Doctor Who Series 4 Episode 7 : ‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’ BBC 1 May 17th 08

The longer this series of Doctor Who continues the more I suspect that the producers are using an online Random Plot Generator to come up with their ludicrous one shots.

We’ve had historical characters on Who before but the sledgehammer style of the Agatha Christie episode got old before we were ten minutes in. Just in case anyone hadn’t picked up on the myriad references to libraries, professors, reverends and lead piping, good old Donna the Plot Mallet kept yelling “Library! Lead Pipe! Agatha Christie! Reverend!” like a demented speak and spell. Yes, we get it! Murder Mystery!

What was the point of this episode? The whole thing seemed to have been inspired by being stuck in a hot room, so we had a big wasp, a bit of homoerotica and a shoehorned in kiss between the Doctor and Donna which was clearly designed to re-brand the episode as ‘The One Where Donna and the Doctor Kiss’ rather than ‘The Worst Episode of Series 4’. There were a few nice moments which got lost in the cavalcade of daftness, but altogether we were left waiting for the series to get back to normal, you know with plots and that. Things that make TV good. Writer Gareth Roberts brought us ‘The Shakespeare Code’ last series and he seems to have simply rehashed the idea for ‘The Unicorn and The Wasp’.

The problem with these historical episodes is that they revel too much in an imagined knowledge of the period and its notables. Plus, they have to appeal to both children and adults and the writers only pull this off once in a blue moon, so we have Agatha Christie meets Cluedo, two paradigms which will mean little to modern kids, and will just confuse the adults. The result is history as reported by an idiot, and which is therefore meaningless in terms of plot. The interest comes in placing the modern day/future knowledgeable characters into a past which they recognise, not in jamming them into your pub quiz machine universe so they have tea and scones with Mick Jagger and unwittingly write ‘Satisfaction’ whilst wandering onto the set of Alfie.

Who seems to have lapsed into two templates this series – the shady corporate/alien slave machine (as seen in episode 1 with the Adipose, 3 with the Ood , 4 and 5 with the clones and the evil satnav, and 6 with the super soldiers) and the history plus aliens of episode 2 in Pompeii and the last Christie debacle. So far we’ve seen none of the inventiveness of ‘Gridlock’, nor the horror of ‘Blink’, nor the brilliance of the Master vs Doctor finales from Series 3. However, next week’s two parter about a haunted library is penned by the writer of three of the best episodes of the RTD era; ‘The Empty Child’; ‘The Girl In The Fireplace’ and the aforementioned ‘Blink’. All hail Stephen Moffat, series four is riding on you.