Doctor Who 4x07 "The Unicorn and The Wasp"

Review thread opening for the latest episode;

An enjoyable episode, it’ll tide me over while the Eurovisioners spoil Saturday evening tv on the Beeb next week :rolleyes:

A nice take on Agatha Christie’s stories, funny if as terribly touching as the writer might have intended.

Donna’s line about Charles Dickens and ghosts at Christmas reminded me of that earlier episode, which was superior in my mind.

Speaking of Donna, still getting better than the previous companions.

An episode for which the phrase “enjoyable romp” was designed. A 1920’s murder mystery set in a country house - plus a giant wasp and some vintage porn… Utterly bonkers - I loved it.

I think the line “There’s NO Noddy!” is probably my favourite of this whole season so far.

And Catherine Tate is wonderful as Donna. I’m so pleased that this is working out.

I loved it! Hilarious fun! Donna is an excellent companion. And I liked the actress playing Agatha Christie, too - she was great.

The ending was maybe a little too gobbledegook, and the revelation needed more clues spread throughout the story for it to properly make sense, but then I’ve never read Agatha Christie, and perhaps her books don’t work that way.

I also wish the Unicorn had a bigger part to play in the story. It just needed an extended cut, with ten more minutes to play with…

Wonderful! I think it’s my favourite of the season so far, which is saying something. Charming performances, a wonderful look, and sparkling dialogue. Probably the funniest episode so far - the poisoning scene in the kitchen had me in hysterics. “Harvey Wallbanger?!? How is Harvey Wallbanger one word?”

The actress playing Agatha Christie was superb. And I love Donna more and more every week.

A most enjoyable romp.

Fucking hamsters ate my post! sigh. Okay, again:

I really enjoyed this episode although the ending was a bit rushed, particularly the bit after the reveal (which was done very well by the way). I felt like they had to tie everything up due to lack of remaining screen time, rather than because it seemed like the best way to do it, although that happens a lot in the one episode format nowadays doesn’t it?

Fenella Woolgar was excellent as Agatha Christie, but in fairness I thought all the actors in this episode were particularly good. I absolutely loved the flashbacks in the interrogation sequence, they were hi-larious.

I hate to be the one who said “I told you so” but, well… I told you so! I said Donna would turn out to be a great companion and slowly but surely everyone is coming around to my way of thinking, he he.

Next week (or should I say two weeks’ time, thanks a fucking lot eurovision) is looking good two.

I agree with the rest of you, an enjoyable story with a rushed ending. It’s nice after last week to have the story resolved through reason and investigation rather than some cheap plot device.

I’ll admit, I thought Catherine Tate would suck as an assistant. I was wrong. I definitely underestimated her acting talents.

I missed the preview for next episode.

Damn Eurovision!

A lot of fun despite being a bit goofy…

Hey wait a second, that’s a description of the series too!

I really enjoyed playing up the stereotypes of an Agatha Christie novel with a giant wasp thrown in…

Cute episode. Loving Donna; she gives the doctor a deserved hard time every chance she gets.

Loved the part when the doctor was interviewing as to their whereabouts at a quarter past four and their stories were completely different from what we saw. “Oh yes, I was taking a constitutional in the fields behind the house. Oh yes. Alone. Completely alone. Totally alone. Always alone. No one with me. Not ever.”

Professor Peach, in the library, with the lead pipe :slight_smile:

Lots of good stuff in this one. I liked how the Doctor stopped Donna trying to talk period/posh, presumably the Tardis made her sound Welsh - or something even more inappropriate.

I thought it was a reference to the episode where the Doctor and Rose were in Scotland and Rose attempted a Scottish accent and he tells her to stop doing it.

Oh and another mention of disappearing bees in this episode too.

I have decided that the secret to enjoying Doctor Who is to not pay any attention to the “explanation” crammed into the last five minutes, which rarely makes a lick of sense. Felicity Kendal had sex with a giant space wasp? Okaaay… They might as well cut that stuff out and just put up a caption saying “Five minutes of ludicrous technobabble later”. I suppose all sci-fi/fantasy suffers from that, because in the end the events depicted are impossible.

