The Unicorn and the Wasp

Chapter The 189th, which concerns itself with the corpus of Christie.

Plot:

England, 1926.The Doctor and Donna gatecrash a party in a manor house held by its aristo owner, Lady Eddison, with Agatha Christie as one of the guests. Soon people start to get murdered in the manner (and indeed in the Manor) of Agatha's novels. There's also a jewel thief known as the Unicorn at large, and a giant wasp at very large. The Doctor and Agatha investigate, the former discovering a clue indicating an alien creature is involved. In the usual detective story fashion, there are many suspects, each hiding their own secrets. A few more people get bumped off and there's even an attempt to poison the Doctor. The murderer turns out to be the giant wasp, which can take the form of a human. In the end, the Doctor gathers everyone together in the drawing room and reveals who is the waspish one. They are the secret alien love child of Lady Eddison after a dalliance with a Vespiform 40 years earlier. A few days before the party, the grown-up child who coincidentally lives in the same area had recently been in a stressful situation which caused a genetic lock to be broken, and a meeting of minds with his mother aided by a telepathic jewel which also inadvertently downloaded the novels of Agatha Christie from Lady Ellison's head, hence the copycat killings. Agatha draws the wasp off in a car driving towards a nearby lake where the creature is drowned. Some more telepathic jewel flim-flam causes her to lose her memory, and a TARDIS trip takes her to the Harrogate Hotel 10 days later, explaining her historically recorded disappearance.

Context:

Watched the story on my own one lunchtime during a day working from home, viewing from the disc in the New Series 4 DVD boxset. As I started writing up this blog post, I wondered exactly when it was set in 1926 so googled the real life disappearance of Agatha Christie and found that it happened in early December. Anyone who's seen the story will know that its sunny garden party sequences weren't filmed in an English winter. This necessitated a quick double check by dialling up the story on the BBC iplayer (I'd put the disc back in its box and put the box back on the shelf by then) to see whether there was any cheating related to the specific date, and there's not really. The Doctor never says the date out loud and there's no close up of the newspaper. So, in the Doctor Who universe, either Agatha Christie disappeared at a different time or global warming is much further along.

First Time Round:

It was May 2008, and I saw The Unicorn and the Wasp accompanied by the Better Half live as it was broadcast. The length of time between then and my typing these words is about a year more than the the gap between The Unicorn and the Wasp and the Paul McGann TV movie, which is amazing... Actually, it's not that amazing, is it? Seems about right, to be honest.

Reaction:

This story is the final entry into a loose new series trilogy of Authors + Aliens celebrity historicals. After Dickens and ghosts (in 2005's The Unquiet Dead), then Shakespeare and witches (in The Shakespeare Code in 2007), Agatha Christie faces a giant wasp (!) that does mysterious murders. There's a bit of desperation here and there in the script to justify propping Christie up at the same level as those previous two heavyweights. She understands human nature, we're told, and she's sold a ton of books. It both over- and under-sells Christie, whose real talent was as a popular storytelling conjuror. She continually creates entertaining magic tricks, with plenty of misdirection that keep one wondering exactly how the thing is done. This is a great skill which produced enjoyable works that have given and continue to give a huge number of readers throughout the world much pleasure; it shouldn't be sneered at, even if some of the novels' trappings may seem a bit risible. Anyone doing a magic trick has to take things reasonably seriously, or it might fall flat. Therefore, doing something like The Unicorn and the Wasp, a gentle send-up of Christie's works, is a risky proposition.

Not that more standard takes of Christie (those without giant alien wasps) are immune. The 1980s and 90s series of BBC Miss Marple stories starring Joan Hickson are generally and rightly hailed as exemplary adaptations, supremely well cast and executed. The 21st century ITV Marple versions on the other hand did not take the source material quite as seriously (at least at first, anyway), and they are less successful and not thought of so fondly. Tonally, The Unicorn and the Wasp is somewhere in between the two. About half of the running time it feels right and we're seeing a nice Doctor Who take on the genre, and half the time it veers too hard into outright comedy, but not necessarily always very good comedy. I'd remembered the gags being better than they turned out to be on this watch. As a single 45-minute episode, the story is also too short to act as a straight murder mystery: it's essential in such a tale that suspicion falls gradually, that the spotlight moves from suspect to suspect, that there's time for red herrings (the alien menace should really have been a giant red herring rather than a wasp, shouldn't it?!).

Instead, what we have is a series of fast, fun scenes which riff on the genre's tropes - there's a nice moment with flashbacks inside flashbacks, for example - but there isn't the opportunity, let alone the inclination, to ever seriously wonder whodunnit. Like any Christie adaptation, it does provide the opportunity for a starry supporting cast to each get a showy role; things are obviously condensed here because of the brevity of the running time, but everyone still gets a chance to shine from Felicity Kendall through to Felicity Jones. Fenella Woolgar is inspired casting as Agatha (I was just a year or two too young to have caught Woolgar acting or performing in the revue at Durham University). The regulars are on good form too with most of the best of the jokes coming from the interplay between David Tennant as the Doctor and Catherine Tate as Donna. The scene where Donna and the kitchen staff help the Doctor with a home remedy to survive his cyanide poisoning is nice ("How is Harvey Wallbanger one word?!") as is the outrageous in-joke where Donna expounds upon the unlikeliness of encountering Charles Dickens surrounded by ghosts at Christmas (i.e. the plot of The Unquiet Dead).

