The Unicorn and the Wasp

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194 –"The Unicorn and the Wasp"
Doctor Who episode
Having followed her to the lake, the titular Wasp is controlled by Agatha Christie using the Firestone.
Cast
Doctor	David Tennant (Tenth Doctor)
Companion	Catherine Tate (Donna Noble)
Guest stars
Fenella Woolgar – Agatha Christie Felicity Kendal – Lady Clemency Eddison Felicity Jones – Robina Redmond Christopher Benjamin – Colonel Hugh Tom Goodman-Hill – Reverend Golightly Ian Barritt – Professor Peach David Quilter – Greeves Adam Rayner – Roger Curbishley Daniel King – Davenport Charlotte Eaton – Mrs Hart Leena Dhingra – Miss Chandrakala Alexander McDonald – Footman (uncredited)[1]
Production
Writer	Gareth Roberts
Director	Graeme Harper
Script editor	Lindsey Alford
Producer	Susie Liggat
Executive producer(s)	Russell T Davies Julie Gardner Phil Collinson
Production code	4.7
Series	Series 4
Length	45 minutes
Originally broadcast	17 May 2008
Chronology
← Preceded by Followed by → "The Doctor's Daughter" "Silence in the Library"
IMDb profile

"The Unicorn and the Wasp" is the seventh episode in the fourth series of the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was aired by BBC One on 17 May 2008 at 19:00.^[2][3] Perhaps due to its later broadcast, it received an overnight audience rating of 7.7 million, making it the most successful episode in this series since "The Fires of Pompeii".^[4] The episode is a pseudohistorical story set in 1926, in a manor owned by a character named Lady Eddison in which crime fiction novelist Agatha Christie is visiting, and is a comedic episode with a murder-mystery storyline.^[5]

Contents 1 Plot 1.1 Synopsis 1.2 Continuity 2 Production 2.1 Writing 2.2 Cast notes 2.3 Music 2.4 Locations 2.5 Editing 3 Broadcast and reception 4 References 5 External links 5.1 Reviews

[edit] Plot

[edit] Synopsis

The episode sees the Doctor (David Tennant) and Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) arrive at a dinner party hosted by Lady Eddison (Felicity Kendal) and her husband, Colonel Hugh (Christopher Benjamin). One of the guests is none other than Agatha Christie (Fenella Woolgar). Looking at a newspaper, the Doctor finds that it is the day of Agatha Christie's famous unexplained disappearance. Just as this revelation is made, another guest, Professor Peach (Ian Barritt), is found by Eddison's friend and companion Miss Chandrakala (Leena Dhingra) in the library, murdered with a lead pipe; Donna alludes to the similarity to the boardgame Cluedo. The Doctor finds morphic residue on the floor while examining the scene, meaning that one of the guests isn't human.

Aided by Agatha, the Doctor interviews the guests while Donna goes looking for clues. She investigates a locked room, which the butler explains Lady Eddison had sequestered herself in while recovering from a bout of malaria contracted in India forty years earlier and they had left locked after her recovery. Donna is attacked by a giant wasp after tracing a buzzing sound to a window. She scares it off with concentrated sunlight from a magnifying glass. It escapes and apparently retakes human form before they can catch up, killing Miss Chandrakala along the way. Her last words are "The poor little child." At this point it becomes clear that the murder is being played out like one of Agatha's novels.

While the three mull over the evidence they've gathered thus far, the Doctor is poisoned with cyanide; however, it is not as fatal for him as it is for humans, and an odd combination of ingredients (ginger beer, walnuts, and anchovies), along with a shock (in the form of a kiss from Donna) allows him to detoxify himself. In return, the Doctor laces the guests' dinner with pepper; naturally this is not harmful to humans, but acts as an insecticide to wasps since it contains piperine. A buzzing sound can be heard moments later, to which Lady Eddison exclaims, "It can't be!" The lights are blown out by a sudden wind and they again fail to ascertain the identity of the alien. Roger Curbishley (Adam Rayner), Lady Eddison's homosexual son, is murdered in the confusion, and Lady Eddison's necklace, 'The Firestone,' is stolen.

In the sitting room, the Doctor and Agatha reveal several secrets about the guests and hosts. Robina Redmond (Felicity Jones) is a thief called 'The Unicorn' who coveted the Firestone and stole it in the confusion. Colonel Hugh is not actually wheelchair bound as he appears to be; he faked the condition to make sure Lady Eddison did not leave him. The truth of Lady Eddison's bout of malaria is also revealed; she was actually made pregnant by an alien known as a Vespiform (played in human form by Damien Mantoulan), who gave her the Firestone necklace. The necklace is psychically linked to her son, whom she had given up for adoption and never saw again. Her son is actually the Reverend Golightly (Tom Goodman-Hill), who had come to associate Agatha Christie's novels with the way the world must work because Lady Eddison had been reading one when his alien biology was awakened in a moment of anger, and had killed those who were working against him in the manner of one of her novels.

