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...'
When Catherine Tate was first cast as Donna Noble a lot of fans groaned. So far comeback Who had been remarkably dark, deep and serious, a world away from the bright gaudy pantomimes of some of the 1980s programmes towards the end of the ‘classic’ run. But actually series four turned out to be the most sombre in many ways. Already this season we’ve had innocent people dying in a volcanic explosion (‘The Fires Of Pompeii’), an enslaved race overthrowing their tyrant ruler (‘Planet Of The Ood’), a plan to gas the entire Earth (‘The Sontaron Stratagem’) and The Doctor coming to terms with being a parent then losing her within an hour (‘The Doctor’s Daughter’). In the stories to come, too, Donna alone is going to be trapped in a parallel universe that we’re meant to think is her death (‘Silence In The Library’), have a time-altering beetle on her back that undoes her greatest achievements (‘Turn Left’) and have her memory wiped (‘The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End’). So it’s with some relief that we finally get that much-delayed comedy story – even though, this being Dr Who, ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’ technically has more bodies in it than any of these other stories.
For, yes, this is the Dr
Who murder mystery as re-done for the 21st century, inspired by a
fun car ride producers Russell T Davies and Phil Collinson shared back to
London from their Welsh base at the end of series three, throwing out the
absolute daftest clichés they could possibly put in Dr Who. ‘We could have a
murder mystery’ said Russell ‘But who could we get as the detective?’ ‘How
about Agatha Christie herself?’ joked Collinson, cueing howls of laughter that
lasted halfway down the motorway. Except…was it really just a joke? There was a
part of Agatha’s real life that was common knowledge and which she never talked
about (not even to her grandson Matthew Prichard, who was thirty-two when his
gran passed so she had plenty of time to tell him her secrets and who became
this story’s script consultant, on hand for comments and attending the final
readthrough), a mystery as big as those in any of her Poirot or Marple books.
Could it be that there was really a Dr Whoy explanation? Agatha had married
young at twenty-two and by the time she was thirty-four, in 1926, her husband
Archive Christie was openly living with another woman, Nancy Neele. It was
quite the public scandal for the day and hit sales of Agatha’s first books
(she’d had six published by this point). Christie fell into a depression, not
helped by the death of her beloved mum soon after, until by December that year
she’d had enough. She left a note blaming all her troubles on her ex husband
(conveniently ignored in the Who version), packed her bags and took her car as
far as a Newlands, Surrey where she abandoned it by the wonderfully descriptively
named ‘Silence Lake’. She wasn’t seen for days and it made all the papers, to
the point where even fellow sleuth Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle was roped into
speculating on her disappearance. Most people favoured suicide but those that
new Agatha knew how out of character that would be; others blamed her ex
husband for murder; others still put the whole thing down to a publicity stunt
to sell her books. It kind of worked too: Agatha had been a steady seller,
increasing sales with every book, but it was after she became a household name
for her disappearance she became a household name as a writer too. The truth is
probably more prosaic than that: a tourist spotted that a lady matching
Agatha’s description had been spotted sitting by herself in the unlikely-named
Hydropathic Hotel in Harrogate and had been there since the day after her
disappearance. A closer look at the guest book revealed that she’d checked in
under the name of Theresa Neele, close to her hubby’s new mistress. The police
were called but Agatha claimed to have no memory of who she was and so still
nobody knew what had happened. Was it grief? A blow to the head? A gimmick that
grew out of hand? Eventually a Doctor diagnosed her with a nervous breakdown
due to mental exhaustion (those books didn’t write themselves either – not in
the days before AI anyway) but not everyone was happy with such a colourful
question being answered by something so mundane. So naturally, to a Dr Who
writer, it’s really a side effect of being attacked by a giant killer alien
wasp.
