Something queer is happening at at Lady Edison’s estate and it isn’t just her sons, it’s murder most foul!
Summary
The Doctor and Donna arrive in England on a bright, spring or summer day, December 8, 1926. (Make that a warm, bright, sunny, late autumn day.)
Lady Edison is having a party, and thanks to the psychic paper, the Doctor and Donna are invited. It’s a right collection of guests, right out of a pulp detective novel: There’s the professor, the vicar, the jewel thief, the gay son, the invalid husband, the butler, the wealthy socialite and of course, the amateur detective – this time in the person of Agatha Christie herself.
The murder is in disguise, which is convenient because he’s actually a giant wasp.
As the body count mounts, the Doctor and Agatha Christie team up to solve the murders.
Analysis
It’s a fine line between an homage to a genre and a parody. In this episode it is mentioned repeatedly that the real people feel like characters out of Christie novel, but I rather thought they felt like cardboard ciphers instead. (Not that Christie was really known for her nuanced characters, but a cardboard cipher of a cardboard cipher is a bit much.) The “sub-plots” concerning the Unicorn (the jewel thief), the gay son and his affair with the house boy, the invalid husband and the secret research of the professor might be intended to be red-herrings, but, because we’re immediately shown that a giant wasp is the killer, the “mundane” murder-mystery plot points are completely wasted. At no point in the story did I feel any of those potential motives for murder would be germane to the alien, and indeed they weren’t.
Isn’t time travel enough? Couldn’t the Doctor and Donna just participate in a “normal” murder. Did they really need to bring in the wasp?
Incidentally, it wasn’t easy to find, as it took me all of 10 minutes with Google, but the average mean temperature in central England in December of 1926 was 40ºF, a far cry from the pleasant sunny day depicted in this episode. I wasn’t about to subscribe to the Time digital archive to look up the exact temperature and precipitation for that day. There’s only so far I’m willing to go to nitpick.
It’s not a nitpick to say that I detested the scene where the Doctor purges his body of the cyanide poison. Freaky Gallifreyan physiology seems to be the new series’ “sonic screwdriver” escape. Would that the Terreliptils could remove the Doctor’s ability to shake radiation out of his foot or stimulate poison out of his system in a cloud of smoke as easily as they destroyed the original sonic screwdriver.
In discussing the show with others, I’ve heard some grumblings that people are getting sick of the “Donna and Doctor” show. They feel that not only is Donna annoying, but she saves the day much too often. I actually thought she’d be a terrible companion, but haven’t felt that way. In fact, I kind of like her. She brings a certain no-nonsense approach that reigns the Doctor in some. If only she could do the same with the scripts.
Doctor Who
The Unicorn and the Wasp
by Gareth Roberts