner who arrived from nowhere telling us a preposterous story about a blue box and an alien. As if that's going to work as an alibi - you only have your accomplice Donna here to vouch for you and she's clearly not from around these parts either. Or maybe it was Miss Marple, whose taken a look at how she's portrayed on Tv in the future and really resents the way her laser accuracy for human character has been altered so that she acts like a dotty little old lady. Mon amie, Hastings, get rid of that wasp that's buzzing around, it's very how you English say unhygenic. Stop looking at me like that vicar...'

Today’s celebrity from history we’ve all heard of is prolific crime writer Agatha Christie in a story that takes the Dr Whodunnit roaring 20s vibes of ‘Black Orchid’ from 26 years earlier and blends with the TV version of ‘Cluedo’ (which just happened to star one Tom Baker as professor Plum – why isn’t that series out on DVD yet then, eh?) Gareth Roberts does what he did with Shakespeare the year before, writing a quick-witted story littered with in-jokes that brings in scifi elements to plug the gaps in the real story where history is dark so that it could all plausibly have happened (at least if you believe in time-travelling police telephone boxes and alien giant wasps). And there’s a surprising lot we don’t know about Agatha Christie’s early years – she was the centre of a mystery as confusing as any in her books when, her first marriage failing and her mum terminally ill, she disappeared and turned up weeks later living under a pseudonym at a hotel, her car having been found abandoned some miles away. It’s long been assumed that she had a bit of a breakdown but given that Agatha herself never talked about these days and in public at least said she had no memory of what happened to her could it be...That she was attacked by a Vespiform, a sort of giant alien wasp, during the middle of a jewel raid and that the local vicar is actually part alien wasp himself? Well...a long shot maybe, but like ‘The Shakespeare Code’ there’s nothing in the real story to contradict this so once again DW makes the most out of a mystery. Though some fans felt this murder mystery was a genre-hop too far we had more than a few Whodunnits in the ‘old’ series (‘Robots of Death’ ‘vervoids’ and ‘Black Orchid’, which was close enough a Christie story even down to not having any scifi elements bar the Tardis and occupants – I like to think it happening on the next door estate at the same time) and it was about time we had one in the modern series. In keeping with new-Who’s desire for going big and bold, rather than simply writing a story like an Agatha Christie murder mystery why not make it a murder mystery about Agatha Christie?! It caused, so I recall, quite a buzz amongst Agatha aficionados, some of whom were horrified but most of whom loved just how much effort had been put into continuity and getting the established facts right. If the set-up just like one of Christie’s novels seems a bit on-the-nose, full of vicars, butlers, lead piping, libraries and a family who seem to have more skeletons in the closet than the Windsors, the script is fun enough to get away with it, frivolous enough to make it all one big in joke but not silly enough to seem stupid. It’s a fine line and Gareth Roberts treads it well, with one of his best scripts (even his best work for DW was still in the missing stories book range says me). In the olden days when you met a figure from history they turned out not to be quite what you expected – think Kublai Khan, Saladin or Emperor Nero. Agatha Christie though is much as you’d expect and the centre of gravitas around which all the other unlikely supporting cast revolve. This is a great story for David Tennant and Catherine Tate who, in the funniest script of what was mostly a melancholy year, make the most of their comic credentials and bounce off each other like never before. Even with such giants of comic timing as Douglas Adams writing for the series for me there has never been a DW scene funnier than a poisoned Doctor desperately trying to mime what he needs to cure him to a hapless Donna, who keeps misunderstanding everything he’s trying to say, much to his exasperation. His timelord nervous systems need protein and salt to work and then a shock– she offers him a Harvey Wallbanger and decides he needs an Al Jolson impression. Which makes a little more sense in context of seeing it rather than reading it here, but not much. I’m never picking Donna for my team on charades, though I’d probably do no better to be fair – no scene sums up their buddy chemistry. Though a fun episode there’s just enough jeopardy and danger to make this plot seem like it matters. There are, too, no less than twenty Agatha Christie books referred to by name in the script (more if you count the cut scenes) and no end of references to plot points, but these don’t get in the way of the plot if you don’t recognise them, they’re just an extra layer for fans who are going to recognise such things. The resolution is quite neat too, if not as deftly plotted as in a real Christie novel (inevitably I guess, with only 50 minutes of screen time to play with – most adaptations even of Christie’s shorter books are three hours or more) – basically everyone has a secret: (spoilers – don’t skip to the last page now) the jewel thief and the alien are two different people, but the colonel is also only pretending to be disabled and the mother had a secret affair and there was a part-alien baby. and the ending is quite touching, making you revisit everything you thought you knew about these people and their motives – which might itself be the single most Agatha Christie thing about this story. The downfall, though, is that everything happens so fast and to such a large cast that you don’t get any feeling that any of the supporting cast are anything more than ciphers and even such luminaries as Felicity Kendall and Christopher Benjamin (making his first DW appearance in thirty-one years!) don’t get to make much of an impact. Incidentally one key actor goes unnoticed – that’s David Tennant’s real-life father as the butler walking in front of shot at the very start of the episode. Which is part of a much bigger problem: Christie books are all about being impressed when someone works out a clever solution – you’re not actually meant to care for the people in it that much. And DW is all about caring for people. The script tries hard to square the two worlds and finds a middle ground that’s all about points of view and context making different people act in different ways (even and especially the non-humans) but compared to the best DW scripts it never quite feels as if it cares. As a result this story never has the emotional resilience of other, even better stories – it’s a jigsaw of clever pieces that slot together to re-create the picture on the box, rather than real life (or as close to real life as you get on a TV show). In retrospect it feels like a dry run for ‘Broadchurch’, Chris Chibnall’s series that mixed and matched Who eras with David Tennant, Arthur Darvill (Rory) and a pre-Who Jodie Whittaker: all the plot beats are there, the dialogue is often strong, the acting features some of the best names in telly and yet the characters are painted in such broad strokes and are such eccentrics that it never feels quite real enough for you to get involved. Still, not every episode can be a serious epic and as enjoyable palette-cleansing romps go this is one of the funniest, with much to admire in the writing and acting, some classy clever lines and some great sequences along the way.

+ Fenella Woolgar makes for an excellent Agatha Christie. As well as looking so like the real thing that you half wonder if all those DW stories about doppelgangers are real, she really gets over Agatha’s personality beyond just the cliches. Notably she changes whoever she’s with - slightly stiff and overbearingly polite in upper class society, with the Doctor and Donna she has a wicked sense of humour and a curiosity and belief in the darker side of human nature that allows her to accept what they’re telling her and which helped her write all her books. You get the sense that her period trappings are her putting on an act, every bit as much as Donna tries to in this story (the Doctor, of course, barely changes whatever time period he’s in).

- A six foot CGI wasp was always going to be a tall ask of any special effects department and its arguably the weakest aspect of the story (if better than, say, Professor Lazarus post experiment or Reapers). The problem it has to be recognisably a wasp, but also recognisably alien and something that can move stealthily at speed – the biggest problem comes when crowds of people have to look at what’s too obviously a blank space and their eyes aren’t all looking at the same place. Still, to be honest when I heard what the episode was going to do, I expected something far worse. And forget what a lot of fans complained about – yes it does fit the vibe of the story and was inspired by the front cover of an edition of ‘Death In The Clouds’ where its attacking a plane. (though in the book’s plot what looks like a wasp sting on board a plane turns out to be a cover for murder – the wasp isn’t alien. As far as I know). Perhaps a biggest disappointment was that the ‘Unicorn’ half of the title turned out to be a jewel thief and not an alien unicorn!