Why a wasp? That was
Gareth Roberts’ addition. Russell handed the idea over to him after ‘The Shakespeare Code’ had impressed
him (albeit with the reminder not to spend the entire annual budget for BBC
Wales this time after what had turned out to be the most expensive Who story so
far!) Russell knew that Roberts was a self-confessed Christie fan who knew more
of Agatha’s books than he did and had read many as a child. One that really
stood out to him was ‘Death In The Clouds’, a lesser Hercules Poirot book
(funnily enough Peter Capaldi is in the David Suchet TV version, long before he
was in, never mind was, Who). Mostly because of the lurid cover, used in the
story’s tag scene, where what looked like a giant wasp the size of an aeroplane
was buzzing a picnic (not to spoil it but, well, it has been out since 1935 so
you’ve had plenty of chances to read it: the first body isn’t actually a murder
at all but an allergic reaction to a wasp sting). To a small child who hadn’t
quite grasped perspective yet and Roberts read it waiting for the giant insect
to appear and was sad that it never did. Writing for Dr Who now gave him the
perfect excuse to add just that (funnily enough Agatha’s second book was titled
‘The Man in The Brown Suit’, just like the one Dr 10 generally wears – though
in the story it’s a red herring about a murder suspect seen entering a house
and vanishing shortly before a dead body is discovered) . Except, this is where
the plot falls down: Agatha Christie lives in a set world of set very English
rules. Her books work as crime novels because, to use the old Sherlock quote,
what happens in them might be improbable but is never impossible. The joy is
trying to work her plots out before the detective does, to work out what’s
coming. Dr Who, of course, isn’t like that. I mean there’s a lot of stories
that put the emphasis on the ‘science’ part of ‘science fiction’ but for the
most part something happens out of left field and the whole point is that the
viewer can’t always see what’s coming.
In theory dropping The
Doctor and Donna into a different genre shouldn’t be any different to, say,
dropping them into the middle of the Wild West or saying hi to Shakespeare and
yet these are two very different worlds so far apart that even a writer of Roberts’
ability can’t quite bridge the gap. For instance, a giant wasp would be silly
even for a normal Who story but here seems spectacularly silly, with the scenes
of (spoilers – if you don’t wasn’t to know who dunnit look away now) Reverend
Golightly getting buzzy and transforming particularly daft. Death is a big
emotional deal in Who stories (to the point where some showrunners refuse to
have it in their stories at all) and yet it’s a joke here as we laugh at the
clichés piling up: of course there’s a professor dead in the Library with the
lead piping. The Doctor and Donna swapping Agatha Christie titles with glee is
out of place with the reverence needed for a real murder too, although Roberts
does at least have the good grace to have Agatha tick the Doctor off for it.
You can see it most in the traditional ‘dining room’ accusation finale though:
Agatha talks about the Earthly clues, The Doctor covers the other-worldly ones.
The one thing both genres have in common, though, is that they have to be
rooted to reality in some way or they fall apart, too insubstantial to take
seriously. Also 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 Dr Who is all about caring for people and not worrying too much
about an explanation involving technical gobbledegook you probably won’t be able
to understand anyway. 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 Dr Who 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). It’s become a game, a hunt the reference
puzzle removed from real life (and there are lots references in the
script: ‘Dead Man’s Folly’, ‘The Body In
the Library’ ‘Cat Among The Pigeons’ ‘Nemesis’ ‘The Secret Adversary’ ‘N or M?’
‘They Do It With Mirrors’ ‘Appointment With Death’ ‘Cards On The Table’
‘Crooked House’ ‘Endless Night’ ‘Yellow Iris’ ‘Taken At The Flood’ ‘The Moving
Finger’ ‘Death Comes At The End’ ‘The Murder At The Vicarage’ and most cheekily of all ‘Why didn’t they
ask…? Heavens/Evans!’ are all mentioned by name, while the books ‘The Murder Of
Roger Ackroyd’ and ‘The Murder On The Orient Express’ are mentioned (even
though that last one hasn’t been written yet! The original draft script had a
reference to another title, as The Donna says ‘It’s like the ten little…’ and
The Doctor interrupts by saying ‘niggles’, mercifully removed at the 11th
hour). Other clichés have characters called Roger (Agatha’s most recycled name)
and poisoning by cyanide. In order to cover this Roberts has to work himself
into knots, coming up with a plot that doesn’t quite hang together where the
Vespiform wasp has been woken up by an alien locket left to his mum by his dad
and which has ‘absorbed’ the essence of the Agatha Christie book Lady Eddison
was reading at the time, somehow transferring all those thoughts to him as if
these books are a ‘normal’ template of Human behaviour. Which is quite clearly a nonsense: how does
reading a book affect a locket? And if it can read minds then surely it would
be able to pick up on the sense that Lady Eddison is well aware that she’s
reading fiction? Why would the locket work this way at all? Plus of course
there’s the uncomfortable truth that Agatha’s early books aren’t much like her
later ones – if the Vespiform had based it’s movements on her first six books
he’d be more likely to go globe-trotting as a spy or indulge in chaste love
affairs (though maybe he’s done that too off-screen?) I mean what next, an
alien vegetab;e that’s reads the complete works of Douglas Adams and walks around
wearing dressing gowns, or a baboon who loves the JNT era of Dr Who and has
taken to wearing loud Hawaiian shirts and going to pantomimes and conventions? It
can’t possibly be as ‘silly’ as his original idea (to have Agatha herself
responsible for the murders after being possessed by the wasp) and seems like a
rather desperate way of allowing this story to have its cake and eat it to
‘really’ be a story about a real life mystery in the life of a real person that
also allows the story to throw in all the clichés we expect.
