selenak

Can't sleep - damn time zone adjustment - so you're getting the result of insomnia and thoughts I'll probably expand upon in my season 4 and Donna essay, once I get to write it. As it turns out, The Unicorn and the Wasp, other than being madcap comic relief before the final five (ahem, cross fandom joke, and it's actually six, but I can count Moffat's two parter as one, can't I?), also contains, I position, some big time paralleling and foreshadowing regarding Donna's past, present and future. It's the last part that causes my insomnia to be happy.

Back when The Unicorn and the Wasp was broadcast, quite a lot of reviews mentioned the parallels it drew conversationally between Agatha Christie and Donna regarding their ill luck in love - i.e. Archie Christie the cheating husband who took up with a younger woman, and Lance the bride-poisoning bastard who sold Donna (and Earth) out to the Empress of the Raccnoss. ("Mine was with a giant spider, but same difference," says Donna. ) What was less remarked upon was something I only thought of in retrospect, too: in that same conversation, Agatha expresses a profound insecurity regarding the worth of her writing. "I'm just a purveyor of nonsense." In fact, this isn't the only time Agatha shows self-doubt, lacking conviction and insists she's nobody special; she later does it again when the other guests demand she should solve the mystery. This is especially interesting because the two other historical writers New Who featured in episodes, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare, while being shown to be plagued by personal tragedies are characterized very differently: both are utterly convinced in the brilliance of their writing, in their genius. Now I'm aware that Agatha Christie wasn't Dickens or Shakespeare, but she was and is, as the episode later points out, the best-selling novelist of all times (only Shakespeare and the Bible sell more books, and no other novelist does). It's been more than a decade since I read her biography, so I'm not sure how she felt about her own writing, whether or not she was convinced of her talent, but that's not important right now. (After all, the Shakespeare of The Shakespeare Code is more a meditation on various ideas about Shakespeare and Shakespearean motifs than an attempt to get an accurate depiction of good old Will.) What is important is that the episode gave its depiction of Agatha Christie this massive self-doubt, which isn't coupled with shyness (she has no problem sparring with the Doctor and telling him when she thinks he behaves wrongly) but is an undercurrent red thread hidden beneath her outward veneer. It's not necessary to make her a sympathetic character - I'd say both Dickens and Shakespeare were presented as sympathetic - but it gives Donna an opportunity to bolster her confidence, culminating in the declaration: "You're brilliant."

All of which should sound familiar by now, as the parallels to Donna are really striking. Encouraged by the Doctor, Agatha then does solve most of the mystery (save for the sci-fi alien element, the explanation for the wasp, which is where the Doctor comes in); the villain is defeated by a mixture of Agatha (who lures him away) and Donna (who throws the amulet in the lake, thus killing the monster). For a moment, the Doctor and Donna fear this resulted in Agatha's death, but then it turns out she lives. Not without a price; part of her memory was erased. Two weeks are lost to her. Again, the parallels are there - the defeat of Davros and the Daleks via a combination of Donna and Blue!Doctor (both of whom are in themselves also a combination at this point, the DoctorDonna), the subsequent fallout as Donna's beginning mental breakdown and impending death is stopped at the price of two years of her memories taken away.

And what then? Having returned Agatha to her place in history, Donna asks the Doctor what became of Agatha Christie next, and he gives her a brief summing up: a lot travels, another man, and above all the bestselling-novelist-of-all-times career. "She never thought her novels were any good, though", Donna says sadly, "she never knew." Upon which the Doctor produces a 51st century reprint of Agatha Christie's novel A Death in the Clouds, the cover of which features a giant wasp (if you're interested: the wasp is normal-size in the actual book, but it's a neat visual gag), and concludes that memory erasure or not, some part of Agatha obviously did remember, and influenced her future life and writing, which went on to be loved and read through the ages.

All of which leaves me to declare: if Agatha is a Donna avatar in so many things, she clearly is concerning her post- Doctor fate as well!

P.S. Also, rewatching the Doctor's conversation with Wilf and Sylvia underlines the memories are still there, i.e. blocked and locked away rather than being erased (i.e. made non-existent), since he says: "You can't ever tell her, because if she remembers, even for one second, she'll burn up." If those memories were irrevocably gone, there would be no danger of Donna remembering at all, no matter what anyone told her. The B5 fan in me is thinking telepathic blocks, which would allow for subconscious leak-throughs a la Agatha without direct remembering. (It also allows for Moffat and/or whoever runs the show after him to bring Donna back if they want to (and you'll bet they'll find a possibilty around Donna's impending death-by-memory; this show specializes in previously declared to be impossible things to be "just a bit unlikely" if necessary by plot), always provided they can get Catherine Tate; amnesia, like coma, is one of those classic tv conditions that mean "we're making the return of this character depending on actor availability". See also: Faith, or Connor over in the Jossverse. I'll do the comparisons between Angel's actions in Home and the Doctor's actions in Journey's End in my big season post, though.