Golightly, now enraged once more at being discovered, transforms into his wasp form. Agatha snatches the Firestone, and Golightly pursues her since she is now linked to it. The Doctor and Donna follow after her. Agatha leads the creature to the Silent Pool, where Donna throws the necklace into the water. Golightly follows it in and thus drowns. Still linked to the necklace, Agatha nearly dies as well, but Golightly chooses to release her as his last act. The trauma causes amnesia, and the Doctor deposits her at the Harrogate Hotel ten days later, explaining her disappearance.

In the TARDIS, the Doctor produces one of Agatha's novels, Death in the Clouds, and points to the copyright page in the front. The publication date is listed as the year five billion; Agatha Christie is quite literally the most popular novelist of all time. The cover features a giant wasp, suggesting that the amnesia was not total (although the wasp in the novel is in fact of the normal variety; it only seems large against its background due to forced perspective).

[edit] Continuity

When the Doctor meets Agatha Christie for the first time, he mentions that he was just talking about her the other day, saying "I bet she's brilliant". This comes from the end of "Last of the Time Lords", when he was suggesting places where he and Martha could go after the Master's defeat.

Several previous episodes are referenced by both the Doctor and Donna. The Doctor produces items from a chest of items beginning with C, including a Cyberman chest-plate from "The Age of Steel" and the crystal ball in which the Carrionites are trapped from "The Shakespeare Code". The chest itself is similar in design to the one featured in the classic serial Timelash.

Donna remarks that meeting Agatha Christie during a murder mystery would be as preposterous as meeting "Charles Dickens surrounded by ghosts at Christmas", unknowingly referencing the events of "The Unquiet Dead". When Donna attempts to use 1920s lingo, the Doctor tells her to stop, just as he did with Rose Tyler (in "Tooth and Claw") and Martha Jones (in "The Shakespeare Code" and The Infinite Quest) when they tried to mimic local speech; the first slang phrase Donna uses ("Topping day, what!") is also used by the Third Doctor when interacting with 1920s characters in the 1973 serial Carnival of Monsters.

Donna refers to her own failed marriage in "The Runaway Bride", comparing it to Christie's husband's infidelity. She notes that her husband was colluding not with another woman but with a giant spider. She also mentions the disappearing bees, following on from previous mentions in "Partners in Crime" and "Planet of the Ood".

The Doctor has a flashback scene when unravelling motives with Agatha Christie. He is shown in Belgium with a bow and quiver of arrows on his back. His voiceover explains that he was looking for Charlemagne who was "kidnapped by an insane computer" (see the Chronology for dating). Christie interrupts before he can paint a full picture; however the events are fully explored on Doctor Who's BBC website in the short story "The Lonely Computer."^[6]

This is the second episode written by Gareth Roberts which features a famous writer. He also wrote the 2007 episode "The Shakespeare Code" which featured the playwright William Shakespeare.

Reverend Golightly shares his name with the owner of Mrs Golightly's Happy Travelling University and Drycleaners, previously referenced in "Voyage of the Damned".

[edit] Production

[edit] Writing

The episode is written by Gareth Roberts, who previously wrote the pseudohistorical episode "The Shakespeare Code". Roberts was given a fourth series episode to write after executive producer Russell T Davies reviewed Roberts' script for "The Shakespeare Code". Several months later, he received an email from the production team which said "Agatha Christie".^[7] The idea for a murder mystery featuring Agatha Christie came originally from producer Phil Collinson.^[8]

Roberts, a self-confessed fan of Christie's works, made the episode into a comedy. Roberts based the episode on his favourite Christie works: Crooked House, which focuses on secrets within an aristocratic society, and the 1982 film adaptation of Evil Under the Sun. Speaking of both works, Roberts noted that it was "quite strange writing a modern Doctor Who with posh people in it. We don't really see posh people on television anymore, except at Christmas", and "there's something funny about the veneer of upper class respectability and the truth of any family underneath". He also stated that "there's really nothing nicer than watching a lot of English actors hamming it up in a vaguely exotic location... and then somebody's murdered!" The episode's title was deliberately chosen to sound "vaguely Christie-ish", but Roberts admitted that "[Christie] never used 'the blank and the blank' construction".^[7]

In writing the episode, Roberts aimed to make the episode a "big, fun, all-star murder mystery romp". He was influenced by advice given by Davies, who wanted Roberts to "go funnier" with every draft, and former Doctor Who script editor Douglas Adams' advice that "a danger one runs is that the moment you have anything in the script that's clearly meant to be funny in some way, everybody thinks 'oh well we can do silly voices and silly walks and so on', and I think that's exactly the wrong way to do it". Using this advice, he used the adage that in comedy, the characters do not realise the humour, and cited Basil Fawlty's mishaps in Fawlty Towers as an example.^[7]