Even though the vast
majority in this story clearly don’t come from Agatha Christie books at all but
Cluedo, the Waddingtons board game released in 1949 (twenty-three years after
this story is set). All the clichés are there, with three of the game’s six
weapons (lead piping, a revolver and a dagger (all a red herring as the ‘real’
weapon is an alien insect sting), multiple rooms (most of the story takes place
in a dining room and a library) and especially the main characters who all
resemble the tokens (Professor Peach is the only one called by name and snuffs
it in the opening minutes. He doesn’t wear any purple, but otherwise it’s a
full house for the other colours: Robina Redmond is Miss Scarlet a younger girl
dressed all in red, Lady Edison is the older and more elegant Miss Peacock
dressed all in blue, Miss Chandrakala is the maid Mrs White, our old friend
Christopher Benjamin – from ‘Inferno’ and ‘Talons Of Weng Chiang’ – is all in
yellow and a colonel just like Mustard, while the reverend is in green). As a
result ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’ doesn’t resemble any actual Agatha Christie
adaptation that’s ever been on telly but is a dead ringer for the 1990s TV
series based on and named for ‘Cluedo’ (one that a young Russell T Davies wrote
an episode for, ‘Finders Keepers’, in 1993: sadly it wasn’t the series that had
Tom Baker perfectly cast as the eccentric Plum but did at least have Nicholas
Parsons as a vicar four years after playing one in ‘Curse
Of Fenric’. It remains about the highest rated series to have never come
out on DVD or blu-ray, though admittedly it hasn’t aged well). If this story
was an attempt to get under the skin of the real Agatha Christie, the way ‘The Unquiet Dead’ does with Dickens or
even ‘The Shakespeare Code’ did
with the bard, then it fails: this is a collection of in-jokes more than a
character piece and you don’t know Agatha any better by the end than you did in
the beginning.
That said, at least
Roberts has done enough homework to realise something. Agatha’s real life
Grandson was left scratching his head at a lot of the scifiness of the story
but praised the script to the hilt for not doing the boring cliched thing of
having Agatha as the confident, brash celebrity of later life. He recognised
that Roberts had written about Agatha at the end of her tether, enduring her
most troubled year when she felt she’d lost everything and everyone but without
making her just an insipid gibbering wreck. We saw glimpses of it when Mark
Gatiss wrote Dickens before the writer went back into ‘performance’ mode and it
will be shoved down our throats by the time Richard Curtis get s to ‘Vincent
and The Doctor’ but it’s intriguing to see a famous person in the years before
they were famous, when they’re full of self doubt and self-deprecating jokes.
Agatha doesn’t want the attention (not the way the egocentric Shakespeare
craved for it): she’s an observer rather than a doer, with a keen eye for human
frailty and contradictions, with a dark side that leads to murder through
protection, fear and love rather than outright evilness. Yet at the same time
there are flashes of the self-confidence that will come into their own once
Agatha falls in love again (just two months after the events of her
disappearance) and marries archaeologist Max Mallowan (the moment her books
start to become international, as she accompanied him on digs, rather than
always in English villages). Fenella Woolgar, recommended by none other than
David Tennant after he read the script and thought his co-star from the 2003
series ‘Bright Young Things’ would be perfect – and she is. Agatha is the one
character here who, ironically, isn’t acting like she’s from real life not the
pages of an Agatha Christie novel or a board game.
