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“Donna… something’s inhibiting my enzymes.”

It’s a garden party in 1926, and this week’s special historical guest star: Agatha Christie. Game of Clue, anyone?

Plot Points – The Doctor and Donna invite themselves to a do at the home of Lady Clemency Eddison (Felicity Kendall), who is hosting the famous novelist Agatha Christie (Fenella Woolgar). Almost immediately people start getting murdered, and the suspects include Clemency’s husband Col. Hugh (Christopher Benjamin), Robina Redmond (Felicity Jones), Reverend Golightly (Tom Goodman-Hill), and Lady Eddison’s son Roger Curbishley (Adam Rayner). And yes, it is very much like the board game Clue, at least at first.

Doctor Who? – The Doctor can overcome cyanide poisoning by a complicated bit of tomfoolery that expels the toxins from his system via the mouth. He seems to know a lot about Vespiforms. (A definite trait of this Doctor is that virtually nothing alien seems to surprise him, which often takes the fun out of it.)  He claims that he once tried to find Charlemagne who’d been “kidnapped by an insane computer.”

Hey, Hey, Donna  – Basically saves the day by throwing the Firestone in the lake, so that the VespiWasp drowns itself. She’s very self-motivated and can think on her feet. When they first arrive, she tries to do a “posh” accent, which the Doctor discourages (as he did with Rose in “Tooth and Claw”). And she has a bad habit of mentioning Agatha Christie novels to Agatha Christie which she (Agatha Christie) hasn’t written yet. (BTW, Donna’s line “Forget about planet Zog…” is a reference to multiple interviews given by exec producer Russell T. Davies when trying to justify the fact that virtually all the stories are set on Earth; “Who cares about a bunch of aliens on planet Zog?” he would say. “I care,” I would say) And, as all companions do (even Captain Jack), she finally gets to kiss the Doctor.

Totally Agatha The dialogue is loaded with references to Christie’s work, particularly the titles of many of her novels and stories. These include Murder on the Orient Express, Murder at the Vicarage, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, Cards on the Table, Appointment with Death, N or M?, The Body in the Library, The Moving Finger, Sparkling Cyanide, Crooked House, They Do It With Mirrors, Cat Among the Pigeons, Endless Night, The Secret Adversary, Nemesis, Taken at the Flood, And Then There Were None, Death Comes as the End, Dead Man’s Folly, and more.

This Year’s Arc – Again with the missing bees. I’m starting to think this is a red herring.

Too Cool – As usual with the BBC, the period details are very finely evoked, but if you’re looking for praise for that CGI wasp, I’m afraid you won’t find it here.

Weird Science – This whole issue of the VespiWasp being linked to the Firestone is very muddled. The Doctor says that it carries all the information about the Vespiform’s true identity, but how? At what point did it obtain this information, and what does a disconnected piece of technology have to do with an alien-hybrid birth? Was Lady Eddison wearing it during the delivery? Did the Daddy Vespiform know Clemency was preggers and program it somehow? And if so, why didn’t it impart this information when the baby was born, rather than years later when it finally turned into a big Waspy thing? Is the VespiWasp—an insectoid life form—really able to mimic the genetic codes of human sperm closely enough that it actually gets another species pregnant? The implications of this whole arm of the plot are very unsavory.

Dumb Stuff –  I’m all for true love, but if you knew your boyfriend was actually a great big Wasp creature, would you really have sex with him? Wouldn’t that be a bit….ewwwwwwwwwwww? Robina Redmond, aka The Unicorn, doesn’t stand up very well to questioning, basically admitting the truth even though the evidence is purely circumstantial. Does she really think she can’t be arrested for stealing the jewel, just because she gives it back? Agatha—a highly educated and refined woman—reacts with confusion when Donna mentions films, even though this is 1926, and movies had been around since at least the early teens; true, the British film industry was in a decided slump by 1926, but someone of Christie’s bearing could not possibly be unaware of their existence, as there had been a boom in the early days of UK cinema. Even if we take this to mean her confusion is over “talking” pictures (which is not how Fenella Woolgar plays it), it still doesn’t make sense; Hitchcock’s Blackmail (considered to be the first British sound feature) was only three years away, and the advent of sound in motion pictures was inevitable to anyone with an ounce of awareness of current events. The whole bit about the Vespiform being connected to Agatha just because its mother liked her books is a bit daft. Fiction is different from the person who wrote it, and if there’s a psychic link to be had, it should be with Lady Eddison, and not with Agatha. But then, the whole story’s a bit daft, really. And what happens to the Vicar’s clothes when he Hulks into a great big wasp? Since he had never transmuted into the VespiWasp until a few days earlier, he must have been wearing real clothes at least up until that point; are we really supposed to assume that his current priest robes are just part of his morphing “skin”?

Classic Who – Christopher Benjamin has appeared twice in the classic series, as Sir Keith Gold in “Inferno,” (7.5/1970) and as Henry Gordon Jago in the all-time classic “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” (14.6/1977). It is very nice to see him in the new series.

Lost in Translation - It’s pretty obvious from context, but “twigged” means “figured out.” Likewise, “it’s a fair cop” is just what it sounds like, and is probably familiar to many from its frequent use in Monty Python. Felicity Kendall (Lady Eddison) is a legend in British television, famous for being completely adorable and endearing in a variety of different series, but most famously the back-to-nature sitcom The Good Life (broadcast on American PBS as Good Neighbors, for some odd reason). Oh, and the Brits—who invented the game, by the way—call it Cluedo, rather than Clue, because it was originally based on another game called Ludo, which we call Parcheesi; since Ludo was also re-named for America, the play on words would obviously be meaningless. Agatha tells the Doctor he sounds like Edward Lear, a popular nineteenth century British humorist known for his nonsensical limericks.

Final Answer – I was actually really looking forward to this one, and for almost the first half it just about holds together as a pastiche of Christie’s work. Overt humor in Doctor Who has always been a dicey proposition, but the various interviews, flashbacks, and general Christie-isms are suitably amusing, with the cast hitting just the right notes. (It does seem a bit sour, though, that there are so many of the same kinds of jokes we had in “The Shakespeare Code”—Donna and the Doctor saying things to Christie that spark ideas for stories she hasn’t written yet—and they weren’t particularly clever there either, but maybe that’s to be expected since this was written by the same writer, Gareth Roberts.) But once the giant wasp shows up, it all goes a bit… stinky. Doctor Who is often accused of being silly, and usually for all the wrong reasons, but here it unfortunately applies. A big-ass wasp buzzing around is not what this story needs; it needs something more elegant and in line with the set-up, like an alien detective tracking an alien murderer to Earth and teaming up with Christie, or even no science fiction element at all. The new series has never done a pure historical, and this could have been a golden opportunity. But suddenly becoming a Bert I. Gordon film ruins any good will the episode has built up. The Doctor’s cyanide convulsions are too similar to his “shaking out the radiation” dance from “Smith and Jones,” the Vicar’s buzzing is just stupid, the Unicorn plotline is so underdeveloped that it certainly doesn’t merit a spot in the title of the episode, and the waspy CGI is adequate but highly variable. This episode is a mess, and not a particularly interesting mess. On the plus side, the performances—particularly Fenella Woolgar, who is simply smashing as Agatha—are excellent, and Catherine Tate is really, really funny in this episode. It’s misguided and dumb, but still at least twice as entertaining as last week’s story, though that’s obviously not saying much.

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