Pop Vultures

Doctor Who, S04 E07: The Unicorn and the Wasp

This week: we get possibly the downright silliest episode of the new Who. And yet, despite herself, Anna is entertained.

It’s a country house in the 1920s, aka the setting of most of my favourite books when I was about 12. An elderly man called Professor Peach is rooting around in a study when he’s disturbed by a terrifying THING. We see the screaming professor through the THING’S kaleidoscopic eyes as it advances. And….credits.

Donna and the Doctor emerge from the Tardis, and by the smell of lemonade and something I didn’t catch, the Doctor deduces that it’s 1926. They realise they’ve arrived at the previously seen country house as a party is about to begin. Donna gets excited and runs back to theTardis to change into a fetching frock which she presumably found in the Tardis’s vast wardrobe. This is exactly what I’d do in her place, so I can’t mock her for that. If I could travel back in time to any period, the ’20s would be my first stop, and a big part of that would be the clothes. Anyway, she manages to put up her hair in an impressive up-do and, arm in arm, she and the Doctor head out to join the party. They don’t have an invitation, except, as the Doctor says gleefully, “oh yeah, we do!” - good old psychic paper strikes again.

The guests gather on the lawn. There is, of course, a vicar, a doughty old colonel in a wheelchair (husband of the house’s owner, LadyEddison), Lady Eddison herself, a young lady called Robina Redmond (played by Emma from The Archers!), and Lady Eddison’s son Roger, who is exchanging loving glances with the handsome footman. Lady Eddison is played by the wonderful Felicity Kendall. Bernard Cribbins , Felicity Kendall - what vintage TV icon will grace this programme next? I’d love Kendall’s old pal Richard Briers, but he was in the last series of Torchwood. Anyway, Lady Eddison pretends to remember the Doctor while Donna puts on a pseudo-posh voice and says “spiffing” a lot until the Doctor tells her to tone it down a bit. Then, another guest is announced, and it’s none other than Agatha Christie! The Doctor sees a conveniently placed newspaper and realises that this is the day on which Agatha Christie famously disappeared. This disappearance is, of course, true, although she disappeared in December 1926 and this is pretty obviously the middle of summer. It was shortly after the breakdown of her first marriage; her car was found abandoned by a lake and she appeared a few days later claiming to have no memory of what had happened.

The guests are discussing the latest antics of an infamous thief known as the Unicorn when Lady Eddison’s housekeeper Mrs Chandralaka discovers the body of the fallen Professor Peach. The Doctor uses the psychic paper again and announces that he is really Detective Smith from Scotland Yard, and Donna is the “plucky young girl” who assists him.Heh . He finds a gooey substance near the body and notices Agatha pick up a fragment of paper from the fireplace. The Doctor and Donna discuss the case, and Donna thinks it’s insane that Agatha Christie is suddenly caught up in a murder investigation. It’s like “Charles Dickens surrounded by ghosts…at Christmas!” (which of course he was, back in the first series of Who 2.0), or like EnidBlyton having tea with Noddy. There’s a very funny moment when Donna starts to wonder if perhaps Noddy is real too. “Tell me there’s no Noddy!” she says in awestruck tones.

The amusement continues as the Doctor interrogates the guests one by one, who tell him what they were doing at the time of the murder with the help of deliberately cheesy flashbacks. DavidTennant , by the way, is really hot in this episode. I don’t want to keep going on about this, but he is. He’s particularly attractive when he’s being all funny and flirty, which happens a lot throughout this story. Sigh. Anyway, Robina Redmond, despite her posh accent, reveals her secret lower-middle-classness when she says she went to the “toilet” rather than the lavatory, where we see her slip a pistol into her bag. Roger was frolicking with the footman, and the colonel was looking at saucy postcards. They don’t quite tell the Doctor all of these things.

Donna investigates upstairs, complete with a hilariously oversized magnifying glass. She finds a locked door and the butler tells her that this room has never been opened since Lady Eddison sequestered herself there for six months 40 years before, when she was recovering from malaria. As soon as I heard this story of a posh young Edwardian woman locking herself away for six months, I instantly said “secret baby!” and I was right. But then, I didn’t enjoy this episode because of the clever plotting. Donna looks around and, for a room that hasn’t been opened for 40 years, it seems remarkably dust and cobweb free. Like, it’s cleaner than my actual sitting room. Anyway, she hears a buzzing noise and when she draws the curtains what should be hovering on the other side of the glass for no apparent reason but a ginormous wasp! It bursts through the window and chases Donna around the room until she very cleverly holds the magnifying glass up to the sunlight and burns the wasp, distracting it enough to allow her to escape and slam the door behind her. The wasp tries to sting her through the door, leaving its sting in the wood, and Donna runs off to find the Doctor and Agatha.

Down in the kitchen, Mrs Chandrakala seems to remember something and heads outside. But what’s this? Something is up on the roof, preparing to drop a gargoyle on her head. Mrs C looks up and sees it wobbling but instead of, oh, I dunno, RUNNING AWAY like any normal person, she stands there with her hands on her cheeks likeMacauley Cuklin in Home Alone and shrieks. The gargoyle falls on top of her, but it doesn’t kill her and she has time to murmur “the poor child” to Donna, the Doctor and Agatha when they discover her prone form.