There’s just enough
‘truth’ behind the script too, because if you were an Agatha purist you could
somehow ignore all the tales about Vespiforms and see this more as a very
English tale of repression from the 1920s, when the impression you get from
this far away is that murder was considered more socially acceptable than
talking about your feelings. Everyone in this story is hiding a big secret, the
way people are in most of Agatha’s books, purely because everyone has been
trained not to talk about difficulties even to those close to them and instead
‘suck them up’. Colonel Hugh, who says he was injured by the 1918 Spanish Flu
epidemic, is really a fraud who can walk perfectly well, but he’s afraid that
his wife, Lady Eddington, is only with him out of sympathy and will leave him
if she sees him as a person not an invalid. The hug she gives him shows how
untrue that is, but it’s amazing the false things that ‘buzz’ in your head
sometimes. Robina is carrying a different sort of secret: she’s a jewel thief,
a working class girl from the wrong end of town who envies the rich their
lavish lifestyle and steals their jewels (including an alien pendant as it
happens), notorious thief The Unicorn living under her real name in plain
sight. Notably Lady Eddison’s response is more ‘why didn’t you just ask for
money you stupid thing I’d have given it to you’ than ‘off with your head!’
This being a Gareth Roberts script there’s also a gay couple who have to keep
their love secret, Donna offering the poignant appraisal of 1926 that Roger
‘can’t even grieve in public – 1926 feels like the dark ages in so many ways’.
Lady Edison of course has the biggest secret of all: in her youth she eloped
with a stranger she met at a party and had a baby by him, holding herself up
inside her house for six months and giving him up for adoption (a storyline
that works fine without him being a killer wasp). The Colonel looks as if he
doesn’t care one bit and is more upset that she didn’t trust him with her
secret rather than keep things to herself. The characters say ‘but you never said
a word!’ over and over in this story, forgetting that they too never spilled
their own secrets.
It’s the Vicar though,
the one character who thought he was living a pious life without any secrets,
who ended up the one that did it and it’s the story’s strongest suit that he
turns into a killer wasp when faced with anger for the first time in his life.
It’s seeing two teens stealing things from his church that brings out a
suppressed anger he never thought he had and ‘activates’ him, a rage he’s kept
deep down all this time partly because he works for the Church and is a man of
God asked to turn the other cheek but also because he’s English in possibly the
most English decade ever. He has no easy way to pour out his rage, no partner
to turn to and a God asking him to forgive trespasses, no support group to tell
him everyone feels angry sometimes. No wonder he feels like an alien, which in
turn unlocks his alien heritage (with anger a ‘genetic lock’ apparently, though
goodness knows how that was ever created whether through technology or
evolutionarily). This mirrors him being a secret wasp quite well: despite their
reputation wasps are placid creatures: they’ve had to learn to be, because on
Earth they usually die after they’ve stung someone and only do so as a last
resort when they feel it’s them or you. Wasps, Roberts seems to be saying, are
the most ‘English’ of insects: they act nosey but really they just want to be
left alone and would rather die than do anything violent, because it would mean
their actual death as much as a social death. That’s a clever idea, something
that lies deep at the heart of most of Agatha’s books (even the ones set after
her heyday period which carried on up to the 1970s – she died in the middle of ‘The
Brain Of Morbius’ and it’s weird to think that that a subject of a Who historical
might actually have watched this series on telly, even her grandson doesn’t
think she ever did!): the frustration with people who just won’t talk to each
other properly and would rather kill than confess feelings, of inadequacy or guilt.
The fact this happens that’s in a story about Agatha shocking people by being
alone and mentioning what her husband has been up to fits perfectly. It’s hard
to work out who the real Shakespeare was and Roberts captured him about as well
as anybody but you feel that he connects to the real Agatha here, behind all
the artifice and jokes, far more than the ‘real’ Bard.
