That Time ‘Doctor Who’ Had Agatha Christie Abducted by Aliens

The Big Picture

• The
  Doctor Who
  episode “The Unicorn and the Wasp” features Agatha Christie solving a murder mystery with the Doctor and posits an explanation for Christie’s real-life disappearance.
• The episode pays tribute to Christie’s enduring legacy with humorous references.
• Christie’s actress, Fenella Woolgar, humanizes the iconic writer by highlighting her insecurities alongside her brilliance.

Doctor Who‘s titular Doctor has met countless historical figures throughout their travels. Gallivanting with icons like William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and Vincent van Gogh is essential to the series’ capriciously wish-fulfillment approach to time travel, and its origins as a children’s educational program. A gleefully clever take on this recurring concept occurs in Season 4’s “The Unicorn and the Wasp,” spotlighting none other than Dame Agatha Christie (before she was a Dame). Still as relevant a draw as ever (as the BritBox series Agatha Christie’s Murder is Easy indicates), “The Unicorn and the Wasp” functions as a love letter to Christie and posits an “explanation” for the real-life mystery surrounding her infamous 10-day disappearance. Duh! It was aliens! But it’s aliens filtered through Christie’s wily wit as the world’s best-selling author solves a murder alongside the Doctor (David Tennant) and his bestie Donna Noble (Catherine Tate).

What Is ‘Doctor Who’s Agatha Christie Episode About?

Written by Gareth Roberts, Doctor Who‘s “The Unicorn and the Wasp” opens with the Doctor and Donna Noble sneaking into a 1920s garden party. The setting’s details immediately evoke Christie: a sprawling mansion house and its posh inhabitants, a quiet countryside, and the local Reverend Golightly (Tom Goodman-Hill) zipping past on his bike. And, naturally, the sparkly-beaded flapper attire, a costume Donna enthusiastically assumes. She and the Doctor are caught unawares by the party’s guest of honor, a polite but troubled Agatha Christie (Fenella Woolgar). The time-traveling pair immediately dissolve into gushing fans (in a previous episode, the Doctor established himself as a Christie lover).

The episode is set in 1926. By then, Christie had authored six of her 65 novels (not counting her short stories, poetry, and plays). Three involved Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, the creation forever associated with her name. She was a proven bestseller. In this episode, it’s not an accomplishment from which she derives joy. The Doctor informs Donna that, historically, Christie has just discovered her husband’s affair with a younger woman. It’s also the day when Christie vanished for 10 days before reappearing at the Harrogate Hotel. She claimed amnesia and never revealed if she knew what had occurred during that time.

Playing a human version of an icon, Fenella Woolgar infuses Christie with dignified wariness. When the party’s host, Lady Clemency Eddison (Felicity Kendal) probes about Christie’s husband’s absence from the party, Christie tosses out defensive barbs. They’re coated in socially mandated courtesy, but she tries to assert her self-worth and individuality after her adulterous husband leaves it in tatters. “Is he needed?” she demands Lady Clemency. “Can’t a woman make her own way in the world?”

‘Doctor Who’ Has Agatha Christie Solve a Mystery

The party’s attendees don’t have much time to, well, party like it’s 1926, before, gasp — there’s a body in the library! The unfortunate corpse belongs to Professor Peach (Ian Barritt), who holds the honor of kicking off the episode’s many Easter Eggs. Before his murder, Peach almost name-drops the title of Christie’s rom-com novel Why Didn’t They Ask Evans, and his murder’s location references the 1942 Miss Marple book The Body in the Library. Clue parallels worm their way in for giggles: “Professor Peach, in the library, with the lead pipe,” Donna declares. After examining Peach’s body, the Doctor deduces that the murderer is an alien. Cue the investigatory hijinks!

If there’s such a thing as bottled delight, it’s watching Agatha Christie’s brilliant mind — especially with most of her career ahead of her — deduce a crime side-by-side with the Doctor and Donna. Who doesn’t want to see her apply that brain to “real-life” mysteries? That’s a spin-off waiting to happen. Christie actively participates in the Doctor-Donna’s amateur investigation, as she should. She’s their equal and venerated as such, almost counting as a one-off companion. Gareth Roberts’s crackling dialogue amplifies the fun with reference after reference, ranging from the obvious to the sneaky: her bibliography on a bookshelf, the murders evoking And Then There Were None‘s complex staging, and Christie calling the house “crooked” — i.e., her book Crooked House.

