Who Reviews The Unicorn and the Wasp by SF Cambridge

 

Starring David Tennant as The Doctor & Catherine Tate as Donna Noble. 

Agatha: “I found my husband with another woman. A younger, prettier woman. Isn’t it always the way?”

Donna: “Well, mine was with a giant spider but same difference.” 

Agatha Christie…. What about her? 

The Doctor and Donna land the TARDIS in 1926 in the grounds of a stately home belonging to Lady Clemency Eddison and her husband Colonel Hugh Curbishley, and promptly invite themselves to her dinner party as guests of hers. They are thrilled to find one of the special guests invited is none other than the famous novelist, Agatha Christie! Very happy and excited to be in the presence of such an influential character the Doctor soon realizes that they have arrived on the very day that she will inexplicably disappear for ten days which is perhaps one of her greatest mysteries and one The Doctor himself might get close to solving. 

Lady Eddison tells The Doctor of a notorious jewel thief named The Unicorn and whilst all the guests are mingling and other guests have arrived, Reverend Golightly from the village, a Professor who hasn’t made an appearance yet although he is seen at the beginning of the episode making his way to the library, Lady Robina Redmond, a socialite from London and the son of Lady Eddison and her husband, Roger, all of a sudden Lady Eddison’s maid comes running out the house screaming “MURDER!” and announces that Professor Peach is dead in the library. 

The Doctor and Donna are the first on the scene and after finding morphic residue left behind by the killer, he concludes that the murderer is an alien in human form and announces to the guests that he and Donna are from Scotland Yard, and orders all the guests to be interviewed by himself and Mrs. Christie. Donna is sent to search all the rooms for evidence and comes across a locked room that has previously been empty for 40 years. She orders it to be unlocked by the butler and within minutes hears and then sees a gigantic wasp outside. It smashes through the window and attacks Donna, embedding its sting in the door before escaping. 

The wasp then kills Lady Eddison’s maid, Miss Chandrakala. The Doctor, Donna, and Agatha chase the alien but it returns to human form before they catch it. the Doctor identifies the substance from the sting as venom from an alien wasp called a Vespiform and all the guests are interviewed and have alibis as to where they were when Professor Peach was murdered. Donna remarks on his murder being something out of Agatha’s books and plans start to hatch in The Doctor’s head, but before he can conclude anything, whilst he is in the study with Agatha and Donna, he is given a drink by the butler and poisoned with cyanide. After a hilarious detox in the kitchen in which he uses several food and drinks to force the poison out of his system followed by some of Donn’s best lines in the whole of series 4, he then devises a plan. 

Donna: “The murderer’s an alien.”

The Doctor: “Which means one of that lot is an alien in human form.”

Donna: “Yeah, but think about it. There’s a murder, a mystery and Agatha Christie.”

The Doctor: “So? Happens to me all the time.”

Donna: “No. But isn’t that a bit weird? Agatha Christie didn’t walk around surrounded by murders. Not really. I mean that’s like meeting Charles Dickens and he’s surrounded by ghosts. At Christmas.” 

The Doctor tries to identify the killer at dinner later that evening believing him to be hiding among the guests still, but after a blackout and a storm, Lady Eddison's “Fire stone” necklace is stolen, and her son, Roger, is murdered when he is stabbed in the back with a knife. 

The remaining guests are assembled in the sitting room. Agatha exposes one of the guests, Lady Robina Redmond, as the Unicorn who stole the Fire Stone, but not as the murderer. Then the Doctor deduces that Lady Eddison's shutting herself away for months in the locked room Donna found, years ago was due to her becoming pregnant at a young age and wanting to hide her shame from her family. She then tells the story of the baby’s father who is another Vespiform who had given her the necklace before he died in 1885; unbeknownst to her, it links her telepathically with their child. The Doctor further reveals that the child, whom she gave up for adoption, is Reverend Golightly. Via the telepathic link, the Reverend became aware of his alien nature and absorbed the details of “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd”, an Agatha Christie murder mystery his mother was reading at the time which led him to kill Professor Peach in the way he did just after he found out the truth about the adoption. 

The Reverend transforms into the Vespiform and threatens the guests. Agatha grabs the necklace and lures him away while driving towards the nearby Silent Pool. When Donna catches up with Agatha, she grabs the necklace and throws it into the water, prompting the wasp to dive in after it and drown. Due to her own connection with the necklace, Agatha falls unconscious and suffers from amnesia, The Doctor quietly drops Agatha off near the Harrogate Hotel ten days later, thus solving the mystery of Agatha Christie.

He then shows Donna a copy of “Death in the Clouds” a book written by Agatha years later, in which wasps play a vital part, stating that maybe she did remember something, after all. 

The Doctor: “She is the bestselling novelist of all time”.

Donna: “But she never knew.”

The Doctor: “Well no one knows how they’re going to be remembered. All we can do is hope for the best. Maybe that’s what kept her writing. Same thing that keeps me travelling. Onwards?”

Donna: “Onwards” 

This is by far my favourite Doctor Who episode of all time. David Tennant and Catherine Tate working together at their very best, with some great plot twists and hilarious one liners. It reminds us that no matter what, no matter where and no matter who, the murderer is always an alien!