The other strength of
this story is that Roberts knows this is a daft situation and despite the depth
the script still has plenty of light touches to it. There are lots of knowing
jokes in the dialogue, the best being Donna’s unintentionally meta comment
about how meeting Agatha in the middle of a murder spree ‘is like meeting Charles
Dickens with ghosts. At Christmas’. David Tennant’s face is a picture (see ‘The Unquiet Dead’ if you’re not sure why!) though it’s hard not
to laugh along woth Donna as she points how rare it is to ‘chase’ the monster instead
of having it chase her! The moment accusations start flying left right and
centre at the end, people admitting stuff they haven’t been accused of, is a
lovely little gag at the expense of the books and the way everyone always keeps
quiet instead of blurting things out. The best scene though, one of the
funniest in years, comes when The Doctor has been poisoned by cyanide only, being
a timelord, he can correct his timelord body if he creates an antidote in time.
It’s the perfect mixture of his and Donna’s characters as David Tennant gets to
run around a kitchen manically in the middle of an otherwise fairly static
story (even the car chase is in vehicles that only go at 20mph!) while Donna
tries to help but keeps getting things wrong, exasperating him with her
attempts to understand him that are way off the boil (she offers him a Harvey
Wallbanger and decides he needs an Al Jolson impression! I’m never putting
Donna on my Dr Who charades team). Had this been Rose she’d be crying, had this
been Martha she’d have been administering first aid, had this been Ace she’d be
blowing things up in retaliation, but this is Donna we’re talking about here,
so she goes straight to pop cultural references and missing the bigger picture.
Hilarious.
Of course if you think about even this scene too much
your head will explode: there’s absolutely no reason for the Vespiform vicar to
try and poison The Doctor. If his plan is really based on Agatha Christie’s
works and been set in motion days before then he has absolutely no reason to
think that The Doctor or Donna will be there. Not to mention other plotholes:
The Doctor identifies the suspect through the use of pepper which contains a
form of ‘pesticide’ – quite apart from the fact that it doesn’t and that it wouldn’t
be in enough quantities to make any difference anyway in someone Human size,
has Rev Golightly really avoided pepper all his life (even without knowing it was
lethal?) One has images of him transforming into a wasp as a toddler while
being brought up by monks: he’d have been cast out as a ‘devil child’, not allowed
to become a vicar. It’s equally implausible that the Colonel has never once been
spotted up from his wheelchair in eight whole years. Or that The Unicorn would
be hanging around Lady Eddington for that long without trying to nick anything –
apparently she’s been undercover a while and yet is still in the papers enough
for everyone to be rather conveniently talking about her in The Doctor’s
presence early on (maybe she has a copycat?) That’s even assuming you buy one
of the silliest things Dr Who has ever asked you to accept (without The Master being
involved anyway): that a wasp from outer space was interested enough in Humans
to come to the Earth and transform into a Human and didn’t realise the implications
of having sex with a local (either he was so bad at his mission he never
understood what 1920s society was really like or he wasn’t really in love at
all and didn’t stop to think about his missus). There’s also no way that many
people would stay in that house (actually the beautiful Llansannor Curt in the
Vale of Glamorgan, seen more at length than it was with werewolves chasing
Queen Victoria down it’s corridors in ‘Tooth and Claw’) with that many murders
without running away or going to the police, even if the Doctor asks them not
to. Surely, if you’re in your true form as a wasp and you’re drowning, you
would simply change yourself back again into a Human to save yourself, necklace
or not. The story glosses over what happens after Professor Plum dies. Surely
the police would be sniffing round, however rich Lady Eddison might be and
however many strings she might pull? The Doctor never seems to give a thought
to what will happen next when Rev GoLightly doesn’t appear for his next sermon.
There’s no plot reason why Agatha should be taken miles away, to Harrogate,
except because that’s what happened in real life. The robber ‘Unicorn’ subplot
is also half-heartedly grafted on and is a bit of a letdown (given we had an
alien wasp I was hoping for an alien Unicorn!) Perhaps the biggest one though
and the easiest one to change: Agatha went missing in early December. It’s
clearly the peak of Summer here, an artistic decision partly because so many of
her books take place then and partly because the series had only just had a
Wintry episode (‘Planet Of The Ood’). But
why change it just for that, really? This story could have been so much better
if they’d gone for a realistic feel – changing the time of year adds nothing
and takes away from the thought that this story could be ‘real’. It cheapens it
and would look better in snow anyway (that car chase particularly). A minor point
but on TV they clearly intended The Doctor to have met Charlemagne during his
time with Martha 9we get the flashback with a bow and arrow from ‘Blink’) yet
the tie-in website prose story is specifically with Donna. Also not a plothole
but a lost opportunity all the same: rather than have Donna accidentally let
slip about the character Miss Marple before Agatha has a chance to invent her,
why not have a little old lady working it all out and getting it right instead
of her, the great detective?