It’s that wasp again. Agatha thinks the wasp must be some sort of special effect, like on the stage. “They do it with mirrors!” she says, which is just one of the many Christie titles inserted, with deliberate and kind of hilarious clunkiness, into the script. There’s a lot of running, but the wasp escapes. Donna wishes she could be like Miss Marple, whom the criminal wouldn’t take seriously because she’s just an old lady; as a result the villain would carelessly reveal something crucial in front of her. Of course, this is years before the Marple books were written and Agatha makes a note of the idea, although Donna requests that she get a cut of any future profits. She and Agatha have a heart to heart in the garden and Agatha says she knows she’ll never be taken seriously and her books will soon be forgotten. Donna is telling her that she won’t but then Agatha notices a strange case in the flower bed and discovers a little case - of picklocks and other tools of the thieving trade. The Unicorn is close at hand!

The detective trio have a cocktail in the sitting room and discuss the case. Suddenly the Doctor starts choking - he’s drunk “Sparkling Cyanide”! There follows a scene of truly inspired slapstick as the Doctor and Donna rush to the kitchen and the Doctor tries to mime all the substances he needs to balance out the poison and Donna desperately tries to guess what they are. The highlight is when he waves his hands, jazz hands style, and a frantic Donna asks/sings “Maaaaamy? Camptown Races?” Anyway, the final thing he needs is a shock, so of course Donna cries “I’ll shock you, mate!” and snogs him. It works!

Everyone sits down to dinner. It turns out that the Doctor has over-peppered the food - harmless to humans, but not to wasps. There’s a buzzing sound, Lady E cries “it can’t be!”, the lights go out, and the wasp attacks. Our three detectives (and the butler - so he didn’t do it) escape outside and when they return poor old Richard is face down in the soup-bowl, stabbed in the back. The poor old footman can’t even publicly mourn his lost love. “1926? It’s more like the Dark Ages,” says Donna, and it seems slightly ridiculous that Donna is surprised by this; it’s not like gay relationships are always respected in our own supposedly more enlightened times. On a less serious criminal note, Lady E’s “firestone” necklace is gone. Dum-dum-DUM!

The Doctor and Agatha stand before the fireplace, Poirot-style, and do a whole “J’accuse!” thing with all the guests. Some of them, believing the detectives know all, admit to things unnecessarily. It turns out that the doughty colonel can walk after all - he was just faking his disability so his lovely wife wouldn’t leave him. Robina is really the Unicorn - Agatha deduced that she was an imposter because of her use of the word toilet, but pretending to be posher than you are doesn’t automatically make you a thief or even prove that you’re faking your identity, so that’s not very good detective work. Robina more or less says “it’s a fair cop, guv” and sneers at everyone.

But the most exciting revelation is that when in India, Lady Eddison HAD AN AFFAIR WITH AN ALIEN WASP-MAN AND HAD HIS BABY!! Apparently, when she found out he was really a wasp she didn’t mind. Alas, he drowned in monsoon season and she returned home to have the baby and hide in the locked room, pretending she had malaria. Her waspish lover gave her the firestone, a gem from his homeland which is psychically linked to his kind. Lady E gave the baby up for adoption and the Doctor deduces that he grew up to be….the Vicar! He recently lost his temper, which somehow awakened the wasp within. At that moment, Lady E was wearing the firestone while reading The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (she describes it as “one of her favourite Agatha Christies”, although if you’ve read it you’ll know why it’s one of the Christies you can never read more than once, because you will always remember who did it), and somehow this transfered the tenets of the Christie-verse into the vicar’s newly awakened wasp mind. This is why he’s been going around killing people in classic detective novel style. Agatha feels responsible for all this death and tries to lure the wasp away by driving off with the firestone. She heads to the lake, pursued by both the wasp and Donna and the Doctor. At the lakeside, she stands up to the wasp, who’s about to attack when Donna grabs the gem and flings it into the lake. The wasp plunges in after it. Now psychically linked to both gem and wasp, Agatha collapses but the vicar wasp chooses not to take her with him when he dies in the lake.

The mystery of Christie’s disappearance is finally solved! The ordeal has robbed her memory of the outlandish events, and the Doctor and Donna take her a couple of days into the future, to the hotel where she was discovered. She staggers into the hotel while the Doctor and Donna look on. Back in the Tardis, the Doctor digs out a chest marked “c”, filled with artefacts like Cyberman helmets, and produces a classic ’60s edition of Death in the Clouds, emblazoned with a giant wasp, indicating that she did remember some of what happened, even if it was subconscious. Donna remarks on how sad it is that Christie never knew that her books would be remembered, although as she lived to a ripe old age and was a huge success to the very end, you might think that she eventually gathered that her books were, you know, a bit popular. But the Doctor shows Donna the copyright information which reveals that this is a facsimile edition published in the year 5 Billion - Agatha is still the most popular author ever. I would debate whether a far-future facsimile edition would choose that particular cover, except I have a friend who thinks those mid-60s Christie editions are some of the best designed books ever and actually collects them even when he has the books in other editions, so there you go.

Next week: Alex Kingston! And the Christie theme continues, albeit indirectly, as there are quite a few bodies in a library.