Review of The Doctor’s Daughter / The Unicorn and the Wasp
There are only two episodes in this month’s segment of my Series Four re-watch, and they make for an interesting contrast. While my pre-viewing memories of one were fairly clear and complete, the other episode was much muddier in my mind than I’d realized.
If you had asked me a few months ago, before I started thinking about Series Four again for this review series, I would have told you that The Doctor’s Daughter included the Tenth Doctor, Jenny—someone grown nearly instantly from a genetic sample from the Doctor—and Martha. I don’t think I would even have remembered that Donna is in the episode.
I can’t pinpoint exactly why Donna’s role had so thoroughly slipped my mind. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, really, because her contribution is huge. But somehow my mind fixated on Martha’s relationship with the Hath soldier instead. [Spoiler alert] The death of Peg obviously struck me hard on first viewing, because along with all the images of Jenny tumbling through a laser field and of human and Hath soldiers fighting each other for “generations,” that is probably the single biggest detail that sticks in my mind from The Doctor’s Daughter.
It’s unfortunate that a quick moment of pathos overshadowed everything else, because Donna is—as usual—f’ing brilliant here. Her big human heart helps thaw the Doctor’s, showing him some of his own prejudices and getting him to open up a little bit about the pain of his various losses. Thanks to Donna, he eventually comes to accept Jenny, just in time to lose her.
More importantly, though, Donna is the brains of the outfit this time around. The Doctor is too focused on finding Martha—which, to be fair, is a valid priority—and condemning Jenny and everyone else here for being soldiers to pay attention to the root of the problem. By contrast, Donna, in her own understated way, sees clearly what others can’t. She looks at things that “important” people often don’t need to bother with (much like how she noticed the empty sick leave binder in The Sontaran Stratagem) and discovers a key truth about the war.
The resolution of the story is a bit overwrought, which is fairly typical of the Tenth Doctor’s tenure, especially near its end. It also famously leaves the door open for Jenny to return in some future story, at Steven Moffat’s request (RTD had planned for Jenny’s story to end here). Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on one’s perspective, I suppose) that never materialized on-screen, though she has appeared in some Big Finish audios.
While The Doctor’s Daughter has significance in the world of Doctor Who because of Georgia Moffett’s casting as Jenny (I imagine my readers already know, but she is the actual Doctor’s daughter (Fifth Doctor actor Peter Davison is her father), and three years after this episode aired, she would go on to marry David Tennant), The Unicorn and the Wasp is very special in my personal Doctor Who experiences; it’s the first episode I saw in the same week that it aired.
Perhaps that’s why I had little trouble recalling details of the episode even before diving back in. I knew all of the major plot points—what they were, when they surfaced, and so on—and most of the character moments and jokes, too.
Though, to be fair, I had forgotten about the Doctor’s mention of Charlemagne and the insane computer that had kidnapped him.
In fact, that character-gets-lost-in-a-memory device is one of the few things that surprised me upon rewatch. Given that so much of the plot was driven by events from forty years beforehand, it makes for a ready method by which to impart that information, and its use for more recent events earlier in the episode make it both useful and amusing as a storytelling motif.
Most importantly, of course, The Unicorn and the Wasp is a historical celebrity episode, in which we are treated to the opportunity to meet mystery writer Agatha Christie. (She thus became the third writer to appear in such an episode, after Charles Dickens and Shakespeare.) Not only is she suffering from personal difficulties, as she has just learned that her husband is having an affair, but she also has a fairly serious case of imposter syndrome—something to which any writer can relate. It makes the character come across very human, so that we viewers feel as if we have actually met the writer herself, rather than just a fictionalized, scripted version of her.
Agatha’s self-doubt is one of the more charming parts of this episode, and the way she and the Doctor tag-team the resolution of the mystery in the drawing room near the end is everything a Christie fan could hope for. While the CGI Vespiform hasn’t aged particularly well (I mean, it has been [ack!] fifteen years, so I’ll cut it some slack), the episode as a whole remains a classic “romp,” with an almost camp flavor, yet very much in keeping with Christie’s works.
I have no way to know why these two episodes filed themselves in my memory in such different ways. Perhaps the fact that I binged everything up-to-and-including The Doctor’s Daughter in quick succession, and then had to wait for more (first for The Unicorn and the Wasp itself, and then for each episode for the rest of the series) gave my brain more time to solidify the details of the latter. Or maybe brains are just weird.
Whatever the case, I really enjoyed having my memories refreshed. I’ll try to keep these upbeat feelings in my heart in the coming months, as I follow the Doctor and Donna down an increasingly dark path towards her inevitable separation from him—and from her own memories.