There are, then, a lot of things that go wrong with ‘The
Unicorn and The Wasp’. It’s slow to start, has a very rushed ending and it
feels very out of place as a Dr Who story (especially the flashbacks, that we
physically get to see, which never happens – even the Doctor has one). Nobody
ever takes events in this story seriously enough for them to feel as if they
matter. At the same time, though, it’s a lot of fun and made with a lot of
skill. Certainly compared to the plots of more see-through threadbare Dr
Whodunnits (‘Terror Of The Vervoids’,
even ‘The Robots Of Death’ for all its grace and
style, not to mention this story’s close cousin from the same time period ‘Black Orchid’ where the plot makes no
sense at all) this one keeps you on your toes throughout, yet still makes a
certain Dr Whoy logical sense all the same. See it out of context and it’s a bit
self-indulgent and weird, but it works as the fun middle of a fairly depressing
set of episodes, a breather before the heavy stuff. It also looks gorgeous,
like ‘Black Orchid’ but with a proper so we get an actual period house, actual
period cars (pricey vintage models: The Doctor drives Professor Peach’s car, a
1925 Sunbeam 14/4 chasing Agatha in a 1926 Morris Cowley, both on loan from car
enthusiast Malcolm McKay who must have been pleased the draft script was changed,
where The Doctor drives into the wasp in the lake, changed at Tennant’s request
as he thought it too bloodthirsty for his Doctor) and one of the best big ensembles in the show:
Felicity Kendall finally joins ‘Good Life’ co-star Richard Briars in playing Lady
Eddison (possibly named for other co-star and Whovian Paul Eddington who sadly
died before he could be in the series – the big ‘joke’ if you know her career
is that she’s playing an upper class lady rather than the girl next door yet
isn’t the detective, like the one she played in Rosemary and Thyme a little
before the episode aired), Christopher Benjamin is brilliant playing a crusty cowardly
colonel only slightly less pompous than music hall owner Henry Jago in ‘Chiang’, Felicity Jones is the third person
to have won an Oscar after appearing in Dr Who early in their career (along
Sophie ‘Scream Of The Shalka’ Okonedu and
Carey ‘Blink’ Mulligan) though at the
time viewers at the time mostly went ‘blimey, Ethel Hallow from ‘The Worst
Witch’ has grown up!’ and Tom Goodman-Hill plays Rev Go-Lightly with just the
right amount of innocence and violence. One key actor goes unnoticed – that’s David Tennant’s real-life father
Sandy McDonald in a cameo as the footman walking in front of shot at the very
start of the episode (just as the Director’s credit comes up on screen). This
is a great story for David Tennant and Catherine Tate too who finally get indulge
their comedic chops and just about get away with being funny without treading
over the line. This script works as well as it does
mostly because of them. And the score, which rather than featuring neverending Murray
Gold is a nice mixture of period records (especially Bix Biederbecke, the trumpet
player with such a crazy backstory he might as well have been a timelord).