Anyway, I really enjoyed that episode and think that I spotted most of the book titles (didn’t notice the very first one though, “Why didn’t they ask… Heavens!” :smiley: ). Catherine Tate is excellent, loved her reaction when he handed her the magnifying glass, and all the “so she’s the murderer?” stuff. Nice looking ep, great sets and costumes, and good performances all round except maybe for the strangely peripheral Unicorn herself.

I think Doctor Who is a bit different to other sci-fi shows like Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica, because the stories aren’t really interested in explaining in a rational way the mechanics of the situation, but in giving you big, wonderful, fantastic visions. They give you just enough explanation to let you dance across the type of questions sci-fi fans are used to having, and let you run with the fun. (I actually think it’s far closer to Alice in Wonderland than any other modern sci-f show.)

I think a perfect examples is last year’s Blink, with it’s “quantum locked” angels who can only move if they’re not observed (even by each other). If you think about it too hard (as in, for about a second), it doesn’t really make a lick of sense, not least from a boilogical viewpoint, let alone the physics of it. But if you just accept the explanation in the spirit it’s intended, you get what I think is one of the coolest fantasy creations ever - statues that come alive and who can kill you if you close your eyes for a second.

Not to say that they’re trying to dumb things down, because a lot of the concepts in the show are fairly sophisticated - just that the point of the show is not a rational scientific explanation, but to give you cat nuns tending giant heads in a jar, clockwork androids haunting a French courtesan, TVs that steal your face if you stare too long, and witches who can be defeated by reciting Shakespeare and Harry Potter. I’d much rather have “Doctor Who” with any of those things than a show which conformed to strict scientific sense.

Blink also contains a couple of other examples of this too… the Doctor explaining the plot is complicated becuase time is not linaer, the way we think it is, but all a bit wibbley-wobbbley, timey-wimey. And as he later explains about his wibbley-wobbley, timey-wimey detector… “It goes DING! when there’s stuff.”

Communism was just a red herring.

No, wait, that’s not right, that’s Clue. What I meant to say was, the Unicorn was just a red herring. You were meant to think he/she/it was going to be a bigger part of the action than she turned out to be… just like in an Agatha Christie story.

Good point, but I do thing Doctor Who pushes things a bit far with the gobbledegook explanations. Even taking them in the appropriate spirit, I’m still regularly baffled by them. The Blink one was preposterous, but fairly simple, so on that occasion I got it. In this episode I kind of gave up when we got to the bit about the pendant beaming stuff into people’s brains.

I wonder if even so, you’re still over-analysing it? This is a program aimed at children, possibly watching with their parents. If it gets them to read Agatha Christie, or about Madame de Pompadour, quantum physics, or whatever, then so much the better. This last episode was gloriously good fun, and what better introduction to murder mysteries could a child have?

Beaming stuff from one brain to another is too complicated scifi-wise for your enjoyment?

-Joe

I think it is more the complexity of the explanation as a whole. It it had merely been en everyday tale of giant shape-shifting wasps getting humans pregnant, that would have been OK. But there was also the “genetic lock” being broken by the vicar getting angry (for the first time in 40 years?), then the pendant forming some kind of psychic link between wasp-man and whoever has it, and the stuff about basing his behaviour on whatever was in the mind of the pendant wearer at the time. (Yes, I rewatched the ending in preparation for this post). It’s a lot to take in from a couple of minutes of breathless exposition. Still not entirely sure why Agatha Christie had to drive off to the lake? And why the Doc admonished Donna for killing the wasp when I think that was Agatha’s plan too?

It looks like we are running (In the US on Sci-Fi Channel) roughly one month behind the originals airings in the UK.

We watched it Sunday night off the recording. I enjoyed the show and it worked extra well as Saturday we watched “Murder by Death” which the kids really enjoyed. They have also been playing a lot of Clue! lately so the episode aired at the perfect time for us.

Fun show, but the end with Agatha tied to the gem was odd and made little sense. My daughter wanted to know how she got tied to the gem instead of the mother. I had no reasonable fanwank this time.

We started laughing as soon as the Professor got it with the lead pipe. Later when we realized the victim was Prof. Peach, we got to laugh again. We missed that at first.