Just as the series 4 ‘holiday’ episode must surely be coming up (last year it was Stephen Moffat’s award-winning Blink), so The Unicorn and the Wasp proves to be this year’s budget-slashing, wardrobe-box raiding period filler (rather than thriller) which has clearly surrendered the majority of its budget to the effects bills for Fires Of Pompeii. Donna’s attempts at a clipped English accent are amusingly stifled by the Doctor, but it’s clearly a great thrill for her to meet the arch-hack and literary bore herself, as it presumably is for writer Gareth Roberts to get to explain Christie’s amnesiac 10-day disappearance in 1926. So it’s all cucumber sandwiches and tea. For about one minute… But this is new Who, which will not surrender its dizzying pace even to the languid tone of a classic murder-mystery. The niceties promptly transform into a busman’s holiday for the intrepid duo, as one of the cluedo-esque guests is killed in the drawing room to the amusing exclamation ‘Why didn’t they ask…heavens!’ (yes, very good). With Donna relishing her role as Tennant’s ‘Watson’, it’s left to the time-lord and the authoress to investigate the alarming avalanche of murders that follow the first. Since Doc has found some clearly alien ‘morphic residue’ at murder number one, there’s no question of calling the real police in – which is handy for maintenance of the cliché. Trouble is that Christie is not up to the job, suffering a crisis of confidence in the wake of discovering her husband’s infidelity, but Donna, the new ‘heart’ of Doctor Who (and at least doing a less irritating job than Deanna Troi) is on hand to take her aside and commiserate. The highlight of Unicorn is the Doctor’s Casino Royale-style efforts to detoxify himself when he realises that he has been poisoned with arsenic by the murderer among them, which necessitates the administration of a nasty shock. At this point, Catherine Tate obliges with a huge frenchy. I must admit, that certainly qualifies in my book. The running joke about the Doctor and Donna ‘not being a couple’ is beginning to look a bit leggy, and also has the worrying ring of anti-truth. Oh Gawd, no… At the earlier introductions on the lawn, Tennant introduces himself, customarily, as ‘the Doctor’, and once again no-one asks the inevitable question, ‘Doctor Who?’. If he needs psychic paper to convince them that he is a policeman, why does he need nothing at all to convince them (and legions of other earthlings) that it’s perfectly normal to have a title and no name? I can’t ever recall getting away with introducing myself as ‘the Mister’… Predictably Donna ends up telling Christie about future events in her life, and novels that she has not written yet, attempting to worm her way into the copyright, but who would the publishers have paid half a century before Donna was born? The cross-species breeding between Kendall and the wasp-creature, whilst only alluded to, is a fairly mind-boggling leap of imagination, whereas the ‘firestone’ locket proves to be yet another super-powered Who McGuffin, this time capable of inculcating a life-time’s worth of experience quicker than you can…well, clone a time-lord, and the creature letting Christie ‘go’ at the end seemed like a tacked-on ‘awww’ moment. Are these now requisite for every episode? Director Graeme Harper is a veteran Who-hand, having started out as production assistant in the Pertwee era and now successfully adapted to the increased tempo of the RTD age in a great number of stories for the new series, most recently in the excellent Planet Of The Ood, and he continues to be adroit at getting decent performances out of regulars and guest cast alike. Writer Gareth Roberts is on famiiar territority in Unicorn, as he got the Doctor together with The Bard in last season’s The Shakespeare Code, as well as being a Sarah Jane Adventures protégé, and contributing ‘Tardisodes’ and the Attack of the Graske videogame for the Beeb’s Doctor Who website in 2005, and writing six Who novels for Virgin publishing. I’m guessing that he is more fond of Black Orchid than I am, and relished the chance to put the Gallifrean into this environment again. We’re all expecting more of the highly anticipated Stephen Moffat two-parter which is coming up after eurovision, Silence In The Library and Forest Of The Dead (could RTD not consider adopting the ‘parts I and II’ etc convention? It worked very effectively for nearly thirty years and caused less confusion). Look out for the shadows…. Check out Martin’s review of The Doctor’s Daughter here. Simon’s review of it is here. Peter Davison Louise JamesonElizabeth SladenSophie AldredNick BriggsNicholas CourtneyJames Moran
title: “Doctor Who Series 4 Episode 7 Review The Unicorn And The Wasp” ShowToc: true date: “2025-08-03” author: “Virginia Obrien”
That’s because The Unicorn & The Wasp had things that the tepid, aforementioned Black Orchid lacked, even though they trod similar ground. A half decent plot was a good start, but also the introduction of Agatha Christie as a character worked a lot better than the previous jollies into the world of Shakespeare, Dickens and Queen Victoria. Oh sure, the script made the same old jokes, dropping hints to Christie of works that she hadn’t yet penned, but on the whole, it gelled a lot better than I was expecting. The highlight of the episode for me? The lovely sequence where the Doctor works out that he’s been poisoned, and has to take a variety of ingredients to counter the effects, and then get a big shock, for his body to be rid of it. The shock? A snog from Catherine Tate, and again you wonder if this wasn’t some kind of response to the criticisms of relationships between the Doctor and his assistant of late. The lowlight, ironically, was the part where the Doctor Who elements popped in, namely the wasp of the title. You still can’t help having a sneaking suspicion that we haven’t seen the last of wasps and bees in this series – they’ve certainly been namedropped a few times, although it could, of course, by a red herring – but if they do come back, let’s hope they look a bit better than this one. Remember Jon Pertwee coming up against giant maggots once upon a time? It sort of reminded me of that. As a murder mystery, The Unicorn & The Wasp wasn’t great by any standard of the genre, but as a fun diversion before the series ramps up to the big stuff in the weeks ahead – and it’s the hugely-anticipated Steven Moffat two-parter next, thank the lord – it has its place. The fourth series has been trucking on quite competently now for a few weeks, with lots of quite good-to-good episodes, but nothing – save for, perhaps, the eruption in Pompeii – overly memorable thus far. Let’s hope that Mr Moffat works his magic again in two weeks’ time, and that the back end of the series delivers in the way that we know it can. Read Martin’s review of the episode here.