Elsewhere, things are a bit more laboured. There's a writerly challenge going on, which also included input from showrunner Russell T Davies, to include as many Christie book titles in the dialogue as possible. It's not funny nor particularly clever, just a little bit distracting if you know the titles in question (and if you don't, would be missed altogether). I don't know who was expected to be entertained by this, but I can't see how it could be the audience. Unlike The Unquiet Dead, the script insists on giving an explanation for the coincidence of Agatha Christie being caught up in an Agatha Christie-style mystery, but it makes rather a meal of it with genetic locks and telepathic necklaces and the like. This is followed by the slowest car chase imaginable where the wasp pursues Agatha (for no readily discernible reason). I have to admit that during this I was looking at my watch wondering when it would be over. There's a minor subplot which seems to find the idea that two of the characters are homosexual side-splittingly funny (it's not); the writer and showrunner should know better than this, but maybe got a bit carried away. So, a mixed bag on the whole, but not an outright failure by any means.

Connectivity: 

Both The Awakening and The Unicorn and the Wasp feature a Doctor that wears trainers, and both have at their centre a being with alien powers trying to recreate something (the civil war and Agatha Christie's oeuvre respectively).

Deeper Thoughts:

The elephant behind the sofa. During the UK Covid lockdowns there have been many tweetalongs organised by one of the staff of the official Doctor Who Magazine - chances for fans to synchronise their viewing of a particular story and share their reactions on twitter - in which cast members, production team members and writers have often taken part. One of the latter ones that was announced but then rapidly cancelled was The Unicorn and the Wasp. This was because many fans on social media (so, the specific audience for these tweetalong events) are unhappy about some comments made by the writer of this story regarding gender. In this specific instance, I think the right decision was made. Given the nature of such an event, it would be impossible to control whether the author - who is still on twitter - was copied in to any tweets, which would not have sat right with a lot of the intended audience, and may in its turn have caused discussion of topics that hadn't got anything to do with the story at hand. Given that the primary reason for the tweetalongs is fan togetherness and celebration, it makes sense not to distract from that. To do otherwise wouldn't have been good for Doctor Who, nor its social media audience, and - whether you care or not about his sensibilities - wouldn't likely have been that great for the author either; so, everybody swerved a pothole there. The author also had a Doctor Who short story removed from a collection that came out shortly after his comments were made. That's a commercial decision made by the publisher, so I'll leave that up to them. But what about things I can control, like my own viewings of the stories he wrote?  

I have an opinion about the comments the person in question made, and the impact of them. I'm not going to voice it here, though. There are two reasons for this. First, I'm a white middle-aged cis heterosexual man, so my opinion isn't perhaps needed in any discussion on the topic. Second is that social media (and I count a blog as part of that) is not the best place to have these discussions anyway. When anyone tries to discuss anything of any importance on twitter it degenerates quickly into both sides (and no matter what the topic, two sides tend to emerge) screaming slogans at each other. My issue is less with the specifics, and is a concern that predates social media, indeed going back as far as media has existed: can one separate the work from the creator? It's obviously hard, particularly when the work is recent and the creator still with us. It may be easier to avoid engaging altogether. I have not been listening to any Morrissey solo albums recently, for instance - see the Deeper Thoughts section of this blog post for more background on that. It does feel like there's an elephant in the room with me as I'm watching something like The Unicorn and the Wasp. The reason I'm still prepared to watch the episodes is partly because there are so many other people involved in the making of a TV show, and everyone involved in The Unicorn and the Wasp bar one is pretty uncontroversial. It wouldn't seem fair to neglect the work of all those people. I wouldn't feel comfortable with that, though, if the subject matter of the piece in any way linked to the source of controversy (as arguably it does on occasion in those Moz solo albums). I've never agreed with this particular Doctor Who writer's politics (and he's not been shy about sharing his views over the years) but I have never once seen any kind of agenda pushed in anything he's written for Doctor Who.

After I started drafting this section of the post, news hit and then hit again of allegations against a new series Doctor Who actor. I know that many people found the comments of the writer discussed above to be hurtful and unacceptable, and I don't seek to diminish that in any way; but, this new situation was much worse. These were allegations of serious crimes, and multiple people had reported consistent examples of wrongdoing. In this kind of scenario, it is vital that those brave enough to come forward are given a full hearing and that the due process is followed, which means - whether one likes it or not, or thinks it is credible or not - a presumption of the actor's innocence. Things will play out, which will take a while, and I hope we see justice done. Compared to the worries of the people involved, any consideration of how it's going to impact the enjoyment of a family sci-fi show is of course of negligible concern, but that elephant is still going to be there in the room watching with me if I see a show including the actor. For now, I'll trust to the random nature of my Doctor Who re-watch to help me avoid that for a while (he's not in that many stories). When it comes to it, I'll watch and try to banish his behaviour from my mind. As above, it's not like the actor had any input into the writing (except for one episode of Torchwood and I'm not covering that for the blog nor in any hurry to watch it again), so there's no agenda to worry about. Plus, all the other talented people in the stories he appeared in should not have their work invalidated by him. 

Both the people mentioned above have shocked fans, I think, because we - perhaps naively, but I'd rather that than the alternative - think of everyone associated with Doctor Who as being part of one generally positive collective. Regular cast and crew have almost universally stayed close to the programme's fans after their time with the show. To use a well worn phrase, it's one big happy family. For the most part, this appears to be the case. But families can be more dysfunctional than they first appear. Let's hope there are no more shocks in store.

In Summary:

Not as funny or clever as it thinks it is, but no Three Act Tragedy either. Cards on The Table, I think it's a little on The Hollow side; I give it The Big Four out of 10. I'll stop now. Sorry.