A telltale tribute more thematic than quippy? Everyone’s lying. When the Doctor demands the cast’s alibis, Lady Eddison claims she was having tea when Peach’s death happened. In reality, she was drinking alone. Robina Redmond (Felicity Jones — yes, it’s Jyn Erso!) was loading a gun in the bathroom, which is her way of prepping for the party. Colonel Hugh (Christopher Benjamin) reminiscing about the war is him fantasizing about showgirls. Everyone has different motivations and secrets reflecting the breadth of human experience, an idea synonymous with Christie’s work.

‘Doctor Who’ Humanizes Agatha Christie’s Brilliance

Through every campy twist and turn, Fenella Woolgar plays Christie with the appropriate level of dry sass and refined British dignity, as well as a woman reluctantly electrified by this mind-titillating distraction. She’s gracious but assertive, wounded and angry, and refuses to publicly acknowledge how her husband’s betrayal has cut her to the quick. The group guilt-tripping her — why hasn’t she figured out who the murderer is? — compounds her existing feelings of inferiority. She says she’s failed them; far from it. But we creatives are usually the first ones to doubt our worth; we’re not objective. Christie carries the extra weight of this murderer “mocking” her work by mimicking it. “I’ve had enough scorn for one lifetime,” Agatha says, even as she derides herself as “a purveyor of nonsense” who fears “my books will be forgotten, like ephemera.”

The Doctor and Donna won’t stand for such self-derision, no matter how human a reaction it is. The best Doctor Who episodes reveal their historical figures as humans riddled with flaws and doubts. The Doctor might be our hero, but individual people are his heroes. Donna and Christie bond over their unfaithful significant others; the former shares how the Doctor helped her rediscover her confidence and find a fulfilling purpose. The Doctor monologues about Christie’s staying power, how her brilliance boils down to her understanding of the human condition’s joys and perils. “All of those tiny things that can turn the most ordinary person into a killer,” he says, rejuvenating her confidence through her honed insight. David Tennant and Catherine Tate’s chemistry shines through the script’s especially goofy banter, yet the star of “The Unicorn and the Wasp” is the great Dame.

With or without her new friends’ encouragement, Christie’s expertise notices details others wouldn’t: a disturbed flowerbed, cover story inconsistencies, different kinds of poison. On a stormy night complete with crackling thunder, Agatha does a Poirot on the remaining group by patiently and decidedly revealing their secrets; the Doctor and Donna watch with the “sit back and relax” excitement of a popcorn-munching gif. “Every murder is essentially the same,” Agatha muses. “They’re committed because someone wants something.” Indeed, everyone here desires something different. Christie’s “wibbly wobbly timey wimey” explanation is appropriately silly and dependent upon her catalog: a character adores The Murder of Roger Ackroyd so much, it psychically imprints upon an alien’s brain.

‘The Unicorn and the Wasp’ Is a Love Letter to Agatha Christie

To fully spoil “The Unicorn and the Wasp” wouldn’t be fair. Suffice to say, the “Agatha Christie was abducted by aliens” explanation for her disappearance is an adorable twist, and it doesn’t happen the way we expect. Once Christie concludes her 10-day sojourn, the Doctor and Donna wax poetic about how readers still consume her works in the year 5 billion. Who else can lay claim to that? James Pritchard, Christie’s great-grandson and the CEO of her estate, praised her place in Doctor Who canon to CinemaBlend:

“I think the first thing I took from it was that it’s a sort of testimony to her power in culture in the UK. I mean there aren’t many novelists you’d put in Doctor Who. Doctor Who has its own huge place in British culture, and I think it was a privilege to have her included in that. And I think that’s what you take from it. When anyone thinks about ‘murder mystery,’ they think about Agatha Christie. She’s synonymous with the genre. And I think that is a testimony to her profile, her success.”

“The Unicorn and the Wasp” isn’t the last time Doctor Who samples from Dame Agatha’s worlds. Season 8’s “Mummy on the Orient Express” drops Peter Capaldi and his companion Clara Oswald (Jenna Coleman) into a mummy-filled parody of (you guessed it) Murder on the Orient Express. (Former Who showrunner Chris Chibnall is even teaming with Netflix for a production of The Seven Dial Mystery.) Only one of these two episodes centers on the bestselling novelist of all time. Wacky and wondrous, “The Unicorn and the Wasp” is one of Season 4’s standouts, making one wonder why Doctor Who didn’t tackle Christie before, but grateful the loving result took this long. Like a Poirot reveal at a story’s end, it was worth the wait.

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