It caused, so I recall,
quite a buzz amongst Agatha aficionados, some of whom were horrified at the
fast and loose way scifi elements were used to plug known holes in Agatha’s
life but most of whom appreciated that this was how Agatha used to work anyway (writing
her story loosely in draft, getting to the end and working out who the least
likely character is then developing a backstory with clues to slot in). This
is, after all, a book unlike any she ever wrote – not just because of the wasp
but because the detective who gives her point of view is a young woman with her
whole life ahead of her that people admire, rather than an outcast like Poirot
(dismissed as an foreigner) or Marple (dismissed for being senile), the twist
being that it’s Agatha herself talking directly in a way the real life author
never did (not till her autobiography anyway and even that was never finished –
and no, there are no wasps in it). It’s kind to her too, more than most
historicals tend to be to their subjects (when the big celeb turns out to be
fallible – the twist is that The Doctor and Donna try to big a doubtful Agatha
up!) and she almost doesn’t need The Doctor there to work the mystery out. Not
like that big lunk Shakespeare! Or at least the broadcast version is: the final
version was over-running so they lopped off about five minutes off the
beginning and end (even making a new shorter conclusion later on the Tardis set
to cover it) where an eighty-six-year old Agatha is dying in bed and trying
to piece together her memory and the
puzzle of what happened in 1926. Apart from giving the game away with
flash-forwards that reveal the plot (a giant wasp!) it’s appallingly written and
badly acted, reducing a full and happy life that achieved so much and broke so
many boundaries to a woman who feels her life only mattered during the hour she
was with The Doctor and apparently having complete control over what her publishers
put on her books, such as that cover for ‘Death In The Clouds’ (most authors
have none, even Agatha).
The replacement works much better, with the old chest we used to see the 2nd Doctor rummage round in (bigger on the inside?) now apparently replaced with one for every letter as, The Doctor digs out his copy of the book from the ‘C’ chest in between Carrionite souvenirs and Cybermen heads, bought in the year 5 billion (and presumably bought in the giftshop when Dr 9 leaves Rose at ‘The End Of The World’. It makes perfect sense humanity would be selling souvenirs of things created on Earth even while it burns). Certainly as a whole this is a lot better than ‘The Shakespeare Code’, if only because the source material is better and has more room for an actual ‘story. Still, having the set-up be 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, is pushing the realism a bit and you have to see this story ore like an extra-curricular comic strip rather than something that ‘actually’ took place between ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ and ‘The Silence In The Library’. For while it hits most of the Agatha Christie moments on the head, it fails at times as part of long running TV series Dr Who. In retrospect it feels more like a dry run for ‘Broadchurch’, Chris Chibnall’s series that mixed and matched Who eras with David Tennant as the detective again, Arthur Darvill (Rory) as a vicar and a pre-Who Jodie Whittaker as a victim’s mum: all the plot beats are there, the slightly stilted and not quite real dialogue and the characters painted in such broad strokes 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 ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’ 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.
POSITIVES + Fenella
Woolgar is 90% of the reason why this story works as well as it does, perfect
casting as Agatha Christie. As well as looking so like the real thing that you
half wonder if all those Dr Who stories about doppelgangers are real, she
really gets over Agatha’s personality beyond just the clichés and nails Roberts’
stage directions (’36, quirkily attractive, but there’s something sad, almost
brittle about her’). Notably she changes character 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. She’s also nice to all the servants,
recognising how much they have to tell where her upper class colleagues write
them off. You get the sense that Agatha’s 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).
NEGATIVES - 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. In a story that’s already borderline fantastical having an
obviously fake effect doesn’t help sell the realism any. Still, to be honest
when I heard what the episode was going to do I expected something far worse
(such as Roberts’ next try at the same idea in ‘Planet
Of the Dead’).
BEST QUOTE: Dr: ‘A giant wasp! Well, there are tons of emorphorous
insectivorous lifeforms, but none in this galactic sector’. Agatha: ‘I think I
understood some of those words... enough to know that you're completely potty!’
PREQUELS/SEQUELS: The Doctor and Donna mention having met Charlemagne at one
point. It happened in ‘The Lonely Computer’, a tie-in short story by Rupert
Laight published on the Dr Who website around a fortnight after ‘Wasp’ went
out. The Doctor’s meant to be taking Donna shopping but a Tardis error means
they end up in Belgium in 800AD instead, the day Charlemagne is crowned emperor
by the Pope. The Doctor is mistaken for Charlemagne’s food tester but
Charlemagne himself has disappeared. The Doctor traces some leftover particles
of energy to an alien planet where a sentient computer called Momus has been
gathering famous guests for a ‘dinner party’, in the hope they might help his
people build a ‘new age’ (other guests include Churchill and Cleopatra). The
Doctor ticks the computer off and gets them all home again. A short and predictable
read but a fun one and great for a freebie, as yet uncollected in any official
book but more than deserving of it, with some particularly good
illustrations.
Previous ‘The
Doctor’s Daughter’ next ‘Silence In The Library/Forest Of The
Dead’
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