1)The latest "Team TARDIS meets a literary figure" episode finds our heroes meeting Agatha Christie. I'd never read any Christie before I saw this - I ended up reading a bunch of her books afterwards and becoming a huge Poirot fan.
2)We start off with an homage to the game "Clue" (which is known as "Cluedo" outside North America, for some reason) with Professor Peach being killed in the library with the lead pipe. Gosh, the hours of my youth that I happily wasted playing Clue! Never was any good at it, of course. I really would've made a bad detective.
3)The Vespiform was quite well-realized - really, you need CGI to do a giant insect believably - just compare this to things like the Zarbi or the Wirrn!
4)Some good scenes in this - Donna trying to comfort Agatha, the Doctor having to be reminded that murder is not a game, the whole 20's repressed aristocratic parasite milieu. Doctor Who has almost always done period pieces well. Lots of good funny stuff - the bit where the Doctor is trying to get over the poison made me laugh out loud. "Camptown Races?" Made me think of the "seda-give" scene in Young Frankenstein. I also liked the bit where they all got lost in reminiscences. The Doctor's reminiscence is a reference to The Lonely Computer.
5)Nice to see Christoper Benjamin (Sir Keith Gold in "Inferno" and Henry Gordon Jago in "The Talons of Weng-Chiang") again - I do wonder how long someone could fake being wheelchair-bound and get away with it. I should think you'd be bound to give yourself away at some point.
6)In the scene right after the opening theme, the footman you see right when Graeme Harper's credit comes up is played by none other than David Tennant's dad!
7)Some fun quotes:
- "Flapper or slap 'er?"
- "Typical - all the decent men are on the other bus." "Or Time Lords."
- "'The plucky young girl who helps me out'?"
- "Tell me there's no Noddy!" "There's no Noddy." I have a dim memory of the Noddy stories from when I was tiny.
- "What do you mean, a giant wasp?" "I mean a wasp that's giant!"
- "Something's inhibiting my enzymes!"
Overall:
A fun episode, one that stands up to re-watching. I'd watch a series of Tennant and Tate solving mysteries in the 20's, for sure.
[Part of list of Doctor Who episodes here.]
Replies
I saw this one! I enjoyed the chemistry between the Doctor and Donna, denying they're a couple while acting like a couple. The few historical Doctor Whos that I watched were great!
Yeah, I like the stories set in the past - it plays to the BBC's strengths, I find.