In an interview with Doctor Who Magazine, Roberts stated that "to a certain extent [there was less pressure]" in writing the episode. He was pleased with the success of "The Shakespeare Code" and the The Sarah Jane Adventures two-parter Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?, but likened himself to Corporal Bell, a member of the administrative staff at the fictional Doctor Who organisation UNIT, in saying that he did not wish to be "in the middle of things" or writing episodes "where big, pivotal things have happened to [the Doctor]".^[7]

Roberts and Davies held an unofficial contest to see how many references to Christie's works could be inserted. Titles that were referenced were: Why Didn't They Ask Evans; Murder is Easy; The Body in the Library; The Secret Adversary; N or M?; Nemesis; Cat Among the Pigeons; Dead Man's Folly; They Do It With Mirrors; Appointment with Death; Cards on the Table; Sparkling Cyanide; Endless Night; Crooked House; The Moving Finger; Taken at the Flood; Death Comes as the End; and The Murder at the Vicarage. A deleted scene referenced The Man in the Brown Suit, referring to the Doctor's clothing. The narrative itself parallels several of Christie's novels: the jewel theft storyline parallels The Secret of Chimneys; Miss Chandrakala's death was influenced by And Then There Were None; and the Colonel's revelation that he was not disabled paralleled a key concept of The Pale Horse.^[9]

[edit] Cast notes

David Tennant's father Alexander McDonald played a footman in one of the early scenes, after being asked to act when visiting David on set.^[10] He had no lines.

The casting of Fenella Woolgar as Agatha Christie was made at the suggestion of David Tennant, who had previously worked with her on Bright Young Things and He Knew He Was Right.^[10]

Fenella Woolgar and David Quilter previously appeared in episodes of Agatha Christie's Poirot ("Lord Edgware Dies" and "The Million Dollar Bond Robbery", respectively).

Christopher Benjamin, who plays Colonel Hugh, previously starred in two serials of the original Doctor Who series, playing Sir Keith Gold in Inferno (1970) and Henry Gordon Jago in The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977).

[edit] Music

Although the opening notes of the gramophone record playing at the garden party have an apparent similarity to the Doctor Who theme, it is in fact the opening of "Twentieth Century Blues", originally from Noël Coward's 1931 play Cavalcade. The recording used here, edited together with other period music, is a 1931 recording of 'Love is the Sweetest Thing' by Ray Noble and the New Mayfair Orchestra, featuring vocalist Al Bowlly.

[edit] Locations

The Silent Pool is a real place near Newlands Corner where the real Agatha Christie's car was discovered when she disappeared. The Harrogate Hotel where the Doctor leaves Agatha is fictitious. In actuality, the hotel where she was found was the Swan Hydro (now the Old Swan Hotel), a somewhat less imposing building than the one depicted in the episode.

[edit] Editing

A framing device featuring the aged Agatha Christie trying to recall the events that took place during her disappearance was deleted because the producers felt it diminished the story's urgency. The original ending featured the Doctor and Donna visiting the elderly Christie; a new ending in the TARDIS set was filmed after the producers decided to cut the framing sequence, much later than the filming for the rest of the story.

The framing sequence and another scene cut for time are present on the Doctor Who Series 4 DVD box set.

[edit] Broadcast and reception

BARB figures show that "The Unicorn and the Wasp", was watched by 8.41 million viewers, making it the second most popular programme of the day (behind ITV's Britain's Got Talent) and the seventh most watched programme the week.^[11] The episode received an Appreciation Index score of 86 (considered "Excellent").^[12]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Tenth Doctor

• The Unicorn and the Wasp on TARDIS Index File, an external wiki
• "The Unicorn and the Wasp" at the BBC Doctor Who homepage
• "The Unicorn and the Wasp" at Doctor Who: A Brief History Of Time (Travel)
• "The Unicorn and the Wasp" at the Doctor Who Reference Guide

[edit] Reviews

• "The Unicorn and the Wasp" reviews at The Doctor Who Ratings Guide

v • d • e Doctor Who series 4 episodes "Voyage of the Damned" • "Partners in Crime" • "The Fires of Pompeii" • "Planet of the Ood" • "The Sontaran Stratagem" • "The Poison Sky" • "The Doctor's Daughter" • "The Unicorn and the Wasp" • "Silence in the Library" • "Forest of the Dead" • "Midnight" • "Turn Left" • "The Stolen Earth"  • "Journey's End" • "The Next Doctor" Mini episodes: "Time Crash" • "Music of the Spheres"